---
id: "virtual-communities:literature-review"
type: "GovLab literature review"
title: "The Power of Virtual Communities: Literature Review"
url: "https://virtual-communities.thegovlab.org/literature-review/"
date: "2021-02-23"
summary: "The formation, structure and governance of groups online, and the relationship of individual members and society to those groups, is a large, robust, multidisciplinary field. Scholars have been writing about “digital” or “virtual” communities since the World Wide Web began (Rheingold 1993) and…"
source: "The GovLab (virtual-communities.thegovlab.org)"
licence: "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)"
---

# The Power of Virtual Communities: Literature Review

*We welcome suggestions for additions to this review. You can add your suggestions by highlighting a piece of text and adding annotations, or email [email removed]. You may also view a version of this document without annotations [here.](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eznAcOte2oKywUw06nVlB72x3PA5niwhpsoHUkWNf6g/edit?usp=sharing)*

## Introduction

The formation, structure and governance of groups online, and the relationship of individual members and society to those groups, is a large, robust, multidisciplinary field. Scholars have been writing about “digital” or “virtual” communities since the World Wide Web began (Rheingold 1993) and about computer-supported cooperative work even before that (Greif 1988), including Douglas Engelbart’s pioneering work in the 1960s building technology for high-powered teams (Engelbart 1995). For decades, sociologists like Sherry Turkle, psychologists like J. Richard Hackman, business and management researchers like John Hagel, and technologists like Jaron Lanier have been interested in how humans form groups and communicate online.

Since the 1980s, the study of online groups has been boosted by the annual ACM [Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems](https://chi2020.acm.org/) (CHI), for scholars who focus broadly on how computers mediate interactions between people. In 1986, the subfield of social computing launched its own [conference](https://dl.acm.org/conference/cscw) on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. More recently, MIT’s Thomas Malone and a group of multidisciplinary scholars started a conference on Collective Intelligence (CI), which also examines the relationship of the Internet to groups, in particular how groups work together aided by machines to create or analyze information, deliberate, and make decisions.

Unlike the geographically-bounded communities of times past, these online groups, from meme-sharing communities on Reddit to Facebook Groups for female entrepreneurs, may be large, and/or distributed crowds interacting via a computer network. But like Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities'' (Anderson 1983), these online groups involve strong bonds of attachment, loyalty and belonging even among people who have never interacted face-to-face.  While there are many online communities whose members may not build relationships, or even directly interact with one another, such as those who contribute to the open-source mapping project [OpenStreetMap](https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=4/38.01/-95.84) or the database of social impact organizations listed at [SDGecosystem.com](http://www.sdgecosystem.com/), this literature review will focus on online groups whose members:

- Have an identity as members of the group
- Feel a sense of belonging and attachment and
- Where the group, enabled by technology, takes actions as a group.

These groups are more than the sum of their parts and distinct from those networked activities where individual members act on their own under a common brand.

Drawing on the literature of multiple fields, including sociology, human-computer interaction, social psychology, business and management, we examine scholarly contributions, both theoretical and empirical, to questions about online communities. We identify:

- Selected scholars and organizations who are researching online communities
- Key questions they are asking and novel hypotheses about how people act in online groups
- Interesting studies and experiments underway and their conclusions
- Gaps in our understanding of online groups

This literature review, which is designed to provide background and context for The Power of Virtual Communities, is organized into three parts:

1. Individual impact - the quantity and diversity of who participates, and the impact on an individual’s personal development
2. Group impact - how members of the group interact in order to achieve their stated goals
3. Societal impact - outputs and outcomes of the group’s work and its ability to have an effect on actors outside of the group.

We look at how researchers address a number of overarching questions, including:

*Individual Impact*

- Group Composition and Structure - How are individuals structured into communities and networks?
- Motivation - What motivates people to participate in online groups? What benefits do they receive from participating?
- Risks - What are the risks or harms that disincentivize people from participating in online communities?

*Group Impact*

- Selection - Who participates in online groups and who does not? How does the selection process affect the group’s outcomes?
- Action - What do people do in online groups? What tasks or actions do people take in groups, and what types of actions do groups take?
- Governance - How do groups approach rules and governance?

*Social Impact*

- Knowledge and Action - How do online groups create knowledge and facilitate action?
- Success - What makes online groups successful and impactful?
- Virtual Life - How do online groups influence offline life, and vice versa?

