Restricted accessOtherFirst published online 2004-01
The New Imagined Community: Identifying and Exploring a Bidirectional Continuum Integrating Virtual and Physical Communities through the Community Embodiment Model (CEM)
The Internet has enabled global growth in the use of virtual communities. Virtual communities provide Internet researchers with an excellent opportunity to study human communication across different conceptualizations of community, different technologies, and different cultures. This article introduces a theoretical framework called the Community Embodiment Model (CEM) to better understand the nature of the virtual community. It is proposed that CEM can help us better understand how participants interact with virtual communities by defining interaction within virtual communities as beginning with a conceptualization of community (imagined community) that embodies a continuum of virtuality/physicality. This article also describes a pilot study, as part of a wider research project, that used CEM as its theoretical framework.
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