Digital Dialogues and Community 2.0: After Avatars, Trolls and Puppets

Citation

Note, M. (2013), "Digital Dialogues and Community 2.0: After Avatars, Trolls and Puppets", Online Information Review, Vol. 37 No. 2, pp. 341-341. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-04-2013-0072

March 2010 is a milestone in internet history because it was first time that Facebook attracted more visitors than Google, signifying “a shift from searching to sharing”. Digital Dialogues and Community 2.0, the fourth in the Chandos Publishing Social Media Series, examines how similar technological changes have influenced communication practices. Divided into four sections, the book assesses facets of the digital world such as online communities of resistance and exile, data and information sharing, professional communication, and consumption and community.

Editor Tara Brabazon, Professor of Creative Media at the University of Bolton, compiles 17 chapters of interdisciplinary research centred on cultural and media studies and library and information science. The contributors “track new modes and models of community and the building of connections, consciousness and social change” and investigate “how particular platforms, portals and applications hook into daily life and build relationships, beyond geographical location or familial links”.

The unifying thread throughout the chapters is that community does not inevitably result from communication, or as Brabazon remarks, “Organising and disseminating digital information can start conversation and consciousness”, but it is not a substitute for it. For example, in “The inevitable exile: a missing link in online community discourse” Venessa Paech, an online community manager, strategist, and researcher, writes about how people's responses when banished from virtual communities “reveal a politically charged landscape […] rife with complex social theatre and paradoxes of governance”. Similarly, Amanda Evans, a lecturer in mass communications at Curtin College in Western Australia, in “Status (update) anxiety: social networking, Facebook and community”, comments that social networking communities are “neither static nor stable, as is witnessed by the relative ease of one ‘friend’ exiting while another crosses the social threshold with an intense desire to belong”. Community boundaries are elastic in the online world.

Other chapters discuss domain name ownership through the lens of postcolonial theory, issues of virtual sex and consent in Second Life, deployment of Web 2.0 in Arab societies, podcasts for libraries and librarians, e‐commerce of tango shoes and Lady Gaga's deployment of the read‐write web. The topics are as multifarious as the uses of digital media, and, while diversity is the book's strength, it is difficult to find connections between chapters beyond ideas of acceptance and marginalisation in virtual communities. For this reason I suggest that Digital Dialogues and Community 2.0 be read for its individual chapters, which may be of interest to media or information studies scholars and students.