Mediated Community from an Intergroup Perspective: A Literature Review

The ways people organize themselves as communities shift along with the digitalization of social interaction. We review studies on mediated community to analyze which aspects of social interaction are considered to characterize community today. We elaborate on their scientific positioning, or as termed by Doise [14], levels of explanation from the intra-individual to the societal level. Noticing that viewing mediated community as an intergroup phenomenon has been marginal, we propose a research agenda that addresses mediated community explicitly from an intergroup perspective. To extend knowledge of how communities are formed and maintained in digitalized, networked settings, we encourage future research to better integrate this perspective, by focusing on (1) the ways in which outgroups contribute to a sense of community (2) the interaction that occurs on the borders of communities, and (3) the ways in which intergroup relations delineate the symbolic construction of communities.