The many faces of online community : Images and imaginings of togetherness on Imgur

________ Corresponding author’s email: annamari.martinv[email protected] ISSN: 1457-9863 Publisher: Centre for Applied Language Studies University of Jyväskylä © 2018: The authors http://apples.jyu.fi http://dx.doi.org/10.17011/apples/urn.201812014967 The many faces of online community: Images and imaginings of togetherness on Imgur Annamari Martinviita, University of Oulu This article discusses the meaning and function of “community” as a discourse on the image-sharing website Imgur. The analysis shows that the community term has many meanings and serves as a shorthand for a wide variety of social practices, and these meanings are shaped by the experiences of social action leading to the use of the term. Based on ethnographic data, nexus analysis provides an understanding of how the interactions related to community on the site come to take place the way they do. In conceiving of these interactions as mediated discourse, the article provides a fresh approach to the long-established academic discussion on the definition of community, suggesting a new conception of the community term as a boundary object, which takes on various meanings and functions as it is employed in social action. On Imgur, the community term is associated with an imagined connection to similar others, a shared culture, and the commitment to participation required by the intertextuality of the site content and the challenge of learning to read and create the content that is popular on the site. Keywords: online community, virtual community, online social interaction, online ethnography, nexus analysis, mediated discourse analysis 1 Introduction Community as a concept has proven notoriously slippery in efforts to subject it to academic definition. In 1955, George Hillery identified 94 commonly used definitions for the term (Cavanagh, 2007, p. 102), and the drive to distil common themes from the vast body of literature continues (see e.g. Chayko, 2014; Parks, 2011). At the same time, lay usages of the term seem largely untroubled: the word “community” appears frequently in conversations related to all manner of interaction, and its meaning is thought to be implicitly understood. It has become a particularly popular word in online discourse, used by a variety of people to describe different kinds of togetherness or group interaction that occur on the internet (Baym, 2010; Parks, 2011). While some suggest that interest in online community has waned as practices of online interaction have gained variety (Herring & Androutsopoulos, 2015, pp. 138–139), participation on many popular online sites still evokes ideas of community for their members (Martinviita, 2017). Apples – Journal of Applied Language Studies Vol. 12, 2, 2018, 55–74 56 Apples – Journal of Applied Language Studies The word community is also used regularly in connection with the imagesharing website Imgur, a site that attracts 150 million visitors each month (Perez, 2014). With such large numbers of people interacting through images and 140- character comments, with no tools for following particular users or for creating networks, the site does not appear to offer affordances for building relationships or engaging in sustained interaction with others, elements that are central to many academic and everyday understandings of community. Indeed, Imgur members themselves engage in arguments over whether Imgur is a community or not. This study focuses on the community question on Imgur, unravelling the roots of the argument and thereby providing a fresh real-life example of how community as a term comes to be associated with the interaction in a particular online setting. The study is built as an ethnography, more particularly as a nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2004). The study takes a historical view to discourse and analyses the interaction on and around Imgur in terms of the processes that shape the interaction, highlighting some of the most salient elements in creating the understandings of community that are visible on Imgur. In other words, rather than beginning from any established definitions of the concept of community, the study aims to discover what “community” means here for these participants, and what work it does in this context. By moving away from the search for common defining elements and instead focusing on the underlying processes that evoke the idea of community for participants, the study creates space for the description of different experiences of togetherness, and an understanding of the community concept as an object that does different work in different circumstances. 2 Theoretical framework This study employs nexus analysis, a research strategy for studying real, now-in- the-world social action as part of a historical and sociocultural continuum (Blommaert & Huang, 2009; Scollon, 2013; Scollon & Scollon, 2004; Wohlwend, 2013). Nexus analysis can be described as the ethnographic application of mediated discourse theory, which posits that discourse and action have a dialectical relationship: that discourse is a form of social action as well as a tool for social action, and as discourse shapes action, action shapes discourse (Jones & Norris, 2005). Discourse can here refer to language-in-use and patterns of situated meaning-making, which Gee calls “small d” discourse, or to the more established semiotic systems that people enact as members of discourse communities, which Gee refers to as “big D” Discourses (Gee, 2015). According to mediated discourse theory, all social action is mediated through the tools used to