February is the month when all the resolutions made early in the New Year are unravelling for most. Be it reading more, losing weight, doing new courses or any other promise, we find it difficult to stay with it.
The reasons are always the same – lack of time, absence of support or just losing interest. But of late, staying motivated to one’s goal has become much easier thanks to a plethora of online communities.
At its simplest level, an online community consists of a group of people who share a common interest and use social media to communicate, share ideas, work on a project or just keep each other going by egging them on.
During the global pandemic, it was even common for university students to just log into a call and do their own work. Just knowing that there was somebody out there doing a similar task was comforting.
As early as 1996, a Harvard Business Review article maintained that online communities “serve consumer needs for communication, information, and entertainment”. Today, they are more important than ever before in offering the sense of a community with a shared goal.
Online communities are used to fulfil multiple purposes: sharing content like news and information; communicating about news and current events or other content; for instant feedback and motivation.
Today, online communities are indispensable to various areas of life, ranging from job searches, sharing recipes, being on a diet or sharing an academic course. All of these are everyday routines in which individuals resort to online communities for motivation and focus.
Research suggests that the primary benefit of online communities is exposure to a variety of people from across the world with similar interests and facing identical challenges. Most people stay on a site because they see themselves benefiting from it – whether tangibly or through ideas and encouragement.
While more than 80 per cent of participants in an online community stay as passive spectators, the rest participate in varying degrees depending on the topic of conversation or the focus of a project at a given time. It is often the role of the host to encourage participation by providing engaging activities, sufficient motivation and encouraging feedback.
Online engagement varies considerably in any platform. Staying committed to one platform is challenging for the hosts, but for participants, it offers competitive, real time motivation to stay on course in any task.
Knowing that others are facing similar challenges and obstacles, gaining insight into how others are coping, and getting daily tips, quotes and prompts keeps one committed to a project.
There are many forms of online communities: those based on learning, networking, social, and even fan communities. What they all share is a common purpose and design, even though their strategies may vary. These groups may spar at times, particularly those focusing on current events and social issues, but the factors that unite them are often larger than the issues which they disagree with. Online communities may have many negative repercussions as well, including disengaging the young from the real world outside, but in so far as it helps people to connect to others, share ideas and stay motivated, it is a platform that is not going away.
Sandhya Rao Mehta is Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Sultan Qaboos University.
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