Online communities have developed over the past decade as an emergent internet phenomenon, largely created by the user community through incremental development processes (Baym, 1998; Rheingold, 1993). These groups are not randomly assigned the nomenclature of community without cause. As mentioned earlier, these online forums operate as virtual communities with many of the same characteristics of a traditional community such as moral voice, rights, responsibilities, and a public interest (Etzioni, 1993). Technological, sociological and economic forces have contributed to the emergence of online communities in the last decade.
The technological forces that contributed to this online phenomenon revolve around the development of the internet and World Wide Web and the adoption of graphical user interfaces. Early online communities adopted the simple text-based user interfaces of the time due to the limited bandwidth and processing capabilities of existing information communications technologies (ICTs) (Timm, 1976). The introduction of the Netscape Navigator internet browser in the mid-1990s and the penetration of broadband communication channels into the market in the late 1990s allowed more complex communities to develop. The communities became very specialized and the social identities of the members were quite well developed (Koh, Kim, Butler, & Bock, 2007).