Virtual Communities as Subaltern Public Spheres: A Theoretical Development and an Application to the Chinese Internet

Background

The metaphor of community has caught the imagination of academics since the early age of Internet research in the 1980s. A famous debate in the CMC field was whether CMC is able to support communities as face-to-face (F2F) interactions do. The cues-filtered-out perspective claims that since CMC lacks nonverbal cues, it is less personal or socioemotional than F2F interaction, and therefore less capable of supporting communities (Rice & Love, 1987; Sproull & Kiesler 1986; DeSanctis & Gallupe 1987; Spears & Lea, 1992). On the other hand, researchers claim that CMC is able to foster the feeling of relational development over time (Walther, 1992), and communicators can successfully achieve collective goals if they are work-oriented (Walther & Burgooon, 1990). The latter camp suggests that virtual communities are probable. Now it seems clear that the debate on the superiority/inferiority of CMC vs. F2F is a false comparison. CMC does not compete with F2F for the same kind of communities. Rather, CMC and F2F are integrated to build new types of communities that emerge out of the postmodern conditions of social lives.

The concept of community has gone through significant changes through history and across social contexts. According to Bell and Newby (1976), the idea of community first appeared in preindustrial societies. Communities in this period bore characteristics such as rural, homogenous, and densely knitted (Wellman, 1999). These communities had a local economic basis and a hierarchical power system (Bell & Newby, 1976). In agricultural societies, ownership of land was the crucial resource for the possession of power; thus, people were linked to the local form of territoriality. Power was exercised personally by the landowning elites via F2F interaction. Communities emphasized a common adherence to territory and solidarity of place, to both the elites and the subordinates.