Interaction on Online Forums and Group Communication: A Case Study of an IT Support Community

In the digital age, group communication migrates online. Web forums serve as communication hubs for people who work together to solve particular problems. This study uses qualitative content analysis and interviews to determine whether discussion threads on an IT user forum could be viewed as group communication in the traditional scholarly interpretation of the term. The findings suggest that online discussion threads dwelling on non-mainstream issues have all five features of face-to-face group work - size, interdependence, task, identity, and norms. The study concludes that though online forums introduce limitations to interactions, discussion threads can indeed be viewed as group communication.