A SEMIOTIC APPROACH TO ONLINE COMMUNITIES: BELONGING, INTEREST AND IDENTITY IN WEBSITES' AND VIDEOGAMES' COMMUNITIES

Borrowing some concepts from the linguistic and semiotic traditions, the paper aims at understanding the nature of online (virtual) communities. First, it distinguishes two basic kinds of communities: communities where members just share something similar (paradigmatic communities) and communities where social relations are established through interactions (syntagmatic communities). On the basis of this distinction, the paper focuses on online communities and analyses the main critical issues concerning them, namely belonging, identity and interest. These issues are then discussed in the last part, where a semiotic approach to online communities is presented: interest is pivotal in order to define the semiosphere of a virtual community, i.e. the social space within the community where interactions are allowed and encouraged; belonging is a key factor for websites’ communities, since it helps them becoming real syntagmatic communities; identity is as much important in websites as in videogames communities, since on the basis of the different identities considered, different play communities can be identified.

[1]  J. Bolter,et al.  Remediation: Understanding New Media , 1999 .

[2]  S. Wilson.  What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy , 2006 .

[3]  A. Cohen,et al.  The symbolic construction of community , 2013 .

[4]  P. Garvin,et al.  Prolegomena to a Theory of Language , 1953 .

[5]  U. Eco,et al.  Lector in fabula : la cooperazione interpretativa nei testi narrativi , 1985 .

[6]  M. Maffesoli.  The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society , 1995 .

[7]  Etienne Wenger,et al.  Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity , 1998 .

[8]  Ferdinand de Saussure.  Course in General Linguistics , 1916 .

[9]  S. Turkle.  Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet , 1997 .

[10]  Robert A. Nisbet,et al.  The Sociological Tradition , 1968 .

[11]  Beat F. Schmid,et al.  Communities and media-towards a reconstruction of communities on media , 2000, Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[12]  Umberto Eco,et al.  Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture , 2000 .

[13]  P. Kollock,et al.  Communities in Cyberspace , 2002 .

[14]  G. A. Hillery.  Definitions of community : Areas of Agreement , 1955 .

[15]  Judith Donath,et al.  Identity and deception in the virtual community , 1998 .

[16]  Lorenzo Cantoni,et al.  Internet (Routledge Introductions to Media and Communications) , 2006 .

[17]  Howard Rheingold,et al.  The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier , 2000 .

[18]  S. Kiesler,et al.  The kindness of strangers: on the usefulness of electronic weak ties for technical advice , 1996 .

[19]  N. Baym.  The emergence of on-line community , 1998 .

[20]  B. Wellman.  An electronic group is virtually a social network. , 1997 .

[21]  E. Wenger,et al.  Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation in Communities of Practice , 1991 .

[22]  Mark S. Granovetter.  The Strength of Weak Ties , 1973, American Journal of Sociology.

[23]  C. W. Morris.  Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism , 1995 .

[24]  Raymond Williams.  Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society , 1976 .

[25]  L. Suchman.  Plans and situated actions , 1987 .