Everyday connections between online and offline: Imagining others and constructing community through local online initiatives

Abstract

Many local online platforms for people to give away or sell items have arisen in recent years. While some research has analysed modes of consumption emerging in such sites, there has been little exploration of the nature of the contact between local residents that these sites occasion and their implications for local sense of community. This article analyses interviews with users of local online platforms for giving and selling items within one town in south-east England, identifying judgments that users make about one another and exploring the connections that are made between online and offline. Imagining other users and projecting social norms onto them emerges as important in making transactions meaningful. Users also often imagine social difference and make judgments that reproduce socio-economic stereotypes. Usage is portrayed as a positive experience enhancing users’ views of local community in a general sense, but shows limited tendencies to overcome existing social divisions.

Prosocial exchange systems: Nonreciprocal giving, lending, and skill-sharing

“…Streetbank has been cited in numerous articles on the sharing economy, particularly as a positive example of sharing (when contrasted with pseudo-sharing i.e. commodity exchanges branded as 'sharing' -See Belk, 2014), and as a case study on the transformative potential of sharing to reframe political economy (Bradley and Hedren, 2014;Kennedy, 2016;Martin, 2016;Hult and Bradley, 2017;Rufas and Hine, 2018;Dellaert, 2019). However, it has nonetheless not received much empirical scrutiny despite calls for analysis of the new social configurations of people using prosocial exchange systems (e.g.…”

Neighborhood hotspot and community awareness: The double role of social network sites in local communities

“…Specifically, we investigate the extent to which localized SNS use, conceptualized as digital neighborhood storytelling, is positively associated to neighborhood sense of community, while considering the mediating roles of community awareness and online sense of community. We investigated this in the context of the recent phenomenon of Online Neighborhood Networks (ONNs), in which neighborhood residents appropriate SNS platforms such as Facebook to develop self-organized neighborhood networks in which they reminisce about the neighborhood's past (Bouko and Calabrese, 2017), share neighborhood-related information (Gulyas, O'Hara, and Eilenberg;Turner, 2015;Konsti-Laakso, 2017;Nygren, Leckner, and Tenor, 2018), exchange small goods (Rufas and Hine, 2018), or fight for the preservation of local heritage (Gregory, 2015).…”

Virtual Urban Communities As An Actor Of Circular Economy Development In Russia

“…Therefore, support from the community, even if virtual, is very important in matters of ethical consumption. Much more important is the presence of not just a virtual, but really neighbourly, local community for the implementation of any actions, such as free markets and sharing practices, recycling activities (Rufas & Hine, 2018). Virtual urban communities are trying to cope with such tasks in modern Russia, the number of which in social networks has been constantly increasing in the last few years, which makes the study of their functioning important and interesting.…”