Silver, David. "Communication, Community, Consumption: An Ethnographic Exploration of an Online City." From the book listed above, pp.327-352.

This article studies the Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV), an online community situated in a small Virginia town, in order to ascertain how users “use the network and make meanings of their use, interactions and contributions” (329). It examines this online community as a case study. The article describes online communities as characterized by shared location as opposed to virtual communities which are characterized by shared interest (some newer networks, like facebook.com, are sort of combinations of both). He also discusses how “networlds” erase social status; this isn’t true with the new social networks that millions of students and young people are a part of.  If anything, networks like Facebook.com and MySpace.com actually create a new kind of social status that members maneuver. The article also defines “flame wars” (conflicts within the community between members) as the process by which online communities negotiate and self-define their communities. In the case of BEV, a certain member named Harry sparked controversy, but it was actually good for the network: it drove people to be more participative.
This article provides a good background in a case study of early online communities and highlights many scholars in the field (check out the references for other places to go for research); it also establishes a useful vocabulary for discussing issues in internet social networks. The potential power of these online communities is seen in the blurring of the border between online and offline communities, “the virtualization of real space” and vice versa. The online community BEV didn’t succeed as a real community on the Internet, but ended up being more of “an online sphere for consumption” used in very practical, as opposed to social ways. The flame wars actually drove more people to be interested in the network; social drama gave BEV a temporary boost, but it still didn’t excel in the way its founders had hoped. This very early example of an online community is dated in its practice, but the case study is still useful to read in the way that it predicts the greater social networks of the future which have worked out some of the kinks that failed in this system (like being so geographically limited). Many of the issues it brings up, like the blurring of borders between virtual and real, are still pertinent in social networks today.