Membership in Virtual Communities is Booming Enormous increases in processing power and bandwidth are blurring the lines between the real world and the virtual one. As work, education, government, and entertainment have moved on-line, the barriers of space and time that formerly marked different parts of people’s lives have disappeared. Virtual work teams, telecommuting, long-distance learning, and electronic shopping for many have resulted in an “anything, anywhere, anytime” lifestyle, in which formerly distinct areas of people’s lives are now intertwined in cyberspace. People’s lives and their relationships with others are increasingly taking place in this electronic reality. As a result, digital technology has transformed the personal and public lives of most Americans over the past 15 years.
Leading organizational thinkers have attempted to address the broader implications of this transformation.
Michael Hauben coined the term “netizen” to describe those who populate this parallel world on the Internet.
Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of MIT’s Media Laboratory, refers to the places where Netizens gather on-line as “digital neighborhoods.”
Howard Rheingold uses an alternative expression, “virtual communities,” to describe the social networks that form on the web. Such virtual communities are created on a daily basis as groups of like-minded individuals gather and interact in cyberspace.
John Hagel III and Arthur Armstrong were among the first to show how businesses could reap considerable rewards by aggregating individuals in these virtual communities. Hagel and Armstrong are McKinsey consultants and authors of the 1997 bestseller Net Gain: Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities. The ensuing Internet explosion effectively united the virtual world of these communities with the commercial interests of mainstream American businesses.
Here are three examples of virtual communities:
Craigslist.org is a virtual community that features innumerable classified ads for companies, community events, apartment rentals, roommate searches, job listings, and much more for over thirty metropolitan areas in the U.S., Canada, and soon Europe and Australia.
Linux.org is another virtual community of programmers who are collaboratively developing a freely available operating system to compete against Microsoft’s Windows software. The system, developed 13 years ago by its Finnish namesake Linus Torvalds, is known as “open source” software. A programmer can download the software for free, customize his own version, and then make his improvements available to others.
At Neopets.com, children have adopted more than 60 million virtual pets. They visit the site regularly to play with their pets and talk to other pet owners.
These Web sites provide electronic meeting places, or chat rooms, to search for, meet, and interrelate with like-minded individuals. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, 53 million Americans now visit an on-line chat room each month. Chat rooms exist for book clubs, professional associations, Scout troops, support groups, quilters ? almost any community of interest.
“The lonely hearts club” is undoubtedly one of the oldest and most well-known communities of interest, so it serves as a good illustration of what the expanded reach and scope enabled by the virtual world can mean for institutions and the people who are part of them. Electronic dating services also are of interest because they are among the most commercially successful on-line services today. Let’s further explore the on-line dating market.
More than 40 percent of the U.S. population was single in 2000. According to market research and consulting firm Marketdata Enterprises, the dating services industry reached $1.14 billion in revenues in 2003. In the first half of 2003, Americans spent $214.3 million for personal ads on on-line dating services. According to ComScore Networks, which monitors consumer behavior on the Internet, 40 million Americans ? or one quarter of the U.S. adult population ? visited at least one on-line dating site in the month of August 2003 alone. The leading U.S. dating site, Match.com, displays more than 8 million profiles.
Virtual dating services use different techniques to “introduce” suitable couples. With the most basic services, participants complete a personal profile and describe the desired characteristics of the person they would like to meet. This information is matched against all others in a database to locate potential dates. At eMode, for example, you play a version of “20 questions” to establish your personality profile. The site then gives you percentage compatibility ratings for other participants in the service.
A new service, Friendster.com entered the dating scene last year. The service is based on the traditional method of meeting people through mutual friends, but it employs a slight twist. When users complete their profiles, they indicate who their friends are on the service and request that they be added to their respective networks.
When friends add a new member to their networks, they “recommend” that person by attaching their comments to his or her profile. The only profiles the user can view are those individuals in the user’s own network of friends. This mimics social circles where acquaintances will match an individual with their friends who have similarly interesting and available friends.
