This issue ELISSA AND ROAMIN' ROY talk about virtual communities.

Birds Of A Feather . . . Or A Zoo?

When I was told the topic for this issue of aMUSine I wondered what I could write about communities since the community I deal with is located mainly in the virtual world.

Whilst Roaming Roy, the Tingle Factor Box and I have met and interacted with many people face to face, the main and broader community is connected through the Tingle Factor Box Blog and Twitter.

Whilst there is much to be said about virtual communities, I didn’t want to focus on the obvious. Although networking and ‘friend’ groups like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook offer great but often unrealised opportunities for engaging with communities and have offered an endless source of study and commentary, the virtual world offers far more, often diverse opportunities for building communities.

One such opportunity, one which is highly relevant for the museum sector, is the possibility of creating a focussed community, such as that created by The Tingle Factor Box.

Virtual communities are not bound by the social norms which we would expect to see in a non-virtual community and are free to form and reform at any time and in almost any place.

We also tend to underestimate the speed with which this can happen. Additionally, one may be a member of many of these virtual communities where in the physical world you might not be ‘game’ to join due to accepted social norms or just timidity.

You may even belong to communities which would not accept one another and indeed I know of some children who regularly visit the Tingle Factor Box who would not willingly go to a museum for fear of what this would do to their reputation within their peer group or do not have parents who are interested in taking them!

Conversely, virtual communities may also overlap, just as physical communities do. It is a common practice to ‘advertise’ ones own, focussed community on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, bringing people from communities which you have joined into the community you seek to grow. This is an important method of creating a community, and one which has proven successful in my own endeavours.

Communities are usually defined by commonalities such as a place, ethnicity or interest but this doesn’t apply in the same way to virtual communities. These are often global communities, and social, political, religious and geographical commonalities simply don’t count.

A common interest may be the sole reason for their existence. Although this interest may be the reason why the virtual community has formed, discussion around that interest may not be forthcoming or, in some cases, even possible.

Similarly, although many virtual communities, like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter encourage friendship between community members, this is by no means a necessity. The group can exist yet remain completely anonymous and separate from one another. For the curator this can be very off-putting. Where is the fun, or indeed interest in curating for an anonymous, and often largely silent community?

The anonymity which is possible within a virtual community also means that the curator may not know their virtual community in the same way as they know their physical community.

Indeed, although I know a segment of the community which visits The Tingle Factor Box, many more are simply anonymous ‘clicks’ counted in the daily blog statistics. I know little more about them than where they came to the site from and even this information is not guaranteed. The norms of face to face social interaction don’t apply and visitors don’t usually leave a calling card!

Physical institutions aim to attract a community and adapt based on information about what that community wants, information often collected through a combination of discussion and observation. Their ability to collect information from the community and adapt based on this gives them an advantage, allowing them to adapt to best serve their communities.

Yet in a virtual community there can be no expectation that a question asked will be answered. Instead Virtual communities often play a passive role. When the community does choose to communicate, often communication must be moderated, placing an added burden of checking appropriateness and veracity on the curator.

Even with careful observation and research, it is often impossible to know exactly who your community is made up of or what exactly it is that they want.  The one thing you can rely on is that those who form a stable part of your community have chosen to do so and are interested in what you are providing.

By combining the virtual and physical world, and gathering information from the physical community, one can hope to mirror their wants in your virtual world, and successfully build a virtual community. This is the model which I used in building the Tingle Factor Box. The Tingle Factor Box was created with a specific target audience – one which could be called a niche market. 

Posts are created around objects and experiences which the children find interesting, in a way which relates to them. Children who I work with as part of my ‘day job’ are active participants in the process, with a group of them having seen the object before it is ‘exhibited’ on the blog.  In many cases the presence of Roy, a ‘virtual boy’ allows the language used to become an “us” not “me” dialogue and the inclusion of the children’s experiences gives them a stake in the blog. Although aimed at children, it appears that there are also a number of adults enjoying it and sharing the children’s interest!

I have only looked at the tip of the iceberg here. Virtual Communities are accelerated by the capabilities of the internet. Given the rapid progress and every changing technologies on the internet, it is also true that virtual communities are beneficiaries of the emergence, development and growth of these new technologies.

We need to think more broadly and flexibly than at any time in the past, as geographic and ethnic boundaries are falling to the pervasiveness of the medium. The Tingle Factor Box even has followers who do not speak English, and I am constantly curious how Google or other services translate the blog into other languages! Other questions focus around how you move your community from passive to active. These are things which I may discuss more in a future article.

So what does this mean for the museum world? Museums must learn to blend their physical and virtual communities, using them to support and build on one another. It cannot be assumed that this support and growth will only be one sided.

Many I have spoken to assume that physical communities will join a museums virtual community, but do not think that the reverse may also be true. You can be part of a museums virtual community even when you live on the other side of the world and indeed many of my own virtual community live in America and Europe.

I believe that if a museum engages effectively, they can grow their audience through their virtual community.

Elissa and Roy curate their virtual museum ...

Photo courtesy Elissa McDonald.

The online museum can be redesigned at any time ...

Photo courtesy Elissa McDonald.

And in any place ...

Photo courtesy Elissa McDonald.