[Air-L] Virtual community building and maintenance in the social media age

[SAMUEL KININMONTH]

Hey David,


Starting a subreddit on reddit could be an easy way to get your students started quickly? reddit is pretty reminiscent of old BBSs.


Further to that, I found Massanari (2015) to be a really helpful resource, not only for reddit but much social media.


Massanari, A.L., 2015. Participatory Culture, Community, and Play. Learning from Reddit. Peter Lang GmbH.


Cheers,

Samuel Kininmonth

Arts Honours Candidate

Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

________________________________
From: Air-L <air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org> on behalf of David Brake <davidbrake at gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2016 12:54:56 PM
To: AoIR mailing list
Subject: [Air-L] Virtual community building and maintenance in the social media age

Dear colleagues,

I will be teaching a course next semester on virtual community building and management, blending theory and practice. A few years ago, I felt pretty confident that I could put together a reading list of books on virtual community management and be comfortable it would cover what is needed. But that was before social media. Now (depending on the purpose of a virtual community itself) I might not even recommend a website-based virtual community at all – for all of the vexed issues of platform ownership, a Facebook group or even Twitter hashtag might be a better solution for some groups. Are you aware of any good books and articles (preferably academic but not necessarily) which bring virtual community advice up-to-date to take into consideration managing virtual communities spread across multiple platforms, some of which a virtual community manager has no direct control over?

The books I am currently considering teaching from are:

Kim, A. J. (2000). Community building on the Web. Berkeley, CA: Peachpit Press.
Powazek, D. M. (2002). Design for community: the art of connecting real people in virtual places. Indianapolis, Ind.: New Riders.
O'Keefe, P. (2008). Managing online forums: everything you need to know to create and run successful community discussion boards. New York: AMACOM.
Bacon, J. (2012). The art of community: Building the new age of participation (2nd ed.). Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Retrieved from http://www.artofcommunityonline.org/ <http://www.artofcommunityonline.org/>
Kraut, R. E., Resnick, P., & Kiesler, S. (2012). Building successful online communities evidence-based social design. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

I am also considering:

Howard, T.W. (2010). Design to thrive: Creating social networks and online communities that last. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann

He talks about social networks vs online communities but seems to suggest they are mutually exclusive while I would say you can layer an online community on top of a social network or use the latter to bring people into the former.

Anyway, I am keen either to find a book that properly takes the new social media options into account when talking about virtual community or at least a book or article that gestures towards the existing conventional wisdom and suggests what the new social media can add.

I will happily feed back to the list or interested people the curated list that results...

Any ideas?

Regards,

David
--
Dr David Brake, Researcher and Educator http://davidbrake.org/, @drbrake
Author of "Sharing Our Lives Online: Risks and Exposure in Social Media” https://www.facebook.com/sharingourlivesonline <https://www.facebook.com/sharingourlivesonline>
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