This literature review is intended to offer an introduction to the study of online groups and communities. It is not intended to be a comprehensive or exhaustive overview of a  topic of exploding interest to a variety of fields. We welcome suggestions for additions to this review. You can add your suggestions inline or email [email removed]. You may also view a version of this document without annotations [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eznAcOte2oKywUw06nVlB72x3PA5niwhpsoHUkWNf6g/edit?usp=sharing).

### What are online communities?

In his seminal 1993 book about life online *The Virtual Community*, Howard Rheingold writes that virtual communities “are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace.” As a journalist writing in the early days of the World Wide Web, Rheingold participated in a number of online social groups, such as the community of tech aficionados and activists on the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, known as The WELL, one of the oldest virtual communities in continuous operation since 1985. Rheinghold was one of the first to popularize the notion that online community exhibits the same behaviors, and provides the same benefits, as an “authentic” real-world community. As Rheinhold writes, “People in virtual communities do just about everything people do in real life, but we leave our bodies behind.”

Just as all groups afford an opportunity for meaningful belonging, communities, both online and off, may also imply an exclusion and even ostracism of those who are rejected or do not participate. In online groups, new tools empower members and leaders to create and police boundaries and decide who can and who cannot join. Some of the earliest work on the negative externalities of virtual communities have looked at this flip side of how the emergence of online groups have contributed to alienation (Williams et al. 2002).

In the years since, many have elaborated on the differences between online and offline communities. They write about the distinctions between the two in terms of the strength of ties between members (De Meo et al. 2014), members’ motivations for joining (Rafaeli and Ariel 2008), the ways in which members communicate (Turkle 2016), and the role they play in our lives (Putnam 2000) among many other factors.

In every case, virtual community is no longer an oddity or an exception but the place to which many people feel an allegiance.

This literature review does not opine on which groups are and are not communities. As such, we will use terms like “online group,” and “virtual community,” interchangeably to refer to any collection of people whose interactions are primarily mediated through technology.

### Types of Online Communities

As offline, there are a wide variety of topics that members of online communities actively engage in (Horrigan 2001).

Some of these communities are oriented around a common hobby, interest, or activity, such as people who create virtual identities in the video game Second Life (Mennecke et al. 2007) or come together on YouTube to learn to play musical instruments (Waldron 2013). There are also fan communities built around a shared love of a TV show, film franchise, or book series such as the *Harry Potter* franchise (Whiteman and Metivier 2013), or sport, such as fans of a professional basketball team (J. S. Zhang et al. 2018). Others build fan communities around a particular brand or product, such as Starbucks coffee (Chang, Hsieh, and Tseng 2013).

Other communities are built by people who share a common experience. These could be a community of parents (Pederson and Smithson 2013), or people residing in the same town, city, or neighborhood (Erete 2015). Another example of a common experience is dealing with a similar physical or emotional issue (Idriss 2009). [Professional communities](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPn9GzsJNF0&ab_channel=INKtalks) are also developed by people involved in the same job or field (Imroz 2019).

Still other communities are developed by people who share a common identity such as the 900,000-person Facebook Group [Surviving Hijab](https://www.facebook.com/groups/631337350298622/), intended for women who wear a headscarf. Members may connect over shared religious beliefs, such as online forums for the Orthodox Jewish community (Okun and Nimrod 2017), political beliefs (Soon and Kluver 2007), or devotion to a social or charitable cause (Cmeciu and Coman 2016). Likewise, many form communities based on a shared ethnic or cultural background (McLean 2011) or sexual identity (Bryan 2018). There are also solver communities, for instance, those who participate in hackathons and software development contests (Boudreau et al. 2011).

Then there’s a wide array of online groups for governance and citizen engagement. Increasingly, public institutions are turning to citizens, who form communities to the end of co-designing and co-creating solutions to public problems. Some of them are representative samples of citizens known as mini-publics, who work together in a group to advise government or even make decisions (Landemore 2013; Gastil and Wright 2019).

In the following sections, we look at research covering a wide variety of these online communities. At the end, we also include seminal works devoted to online groups by topic.

### Individual Impact

The individual impact dimension looks at the identity and diversity of who participates in online groups, the number of individuals, and the impact on an individual’s personal development. Scholars who write about such questions as how groups are structured, members’ motivations for participation, and risk factors that may discourage members from participating.

#### 1\. Group Structure - How are individuals structured into communities and networks?

Researchers study the characteristics of groups in order to describe how members connect with one another and the role that technology plays bringing individuals together.

