Well Davey boy you will have to put your cards on the table and define what you mean by community than!

Sure; I was just throwing stuff out there and going on instinct, I hadn’t really collected my thoughts on it myself at that point. I basically agree with your definition of

a product of cumulative interactions between individuals that may have initially shared some interest, ideal, common purpose

with an emphasis on “interactions”. I wouldn’t call the likes of the Guardian’s Comment is Free or the BBC’s Have Your Say communities, for example, because the posters tend not to interact with each other so much as throw comments at the wall. They do have a shared interest, but I don’t view that as enough. The Dawkins forums, as I said, would qualify (again, from my limited exposure to them).

I’m not sure that there is a lack of “solidarity” in the “gay community” – surely organisations like Stonewall and gay pride or gay history events perhaps indicate otherwise?

No; not all gay people are involved with Stonewall or Pride. I would guess the majority aren’t. Those things may be communities in and of themselves, and part of a larger community of gay rights activists (who, of course, aren’t all gay) but I don’t believe there’s a “gay community” that you’re automatically a member of by virtue of being homosexual.

Also just because you are an atheist and don’t consider yourself part of the atheist community doesn’t mean an atheist community doesn’t exist.

I object to the idea of a community of people that don’t interact on any level and have no connection to each other beyond the fact that they don’t believe in something. I’m not part of the not-believing-in-fairies community either. If you’re talking about a community of atheist activists, then sure, that exists.

The existance of a community is not decided by the totality with which it includes everyone who holds a similar stance or worldview.

Well, I agree with you; thousands wouldn’t, and would use the term “community” to mean just that. The OED allows for that definition, which is why I said above that any group with a shared interest could be called a community, but it’s not a usage I’m terribly comfortable with.

Regarding the differences between online and flesh and blood communties:

The interaction between people in online communities is limited by the medium. It’s mostly conversation, exchange of ideas, without physical interaction (or with a siginficant amount of it removed). There are exceptions where there are other activities, like gaming guilds and so forth, but even that doesn’t have a physical element and has clear limits. There’s one big difference.

With regard to online personas, I’m not really talking about the way a peron’s manner online may differ from their personality IRL, though that is a factor. I’m more getting at the relative anonymity that can be enjoyed online. It’s a lot easier to hide elements of youself, and you can always duck out and create a new name and identity whenever you feel like it. Sure, people construct personas offline as well, but I think they’re more limited in how far they can take that. This certainly doesn’t preclude the creation of a community, but there’s a barrier there that will affect the way its members interact. This is why I don’t really like posting on forums or comments threads under a screen name.

I’d like to point out that at the richarddawkins.net forum, I met individuals who took care of my autistic son when he ran away to California and put him back on a bus to Canada. If that is not real community, I wonder what is.

I’m not sure that there is a lack of “solidarity” in the “gay community” – surely organisations like Stonewall and gay pride or gay history events perhaps indicate otherwise?

Not all members of a community have to get on for a community to exist afterall.

I would define a community as a product of cumulative interactions between individuals that may have initially shared some interest, ideal, common purpose if they aren’t geographically co-located but where they are then proximity may be enough to define a community. Really in a sense online communities have the potential to be based on far, far stronger foundations than those determined by geographical constraints. As they are based on shared values or ideals rather than postcodes.

Also just because you are an atheist and don’t consider yourself part of the atheist community doesn’t mean an atheist community doesn’t exist. The existance of a community is not decided by the totality with which it includes everyone who holds a similar stance or worldview.

There is perhaps more to how people construct online identities than being a little less polite and there are cases of people being deceptive on the net. However a community online doesn’t have to concern itself with how much someones online persona matches their away from keyboard persona. As the community member is the online persona – thus the nature or extent to which the constructed identity is pretty much irrelevant unless it has been constucted for some malficient purpose.

Also that seems to sidestep the issue that we all construct ourselves in real life interactions anyway – there is more to how we conduct and construct everyday P offline interactions then your point seems to imply.

If anything the one thing you can say for definite on the internet is that it exaggerates things – the speed at which we can communicate, the distances we can communicate over and perhaps the identities we construct and present to the world on a day to day basis.

Keir – depends what you mean by “community”, really. You could quite legitimately call any group of people with a shared interest a communtiy. It’s maybe just me, but I’ve always had a bit of a thing about terms like “gay community”; to me it implies a degree of solidarity that isn’t there. I certainly don’t regard myself as part of the atheist community, if there is such a thing.

As for the second point, I think the medium of communication has more of an impact than you seem to; there’s more to the way people construct online identities than being a bit less polite. That nothwithstanding, a community based around people living in the same town is going to be quite different from one based around a common interest, as online forums tend to be.

I don’t nessecarily think that they are “very different” from real life communities – people can perhaps be more strident or forthright on the internet then social politeness may generally allow but the same processes and features are generally seen in both.

That said, the strongest online communitites can always just relocate, so maybe a site owner closing/restricting his forums is trivial.

Or something.