Inhabiting the virtual city: the design of social environments for electronic communities
Judith S. Donath, Andrew Lippman · DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) · 1997
The goal of the proposed work is to develop a theory of design for building on-line social environments. The underlying hypothesis is that in order to foster the development of virtual communities and cultures, the environment must provide the means to communicate social cues and information: the participants must be able to perceive the patterns of activity and affiliation that reveal the structure of a community and to have a fluid and subtle vocabulary for conveying cultural information. The theoretical foundation for the research is drawn from traditional studies of society and culture and from observations of contemporary on-line systems. Starting with an analysis of the fundamental differences between real and virtual societies - most notably, the presence and absence of the body - the first section examines the ways social cues are communicated in the real world, discusses the limits imposed on online communities due to their mediated and bodiless nature, and explores directions...