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Today, we can find an online community to suit almost any interest we may have. And yet these communities carry an element of menace. The anonymity associated with online communities allows particularly vicious interplay, where people can pile on others with virtually zero consequences. Using current examples from the news and connecting this phenomenon to historical incidents like the Salem witch trials, this fascinating resource examines an interesting time in the world and grounds it with practical guidelines for being a responsible member of an online community

The spatial dimensions of online communication establish the basic conditions for online social life. The protocol-based constructions make it clear that spatial constructions matter for the sense of community. Parallel to offline life, the spatial dimensions in online communities are important for the individual's navigation, relation, and communication. This article presents a typology of online space, where three different kinds of spatial dimensions are defined. Analyzing the patterns within any online community provides useful information on the basic terms of social life. The interface serves as a visible and ontological space on the screen, a shared common spot in the vast cyberspace. The social space is mainly epistemological, based on the individual's interpretations of social interactions. The metaphorical space is purely epistemological, based on reconstructed reality and geography, and evokes the sense of a place. The typology holds the key to understanding many of the differences within online social life.

Online communities (OCs) are a virtual organizational form in which knowledge collaboration can occur in unparalleled scale and scope, in ways not heretofore theorized. For example, collaboration can occur among people not known to each other, who share different interests and without dialogue. An exploration of this organizational form can fundamentally change how we theorize about knowledge collaboration among members of organizations. We argue that a fundamental characteristic of OCs that affords collaboration is their fluidity. This fluidity engenders a dynamic flow of resources in and out of the community—resources such as passion, time, identity, social disembodiment of ideas, socially ambiguous identities, and temporary convergence. With each resource comes both a negative and positive consequence, creating a tension that fluctuates with changes in the resource. We argue that the fluctuations in tensions can provide an opportunity for knowledge collaboration when the community responds to these tensions in ways that encourage interactions to be generative rather than constrained. After offering numerous examples of such generative responses, we suggest that this form of theorizing—induced by online communities—has implications for theorizing about the more general case of knowledge collaboration in organizations.

Large-scale online communities rely on computer-mediated communication between participants, enabling them to sustain interactions and exchange on a scale hitherto unknown. Yet little research has focused on how these online communities sustain themselves and how their interactions are structured. In this paper, we theorize and empirically measure the network exchange patterns of long-duration sustainable online communities. We propose that participation dynamics follow specific forms of social exchange: direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, and preferential attachment. We integrate diverse findings about individual participation motivations by identifying how individual behavior manifests in network-level structures of online communities. We studied five online communities over 27 months and analyzed 38,483 interactions using exponential random graph (p*) models and mixed-effects analysis of covariance. In a test of competing models, we found that network exchange patterns in online community communication networks are characterized by direct reciprocity and indirect reciprocity patterns and, surprisingly, a tendency away from preferential attachment. Our findings undermine previous explanations that online exchange follows a power law distribution based on people wanting to connect to "popular" others in online communities. Our work contributes to theories of new organizational forms by identifying network exchange patterns that regulate participation and sustain online communities.

Introduction -- Chapter 1. Speech etiquette in a polylogical communication of the online community: approaches to the study (L. Duskaeva) -- Part 1. Speech etiquette in Russian online communities -- Chapter 2. Technological factors in the formation of speech etiquette in Runet (Yu. Konyaeva) -- Chapter 3. Professional Groups' Speech Etiquette (Liubov Ivanova) -- Chapter 4. Speech etiquette in social communities for mothers (Shcheglova E.) -- Chapter 5. Speech etiquette in social communities for teenagers (Prokofyeva N.) -- Part 2. Speech etiquette of online communication on Slavic languages -- Chapter 6. Etiquette of identification (dissociation from others) in Russian-speaking communities of Lithuania (A. Belovodskaya) -- Chapter 7. The language code in speech etiquette of online community (Minchuk I. I., Pivovarchik T. A.) -- Chapter 8. Language politeness in Polish social media (Danuta Kępa-Figura) -- Chapter 9. Speech etiquette in the Slovak (online) linguistic culture (Dulebova, Cingerova) -- Chapter 10. Speech etiquette of political online discourse in Serbia (Rajna Dragicevic, Аnna Zhavoronkova).

The chapter describes the basic tenets of online communities, their typology and their fundamental elements with a view of informing ways in which people can get to participate online, something that those individuals or organizations dealing with e-governance initiatives also aim at. A key consideration is the importance of socializing as an ingredient that motivates individuals and which can offer them a degree of freedom to discuss government related matters.

▪ Abstract  Information and communication technologies based on the Internet have enabled the emergence of new sorts of communities and communicative practices—phenomena worthy of the attention of anthropological researchers. Despite early assessments of the revolutionary nature of the Internet and the enormous transformations it would bring about, the changes have been less dramatic and more embedded in existing practices and power relations of everyday life. This review explores researchers' questions, approaches, and insights within anthropology and some relevant related fields, and it seeks to identify promising new directions for study. The general conclusion is that the technologies comprising the Internet, and all the text and media that exist within it, are in themselves cultural products. Anthropology is thus well suited to the further investigation of these new, and not so new, phenomena.

This editorial introduces the thematic issue of Online Communities and Populism. I begin by laying out the justification for taking up this topic and then articulate why Media and Communication is the ideal location to hold this discussion. Then I introduce the articles in this issue by listing the questions these articles take up, the four major themes these articles take on, and preview each article.