take the action. These tools include discourse and language, but also any other objects, concepts or beings in the world (Scollon, 2001a). Any such objects or materials, having become recognised as useable for a particular action, become the “mediational means” to achieve that action (Scollon, 2001b, pp. 115, 135, Scollon, 2013, p. 195; Wertsch, 1998). All these means also have their own histories and incorporated meanings which affect the action being taken, while being thus employed in situated action also imbues the tools with new meanings. These views on discourse and action are a distillation of the body of related conceptual work on discourse, language and sociality by, among many others, Bourdieu (1977), Wertsch (1994), Vygotsky (1987), Bakhtin (1981) and Gumperz & Hymes (1986), succinctly summarised by Jones & Norris (2005). Overall, the aim A. Martinviita 57 of nexus analysis is to “keep alive our understanding of the layered simultaneity of human action” (Scollon, 2008, p. 236; see also Blommaert, 2005), and to acknowledge that each instance of social action is packed with meaning that reaches to the past (the past actions that enable and shape that action) as well as the future (what new actions are enabled and shaped by that action). Nexus analysis aims to grasp this layered simultaneity through the concept of “cycles of discourse”, (Scollon & Scollon, 2004, pp. 14‒15), also sometimes termed “discourse itineraries” (Scollon, 2008). Both terms direct the analyst’s focus onto the connectivity and interaction between and across all the semantic materials involved in an action. Three central concepts further elaborate the kinds of elements involved in each social action: the history of experience and learning that shapes each participant’s views and actions is described through the notion of “historical body” (Nishida, 1958; Scollon & Scollon, 2004, p. 13); “discourses in place” highlights the fact that places are never neutral, but that places evoke a variety of meanings and practices, shaping the social action that occurs in them (Scollon & Scollon, 2004, p. 14); and the “interaction order” among participants, whether among those present or further away from the scene, also always plays a role (Goffman, 1983; Scollon & Scollon, 2004, p. 13). In order to highlight the fluidity of semantic materials, nexus analysis employs the concept of resemiotisation (Iedema, 2001, 2003). Resemiotisation refers to the transformations that occur in the materials used to take social action: any piece of knowledge, thought, word or object we use to take social action has a tendency to change shape depending on the context of the action (Scollon & Scollon, 2004). Discourses may be resemiotised into social practices, or become “frozen” in objects, and objects and practices may in turn become resemiotised into discourses (ibid., p. 170; Jones & Norris, 2005, pp. 8–9). For example, the analysis below shows how various discourses of technology development and online interaction have become resemiotised into the elements of the graphical interface seen on Imgur. Overall, the following analysis first highlights the key elements identified as affecting and enabling participation on Imgur, moving then to focus particularly on the journey of the concept of community on to the site. The analysis notes that the concept of community arises as a mediational means in many instances, taking on different meanings as required by the participants in different actions. While the participants work to construct and identify the community that is unique on this site, they also invoke meanings and understandings of community coming from elsewhere in their life worlds. Considering the many meanings also discussed in the ongoing academic conversation on definitions of community, the article therefore suggests a more useful conceptualization of community as a “boundary object” (Star & Griesemer, 1989) to describe the fluctuating meanings it takes on and the many usages it is put to, as seen in this case study. The roots of the notion of boundaries can be traced to the work of Bakhtin (e.g. 1986) (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011): the dialogical nature of human understanding means that ideas attain their meaning in dialogue with other ideas or other minds. In effect, it is the boundaries between understandings that provide meaning. The article argues that the concept of community becomes a boundary object on Imgur, as participants employ the concept as a mediational means to understand and explain their participation on the site. Community can therefore be thought of as an “ideal type” boundary object: an object which does not accurately describe any one thing but is rather an abstract, and even fairly vague description that can be 58 Apples – Journal of Applied Language Studies adapted to different locations to serve as a tool for communication and cooperation (Star & Griesemer, 1989, p. 410). The concept of community has often been criticised for its vagueness in terms of academic analysis (Fernback, 2007; Postill, 2008), but this article argues that in enabling and explaining social action this vagueness becomes a positive aspect. Analysed in this materialistic way, the word “community” can be seen to be and do many different things in the context of the internet, and of Imgur; the meaning of “community” may change as the processes and practices behind it change. This is a departure from the online community research produced thus far, which has involved a recurring struggle to develop or agree upon academically robust definitions (Day, 2006; Parks, 2011). Beyond the issue of