Are newsgroups virtual communities?
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Socialbilty
Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Socialbilty
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
Collective efficacy as a measure of community
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Local Communities: Back to Life (Live) Through IPTV
EUROITV '08 Proceedings of the 6th European conference on Changing Television Environments
Values as lived experience: evolving value sensitive design in support of value discovery
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Proceedings of the ACM 2009 international conference on Supporting group work
Local communities and IPTV: Lessons learned in an early design and development phase
Computers in Entertainment (CIE) - SPECIAL ISSUE: TV and Video Entertainment Environments
Pushing personhood into place: Situating media in rural knowledge in Africa
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
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Scholars have long argued about the nature of "community," and the growth of Internet-based communication and "online communities" has intensified this debate. This paper argues that a new perspective on the concept "community" can shed light on the subject. Ideas from cognitive science, particularly category theory, can help. I suggest that community can be viewed as a prototype-based category. Prototype-based categories are defined not by simple rules of inclusion and exclusion, but instead by their prototypical members--a robin is a better example of a bird than an emu or a penguin. Items in a category are better or worse examples of the category depending on their degree of similarity to the prototypical members. I will argue that these theoretical insights can help resolve debates about the nature of community, and also can help guide designers of computer-mediated communication (CMC) systems.