"Concepts: Community, Social Groups, and Socialization - What's the difference?

Community refers to a number of social groups or social organizations gathered in a certain area to form a life interrelated large collective, is the most basic content of the social organism, is the macro-society of the microcosm.

The reality of the community has the following characteristics: a certain geographic area; a certain number of people; residents have **** the same consciousness and interests; have closer social interaction.

With the development of the Internet, the "community" in people's mouth has also undergone subtle changes. It can be a network board, by different people around the same topic triggered by the discussion, such as the end of the world, cat flap, forums, posting, etc.; it can also be SNS operation nature of the community, in order to drive the Taobao and other online shopping groups to promote the exchange of communication between the members of the community, such as: Ximi community.

Community, refers to all the social relations that take place within certain boundary lines, areas or fields. It can refer to the actual geographic area or social relationships that occur within an area, or it can refer to relationships that exist in a more abstract, ideological sense.

In addition to this, Worsley (1987) has proposed a broad meaning of community: it can be interpreted as a regional community; it is used to denote a network of interrelationships; and a community can be a special kind of social relationship that contains a community spirit or a community feeling.

Socialization refers to the social interaction between people in society, which is a social activity in which people use certain ways (tools) to transfer information and exchange ideas and consciousness in order to achieve certain goals.

In today's era, changes in the economic and social environment make human interaction more important. We can only enrich and develop ourselves by constantly interacting and communicating information with all kinds of people.

After clarifying the definition, let's take a look at what are the points of difference between community products and social products:

If it is still difficult to understand, let's use the following two charts to make a comparison, a picture is worth a thousand words:

According to the two different organizational forms, people combined with the Internet technology, and gradually developed to form the two largest platforms -- online communities (BBS) and social networking sites (SNS).

Let's compare and analyze the ten dimensions of attributes, user focus, operations, perception, culture, scale, social effect, information aggregation, relationship style, and composition to see how these two differ.

Supplementary note: Twitter and its invention of the follow mechanism, so that Twitter has become a form between BBS and SNS.

People in a community may not necessarily be related to each other, and may not necessarily cross paths; individuals in a community are bonded together in a very close relationship after a long period of time; and socialization is the fundamental action that turns a community into a community.

To give a more concrete example:

The difference between a community and a social group is whether it is decentralized or not, or whether there is an opinion leader or not, and whether the opinion leader has enough energy to reconstruct the responsibilities and relationship structure of everyone in the entire relationship chain.

Traditional relationships are not as centralized as they could be.

Traditional BBS and UGC communities, and finally to a section, will form multiple communities: each section of the moderator or high-quality content providers, it is possible to obtain a stable belonging to their own community, which is what we often say that there are countless small circles in the community.

Regardless of whether it is a community or a community, the basic means of construction is still social, and we often talk about social networks, but in fact, it is the social formation of the network, rather than the provision of a network to have a social. Therefore, social networking is a tool of nature, which is why in the social tool level to do the least adjustment (here refers to the core method of social networking did not try to change, for example, QQ, even if the provision of video, voice, anonymous chat, but will not be weakened or cut off the text communication method) of the product can occupy the largest market share.

Communities and communities are the result of socialization, both offline and online. And when you compare a community to a social group (such as a Douban group), the stability, cohesion, and appeal of the opinion leaders should be better for the community than for the community.

Above. Thanks for reading! Welcome to the exchange