Abstract
Whereas substantial scholarly attention has been paid to the online
presentation of self, symbolic interactionist approaches are largely absent
in the literature on virtual communities. Instead, recurrent questions
are whether communities can exist online and whether specific
online venues qualify as communities. This article aims to move beyond
these dichotomous questions by studying how different meanings attached
to an online venue can be understood from offline experiences.
In a case study of a Dutch forum for orthodox Protestant homosexuals,
two types of understanding of online community emerged from an
analysis of fifteen in-depth interviews. Users struggling with stigmatization
in offline life seek empathic support and have an encompassing
sense of online community—the forum as “refuge.” For users dealing
with practical everyday questions, online contacts are part of so-called
personal communities and help ameliorate offline life—the forum as
“springboard.” Apart from demonstrating that online forums can serve
as Goffmanian backstages in two distinct ways, these results indicate
it is fruitful to take a symbolic interactionist approach to uncover relationships
between offline and online social life.
Keywords: backstage, Goffman, offline-online relationship, sexual
minorities, stigma, virtual community, virtual imagery
| Original language | Undefined/Unknown |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 552-577 |
| Number of pages | 26 |
| Journal | Symbolic Interaction |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2010 |