##### Group Size

Just as the Asch conformity experiments in the 1950s (Asch 1951), which studied the impact of the size of a group on people’s tendency to conform to the group’s opinion, contemporary researchers study the relationship between group size and the impact that the number of members has on an individual’s experience in the group. Famously, anthropologist Robin Dunbar stated that smaller groups of 50, 100, and 150 have greater longevity than larger groups: “Optimal community size will, of course, ultimately be determined by the functional demands of the socio-ecological environment (Dunbar, et al. 2009).” However, the question arises as to whether there are natural “sweet spots” at which communities are likely to be more successful (i.e. survive longer without fissioning) because they map better onto natural grouping patterns and their underpinning psychology (Dunbar and Sosisc 2018).”

Building on these classic studies and the insight that smaller groups tend to have greater longevity because of stronger ties between members, researchers still disagree about the concept of optimal group size. Emilio Ferrara (2012), for example, in a study of the connections formed by more than 500 million Facebook users found that, even on very large platforms like Facebook, people tend to structure themselves into smaller communities rather than very large groups.

On a similar note, Chao Yu, Yueting Chai, and Yi Liu (2018) of the National Engineering Laboratory for E-commerce Technologies at Tsinghua University in Beijing conclude based on a meta-review that groups that are too large can become unwieldy, making it difficult for members to exchange information.

On the other hand, in their book *Principles of Social Psychology*, Rajiv Jhangiani and Hammond Tarry (2014) state that the optimal size of a group simply depends on the task at hand. The authors write that “Groups in which the members have high ability may benefit more from larger group size” and that “groups that have greater commitment or social identity may suffer less from motivational losses, even when they are large.”

##### Strength of interpersonal ties

An interrelated concept to the question of size is the strength of ties or links between group members. Researchers frequently attempt to measure the quality of social cohesion in online groups, comparing them to offline groups or examining the relationship between size and other variables on the relationship among members. In a 2009 interview, social psychologist J. Richard Hackman, who studied online and offline teams, told Harvard Business Review that “It’s managing the links between members that gets teams into trouble. My rule of thumb is no double digits (Coutu 2009).” Pasquale De Meo et al. (2014) looked specifically at weak ties on Facebook, and found that weak ties occur frequently, even in small communities, and help to spread information throughout the community. Likewise, Shoake Zhang et al. (2011) interviewed Facebook users about the connections they formed with others on the platform, and found that both strong and weak ties are prevalent on Facebook, and that individuals use those types of ties for different purposes.

On a similar note, a 2010 study of adolescents’ involvement in online communities by University of California education researcher Stephanie M. Reich found that communities on Myspace and Facebook exhibited networked individualism, a concept developed by sociologist Barry Wellman which means that individuals formed large and expansive networks in order to seek a particular benefit, such as exchanging resources. Wellman and co-author Lee Rainie studied networked individualism in their 2012 book *Networked: The New Social Operating System*, writing that individuals are the “primary unit of connectivity,” which allows them to participate in more networks with varying strength of ties to each

Still others study how offline factors influence online ties. One study looked at how real-world friendship networks on college campuses are represented on social media platforms, and identified a number of personal traits (e.g. which high school a student attended) that shape who connects with whom (Traud et al. 2011). Yuri Takhteyev et al. (2012) studied the geography of Twitter networks and found that the physical distance between members (as well as other factors such as the number of flights between their locations) had a significant effect on the formation of ties.

#### 2\. Motivation - What motivates people to participate in online groups? What benefits do they receive from participating?

Motivation and incentives is a well-studied area within the field of behavioral psychology, human-computer interaction, and other fields. Scholars differentiate between intrinsic motivation (where behavior is inspired by one’s own desire to achieve an outcome) and extrinsic motivation (where an external influence shapes behavior) (Hossain 2012). In this section we identify a number of both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for participating in online groups.

##### Psychological safety

Safety, or the sense of being able to exist and express oneself without fear of judgement, is often pointed to as a requisite for participating in groups and organizations (Herway 2017). In a survey of employees in a workplace, Barjinder Singh et al. (2017) found that psychological safety and the need to belong helped to mediate relationships between community members. Likewise, a review of the organizational management literature on psychological safety found that a sense of safety makes for better collaboration, interpersonal communication, and team performance (Edmondson and Zhike 2014).

##### Expertise and information

Another common motivation is to gain expertise or information. A large survey of Facebook Groups users found that participants used the platform to socialize, but also for information, entertainment, and to maintain their social status (Park et al. 2009). Liping Deng and Nicole Judith Tavares (2013) studied how students have formed online learning communities on Facebook, and found that such communities serve an educational as well as a learning purpose.

Others have formed online communities of practice on Facebook Groups, where they learn a skill - such as how to run an Airbnb - from others with experience doing so (Holikatti et al. 2019). Still others participate in order to exercise or share their own knowledge or skills with a knowledge-building community, for instance, by contributing to Wikipedia (Rafaeli and Ariel 2008).

##### Interpersonal relationships

Naturally, many come to online groups in order to build or maintain interpersonal relationships. One study of students' motivations to use Facebook by researchers in Hong Kong found that social presence - or the degree to which online interactions and relationships feel salient or real - had the greatest influence on students’ motivations to use platforms (Cheung, Chiu, and Lee 2011).

Participants build these relationships for varying purposes. One study looked at how people moving between social networks (e.g. transitioning out of college) used Facebook, and found that two primary uses were to keep in touch with old friends and to build or maintain a professional network (Dimicco and Millen 2007). A study of healthcare workers in India found that many women joined communities of practice on social media for self-empowerment and to challenge gender roles (Ismail and Kumar 2019). Still others build relationships on Facebook for support, for instance, during periods of mourning (Forman et al. 2012).

##### Advertising and branding

Researchers in business and Internet commerce study how online platforms incentivize individuals to consume. Many academic researchers and [private sector practitioners](https://www.standingongiants.com/author/vincent-boon/) have studied what motivates consumers to participate in an online community built around a brand (Pöyry, Parvinen, and Malmivaara 2013; Islam and Rahman 2016), and how companies can engage with and profit from these online consumer communities (Armstrong and Hagel 2000; Happe 2016). Unsurprisingly, a study of members’ motivations in Facebook brand communities found that high levels of engagement within the online brand community translated to greater brand loyalty (Munnukka et al. 2014). For social networking sites like Facebook, the platform itself, or the company that owns it, acts as a brand; a study of users’ loyalty to the Facebook brand found that the platform can incentivize participation by building users’ trust and helping them to cultivate an identity for their community (Ho 2014).

#### 3\. Risks - What are the risks or harms that disincentivize people from participating in online communities?

On the other hand, researchers have also studied how certain factors can undermine incentives or discourage people from participating in online groups. In many cases, the risk of harm or loss of privacy disincentivizes participation.

##### Emotional harm

The risk of emotional harm affects both a person’s decision to join an online group and their behavior as a member. Michela Del Vicario et al. (2016) studied how Facebook users formed echo chambers, or groups isolated from the outside environment which enforce members’ existing behaviors and beliefs. The authors found that highly active users in those groups exhibited more negative emotions, and that higher activity in these communities correlated with greater polarization. Likewise, a study of political discussions on Twitter found that tweets that contained moral and emotional language spread more widely than those that did not, but that this diffusion was largely contained within each ideological group, which the authors argue “may partly explain increasing polarization between liberals and conservatives (Brady et al. 2017).”

Some have studied how the emotional distress that some experience within online groups, for instance due to [cyberbullying or online harassment](https://www.socialmediamatters.in/how-india-deals-with-online-abuse), can negatively impact their experience or even drive them off of social media altogether. Jon-Chao Hong et al. (2015) studied users’ motivations to participate in Facebook communities and found that people with higher levels of general anxiety and social anxiety were less likely to continue participating in communities on the platform.

##### Privacy and security

Privacy and security concerns are another consideration. Even before the modern Internet, scholars like David Lyon, in his book *The Electronic Eye* (1994), raised concerns about electronic surveillance and data collection, worries that have only been accelerated by social media (Zuboff 2020).

An individual has to weigh the potential benefit of engaging with their online community against the risk that other community members, or the platform itself, may breach their expectation of privacy. This tradeoff intersects with social traits, such as gender (Fogel and Nehmad 2014). For instance, studies of social media use by young women in urban India have found that while participating in online communities that cross social boundaries can be empowering (Kumar 2014), many women have also experienced breaches of privacy both online (e.g. unsolicited messages from other users) and offline (e.g. stalking and sexual harassment) as a result of using social media (Karusala et al. 2019).

On the other hand, information collection and sharing may now be so pervasive that privacy concerns are diminishing as a deterrence to participating in online spaces (Al-Ameen et al. 2020). Nusrat Jahan Mim and Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed (2020) studied the conflicts between the image sharing culture of online social networks and the privacy that is expected within the home in urban Bangladesh. Rather than change their image-sharing practices, many participants actually modified the functions of rooms within homes to accommodate picture-taking, much to the dismay of family members who felt their privacy was being violated (Mim and Ahmed 2020). Another possible explanation is that it is difficult for individuals to make informed decisions about what to share when they are not aware of who is privy to the information they share, as is often the case on social media (Acquisti and Gross 2006).

