Blog #8

This excerpt from Dr. Howard’s book focuses on what online communities must do in order to establish themselves as a leading authority in their field, the kind of place that you logically go to if you share the common interest of the community – in his terms, it is known as “significance.” There is no utility in being one of many other groups of the same kind – instead, it is crucial for online communities to find some kind of niche, even if it is within the same field as other communities, to make it stand out and thus be worth an investment of time and effort. To be significant is not just to have a lot of members, but members who are interested in seeing the group produce measurable results or have some kind of real output. That should be the true mark of significance – this is a problem that plagues my field of interest, South Carolina Democratic politics. We have a problem where a few people get together and start up an “independent” group of all Democrats and give themselves a liberal sounding name rather than working within the party, and they get lost in the noise. There are literally several of these on Facebook and with corresponding Twitter accounts, and there is a great deal of overlap in the groups so they are not able to stake out their identity. Now if these groups were each devoted to one issue or another they might be able to establish a niche like I was discussing earlier, but as it stands none achieves significance because it has no well-defined audience and has no real output – we are not winning elections, and they serve only to split up our party further, making it even more difficult to organize.