Communities

A community is, according to the Oxford Dictionary, a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common¹. In traditional research, the study focuses on localy bound communities like neighbourhoods and villages, because they have clear boundaries of who is involved in the community[7][6].
With the introduction of modern media, like games, social media and messenger-applications, communities are not bound anymore by location and the characteristic becomes the central point of the community. A concequence of this is that boundaries of the community are less clear. Therefore, one of the challenges of doing research on these virtual communities is determining who is and who is not part of a community[12].
Virtual communities have four necessary characteristics: interactivity, communicators, a publicly shared mediated (virtual) communication place and a minimum level of sustained membership[13]. This means that in a virtual community, there must be a longlasting, self-sustaining communication (interactivity) about subjects (related to the relating characteristics) by two or more persons (communicators) over one ore more platforms like a website or a chat-group (communication place) where there is a certain amount of active members (sustained membership).

Before we can compare different communities and their structure, we first need to define a few (types of) communities. We will look at two types of real-life communities and two types of virtual communities, such that we can discuss their similarities and differences.

¹. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/community ↩