Nu Sun et. al (2014) examined a variety of these factors in their study of lurkers, or those who are members of online groups but do not actively participate. The authors pointed to a number of reasons for this behavior, including environmental reasons (i.e. the social environment does not make posting easy), personal reasons (e.g. introversion), relationship reasons (e.g. a lack of intimacy in the group) and reasons related to security and privacy.

### Group Impact

This section considers how members of the group interact in order to achieve their stated goals. A number of factors, including how groups select their members, the actions that groups take, and the group's governance structure, influence the Group Impact dimension.

#### 4\. Selection - Who participates in online groups and who does not? How does the selection process affect the group’s outcomes?

Groups can either take all comers (with some restrictions), or group leadership can select participants from the top down. Both approaches have their proponents in the literature around collective intelligence and online communities more generally.

##### Top-down selection

In a top-down selection process, members are selected by the group’s governance body according to some preordained set of criteria. Top-down selection is often used to recruit participants to complete a specific task, such as a group problem-solving process. For instance, problem-solvers can use social media to identify and reach individuals with expertise in a certain subject matter (Bozzon et al. 2013). Top-down selection can also help to build certain desirable group characteristics, such as a small size (Chao et al. 2018) and diverse membership (Hackman and Katz 2010).

##### Self-selection

Self-selection is more common for general interest groups online. Members participate for a variety of personal and social reasons, which are discussed in greater detail in the “Motivation” section of this literature review.

Members of online groups also choose what content to share and whom to interact with. Bernie Hogan likens this process to a series of “performances,” where other group members act like an audience. The reaction of the “audience” can either encourage or dissuade members from continuing to contribute to the group, or cause them to alter their behavior (Hogan 2010).

To be sure, self-selection is also used extensively in collective intelligence efforts. Tanja Aitamurto et al. (2018), in an article about using collective intelligence in policymaking, argue that crowdsourcing, by definition, is an open call and that self-selection should be used even if it leads to unequal representation.

#### 5\. Action - What do people do in online groups? What tasks or actions do people take in groups, and what types of actions do groups take?

The actions people take in online groups depend largely on the goal, purpose, and topic of the group. Among many possible actions, groups and their members often create or manage identities, facilitate mutual support, or work together to solve a problem or complete a task.

##### Create or manage identities

Members of online groups create or manage new or alternative identities. Online groups can serve as a space for self-expression, where individuals explore their identities with friends or with the larger platform (Hogan 2010). Individuals also cultivate new identities, for instance, when transitioning into the professional world (Dimicco and Millen 2007) or connecting with others from new or different cultures (Kumar 2014).

Individuals sometimes also alter their identities to conform with the expectations of their online communities. For instance, a woman may conceal her gender when participating in a male-dominated space, such as a forum for computer programming, in order to avoid discrimination or stereotyping from other members of the community (Brooke 2019).

A large body of literature also looks at the imagined identities which individuals have formed within video games and virtual worlds (Balkin and Noveck 2006). As Josh Call et al. write in their 2012 book *Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital Denizens*, digital roleplaying games have “developed new ways to immerse players, inviting them to participate in fictional worlds by inhabiting the gaze of characters.” Indeed, in her 2011 book, *Alone Together*, which studies the impact of technology on people’s emotions and relationships, Sherry Turkle writes that “It is not unusual for people to feel more comfortable in an unreal place than a real one because they feel that in simulation they show their better and perhaps truer self.”

In some Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPG’s), individuals’ interactions in the virtual world are similar enough to real-world interactions that researchers use these spaces for controlled social science experiments (Castranova 2008). For instance, Luca Rossi (2008) has studied how guilds - or cooperative online groups formed by players - function as communities as well as an important part of the gameplay within MMORPG’s.

##### Mutual support

Other groups facilitate mutual support. These groups are often composed of people linked by a common identity or demographic trait. For instance, Paul Baker et al. (2013) studied online communities composed of people from underrepresented groups, such as individuals with disabilities and aging people. Other groups are formed to provide mutual support during times of trauma, such as for mutual support after the death of a loved one (Forman et al. 2012)

##### Problem-solving

Still other groups solve a problem or complete a task. Beth Simone Noveck (2018) has written extensively about [crowdlaw](https://crowd.law/) or structured collaboration between public institutions and crowds in the lawmaking process. Much of the collective intelligence literature discusses crowdwork, a practice where companies pay distributed groups to complete tasks on online platforms, such as [Amazon Mechanical Turk](https://www.mturk.com/) (Kittur et al 2013). Other parts of the literature focus on volunteer-based co-creation, where online groups work together on a common task, such as maintaining a Wikipedia page (Rafaeli and Ariel 2008).

