Designing Online Communities

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Owens, Trevor.
Designing online communities: how designers, developers, community managers, and software structure discourse and knowledge production on the Web / Trevor Owens. pages cm. — (New literacies and digital epistemologies; vol. 72)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Online social networks. 2. Social media. I. Title.
HM742.O94  302.30285—dc23  2014043811
ISBN 978-1-4331-2847-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4331-2846-2 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-4539-1502-8 (e-book)
ISSN 1523-9543


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Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

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About the author

TREVOR OWENS is a digital archivist at the Library of Congress. He holds a doctorate in social science research methods from George Mason University. His research has been published in journals such as Curator: The Museum Journal, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Science Communication. In 2014, he received the Society for American Archivists’ Archival Innovator Award.

About the book

Discussion on the Web is mediated through layers of software and protocols. As scholars increasingly study communication and learning on the Internet, it is essential to consider how site administrators, programmers, and designers create interfaces and enable functionality. The managers, administrators, and designers of online communities can turn to more than 20 years of technical books for guidance on how to design online communities toward particular objectives. Through analysis of this “how-to” literature, Designing Online Communities explores the discourse of design and configuration that partially structures online communities and later social networks. Tracking the history of notions of community in these books suggests the emergence of a logic of permission and control. Online community defies many conventional notions of community. Participants are increasingly treated as “users,” or even as commodities themselves to be used. Through consideration of the particular tactics of these administrators, this book suggests how researchers should approach the study and analysis of the records of online communities.

“Designing Online Communities is a must-have for anyone designing or researching online communities, particularly for learning. Trevor Owens’s work is both comprehensive and eminently readable, a sweeping look at the technologies, design patterns, and cultural forms they produce that is both theoretically ambitious and grounded in examples and tools that will help you develop, research, and manage online communities.”

—Kurt Squire, University of Wisconsin

“[Owens’s] engaging analysis gives clarity to how the design strategies implicit in code influence the ways we build conversations, relationships, and communities on the web.”

—Jefferson Bailey, Internet Archive

“Can media archaeology have a methodology? Does software studies need data sets? In Designing Online Communities, Owens presents a bracing case study that not only contributes to our understanding of lives lived online, but also joins the empirical rigor of applied social science with leading-edge digital and media studies.”

—Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland

“Owens asks us to consider how technologies reflect and shape permissions and control, and how the managers and builders of online communities wield power beyond simply an offer of ‘connectivity.’”

—Audrey Watters, Hack Education

“This book provides essential context for our shared online existence.”

—Dan Cohen, Digital Public Library of America

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR designing online communities

“Designing Online Communities is a must-have for anyone designing or researching online communities, particularly for learning. Trevor Owens’s work is both comprehensive and eminently readable, a sweeping look at the technologies, design patterns, and cultural forms they produce that is both theoretically ambitious and grounded in examples and tools that will help you develop, research, and manage online communities.”

—Kurt Squire, University of Wisconsin