definition, several distinct streams of research on online community can be identified: research which focuses on the experience of community using specific psychological concepts, often based on the theory of sense of community (Blanchard & Markus, 2002, 2004); research that utilises community as a pragmatic term signifying “a group of people who interact in the same context regularly”, as is prevalent in work that concentrates on the technological or business aspects of online social environments (Iriberri & Leroy, 2009); and research which acknowledges the emotional aspects of community without strictly defining them, referring to community as imagined (Anderson, 1991; Gruzd, Jacobson, Wellman, & Mai, 2016) or an image that can be used to make the experience of participation more visible or tangible (Chayko, 2014). While the abovementioned studies have discovered and described many important aspects of the online community phenomenon, this study aims to provide a more holistic, yet pragmatic view: instead of favouring a particular aspect of or viewpoint towards social action, the nexus analytic approach suggests that experience, imagination and pragmatic function are all incorporated in any act of using a word. Thus, when an Imgur member uses the word “community”, they could be leveraging the idea of the group both in its practical and imagined aspects, as well as the experience of participating in that group, while through the act producing yet new associations for the word. 3 Data and methods The data collection methods used in nexus analysis build on the standards of ethnographic research (see e.g. Scollon & Scollon, 2004). These centre on collecting the knowledge and materials required to build rich descriptions of moments of social action that are truthful to the experience of participants; long-term immersion in the social scene being studied is required to gain a nuanced understanding of what is happening and why, and data should be collected from multiple viewpoints apart from the researcher's own to verify and extend the observations made (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995; Leeds-Hurwitz, 2005). In online ethnography, organising the data collection is a particular challenge, as the online environment with all its recorded interaction gives the researcher a “panoptic gaze” into everything that goes on (Stone, 1995, p. 243). Data collection should only continue as long as new insight is being gained (Kozinets, 2010 p. 116). In this study, the data collection focused on finding the central processes of meaning-making related to the community question on Imgur, embedded in the practices of participation on the site. A. Martinviita 59 The main challenge in designing a study exploring the experience of participation on Imgur was accounting for the necessarily large variety of experiences among a member base of millions. The very first observations on the site showed discrepancies, with members having very different understandings of what it is to participate on the site. Thus, it was important to collect a range of data that would allow the exploration of these different understandings, and how they might relate to how “community” was understood on the site. Therefore the data collection process was designed to cover multiple viewpoints into the phenomenon of participation on Imgur: those of the researcher, the site members (both in terms of what they think of the site and what they actually do) and outside commentators. As a result, this case study relies on four different data sets, as follows: 1. Participant observation data, collected over a period of two years between 2014 and 2016; 2. A survey of open-ended questions (49 responses) developed based on six test interviews; 3. Qualitative analysis of site interactions, focusing on the “community” topic (roughly 100 image posts and their associated comment threads); 4. A “discourses survey” of what is being said about Imgur elsewhere (Scollon & Scollon, 2004, pp. 156–157). The participant observation, the content analysis and the discourses survey cover a time period of two years, allowing for the maturation of an understanding of what is constant and what are the changing phenomena on the site. Participant observation focused on the overall activity on the site and on interactions related to the community topic, found in the course of observation as well as through searches with the keyword “community”. The discourses survey consisted of periodic web searches for content related to Imgur, resulting in a selection of news articles and posts on other websites, particularly Reddit. In the final stage of data collection, six interviews with recently active members were first conducted to gauge the response to questions designed on the basis of the observations already made in the study, and to elicit any detail the study may not yet have uncovered. The questions were then developed into a survey. Where the content analysis had focused on the micro-level of instances of interaction that members actually engaged in, the interviews and survey gauged the overarching opinions and experiences of members. Participants for the interviews as well as the survey were sought by directly contacting individuals who had been recently active on the site (11 individuals in total), as well as through posting on the so-called “Imgur Community”, a new segment of the site with a discussion board structure (where the post may be assumed to have reached hundreds of individuals). The 55 individuals who responded to the interview and the survey were not expected to represent the entire site userbase of millions, but