#### 6\. Governance - How do groups approach rules and governance? What kind of governance works best for different topics and functions?

Online groups form written rules and processes which govern members’ behavior. Depending on the group’s purpose, these governance structures can be developed by the groups and its leadership, the group can be managed by another entity, or the governance structure may be a combination of these two approaches.

##### Emergent governance

Emergent rules and processes are those which are formed ad hoc by the group or by leaders in consultation with the group. In an article about the value of online communities for solving sustainable development challenges, Luca Iandoli (2009) argues that, compared to a real-world group, “a virtual community is a self-organized system in which top-down management and centralization are virtually absent.” With the absence of top-down leadership, Iandoli argues, these groups are left to form their own rules and processes. Likewise, in their book *Networked*, Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman describe a “choreography and exertion” that occurs within social networks, where members organically form relationships and protocols to tackle the task at hand (12).

##### Top-down governance

Other groups are managed by a leadership team or external organization which defines the rules and processes from the top down.

There is extensive collective intelligence literature about how organizations can design and manage the crowd’s process and workflow. For instance, Kevin J. Boudreau and Karim R. Lakhani (2013) have studied how businesses and organizations can tap online crowds to generate new ideas through problem solving contests. In their Handbook of Collective Intelligence, editors Tom Malone and Michael Bernstein (2018), along with a dozen other contributors, outline how online groups can be designed to coordinate shared resources, manage relationships between participants, synchronize tasks, relate tasks to one another, make decisions, and communicate. To this end, the United Kingdom’s innovation foundation Nesta has published a playbook for individuals and organizations to use in designing collective intelligence projects (Peach, Berditchevskaia, and Bass 2019).

##### Mixed Governance

Still others contend that online communities should combine elements of emergent and top-down governance. Daren Brabham (2018) argues that “crowdsourcing entails a mix of top down, traditional, hierarchical management process and a bottom-up, open process involving an online community” where control rests “between organization and online community rather than primarily in one or the other.” Likewise, a study of open source software development communities by Siobhán O’Mahony and Fabrizio Ferraro (2007) found that the most successful groups were those with mechanisms of governance that were both bureaucratic (meaning that decisions were made through a formal, hierarchical process) and democratic (meaning that the bureaucracy’s decisions were tempered by input from the community at large).

### Societal Impact

This section examines the impact of online groups on society at large, including a discussion of how online groups create knowledge and facilitate action and what makes groups successful. Finally, we discuss how online groups have influenced offline life, and vice versa.

#### 7\. Knowledge and Action - How do online groups create knowledge and facilitate action?

A wide range of literature looks at the value of collaborating with online groups for knowledge creation, idea generation, and decision-making.

##### Crowdsourcing information and expertise

Online groups can contribute to our collective understanding of a topic by crowdsourcing information and expertise. In his book *Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge*, Cass R. Sunstein writes that online groups are particularly good at identifying, assimilating, and analyzing large quantities of information. For Sunstein, some of the most impactful online groups are those that have aggregated and synthesized large amounts of information (such as online wikis, or open source software) or used the information collected to draw insights, inform action, and make decisions. Nesta’s Aleks Berditchevskaia and Peter Baeck (2020) have studied how artificial intelligence can aid in the processing, structuring, and organizing of the collective knowledge of online groups. In their report *The Future of Minds and Machines*, Berditchevskaia and Baeck identify numerous initiatives that have combined AI with insight from online groups for a range of purposes, from improving medical diagnoses to mapping human rights violations in Syria.

##### Idea generation

Some study how online groups generate ideas, and how the structures of those groups influence this process. In an experiment, Karan Girotra et al. (2010) found that problem-solving groups organized in a “hybrid” structure - meaning that they first work independently and then come together - were able to generate more ideas and better quality ideas, and were more able to discern the quality of the ideas they generated. Eric Bonabeau (2009) writes that groups thrive at idea generation, while individuals are better at idea evaluation. For Bonabeau, a diverse group of examples from market forecasting to crisis response have shown that “a group of diverse, independent and reasonably informed people might outperform even the best individual estimate or decision.”

