Mobile Technologies for Virtual Community Development in Entrepreneurship

• In Event: 378 - Open Refereed Roundtable Session II
  In Refereed Roundtable: B. Table 07. Communication and Information Technologies

Abstract

This applied research examines how the implementation of a mobile and social technology currently being developed can foster social capital formation, virtual community development, and entrepreneurship. We examine research done in this area and discuss potential applications of this technology.
This research is part of an ongoing project at a small college in a major metropolitan area in the US, focused on developing a mobile app engine that can be used to create virtual communities with specific domain interests and a high level of interactivity. A simple mobile app concept was borne out of an undergraduate-level entrepreneurship course, where there was student interest in entrepreneurship, audience engagement, virtual community development, and the use of mobile technologies. A central issue is the perceptual boundaries between intentional virtual communities and brand communities. Specifically, how users navigate the commercial sphere overlapping with the social and under what conditions is this overlapping not viewed as a violation of a community’s social reality.
The mobile app platform will be guided by sociological concepts of embeddedness, social reality, and field. The mobile app is designed to create a social reality, where individuals interact and have relational ties to each other (embeddedness), and have specific positions within the virtual community (field). Aspects of the virtual community’s social identity (how we identify ourselves and how others identify us) would serve to guide economic activity and user behaviors. Online social identity and self-presentation are how people perceive and project themselves in an online environment, respectively.

Author

• Kenneth M. Kambara, LIM College