rather to provide expert commentary on an issue familiar to them: participation on Imgur. All in all, the data collection in its different forms captured the actions of thousands of Imgur members to some degree. Assisted by the length of the period of participant observation, this enabled the identification of key practices and understandings specific to the site, and the maturation of the researcher’s own sense-making of what is happening on the site. The data supplied multiple 60 Apples – Journal of Applied Language Studies viewpoints into the social scene on Imgur, giving voice to the variety of opinions and experiences present. The analysis chapter explores the key processes thus identified that contributed to the understandings of community seen on the site; first, a description of the site as it functioned at the time of the study is provided. This description is built from information accumulated during the study, through all the forms of data collection. 3.1 Imgur in brief Imgur is a social site for browsing and commenting on popular images from the internet. Imgur was first created in 2009 to provide a simple tool for uploading and sharing images on the content aggregator site Reddit. At first, the site provided no tools for interaction, but this soon began to change. A gallery of the most popular images was added first in 2009, while usage of the image-sharing tool also began to spread outside Reddit. Voting and commenting tools were added soon after and remain the central interactive tool on the site. Image comments were first conceived of as captions, with the highest-scoring caption displayed directly underneath the image. Captions were later renamed as comments, and functionality such as comment responses (displayed as threads) was added. The content in the public gallery is broadly organised into two categories: viral content drawn from across the web, and user-submitted content from within Imgur. This study focused largely on the user-submitted section as providing the richest interaction on the site: in addition to votes and comments, here site members also create the images and their captions themselves. All content on the site – images and comments – can be voted on, and votes determine the order in which the images are displayed on the site, and the order in which the comments (limited to 140 characters in length) are displayed underneath the images. Contents can be downvoted as well as upvoted, with the total score defining the visibility of the content. Site members gain points based on the votes they receive on their shared images and comments. Thus the voting system strongly influences the interaction that takes place on Imgur, encouraging users to create content that is more likely to gain upvotes – and therefore, visibility. As users typically browse images beginning from the front page of the gallery (which displays the highestranking images), votes strongly influence how many individuals will view a posted image. Each registered member has a profile page with mostly automated content: previous images and comments posted by the member, as well as the points from votes and any trophies the member has earned through participation. The profile page contains an optional space for a profile text the member may create, based on text only. The site does not use profile pictures or avatars; members are identifiable across the site only through their usernames which are linked to their profile page. The profile page provides the option of privately direct messaging an individual member, but there are no tools for group messaging or following particular users; all the group interaction on the site takes place via the images and their comments. This means that the interaction on Imgur is very much focused on content, not relationship-building, and the data shows that members rarely spend a lot of time getting to know others. Rather, the majority of the interaction that takes place is based on voting and commenting only, and due to the large number of members and vast amount of content posted, usernames are not likely to become recognizable. A. Martinviita 61 In addition to still images, Imgur enables the posting of gifs (moving images) and galleries (several images within one post). The voting structure promotes the sharing of certain types of content; posts tends to be humorous and entertaining, but political commentary and the sharing of personal stories are also common. The content tends to be highly intertextual through references to popular culture, current events, online phenomena and Imgur-specific phenomena and practices. These references can be direct or veiled, simple or complex combinations and remixes of content from elsewhere; often quite extensive knowledge of popular culture and previous events on Imgur is required to fully penetrate the meaning of a post. As comments are limited to 140 characters, concise commentary is required. As the comments were originally conceived of as captions, the most popular kind of comment on the site is still the witty one-liner that illustrates or comments on the image in some way. 4 Analysis The following analysis is presented in two parts. First, the focus is on the discourse cycles that shape the social action of “participating on Imgur”, in other words, the discourse cycles that are most salient to developing a shared understanding among Imgur members of what Imgur is for and how it is supposed to be used. The analysis then moves to observing the life of the concept of community on the site, showing how the concept moves through and along the cycles identified in the first part to gain different meanings and usages on the site. Excerpts from the data are provided throughout to illustrate the different observations; these excerpts have been chosen as being particularly representative of the observations they illustrate, but all the findings thus discussed rely on multiple data sources, as discussed above. 