To this end, many organizations have recognized the value of engaging crowds to generate solutions to tough problems. This often takes the form of [open innovation challenges](https://www.luminary-labs.com/insight/lessons-learned-open-innovation-prize-competitions-challenges/), or competitions that incentivize the creation of solutions to a defined problem, often by offering a prize to the winner(s) (Holoubek n.d.). Through prize-backed challenges, governments, organizations, and companies have tapped online crowds to generate ideas for open source technologies for [COVID-19 response](https://covidcourse.thegovlab.org/modules/innovation-challenges.html), the [expansion](https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-your-community-challenge) of solar electricity, and the promotion of [early childhood literacy](https://www.challenge.gov/challenge/bridging-the-word-gap/).

##### Assemble ideas and information

Others study how online groups collaborate, in order to assemble ideas and information into a common output. In his book *Big Mind*, Geoff Mulgan writes that, like neurons in a human brain, members of groups coordinate in order “to link observation, analysis, creativity, memory, judgment, and wisdom.” Mulgan argues that “assemblies that bring together many elements will be vital if the world is to navigate some of its biggest challenges, from health and climate change to migration.” In some cases, individuals who participate in these assemblies are coordinated by an administrator and may not even know that they are part of a group, let alone interact with other members. This is often the case with online “citizen science” projects, or research efforts that involve distributed groups of volunteers (Reeves et al. 2017)

#### 8\. Success - What makes online groups successful and impactful?

Assessing the success of online groups is a matter of developing criteria or measures of success, and then identifying determinants, or factors that influence whether these criteria are met.

##### Social traits

Some look at the social traits that make groups successful. Human-computer interaction researcher Jenny Preece (2001) developed a framework for success that measured sociability: the quality of social interactions in online communities. Preece found that successful groups in this regard had a shared purpose and that these groups had clear policies in place to guide members behavior. Leanne Trembath (2011) also studied social determinants of success, and found that successful online communities’ members were satisfied with the quality of the community’s content. Trembath also linked success to a sense of trust, belonging, and a belief that the community is socially useful.

##### Technical factors

Others look at the technical factors of platforms that impact the success of online groups. Hsiu-Fen Lin and Gwo-Guang Lee (2006) developed a quantitative model of how the quality of a platform influences members’ intentions to continue participating in online communities on the platform. They found that the key determinants of success were system quality (e.g. website reliability and ease of use), information quality (e.g. accuracy, timeliness, and usefulness) and service quality (i.e. the community’s management is trustworthy and responsive).

Success can also be measured via a combination of social traits and platform traits. In a 2004 paper, Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza and Jenny Preece presented a framework for evaluating online communities that combines sociability with usability, or the quality of interaction between humans and computers. Souza and Preece write that these dimensions “are systematically related to each other and to the success of the community.”

#### 9\. Virtual Life - How do online groups influence offline life, and vice versa?

To assess the impact of online groups on offline life, scholars look at several factors related to how online groups operate and the features and limitations of the platforms they use.

One of these factors is the role of online groups in building (or degrading) social capital, or the value that people receive from their relationships with one another. The observation that social capital is declining in the United States is key to Robert Putnam’s seminal work *Bowling Alone*. In this book, published in 2000, Putnam worried that for a growing number of people, spending time on the Internet had come to occupy time that would be spent building community through face-to-face interactions. Putnam argued that this behavior, among many other factors, had contributed to a decline of community, and thus a diminishing of social capital.

In another book-length work, *State of Play: Law, Games and Virtual Worlds,* Jack M. Balkin and Beth Simone Noveck (2006) collected a dozen and an half essays from scholars examining the interplay between “real world law” and virtual world space; Chapters on intellectual property, criminal law, privacy and democracy look at how new activities among online groups challenge jurisprudential ideas developed for an online -- or “meat space” -- world and how online groups are practices new forms of democratic engagement that can teach us about how to transform real world institutions

##### Interpersonal communication

Some focus their analysis on the role of online platforms in shaping how members of groups communicate with one another online.

For some, communication mediated by social media fails to live up to the real thing. In her 2015 book *Reclaiming Conversation*, Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argues that face-to-face communication forces people to be both vulnerable and present. For Turkle, mobile devices and social media cannot emulate true conversations: “We are being silenced by our technologies - in a way, ‘cured of talking’.” Turkle fears that, in the absence of conversation, young people will have difficulty forming identities and developing empathy.

New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg is more optimistic about the potential of social media to enhance, rather than replace, face-to-face interactions. In his 2018 book *Palaces for the People*, Klinenberg writes that “For most of us, Facebook friends and Instagram followers are supplements to - not surrogates for - our social lives” and that “building real connections requires a shared physical environment - a social infrastructure.”

