A Study On Self-organizing Evolution Of Virtual Community

Virtual communities are common aggregations of people on the Internet, and playing an increasingly important part in social communications. However, the roots of virtual communities go back early before the popularization of the Internet, when there had been full-blown virtual communities from which today's communities inherited certain characteristics. Furthermore, virtual communities have been pullulating after their birth, which appearing like life-forms. This thesis focuses on the life-mimesis presenting to virtual communities, and tries to chase down the inner factors and mechanism.This thesis embarks from the angle of systemic view, and is supported by the Self-organizing theory and method, and the production of sociology, communication and journalism. The Self-organizing theory is made up of six separate ones: the Dissipative Structures, Synergetics, Catastrophe Theory, Hypercycle Theory, Chaos Theory, and Fractal Theory. All of them were in distinct context, and severally came into being from about 1960s, together with different concepts and methods, but they concurrently opened out some certain general conditions, mechanism, and rule, which administrate segments or components to form a whole by themselves, from out-of-order to ordered, or from ordered to well-ordered.While carrying the research, this thesis regards virtual communities as complex systems, and by means of case study explores some self-organizing phenomena of virtual communities, such as self creation, self duplication, self reproduction, and self renascence. In nature, the lifespan of virtual communities, which consists of creation, outspread, evolution, is totally a self-organizing course. When some dissipative structures appear and persist interiorly, virtual communities are self-organizing. The evolution of virtual communities means to establish dissipative structures from the ground up, or to replace the ones with newer ones. There is certain requirement for virtual communities to establish dissipative structures: to be open, nonlinear and perturbing, and catastrophe occurs. What drive the virtual communities to be self-organizing are competition, cooperation, slaving and serving, and role-transforming among components. The order parameters make other components co-operating, then virtual communities being ordered in the angle of macrocosmic. There are more than one order parameters in virtual communities, which are community elites, community structure, and community rules.