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Communities in Cyberspace
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Author: Marc A. Smith, Peter Kollock
List Price: $33.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0415191408
Publisher: Routledge (December, 1998)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 97,900
Average Customer Rating: 4 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 5 out of 5
Really good one for researchers
Very good articles above important aspects of virtual communities like identity, gender, sociability and other stuff written by people that really knows about the subject, famous researchers. If you are a researcher, you'll love it.
Rating: 4 out of 5
A good resource for writers and academics
This book covers four main areas in regards to online communities: identity, social order and control, community structure and dynamics, and collective action.Like many other texts on community, this book tends to focus on older technologies, i.e. Usenet, and MUDs/MOOs. That said, it contains a lot of good analysis done in these areas, and can provide good background for writing about online community. Note that the articles tend to be from the perspective of sociology. The strongest articles, in my opinion, were chapter 2, "Identity and deception in the virtual community," chapter 7, "Virtual communities as communities: Net surfers don't ride alone," and chapter 10, "The promise and peril of social action in cyberspace." If you are interested in building a community or just in the ideas of online communities, this is probably not the best book for you -- it's pretty academic. Check out Jenny Preece's _Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability_ as an alternative.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Lost in (cyber)space?
I was introduced to this book because my enlightened sociology prof used it as a text for our discussions of sociology and cyberspace. Some intellectually stimulating articles, like Jodi O'Brien's discussion of gender. It was very stimulating . . . However, the book was far too focused on issues relating to North America and the West generally. What about the rest of the world? Some sections were extremely dull. This is exciting stuff, why must people pervert it into intellectual cheeseburgers?
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