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.