The Cyberians : an empirical study of sociality in a virtual community

This paper presents some field results of a study of an on-line community : the cyberians. Backed up by our empirical findings we discuss the concept of community in order to gain a better understanding of the sense of the still problematic notion of virtual community. We suggest a set of issues defining, in our opinion, virtual communities and allowing their empirical study. We follow two main lines of investigation : the construction of Self and the relationship to the Other in the CMC settings and the social structures of the virtual community of the cyberians. Internet users clients of Cyberia, a French access provider. We selected a population who is active on newsgroups and has its own homepage. Five newsgroups are reserved to Cyberia clients, and namely one dedicated to technical help. This newsgroup is quite active : an average of around 200 messages are posted every day, to be compared with the average of 24 messages a day calculated on 500 newsgroups by Whittaker & al. (1998). We started with an ethnographic account and analysis of productions of cyberians on the net : their homepages and their messages on the newsgroups. Those provide new communication spaces, which are opportunities for relations in public in Goffman's sense (presentation of self, meeting and interacting). Three issues are of concern to us here : the presentation of self, the building of the relations with others, and the construction and social life of Internet communities. We tried to use the classical sociological notions on community, and see to what extent they were useful for the study of " virtual " groups. We hope to contribute to clarify the term " virtual community " and facilitate its empirical description. We use the notion of sociality in Alfred Schutz's (1976, p. 230) sense as " the common intersubjective world of communication and social action ". This definition highlights the founding value of common-sense shared knowledge for the constitution of social groups. The notion of sociality refers here to the social constructs which enable communication and interaction. When studying cyberian everyday life, we tried to see whether there was a specific form of sociality in the situation of CMC