4.1 Identifying discourse cycles To begin identifying the discourse cycles that affect the use and meaning of the community concept on Imgur, it is necessary to develop an awareness of the different levels at which participation on the site can be described, in terms of space as well as time (Scollon, 2008). Observation shows that the social action which produces site content such as the image and comments seen in Figure 1 involves a complex nexus of action as follows. On a short-term timescale, the action of “participating on Imgur” involves loading the site or the app, scrolling pages, moving from one page to the next, voting on content, and posting comments. On a wider time-scale, participation on Imgur involves the process of learning about social media and what actions are possible there, in order to first discover the site. Further, it involves learning what actions are appropriate on social media, beginning with what kind of language should be used, whether to be polite or rude, whether to share private details or not, and so on. In the case of Imgur, a basic understanding of the social media practices of posting images and text for public viewing and commentary will enable a first-time viewer to interpret to some extent what is visible on a typical page on the site, as seen in Figure 1. 62 Apples – Journal of Applied Language Studies Figure 1. View of the top left (main segment) of an image post when viewed on a computer (see https://imgur.com/gallery/3hKU1zF for the unedited view)1. More experience is required to fully understand and engage with the multilayered, highly intertextual content that is typical on the site and also seen in Figure 1; the image itself takes the Beatles song “The Yellow Submarine” and its lyrics and related graphics as a starting point, incorporates images of famous film and TV characters popular on Imgur, and links the whole to the idea of the “user submitted” section of Imgur as a place to live. This linking is achieved somewhat in cooperation among several users, as the original poster has given the image the headline “We all live in the”, which commenters recognise as an invitation to engage in the popular practice of posting subsequent lines of song lyrics as responses to a previous user, with words changed to fit the context. Here, the first commenter in particular completes the idea of the “user submarine”, suggested by the original poster’s image manipulation and headline. Thus, the historical body (previous experience & knowledge) of the individuals involved enables their ability to participate in the expected way, while others may struggle to read the content in the manner it is designed by its contributor(s) to be read. A. Martinviita 63 A closer examination of the page’s technical and visual construction also presents a distribution of levels of action and discourse across different timescales and spaces. In the short-term the page is loaded and displayed according to the programming and other technological structures behind it, which imply the much longer-term cycles of technology development to do with for instance the graphical design of the user interface and solutions related to the uploading and sharing of images, and all the decisions that have been made in the design of those technologies. Incorporated into the page design are a large number of functions for the viewer; an experienced user will be able to identify many areas of the page where a click or a tap will result in an action such as moving to another image page, voting or commenting on the image or sharing it elsewhere on the web. The button-like images give access to the central functionality on the site: for example, clicking on an “up” arrow gives the related content a plus point, while clicking on a “down” arrow gives the related content a minus point. An active participant will soon learn to pay attention to the numbers near the voting buttons, which indicate the current total points the content has received. The same area of the page also includes functions for posting comments, for changing the view so that different selections of comments are visible, and accessing each commenter's profile page through the link included in their username. The design of the site thus implies that it is a place for interaction and the rating of content. Other sources of information further specify the understandings of the developers, such as the “about Imgur” page easily accessible from the main menu of the site, which states: “Every day, millions of people use Imgur to be entertained and inspired by funny, heart-warming and helpful images and stories from all around the world” (Imgur, 2016). The case study data in turn illustrates the views of the participants. Starting with the momentary timescale, the data shows that the act of participating on Imgur (browsing, commenting, posting images) is usually an act following the desire to be entertained, distracted or to interact with others. This is again linked to a longer timescale of having learned that Imgur is a place where one can find entertainment, distraction and interaction, probably related to an understanding that “online” is where one can go quickly and easily to find places like this. The following survey responses describe typical experiences (responding to the question “Why do you go on Imgur?”): 