Designing Online Communities

How Designers, Developers, Community Managers, and Software Structure Discourse and Knowledge Production on the Web

By: Michele Knobel, Colin Lankshear, Trevor Owens

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eBook | 27 September 2022 | Edition Number 1

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139 Pages

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Discussion on the Web is mediated through layers of software and protocols. As scholars increasingly study communication and learning on the Internet, it is essential to consider how site administrators, programmers, and designers create interfaces and enable functionality. The managers, administrators, and designers of online communities can turn to more than 20 years of technical books for guidance on how to design online communities toward particular objectives. Through analysis of this «how-to» literature, Designing Online Communities explores the discourse of design and configuration that partially structures online communities and later social networks. Tracking the history of notions of community in these books suggests the emergence of a logic of permission and control. Online community defies many conventional notions of community. Participants are increasingly treated as «users», or even as commodities themselves to be used. Through consideration of the particular tactics of these administrators, this book suggests how researchers should approach the study and analysis of the records of online communities.

Industry Reviews

«'Designing Online Communities' is a must-have for anyone designing or researching online communities, particularly for learning. Trevor Owens's work is both comprehensive and eminently readable, a sweeping look at the technologies, design patterns, and cultural forms they produce that is both theoretically ambitious and grounded in examples and tools that will help you develop, research, and manage online communities.» (Kurt Squire, University of Wisconsin)
«[Owens's] engaging analysis gives clarity to how the design strategies implicit in code influence the ways we build conversations, relationships, and communities on the web.» (Jefferson Bailey, Internet Archive)
«Can media archaeology have a methodology? Does software studies need data sets? In Designing Online Communities, Owens presents a bracing case study that not only contributes to our understanding of lives lived online, but also joins the empirical rigor of applied social science with leading-edge digital and media studies.» (Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland)
«Owens asks us to consider how technologies reflect and shape permissions and control, and how the managers and builders of online communities wield power beyond simply an offer of 'connectivity.'» (Audrey Watters, Hack Education)
«This book provides essential context for our shared online existence.» (Dan Cohen, Digital Public Library of America)