When we look into the popular online auction web site - ebay, we can observe that it has very strong sense of locatily with online communities. Under the top level domain http://www.ebay.com/, it has many sub-domains by country. The default page of each sub-domain has its locality.
Virtanen & Malinen (2008) claimed that "people tend to have a positive emotional bond to familiar places, and this psychological relation between people and their environment is referred to as place attachment". I greatly agree with this statement. That is why we can find immigrants with the same race would settle down together and build up their own communities through various means in Australia. For example, we can find China town, Korean town, Eastern Orthodox Churchs or Jewish synagogues in Australia, people build up their connection through these places.
Locality can give members a strong sense of virtual community. That is why the well-organised online communities such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Wikipedia and etc strongly focus on the locality. Very often, the languages to be used is the online communities are subject to the locality.
According to Virtanen & Malinen's studies, Facebook started as a geographically-based campus community, with its members sharing mainly local offline connections. It was launched outside US on 2006, quickly became popular in Finland in the autumn 2007and is now the 8th most popular web site in Finland. The result is prominent. That is why the great success of the online communities have pushed the growth of e-commerce.
References
Virtanen, T & Malinen, S 2008, ‘Supporting the Sense of Locality with Online Communities’, MindTrek: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Entertainment and media in the ubiquitous era 2008, Tampere, Finland, pp. 145-149.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment