The New Imagined Community: Identifying and Exploring a Bidirectional Continuum Integrating Virtual and Physical Communities through the Community Embodiment Model (CEM)

Abstract

The Internet has enabled global growth in the use of virtual communities. Virtual communities provide Internet researchers with an excellent opportunity to study human communication across different conceptualizations of community, different technologies, and different cultures. This article introduces a theoretical framework called the Community Embodiment Model (CEM) to better understand the nature of the virtual community. It is proposed that CEM can help us better understand how participants interact with virtual communities by defining interaction within virtual communities as beginning with a conceptualization of community (imagined community) that embodies a continuum of virtuality/physicality. This article also describes a pilot study, as part of a wider research project, that used CEM as its theoretical framework. Keywords: Community Embodiment Model; virtual community; imagined community; physical community; Internet; continuum of virtuality/ physicality Fifteen years ago in popular culture, people were just getting used to the idea that computers could project and extend a person's intellect. Today people are embracing the notion that computers may extend an individual's physical presence. -Sherry Turkle (1995, 20) The Internet is a global phenomenon that arguably changes the nature of how both individuals and communities develop and function on a daily basis.

How consumers persuade each other: rhetorical strategies of interpersonal influence in online communities

“…Members may be offering or searching for advice, exchanging technical information and knowledge, or talking about events or other community members. All of these involve activities that transform virtual communities into emulations of a physical community, suggesting a close social and personal link between the online individual and his/her life outside the Internet (Fox, 2004).…”

A culturalist critique of ‘online community’ in new media studies

“…Out of this ideology has emerged a conception of online community as a social artifact of the Internet era (Fox, 2004). Appropriating Anderson's popular notion of the nation as an imagined community, scholars understand the formation of online communities as a mainly subjective process.…”

“…As the Internet seamlessly assimilates the fabrics of our daily life, the online and the offline converge into a single social realm (Fernback, 2007). Interactions within communities need to be understood as a melding of the physical and the virtual (Fox, 2004).…”

“…Baym, 1998; Fernback, 2007; Jones, 1995, 1998; Katz et al, 2004; Preece and Maloney-Krichmar, 2005; Rheingold, 1993; Wellman, 1999). Recently, however, discussions of online community have subsided (Fox, 2004). Scholars are now concerned that the voluntary, fluid, and ephemeral social relationships online do not bear out the deeply embedded human interdependence embodied in the concept of community, despite its normative appeal (Bakardjieva, 2003; Fernback, 2007; Postill, 2008).…”

A multi-perspective cultural study of information technology in developing and developed countries

“…The community phenomenon is central to internet growth. Although there has been some research into virtual community and globalisation (Catterall and Maclaran, 2001;Rothaermel and Sugiyama, 2001;Kozinets, 2002;Fox, 2004;Leimeister, Ebner and Krcmar, 2005;Wellman, 2005;Chiu et al, 2007), other studies prefer to measure the astounding growth of virtual communities by counting, for each country in the region, the number of web hosts, internet nodes, web pages, or results generated by web search engines. According to these measures, the impact and the growth of virtual communities in the global arena has been equally compelling in the last few years.…”