This is a case study about the possible community formation on the website www.soccernet.com. The aim of the case study is to determine whether or not this site has formed a community based around the interest of football and also sport in general.
To achieve this aim the case study will look first of all into a brief background and history of Soccernet in ‘What is ESPN Soccernet?’, followed by the features and content provided on Soccernet. To look into the community aspect of the website the question ‘Is there a community formed behind the guise of Soccernet?’ is discussed and also the influences of football and peoples interest in forming the community, whilst also taking into account theory’s on virtual communities and its definition in certain scholarly circles.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
What is ESPN Soccernet?
Soccernet is a very popular football website that was created in 1995 (Who.is, 2009) there is no clear or easy to find historical data available as to its actual origins however stories on the internet seem to suggest that it was created by a 12 year old boy and one such story names this boy as Tom Hadfield who sold the website as it became popular (Tux-hacker, 2005), however this is unsupported evidence.
The site started out as a place to go for football statistics and current news. It has always been a regularly updated site which is one of its main attractions, providing the current football news and events available for free to the public who have access to the internet.
Today it provides almost instant textual information regarding ongoing matches and competitions and is considered a staple channel of information for football enthusiasts. It incorporates the viewers by providing an almost Facebook like setting. Back in 1999 only 4 years after its creation it received the ‘Best use of new media’ in a British awards show called Revolution Awards (Business Wire, 1999).
The site started out as a place to go for football statistics and current news. It has always been a regularly updated site which is one of its main attractions, providing the current football news and events available for free to the public who have access to the internet.
Today it provides almost instant textual information regarding ongoing matches and competitions and is considered a staple channel of information for football enthusiasts. It incorporates the viewers by providing an almost Facebook like setting. Back in 1999 only 4 years after its creation it received the ‘Best use of new media’ in a British awards show called Revolution Awards (Business Wire, 1999).
Features and content of Soccernet
The Soccernet website is huge in terms of its audience and football coverage. The site covers many countries professional leagues and also all national clubs. To draw the users of Soccernet together and gain information from them Soccernet developed a message board system. However since its takeover by the American sports giant ESPN it has merged its site with the other sports associated with ESPN and their major websites and so all of these smaller communities have been mixed into the hosting network putting them in an even bigger community one that covers all major sports.
The first feature to look at is the user profile which you need to create in order to look at forums and post on the message boards. The user profile in Soccernet as shown below is actually quite similar to a social networking site, such as Facebook. With the Soccernet user account you can find friends on Soccernet, people can post on your wall, you can join groups, upload photos and do almost everything that you can in Facebook besides applications.
On Soccernet you can post your own blog as well, for other users to look at and comment on. As you can see in the example this one user has created a blog where he writes about things that interest him and does so in a humouring manor. He has managed to obtain some frequent repeat visitors by getting noticed in the groups he is in and through friends he has made in the forums.
This part of Soccernet is a ‘twitter’ style real time conversation about certain hot topics that are current in the news or still up for debate within the ‘community’.
The message boards on Soccernet are linked through the ESPN network as ESPN bought the website Soccernet.com and since changed it to Soccernet.espn.go.com. This means that the Soccernet community before the buy-out were thrown into the mix with all of the other major sports covered by ESPN. The community however has been growing since the creation of the website and now through the ESPN logo Soccernet gets a lot of media coverage and thus attracts an even larger audience. There aren’t many other places to go on the internet that are like Soccernet and so the retention of old users is not difficult as the site has developed so much that it is at the forefront of its industry. This is similar to how Facebook changes its image yet people don’t leave they complain but still adjust to the new and stay on Facebook.
This is the layout of the message boards on Soccernet, they are very simple and do not focus much on instant community interaction as they do not make it apparent who is online at the current time.
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Message Board Rules
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The message board rules are quite strict in terms of copyright and posting pictures of certain things as ESPN is a major media organisation and copyright infringement is taken very seriously, there is also an option to choose if you don’t mind your picture being used on television as there is a TV talk show called ‘ESPN Soccernet press pass’ usually before and after games that broadcasts images from the internet to talk about on the show.
Is there a virtual community formed behind the guise of Soccernet?
The people that are signed up to ESPN Soccernet message boards have all got one thing in common, they enjoy football in some manner. There are exceptions to this when people stray over from the other sports in the message boards; however this does not happen often. The message boards have been set up in a way that encourages more focus on headlines and important topics of conversation. They are also separated into clubs and countries. This means that there is an obvious address of fan support and a move to push people with similar interests together.
The community formation in-between the Soccernet members is not very extensive as there is no evidence from the message boards studied nor of blogging responses that suggest the people know of each other’s existence outside of Soccernet. Also with the profile option involved people may find out about who you are without actually speaking to you. This can be a useful tool on networking sites; however it does not seem to boost the Soccernet community as sites such as Facebook are centred on meeting people and making friends. However Soccernet is focused more around information about football and opinion discussion but not necessarily on making friends or forming a community.
There is no evidence of people meeting up in person or having prior knowledge of each other before moving on to Soccernet. This means that the community hasn’t taken the steps to naturally progress to the next step as discussed by Rheingold (1993). This means if we are to consider Soccernet as a community it is still in the early stages of formation, people have not formed the closely knit bonds seen in other online communities.
If we are to follow Rheingold’s way of thinking then Soccernet definitely has a sense of community as Rheingold (1993) states that the formation of virtual communities “when people carry on public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships”.
