The feeling of belonging is a powerful emotion and social tool. It is actively used in propaganda and social dynamics even when we don't notice it.
One of the most powerful tools to push and facilitate this feeling is the internet. Online communities are known for the support they can give to those who cannot find support locally. But there also exist several new problems spawned out of this feeling of relatability. This writing will attempt to analyze and describe how these work and play out in reality.
Online communities have existed since the earlier days of the internet. From the forum boards of the 2000s era to the modern discord servers of today, it’s been a constant on the internet. With a sudden increase in online communication services under the pandemic, there is only an increase in the creation of these communities.
An interesting dynamic many of these communities create is the feeling of belonging. Some online communities exist for a sense of belonging as a result of circumstance, these are particularly important for individuals who locally have nowhere to go and gives them a chance to explain their worries and attempt to obtain support.
The LGBT community highly benefits from online support since they are particularly helpful in sexual education and understanding of sexuality for queer youth who are often afraid and cannot be open about their sexuality and can interact safely in online anonymity.
This can apply to disabled communities as well, showing how a lack of numbers locally may no longer be a barrier for socialization with peers of similar interest and finding other individuals who could post and support one another.
But note that the internet is not restrictive on who it gives a voice and a feeling of belonging to, and has a history of creating new communities spawned out of hate and discrimination. Plenty of groups exist to hurt and harm those who they believe have wronged them when in fact they haven’t been wronged.
Operation Pridefall was organized by members on 4Chan with the intent to disrupt any online activities of LGBT+ groups. This would even include hacking of events, active slander campaigns, and vicious, psychological offenses over numerous online applications. This level of activity only means the internet is not the haven it is often portrayed to be and shows how dangerous these kinds of communities can often become. Sharing political views can often create ‘echo chambers’, where opinions you say will simply be agreed with, decreasing the extent of criticism given to your statements.
It’s interesting to note that this is also actively pushed by social media sites quite discreetly. The algorithms used often employ the use of hashtags and other metrics to give a user posts relevant to their search and scroll history.
This can be used to push very narrow political beliefs onto one’s social media feed. Exposing one to only one kind of narrative can also be dangerous, especially if it is reinforced by technology itself. Since, to a user, there are many individuals on the internet who seem to think like them and support their ideas. The opposition can’t possibly be that large. And that kind of idea makes it increasingly difficult to deal with conspiracy theories and discriminatory rhetoric. Individuals no longer feel downtrodden when those locally around them do not approve of their views because an entire group chat exists telling them that the world is wrong and that they are correct- all perfectly facilitated by the internet.
According to the social identity model of deindividuation effects (or SIDE model), developed by Reicher, Spears, and Postmes (1995), individuals who collectively join together other a collective identity where their anonymity was assured have greater chances of doing an activity as a group than they would do otherwise. The Klu Klux Klan and rioting are fair examples of this model in action. What would seem even more interesting is if we would try to see how it applies to online communities. The anonymity is easier than ever before and the creation of echo chambers creates the perfect ground for individuals to take up collective roles and act on them, in possibly dangerous and anti-social ways. Even if these anti-social acts were restricted to being performed on the internet, it can still take the form of something as harmful as Operation Pridefall.
An easy assumption here is that it may only be politics that fuels this fire of anti-social activity. But this assumption isn’t entirely correct. Anti-social activity can come from more than just political belief echo chambers.
It can also come from interest-based communities.
Many communities are also formed around hobbies. From specific types of games to book clubs, there are all sorts of hobby clubs for one to explore and get into. Some of these communities o cause harmful activity. One notable example is Gamergate. Gamers on 4Chan, Reddit, and 8Chan banded together and doxed and threatened women and minorities in the field of game development and journalism. The group was formed as a result of anger expressed at the rise of increasing narratives given towards women and minorities in games. Note that this was a primarily culture-based feud and less based on ideas on the political spectrum, showing us that online communities can garner active power without a specific political focus.
This can be even more disparaging when we see how communities of today are being created through gaming. Until quite recently, online games were meant to form active communities who often supported each other or at least had groups of individuals team up together for socialization over the internet to foster strong interpersonal relationships. This seems to have changed in present. Battle royale games are games that involve putting players into a field and making them fight to the death(or perform another task) ass a form of competition. This has garnered greater interest for its easy-to-pick-up nature and made online gaming dynamics dramatically changing to more roulette-based approaches for teammates. Rather than set up an online game for community building, it now centers more on a player requiring efficient teammates to help them in matches, since their prizes often matter on their win and less on their relationships.
In traditional massively multiplayer online games, this is not the case. Since each person on the player’s team plays a different role, fostering relationships is a clear-cut way for strategic victory.
Battle Royale games emphasize less strategic coordination and more on the plain skill of each player to harm another since each player is given more or less the same tools to perform in the game unlike how MMOs promote diversity in player roles and purpose, often requiring different players to take up different roles which involve supporting one another than simply fighting enemies.
As a result, communities made around battle royales now require less obligation to perform community bonding.
From this basic overview, it proves that these communities provide support grounds for those who do not have a voice, but the extent of freedom on the internet allows this to be both beneficial and harmful. While those who are actively oppressed in society for things they cannot control obtain safe spaces, some fall into echo chambers where bigotry can roam free and increase one’s chances of entering into an activity that could harm others.
When we look specifically into communities made as a result of video games, we can notice that the former has reduced its community-based approach and replaced it for easier accessibility and can also create dangerous groups far from political motivation.
With this, we can get a better picture of how the internet may be the utopia of belonging but give rise to greater anti-social powers not present before. With the growing use of these online forums, we must ask how we would deal with growing discrimination on the internet and violation of safe spaces while not restricting the freedom that already exists.
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