Tracing Community Life Across Virtual Settlements

Recent scholarship has demonstrated that virtual communities can be traced in the online ‘tells’ retained by popular virtual settlements like Facebook and Twitter. In this article, the authors push this line of research toward an analysis of pre-requisites and constrains of virtual settlements that determine the understanding of community life across settlements. The approach followed is grounded on a ‘practice lens’ that views virtual communities as enacted cyber-structures revealed through cultural artifacts facilitated by affordances inscribed into virtual settlements. The presence or absence of key affordances determines not only what is retained as online ‘tells’ in a virtual settlement but also the type and range of cultural artifacts, as well as how these artifacts are used across virtual settlements. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-1553-3.ch013