Virtual communities and social activities: reframing the online experience

The way communities are being reconfigured via the uses people make of media technologies is a key aspect to understand how contemporary experience is evolving in a changing media environment. This article presents and discusses the findings of an ongoing project that deals with the study of media-based participatory culture and the linkages between face-to-face and virtual communities from the point of view of user's specific activities. The document specifically deals with the metrics sense of community (SOC) and its reframing in the online context. Empirical evidence extracted from the study of several operational communities located in Portugal is exploited in order to discuss the relation between media use and community development, namely on what concerns the improvement of social capital amongst those groups. The main contributions discussed are: the concept of SOC and its validation for virtual communities; the role communities have in informing media consumption and the consequences online communities have for the behaviours and media use patterns depicted by existing face-to-face communities.