Online communities and communities of practice
Jo Angouri · 2015
In the 1960s, Licklider and Taylor foresaw the ways in which users would reorganize life around the infrastructure that was becoming accessible and the growing significance of interacting online with other users. They suggested that online formations ‘consist of geographically separated members, sometimes grouped in small clusters and sometimes working individually. They will be communities not of common location, but of common interest’ (1968: 30). Groups of people interacting across boundaries of the past is also in line with Levy’s (2005) idea of a cosmopedia, a knowledge space where users or ‘global citizens’ form groups and share knowledge across geographical and national boundaries. The widely cited remark that ‘no one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity’ (Levy 1999, cited in Jenkins 2006: 139) succinctly illustrates Levy’s conceptualization of a universally distributed intelligence with the transformational potential to change societal power structures. Although Levy’s work presents an attainable utopia (see Jenkins 2002, 2006), what is particularly relevant for the discussion here is the tremendous socio-political and economic implications deriving from the fact that users in different geographical locations routinely and effortlessly come together around some common interest. These online formations are commonly referred to as ‘online communities’.