In the Soccernet forums this criteria although judged subjectively can be applied to it. There have been discussions going on for years on the website and people are constantly chatting on the ‘real time conversation’ section of the site 24 hours a day from all over the world. There are topics on racial issues that get fairly heated and sometimes petty which shows us there is human feeling going into the site as people are taking things personally, even though they may have never met the person who is upsetting them. There are definitely personal relationships in the sense that people go to other user’s blogs to read them and find out what this person has to say and respond to it.
In discussion of Rheingold’s work Lipnack & Stamps (1997) have discussed that the Individual, Space, Time and Culture are all equally important things to consider in human interaction and that these things need to be fulfilled. Webcams and video conferences have been seen in companies and also very big and successful companies such as Nokia have “Halo” rooms which are holographic projections of people so you can be in a room on your own in New York but be sitting with people in that room who are also sat alone in Beijing, Singapore, London, anywhere around the world that they have these halo rooms. Therefore the technology shows us that if we take into consideration these ideas put forward by Lipnack & Stamps (1997) then a community is easy to develop but in order to advance it we must use better technology. This leads to the assumption that communities on the internet would be more tightly knit if they were in a ‘virtual reality’ setting that represented them in their real form.
To understand what a virtual community is we cannot try to redefine the word itself but look at how new technologies that are coming into use have a creation affect forming more and more opportunities. An virtual community is possible however we must take into consideration how the fact that it is online has an effect on it, maybe some virtual communities are not as close as others however this does not mean we cannot refer to them all as online communities as we have these differences in modern day real life communities.
The community formation in-between the Soccernet members is not very extensive as there is no evidence from the message boards studied nor of blogging responses that suggest the people know of each other’s existence outside of Soccernet. Also with the profile option involved people may find out about who you are without actually speaking to you. This can be a useful tool on networking sites; however it does not seem to boost the Soccernet community as sites such as Facebook are centred on meeting people and making friends. However Soccernet is focused more around information about football and opinion discussion but not necessarily on making friends or forming a community.
There is no evidence of people meeting up in person or having prior knowledge of each other before moving on to Soccernet. This means that the community hasn’t taken the steps to naturally progress to the next step as discussed by Rheingold (1993). This means if we are to consider Soccernet as a community it is still in the early stages of formation, people have not formed the closely knit bonds seen in other online communities.
If we are to follow Rheingold’s way of thinking then Soccernet definitely has a sense of community as Rheingold (1993) states that the formation of virtual communities “when people carry on public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships”.
In the Soccernet forums this criteria although judged subjectively can be applied to it. There have been discussions going on for years on the website and people are constantly chatting on the ‘real time conversation’ section of the site 24 hours a day from all over the world. There are topics on racial issues that get fairly heated and sometimes petty which shows us there is human feeling going into the site as people are taking things personally, even though they may have never met the person who is upsetting them. There are definitely personal relationships in the sense that people go to other user’s blogs to read them and find out what this person has to say and respond to it.
In discussion of Rheingold’s work Lipnack & Stamps (1997) have discussed that the Individual, Space, Time and Culture are all equally important things to consider in human interaction and that these things need to be fulfilled. Webcams and video conferences have been seen in companies and also very big and successful companies such as Nokia have “Halo” rooms which are holographic projections of people so you can be in a room on your own in New York but be sitting with people in that room who are also sat alone in Beijing, Singapore, London, anywhere around the world that they have these halo rooms. Therefore the technology shows us that if we take into consideration these ideas put forward by Lipnack & Stamps (1997) then a community is easy to develop but in order to advance it we must use better technology. This leads to the assumption that communities on the internet would be more tightly knit if they were in a ‘virtual reality’ setting that represented them in their real form.
To understand what a virtual community is we cannot try to redefine the word itself but look at how new technologies that are coming into use have a creation affect forming more and more opportunities. An virtual community is possible however we must take into consideration how the fact that it is online has an effect on it, maybe some virtual communities are not as close as others however this does not mean we cannot refer to them all as online communities as we have these differences in modern day real life communities.
Conclusion
ESPN Soccernet is a football site that is dedicated to providing people with up to date football news, there is also a virtual community masked by this information domain. The community has been formed around the common interest of football however there are members that have been on Soccernet for years and there are millions of viewers each year (Who.is, 2009). The community that has developed is huge there are thousands of posts a day and are always a lot of people online on Soccernet. The case study has not discussed every detail of every message board on Soccernet as there are hundreds. However I can say from studying them myself there are definitely different forms of community all around the site especially as people are separated into talking about clubs specifically and people depending on their adaptation to the technology and their personality will make interacting communities as seen in the blog example above. The social setting of Soccernet is friendly and people generally seem comfortable talking about things football related, with some occasions of non-football topics. Soccernet definitely has an online community within it, however it may not be as well developed as other communities on the internet.
References
Bussiness Wire (1999). Soccernet takes trophy at British Revolution Awards. Retrieved April 29th, 2009, from http://www.allbusiness.com/technology/software-services-applications-electronic/6740924-1.html
Lipnack, J., Stamps, J., (1997), Virtual Teams: Reaching Across Space, Time and Organizations with Technology, John Wiley & Sons.
Rheingold, H.(1993). The Virtual Community (1st. ed.). Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.
Tux-hacker (2005). Soccernet’s 10th Birthday. Retrieved May 1st, 2009, from http://tux-hacker.blogspot.com/2005/07/soccernets-10th-birthday.htm
Who.is (2009). Registry whois for Soccernet.com. Retrieved April 29th, 2009, from http://www.who.is/whois/soccernet.com/
Bibliography (sites used for case study and images)
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/2.html
http://sportsnation.espn.go.com/groups/3573
http://sportsnation.espn.go.com/fans/Cmsmag77/blog/posts/82851
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