Understanding communities in an age of social media: the good, the bad, and the complicated

Not only does this special issue of Information, Communication and Society bring you seven fascinating articles, it also brings together contemporary thinking about community and social media. The study of community no longer must keep to a parallel track with the study of digital media. We intertwine and integrate the two, celebrating the people who are connected in a community, by whatever means. Once upon a time, we thought we knew what communities were: small knots of people in local areas (‘neighborhoods’) where people knew each other and were mutually supportive. This golden narrative is repeated throughout time: nearly 80 years ago, American authors such as Thornton Wilder wrote romantic pieces about ‘Our Town’ (1938), and the play has been in production ever since. Even in 2016, U.S. presidential candidate John Kasich’s campaign is based on anecdotes about community’s social supportiveness. Yet, such pastoralist nostalgia for community is wrong in two ways. First, most people in neighborhoods do not know one other –much less like or support one other. Second, if we focus on the sociability and supportiveness of community ties, rather than on their putative neighborhood location, it turns out that in the developed world, most of the ties people have will stretch well beyond their neighborhoods and often well beyond the sea. All of this was shown to be true well before the advent of the internet (Darin, 1959; Fischer, 1976; Wellman & Leighton, 1979). Several things have happened to affect our understanding of ‘community’ over time. For one thing, politicians use the word to refer to aggregates of people with similar attributes or characteristics (such as ‘the gay community’) even if few of these people have ever met. That is quite different than a community based on connectivity and support. Political scientist Anderson (1991) expanded the term even further: ‘imagined communities’ which referred to nations to which people thought they were members. In Anderson’s imagined communities, ‘the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (p. 6). Anderson’s concept has served as an illustrative lens through which to understand and appreciate online communities, such as World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that brings people together around the world in short or long-term clans or conflicts (Nardi, 2010). Even in such amorphous, less-bounded milieus, people may need to imagine that they belong to a community; in this way, community is a mental conceptualization of the people with whom they are