The most widely-used dating service, Match.com, hired a team of psychologists to develop a free-association test to mimic commonly used and very accurate psychological surveys. Match.com uses the information to identify what it thinks will be the compatible dates for its members. In other words, the service uses personality profiling to put each member in touch with other like-minded individuals.
Some critics contend that these virtual social networking applications will do considerable harm to individuals, to relationships, and to society as a whole.
According to political scientist Norman Nie at Stanford University, spending time on the Internet is leading Americans “to spend less time with family and friends.” However, the 2001 UCLA Internet Report, “Surveying the Digital Future,”4 concludes that time spent on the Internet has little or no effect on face-to-face relationships or socialization in the real world. Going on-line either has no influence on the amount of time spent with household members, or positively influences household time together, the report discloses.
Some researchers have also documented that people say and do things in cyberspace that they wouldn’t say or do in the physical world. Web surfers frequently disregard social codes that exist outside the Net. This can be positive or negative.
In fact, it appears that every potentially negative effect of virtual communities is offset by a potentially positive impact.
The point is that a virtual community is only made possible by technology and not driven by it. The life of the virtual community can only emerge from human communication. While the quality of that communication canbe enhanced and evolved through technology, it is fundamentally governed by human, not technical factors.
Based upon this discussion, we offer the following forecasts:
Over the next three years, we expect the number of people joining virtual communities to explode due to improved user interfaces. Advances in voice recognition technology already enable users to dictate into their PC’s microphone conversations with other virtual community members. Software automatically transcribes the responses. In the next three years, users will have the option to either read or to hear the words. These words may be spoken in one’s own voice or in a voice selected from a range of mechanical options. We expect many computer-phobic individuals to begin conversing on-line over the coming years.
By the end of the decade, we predict that language barriers will fall, and people will be able to communicate effectively with nearly any other on-line user in the world. IBM’s Watson Research Center already has prototyped an English-Chinese automated translator that it will pilot by the end of the year. IBM Researcher Yuqing Gao is hopeful that the technology will be available on cell phones and PDAs in 10 years. Virtual community members already log on to chat rooms where users are having text-based discussions in another language, for example Spanishor French in North America. We predict that latent demand for automated translation will result in global virtual communities that will grow to include non-English speaking users.
In five years, we anticipate many companies will operate their own virtual communities for customers. Some commercial Web sites already provide interactive customer service and support on the Internet. We predict a select few companies will transform their “call centers” into virtual service communities. Customers will reach company representatives ? or other customers ? to get help and support with a company’s products or services. Firms that previously did not, or could not, offer round-the-clock customer support will now partner with customers to provide an extended support network. Customers will also use Avatars to help answer questions based on a database of previous solutions. These cyber-reps will send text-based instructions to customers, or will voice their answers via phone, PC, or voice mail.
We will see the launch of increasingly complex and informative commercial virtual communities targeting children and seniors. Virtual communities will form around toys and games so that children can “play” and interact remotely with fellow playmates. Seniors will join moderated virtual communities where they read and discuss books, follow guides on museum tours, and hold scheduled interactive forums with leading medical experts.
References List :
1. Net Gain: Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities by John Hagel III and Arthur G. Armstrong is published by Harvard Business School Press. ⓒ Copyright 1997 by John Hagel III and Arthur G. Armstrong. All rights reserved.The audiotape summary of Net Gain: Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities is available from Audio-Tech Business Book Summaries. Ask for catalog #5972.2. BusinessWeek Online, June 10, 2003, "The Net: Now Folks Can’t Live Without It," by Olga Kharif. ⓒ Copyright 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved. 3. BusinessWeek Online, June 10, 2003, "Finding Love Online, Version 2.0," by Alex Salkeverc. ⓒ Copyright 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved. 4. To access the report "Surveying the Digital Future," visit the UCLA website at:ccp.usla.edu/pdf/UCLA-Internet-Report-Year-Three.pdf
