Community: a timeless tool
Although the Internet is renown for embracing new ideas, chewing them up, spitting them out and moving on to the next one, a few concepts keep coming back, albeit in new forms.
The most resilient of these is the concept of communities. They’re in vogue again, for exactly the same reasons they have been in vogue in the past – the concept of community aptly describes the nature and the potential of the online environment.
A couple of years ago, I was asked to write a piece for the “My Five” column in the Australian Literary Review, where people write about five books that have influenced them in their career. The first book I listed was Net Gain: Expanding markets through virtual communities.
Net Gain was one of the first books that put Internet communities into a business context: not surprising, since authors John Hagel and Arthur Armstrong were both McKinsey&Company consultants. They argued that the web is used for three basic purposes – to find content, to interact and to complete transactions – and they correctly predicted online communities would grow around these purposes.
The book was strongly criticised by purists when it was published; they said that on the Internet there was commerce and there was community and never the twain shall meet. Not long after this, of course, eBay appeared. eBay is the textbook example of the type of virtual communities predicted by Hagel and Armstrong: a vibrant, self‐regulated community where people barter and sell, and make friends (and dollars) along the way.
They also forecast the disintermediation of industries such as travel, describing a future that looks a lot like travel sites such as Zuji, Wotif and TripAdvisor.
