[Air-L] Virtual communities spanning multiple online platforms

[Nathaniel Poor]

David-

Celia Pearce’s book looks at a game community where the game shut down, and how they dispersed to other platforms, trying to maintain and re-build their original community:
Pearce, C. (2009). Communities of play. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

I think that’s where she uses the term latitudinal studies, which is great, directly addressing the issue you raise (people use more than one online space, so researchers have to look widely across spaces). 

I also have a paper looking at how an in-game community fell apart in the game where it initially formed but mostly stayed connected across different platforms:
Poor, N., & Skoric, M. M. (2014). Death of a guild, birth of a network: Online community ties within and beyond code. Games and Culture, 9(3), 182–202. http://doi.org/10.1177/1555412014537401

Hopefully there are some useful cites to and from those pieces as well.

HTH,
-Nat

---------------------------
Nathaniel Poor, PhD
http://github.com/natpoor <http://github.com/natpoor> 
http://natpoor.blogspot.com <http://natpoor.blogspot.com/> 
http://sites.google.com/site/natpoor/ <http://sites.google.com/site/natpoor/>
http://www.underwood-institute.org <http://underwood-institute.org/> 

> On Feb 16, 2017, at 1:26 PM, David Brake <davidbrake at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> I have a grad student who wants to look into this really interesting question in a literature review essay (see below) - I don't know what literatures to suggest to her however - the texts I am familiar with about virtual community all tend to look at them on a single platform. Are there multi-sited ethnographies and other studies examining this you can suggest?
> 
>> I would like to look at how presence on multiple platforms (eg, Facebook, Twitter, Web, Blog, etc) either strengthens or dilutes a community. This springs off of the discussion you and I had last week about how the platform shapes the community (or not to beat the dead McLuhan horse - how the media shapes the message). I'm curious to examine how the community changes as the platform changes - eg, is it the same community spread across multiple platforms or does each platform represent a distinct community. 
> 
> It's my fault for irresponsibly finding the subject interesting ;-)
> --
> 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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