Amy Bruckman

What Is a “Community”? Cognitive Science Helps Provide an Answer

Biography
Amy Bruckman is an Associate Professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She and her students in the Electronic Learning Communities (ELC) research group do research on online communities and education. Current projects include AquaMOOSE 3D (a graphical world designed to help teenagers learn about the behavior of mathematical functions), Anival (an online festival of animation designed to encourage elementary and middle-school students to develop both technical and artistic skills through creating original computer animation), The Open Policy Project (in which undergraduates studying government contribute and critique positions on issues of public policy). Amy received her PhD from the MIT Media Lab’s Epistemology and Learning group in 1997, her MSVS from the Media Lab’s Interactive Cinema Group in 1991, and her BA in physics from Harvard University in 1987. In 1999, she was named one of the 100 top young innovators in science and technology in the world (TR100) by Technology Review magazine. In 2002, she was awarded the Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies. More information about her work is available at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~asb/.

Position Paper
Much ink has been spilled on the topic of which online communities are “really communities.” On one end of the spectrum, writers like Howard Rheingold chronicle the benefits online communication can bring to participants, from daily camaraderie to both emotional support and real aid in times of crisis (Rheingold 1993). On the other side, some writers seem offended that the term “community” is often used as a synonym for “group,” without regard for the quality of the interaction. For example, Rob Kling and Christina Courtwright argue that “the casual use of the term community to characterize groups that are engaged in learning, or groups that participate in e-forums, is seriously misguided” (Kling and Courtwright 2004). For Kling and Courtwright, creating a successful learning community is a substantial accomplishment. Using the word community “casually” risks trivializing that accomplishment. They set a high standard for what counts as a community. However, Barry Wellman and Milena Gulia caution us that our more idealistic notions of community may be overblown. They write that, “pundits worry that virtual community may not truly be community. These worriers are confusing the pastoralist myth of community for reality. Community ties are already geographically dispersed, sparsely knit, connected heavily by telecommunications (phone and fax), and specialized in content” (Wellman and Gulia 1999). What really is a “community”? Cognitive science can help answer the question more clearly. The word “community” refers to a category of associations of groups of people. To understand “community,” it helps to have a more nuanced view of a “category.” Eleanor Rosch found that categories are not organized in the mind by simple rules of inclusion and exclusion, but by prototypes. Each category has one or more best or “focal” members. These are the prototypes for the category. For example, a robin or sparrow is a better example of a bird than an emu or penguin. Categories can have either clear or fuzzy boundaries, and within a category each item has a degree of membership. The degree of membership of an item in a category depends on its similarities and differences from the focal members (Lakoff 1987). Thus, when Wellman and Gulia argue that the worriers are confusing a “pastoralist myth” for the reality of community, they are saying in effect that our focal member for the category community is a historical and idealized. In this light, asking whether something “is a community” is a poorly formed question unlikely to yield deep insights. The category “community” has fuzzy boundaries. Instead, we can ask how similar a particular group is to our ideal of community or learning community. This is a more productive line of inquiry, because it challenges us to reflect on the nature of our prototypical model of community, and explore in detail its specific features and why they might or might not matter. In this talk, I will explore how the prototype view of “community” can help us better understand research issues in social computing.

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