1) “Entertainment, as a fun distraction, to remove boredom.” (survey response) 2) “Many reasons. To kill time. To laugh. To see a great post with humanity not being complete shitbags to each other. To laugh.” (survey response) 3) “I live in middle of woods, alone all day, it's a social thing to do. And makes me laugh and brings news to my front door faster than a news channel.” (survey response) These descriptions of the actions involved in participating on Imgur highlight the different temporal extensions and spatial distributions involved in a single action: the Imgur member who loads a page and posts a comment is simultaneously engaging in several cycles of discourse, some immediate, such as the posting of a comment on this content just seen, in the space of this one page on the site; and some extended, such as the enacting of the established identity “I like to go on Imgur”, in the space of the whole site as well as the physical space of the mobile phone or computer and its surroundings, as the case might be. Processes of 70 Apples – Journal of Applied Language Studies 5.1 The concept of community as a boundary object This study relates to a larger discussion on why academics continue to work with the concept of community, when it has always been plagued by problems of definition (Day 2006; Parks, 2011). The problem has been exacerbated by the prevalence of the term in discussing online social interaction, where some suggest the term has become “diluted” to the point where it would be much more fruitful to allow the data to speak for itself (Fernback 2007; Postill, 2008), that is, to look at the ways people connect in today's technologically augmented social landscape, and to describe those connections as they are, unhampered by the baggage that comes with the term community. However, as this study shows, community continues to be a meaningful term that is in everyday usage by everyone involved in the interaction analysed: participants, developers and commentators alike. To some extent this may be due to a difference in the timescales that govern the interpretation of meanings by humans: the cultural codes we utilize to interpret the meaning of information-carrying objects change much more slowly than the events in which those objects are used and interpreted (Lemke, 2001, p. 83). In other words, the old label of community can be applied to the interaction on Imgur to bring meaning to and explain the participation (Martinviita, 2016b); at the same time, new meanings become associated with the label. A useful way to think about the continued ubiquity of the community concept and the changing meanings associated with it is to view community as a ”boundary object” (Star & Griesemer, 1989), i.e. an object that connects many spheres of meaning, perhaps functioning somewhat differently or implying different meanings in each sphere, and in fact gaining its meaning only in its connection to those different spheres. Thus it could be said that the word ”community” functions as a boundary object for many varieties of social interaction, or many different environments in which humans interact in groups; it becomes a term which helps contextualize those environments and explain the interaction that goes on in them, and itself gains meaning from the light in which it appears within those environments. In other words, ”community” on Imgur may mean something quite different than ”community” on another site (online or offline). And as the analysis here has shown, it is the conflict that occurs at the boundaries of different usages that (re)produces the meaning for the participants in that context. Seen in this light, the readiness with which the concept of community is invoked in relation to an endless variety of social situations, by all manner of individuals, suggests that there is a deeper significance to the term making it enduring, or simply a useful tool for social action. Studies like the one presented here, delving into the finer details of present-day community experiences, continue to shed light on the meaning of the term. But if the main role of community is to function as a boundary object, then it can only ever be explained to some degree of completeness in the context of each particular appearance, and each such appearance will be somewhat different. 6 Conclusion This article has displayed the richness of historical and cultural elements packed into each simple action of participating on Imgur. There is a wide-ranging A. Martinviita 71 tendency for people to ”read” a site like Imgur as a ”community”, based on the historical body they have accumulated and the discourses associated with the site, both implicitly ‒ embedded in the design and technology ‒ and explicitly in the interactions of the developers, members and outside commentators. Community is associated with many varieties of social organisation because community is what people have learned to use as a label for group interaction that involves some kind of identifiable togetherness. Applying the ”label” of community serves to give meaning to the interaction and to explain it to the participants and outsiders alike. Conceiving of the site as a community helps delineate the boundaries between insiders and outsiders, to make sense of one's identity in relation to others. By now, research has established that online communities exist and are meaningful to many individuals. What this study has begun to explore are the many varieties of togetherness experienced by individuals in today's technologyrich world, and the underpinnings of those experiences of togetherness: the technological and social affordances that enable and shape experiences of connection to others. In the case of Imgur, the ”community” that people perceive is related to a shared culture that can only be fully penetrated through extensive engagement with the site; to the malleableness of the image medium to highly intertextual meaning-making and a system which encourages concise, witty messages; and to the ”out in the open” obscurity thus achieved: anyone can view the contents shared, but only an insider can understand ‒ and, perhaps, only a true community member can appreciate. Endnote 1 The image contained within the image post cannot be reproduced here due to copyright issues. References Akkerman, S. F., & Bakker, A. (2011). Boundary Crossing and Boundary Objects. Review of Educational Research, 81(2), 132–169. