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Virtual Communities

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Abstract

The touchless economy of the pandemic era includes a network of virtual communities in which people participate as they conduct their everyday lives in a low-exposure-risk fashion. To help understand and put these communities in context, this entry describes a typology of virtual communities adapted from Porter (2004). The five elements of the proposed typology include (1) purpose (content of interaction), (2) population (participants in the interaction), (3) platform (design of interaction), (4) place (location of interaction), and (5) profit model (return on interaction). This five-element typology facilitates recognition of essential elements and differences between the many virtual communities that are becoming part of people’s lives in the pandemic era and helps frame and put in context (a) likely new practices and technology applications and (b) new topics for future post-pandemic research in the social, business, and computing sciences.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Alberta School of Business, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

    Paul R. Messinger

  2. Department of Business Administration, Whittier College, Whittier, CA, U.S.A.

    Kristen Smirnov

  3. School of Business, University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, Canada

    Xin Ge

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  1. Paul R. Messinger
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  2. Kristen Smirnov
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  3. Xin Ge
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Correspondence to Paul R. Messinger .

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  1. Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

    Vlad Petre Glăveanu

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  1. Department of Psychology, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy

    Alice Chirico

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Messinger, P.R., Smirnov, K., Ge, X. (2022). Virtual Communities. In: Glăveanu, V.P. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90913-0_161

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