that we got 26 people.… Then we went up to 144, and now we’re at 250.
Through a collaborative effort between Mona and her friends, Collegiate Starleague has become an overwhelming success, built on the principles of peer support and shared interests. These college students use their social networks of similar-aged peers to build a league in which players share an interest in StarCraft II competition and learning and are identified by the college they are attending. In 2013, participating colleges included the champion University of California, Berkeley; University of California, San Diego; and University of Washington.
2
Affinity
Bonding through Shared Cultures and Practices
Lead Authors: Rachel Cody Pfister and Crystle Martin
Introduction
Maria, a 17-year-old Asian college student from the Philippines, was interviewed as part of Martin’s study of online fans of professional wrestling (see the end of chapter 1 for the Wrestling Boards case study).1 She was first introduced to World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) when her father brought home some wrestling trading cards, and she started to watch WWE when she was a freshman in high school. Her brother would watch with her, but her friends at school teased her and called her a tomboy when she shared her interest in WWE. The online world became a haven for her to connect with peers who shared her interest, and she became an active participant in discussion forums for the WWE fandom. She is particularly active on a role-playing board on the Wrestling Boards, where fans write collaborative fanfiction together, creating and taking on the roles of different wrestlers. Through her participation in the Wrestling Boards, Maria developed both an interest and skill in writing.
Online affinity networks such as the Wrestling Boards are collectives that have shared interests, practices, and marked roles in the community that define levels of responsibility and expertise. These groups are not necessarily limited, however, to the tight ties that one might associate with a “community,” though all of them do include participants who have these kinds of personal relationships. Because of their reliance on open peer-to-peer networks, online affinity networks can include large numbers of lurkers, observers, and transient participants, whether they are sporadic readers or readers with casual interests who might browse a forum after a Google search. Indeed, these more casual participants make up the majority of an affinity network (Gee 2017). Even while allowing for lurkers and casual audience members, these online affinity networks are sustained through interpersonal relationships, shared activities, and a sense of cultural affinity. These characteristics distinguish online affinity networks from more traditional media audiences or from a diffuse interest or scene. For example, the StarCraft gaming scene is very broad and diffuse, and it includes a constellation of online affinity networks centered on activities such as game modding, or competitive league-based play where some people develop close working relationships with one another. Conversely, an online affinity network is broader than what one might associate with a specific activity or program, such as a summer StarCraft program, or a single gaming event, at which participants might gather for a specific period but then disband without forming sustaining practices and relationships.
We describe the groups we have studied as “online affinity networks” to distinguish them from long-standing affinity groups and networks that have predated the online world. We call them “online” affinity networks as a shorthand to distinguish them from affinity networks that are primarily grounded in place-based activities and organizations, and we are not implying that they are not “real,” tied to face-to-face interactions, or embedded in physical infrastructures. This chapter delves into the infrastructure, culture, and practices that hold online affinity networks together.
Infrastructure and Space
Ever since its early days, the internet has been an avenue for people to connect with others with shared interests and identities, varying from fandoms, political discourse, and gaming to ethnic, religious, or LGBTQ identities. Howard Rheingold described the unique bonding among participants in early online forums such as the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (the WELL) in his book The Virtual Community (2000), and many other researchers followed in his footsteps by studying, for example, virtual worlds (Boellstorff 2008; Kendall 2002; Turkle 2005), online groups of gamers (Nardi 2010; Steinkuehler 2008; Taylor 2009), fans (Baym 2000; Bury 2005; Jenkins 2008), and bloggers (Russell and Echchaibi 2009). Eventually, internet platforms such as MySpace and Facebook became mainstream, mirroring the everyday networks that we navigate in school, community, and workplace (boyd 2014). At the same time, niche and interest-centered online communities also continued to proliferate and now encompass almost every imaginable affinity and pursuit. The internet has provided a new infrastructure for people to communicate and organize around interests and affinity with ease and in a more pervasive way. For children and youth who have limited mobility and access to face-to-face affinity groups, the impact of online affinity networks is particularly profound.
In online affinity networks, young people are pursuing what, in our earlier Digital Youth research (Ito et al. 2010), we described as “interest-driven” learning and participation—where they are going online to find information, communities, and learning resources that support specialized interests and affiliations that may not be available in their local communities. In our earlier study, LiveJournal was a gathering spot for these kinds of interactions, which later moved to platforms such as Tumblr or Twitter. We contrasted this with “friendship-driven” forms of online communication through MySpace and instant messaging (IM) and eventually through text messages, Facebook, and Instagram. Teens might discuss romantic relationships and negotiate school-based popularity on Snapchat and Facebook, while they geek out on games, anime, or music on Tumblr and Twitter. While some online affinity networks do use platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, they more typically rely on sites and platforms that allow for more specialized forms of content creation, sharing, and reputation building. Young people describe how they will segment their online identities between the friendship-driven and interest-driven platforms. Often, they will have little overlap between their social networks on Facebook or Instagram and their online affinity networks.
Online affinity networks share some characteristics with long-standing hobby and sports networks, but they are not characterized by the organizational contexts, infrastructures, and face-to-face relations that we associate with these place-based groups. In their analysis of online social networks, Rainie and Wellman (2012) describe how online access is tied to a growing and flexible palette of choices for affiliation and a resulting shift away from affinities grounded in local places and organizations. We see youth online affinity networks as part of this broader trend toward affiliation defined by affinity rather than by geography or organizational membership. While Rainie and Wellman describe this as “networked individualism,” our cases indicate a shift toward intentional and tailored group membership rather than individuation. The young people we spoke to stress how online networks enabled them to find a social context for what was previously a solitary interest. We see continuity between place-based affinity networks and online affinity networks in that both support learning and participation that is centered on the pursuit of interests. What differentiates online affinity networks from the hobby and sports groups in a young person’s local community is that the infrastructure centers on online space and infrastructure, rather than on brick-and-mortar organizations and settings. Although most hobby and interest groups now have some mix of online and place-based presence, online affinity networks are distinguished in their primary reliance on online infrastructure. We have identified three common features that characterize online affinity networks, which we elaborate on in this section:
1 The network is specialized. It is centered on a specific affinity or interest, rather than being layered with other forms of affiliation. Organizations such as schools and workplaces can support affiliation based on specialized interests, but