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654311404435 Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (reprint, revised). London: Verso. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). Discourse in the Novel. In M. Holquist (Ed.), The Dialogic Imagination (pp. 262–349). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). From notes made in 1970–71. In C. Emerson & M. Holquist (Eds.), V. W. McGee (Trans.), Speech genres and other late essays (1st ed) (pp. 132–158). Austin: University of Texas Press. Baym, N. K. (2010). Personal connections in the digital age. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Bertoni, S. (2015, March 25). Can Imgur Turn Its 150 Million Users Into A Booming Business? Forbes. Retrieved 27 June 2016, from http://www.forbes.com/sites/steven bertoni/2015/03/25/can-imgur-turn-its-150-million-users-into-a-booming-business/ Blanchard, A. L., & Markus, M. L. (2002). Sense of virtual community – maintaining the experience of belonging. In Proceedings of the 35th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp. 3566–3575). Hawaii: IEEE. https://doi.org/doi: 10.1109/HICSS.2002.994449 72 Apples – Journal of Applied Language Studies Blanchard, A. L., & Markus, M. L. (2004). The experienced sense of a virtual community: Characteristics and processes. ACM SIGMIS Database, 35(1), 64–79. https://doi.org/ 10.1145/968464.968470 Blommaert, J. (2005). Discourse: a critical introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J., & Huang, A. (2009). Historical bodies and historical space. Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice, 6(3), 267–282. https://doi.org/10.1558/japl.v6i3.267 Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Broderick, R. (2013, July 9). How Imgur Is Taking Over Reddit From The Inside. BuzzFeed News. Retrieved from https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/howimgur-is-taking-over-reddit-from-the-inside Cavanagh, A. (2007). Sociology in the Age of the Internet. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Chayko, M. (2008). Portable communities: the social dynamics of online and mobile connectedness. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Chayko, M. (2014). Techno-social Life: The Internet, Digital Technology, and Social Connectedness. Sociology Compass, 8(7), 976–991. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12190 Day, G. (2006). Community and everyday life. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Fernback, J. (2007). Beyond the diluted community concept: a symbolic interactionist perspective on online social relations. New Media & Society, 9(1), 49–69. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/1461444807072417 Gee, J. P. (2015). Discourse, Small d, Big D. In K. Tracy, T. Sandel, & C. Ilie (Eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction (pp. 1–5). Hoboken, NJ, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118611463.wbielsi016 Goffman, E. (1983). The Interaction Order. American Sociological Review, 48(1), 1–17. Gruzd, A., Jacobson, J., Wellman, B., & Mai, P. (2016). Understanding communities in an age of social media: the good, the bad, and the complicated. Information, Communication & Society, 19(9), 1187–1193. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1187195 Gumperz, J. J., & Hymes, D. H. (Eds.). (1986). Directions in sociolinguistics: the ethnography of communication. Oxford, UK; New York, NY, USA: Blackwell. Hammersley, M., & Atkinson, P. (1995). Ethnography: Principles in Practice. London: Routledge. Herring, S. C., & Androutsopoulos, J. (2015). Computer-Mediated Discourse 2.0. In D. Tannen, H. E. Hamilton, & D. Schiffrin (Eds.), The handbook of discourse analysis (Second edition, pp. 127–151). Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Iedema, R. (2001). Resemiotization. Semiotica, 2001(137), 23–39. https://doi.org/10.1515/ semi.2001.106 Iedema, R. (2003). Multimodality, resemiotization: extending the analysis of discourse as multi-semiotic practice. Visual Communication, 2(1), 29–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1470357203002001751 Iriberri, A., & Leroy, G. (2009). A life-cycle perspective on online community success. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 41(2), 11. Jones, R. H., & Norris, S. (2005). Discourse as action/discourse in action. In Discourse in Action: introducing mediated discourse analysis (pp. 3–14). London: Routledge. Kozinets, R. V. (2010). Netnography: ethnographic research in the age of the internet (1st ed). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Ltd. Leeds-Hurwitz, W. (2005). Ethnography. In K. L. Fitch & R. E. Sanders (Eds.), Handbook of language and social interaction (pp. 327–353). Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Lemke, J. L. (2001). Discursive technologies and the social organization of meaning. Folia Linguistica, 35(1–2), 79–96. Malinen, S. (2016). Sociability and Sense of Community among Users of Online Services. Acta Universitatis Tamperensis 2125. (Published doctoral dissertation). Tampere: Tampere University Press. Retrieved from http://tampub.uta.fi/handle/10024/98292 Martinviita, A. (2016a). Online community and the personal diary: Writing to connect at Open Diary. Computers in Human Behavior, 63(October 2016), 672–682. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.chb.2016.05.089 A. Martinviita 73 Martinviita, A. (2016b). Understandings of togetherness online: community as a tool for social action. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Web Science (pp. 346–347). New York, NY, USA: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/2908131.2908189 Martinviita, A. (2017). Online community as experience and discourse: a nexus analytic view into understandings of togetherness online. Acta Universitatis Ouluensis. B, Humaniora. (Published doctoral dissertation). Oulu: University of Oulu. Retrieved from http://urn.fi/ urn:isbn:9789526216430 McCracken, H. (2016, March 14). How Imgur Became An Image-Sharing, Meme-Generating Megacommunity. Fast Company Magazine. Retrieved 27 June 2016, from http://www.fast company.com/3057682/startup-report/how-imgur-became-an-image-sharing-meme- generating-megacommunity Nishida, K. (1958). Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness: Three Philosophical Essays. (R. Schinzinger, Trans.). Tokyo: Maruzen Co., Ltd. Obst, P., Zinkiewicz, L., & Smith, S. G. (2002). Sense of community in science fiction fandom, Part 1: Understanding sense of community in an international community of interest. Journal of Community Psychology, 30(1), 87–103. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcop.1052 Parks, M. R. (2011). Social Network Sites as Virtual Communities. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), A networked self: identity, community and culture on social network sites (pp. 105–123). New York: Routledge. Perez, S. (2014, April 3). After Five Years Of Bootstrapping, Imgur Raises $40 Million From Andreessen Horowitz & Reddit. TechCrunch. Retrieved from http://techcrunch.com/2014/ 04/03/after-five-years-of-bootstrapping-imgur-raises-40-million-from-andreessen-reddit/ Postill, J. (2008). Localizing the internet beyond communities and networks. New Media & Society, 10(3), 413–431. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444808089416 Rotman, D., Golbeck, J., & Preece, J. (2009). The community is where the rapport is – on sense and structure in the YouTube community. In Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Communities and technologies (pp. 41–50). New York, NY: ACM. Scollon, R. (2001a). Action and text: towards an integrated understanding of the place of text in social (inter)action. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis (pp. 139–182). London: Sage. Scollon, R. (2001b). Mediated discourse: the nexus of practice. London; New York: Routledge. Scollon, R. (2008). Discourse itineraries: Nine processes of resemiotization. In V. Bhatia, J. Flowerdew, & R. H. Jones, Advances in discourse studies (pp. 233–244). London: Routledge. Scollon, R. (2013). Geographies of Discourse. In I. de Saint-Georges & J.-J. Weber (Eds.), Multilingualism and Multimodality (pp. 183–198). Rotterdam: SensePublishers. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-94-6209-266-2_10 Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. W. (2004). Nexus analysis: discourse and the emerging internet. London: Routledge. Shoham, M. D., Arora, A. B., & Al-Busaidi, A. (2013). Writing on the Wall: An Online Community of YouTube Patrons as Communication Network or Cyber-Graffiti? In 2013 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp. 3951–3960). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.2013.615 Smith, J. I. (2015, August 19). Imgur Is the Last True Internet Culture Remaining — But Can It Survive? Mic. Retrieved from http://mic.com/articles/123956/imgur-s-alan- and-sarah-schaaf-look-to-the-future Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907– 39. Social Studies of Science, 19(3), 387–420. https://doi.org/10.1177/030631289019003001 Stone, A. R. (1995). The war of desire and technology at the close of the mechanical age. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky. Volume 1. Problems of general psychology. Including the Volume Thinking and Speech. (N. Minick, Trans.). New York: Plenum. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-1655-8 Welbourne, J. L., Blanchard, A. L., & Boughton, M. D. (2009). Supportive communication, sense of virtual community and health outcomes in online infertility groups. In Proceedings 74 Apples – Journal of Applied Language Studies of the fourth international conference on Communities and technologies (pp. 31–40). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1556466 Wellman, B., & Gulia, M. (1999). Net surfers don’t ride alone: Virtual communities as communities. In B. Wellman (Ed.), Networks in the global village (pp. 331–367). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Wertsch, J. V. (1994). The primacy of mediated action in sociocultural studies. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 1(4), 202–208. https://doi.org/10.1080/10749039409524672 Wertsch, J. V. (1998). Mind as action. New York: Oxford University Press. Wohlwend, K. (2013). Mediated Discourse Analysis: Tracking Discourse in Action. In P. Albers, T. Holbrook, & A. Flint (Eds.), New Methods on Literacy Research (p. 56–69). Oxon: Routledge. Received June 5, 2017 Revision received September 13, 2018 Accepted November 25, 2018