Loriato, Cécile
Taking Part in an Online Users Collective: Being “a Community” ?
- 2021.
97
Based on empirical work in information and communication sciences and in close fields of study, this contribution proposes avenues for reflection on the relevance of the notion of community to define a collective of online users. Building on the ethnography of a Facebook group dedicated to a new HIV prevention strategy, we shed light on the elements characterizing the collective : its perception as a community, the objective sought by the participants, or the involvement of the latter in the activities of the collective. We show that the notion of community to qualify a priori a collective of online users is to be qualified and we propose to design it in a transverse way, overcoming the online/offline opposition.