##### Time and attention

Other critics have written about how social media algorithms manipulate our time, attention, and behavior (Magalhães 2018). Technologist Jaron Lanier (2018) argues that social media has contributed to a politics that is “neither left, nor right, but down.” As the culprit, Lanier points towards algorithms that amplify conflict for the purpose of tailoring advertising and retaining individuals’ attention. For Lanier, this process has had a number of negative outcomes, from the proliferation of extremist online political movements to the amplification of negative emotions and - as Turkle also notes - a lapse in empathy.

On a similar note, in her book *Alone Together*, Sherry Turkle (2011) argues that social media occupies larger and larger portions of our time with the reward of connection ever-diminishing. As Turkle writes, “The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy.” For Turkle, the result is a sense of being “there but not there” - a condition of being constantly available, with the stress and anxiety of our lives documented in a permanent public record, but also socially isolated, without the benefits that real connections bring.

By contrast, Eric Klinerberg argues that an overabundance of connection, rather than a lack of connection, is the greater concern. In his 2012 book *Going Solo*, which discusses the trend of people deciding to live alone, Klinenberg writes that “Our most burning questions about the nature of contemporary society are not about isolation, but the problem of being hyperconnected.” This is particularly true for those who choose to live alone, who Klinenberg says “In many cases ... are socially overextended, and hyperactive use of digital media keeps them even busier.” Though, in his more recent work *Palaces for the People*, Klinenberg (2018) does note that “keeping people on their screens, rather than in the world of face-to-face interaction, is a key priority for designers and engineers.”

##### Collective action

To be sure, many have also written about the opportunities for online group-led collective action to positively impact society.

One of these potential benefits is in building social capital. James K. Scott and Thomas G. Johnson (2005) studied several early online groups on sites like eBay.com and geocaching.com to evaluate their potential benefits. The authors observed extensive and civil interactions within these communities, concluding that “Online communities offer a number of intriguing possibilities for collective action and community development initiatives, primarily because of their convenience, accessibility, and capacity to facilitate collective action or collaboration.” On a similar note, in his 2008 book *Here Comes Everybody,* Clay Shirky argues that, due to advances in social media and communications technology, the relative advantage of institutions to take collective action has disappeared. For Shirky, “most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done.”

Paul Resnick (2001) argues that, in order to combat the decline of civil society that Robert Putnam described in Bowling Alone, online systems should be designed in order to build social capital. He points to the benefits of online platforms, such as their capacity to expand a person’s network and cement a sense of individual identity and group identity. Compared to offline groups, Resnick argues, members of online groups can interact more efficiently with a larger number of people if the platforms they use are well-designed.

On this note, other [scholars and practitioners](https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/author/pablo-collada/) have written about instances where public institutions have used information and communication technologies to engage online groups in order to solve problems in ways that are both more effective and more legitimate (Noveck 2009). In her 2015 book *Smarter Citizens, Smarter State*, Beth Simone Noveck argues that “The Internet is radically decreasing the costs of identifying diverse forms of expertise and segmenting audiences on the basis of credentials, experiences, skills, and interests.” For Noveck, “The way to make government institutions more agile and effective is to reestablish them in constant conversation with an engaged, diverse, and knowledgeable public.”

At the same time, online platforms have also become gathering places for extremist groups. In his 2020 book *Empire of Resentment*, UC Berkeley researcher Lawrence Rosenthal describes how a loose network of far-right nationalists, white supremacists, populists and militia groups were able to form a coherent political movement, in part by organizing and growing their groups on social media.

## Conclusion

In this brief interdisciplinary literature review of more than 100 articles and books, we examine nine key questions related to the individual impact, group impact, and societal impact of online groups.

There are many important questions about related issues that impact online communities which this literature review does not touch upon. These include concerns about “digital divide” and unequal access to the Internet (Townsend et al. 2013), disparities in digital literacy (Radovanović et. al 2020), and concerns about the potential of corporate surveillance to inhibit groups’ collective action on privately-owned platforms (Zuboff 2020). While digital technology has played an increasingly central role in social and political movements over the past two decades, from Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign (Ganz 2010) to the Arab Spring (Deely and Nesh-Nash 2014), we do not discuss the leadership skills and organizing tactics that made such movements possible. We treat these at greater length in The Power of Virtual Communities.

We endeavor to provide a three-dimensional framework to guide scholars in assessing the impact of online groups and conceptualizing how their own work fits against the landscape of scholarship across a range of fields. We hope that researchers will continue to direct their attention toward these questions, and in so doing, advance our collective understanding of online groups and the role they play in our lives.

To share your own or other work in this living document, please type your additions inline or email [email removed].

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