Jomc 191 Class Blog / Official PSP Website

Community Ties

In class we discussed the importance of creating a sense of community, and we already touched on the how the PSP community set up the necessary.  Due to the large scope of the PSP community each user of the PSP is a potential member of the online community and so far the numbers have reached over 10 million.  With 10 million units shipped,  there is a niche group for everyone.  Be it game reviews and tutorials posted on sites like Yahoo or  IGN.com and/or a large dynamic information sharing community such as PSP3D.com. that utilizes a BBS and a database of information that can be searched by users.

We’ve studied the concept of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in class, where Gemeinschaft means community and Gesellschaft means society.  In brief, we learned that community occurs when members of a group feel stronger loyalties to the group than they do to their own personal interests.  The PSP community demonstrates this because the community shares a set of same beliefs and social customs.  Furthermore, we also saw how homebrew programmers posted their source code on websites for the entire community to review.  In effect, these programmers, users of the community, are putting the community before their personal interest of gaining credit for their programs and applications.  PSP homebrew developers strongly disagree with propriety software and are trying to create a sense of openness.  In order to facilitate this need they created online communities to bounce ideas off of one another and to share their latest developments.  These users strongly believe in the PSP brand and have created a subculture around the product, hence the reason why the online community is so strong.

The PSP community has a shared goal – to further develop the PSP brand.  Preece lists this as an attribute a community should have.  Educated users help the new users  understand how to maximize the potential of their PSP, and new users appeal to the older users on as to how to get the most from their investment in the PSP.  No matter what the experience of the user is, each person has a role in furthering the goal of the community. 

Going through the pages today we witnessed a high sense of emotion from the users critiquing each other and appealing to the community for help -- to new users asking for information, to adminstrators making new users feel welcomed -- emotions are high in the PSP community.  The community unites against the efforts of Sony cracking down on homebrew applications, and the community also applauds the efforts of programmers making the PSP a better machine.

The PSP community shares the same activities via creating their own homebrew aps, cracking firmware updates and from the simple premice of getting the most from a PSP console.  The entire community comes together, no matter what their expierence with the product is, and tries to develop the idea.  For example, on the PSP3D boards users are ranked by their experience with the product.  On threads dedicated to updating a firmware crack you see the novice users asking for advice on how to upgrade, the junior users critiquing the product and giving suggestions on how to make it better, and the experienced users actually doing the hard coding for the product.  This fulfills the second and fourth criteria of a community for Preece. 

PSP community users share the same resources and policies.  If you remember when looking at thread dedicated to the cracking of firmware version 2.5 a community member asked for the source code to the cracked version.  In the PSP community nobody is at a disadvantage, the ethos surrounding those in the community is open-source.  Regarding the interactivity between users, yes there is a hierarchy amongst the PSP community, where certain users have more credibility than others – yet the same exists in real life as well.

The last criteria for Preece is that a community shares the same customs and conventions of interaction.  The PSP community has created its own jargon.  Browsing any community you’ll notice terms such as “bricking,” “homebrew,” “compiler,” and so forth.  The entire community has accepted this unique culture hence creating a stronger sense of community.

All of the above listed reasons only contribute to the long-term sustainability for the community.  True the PSP community is unique and is better adjusted due to the fact that it is centered around a single item where thousands, if not millions, of individuals have a vested interest in the product, yet it still behaves and reacts to the same social theories we have studied this semester like any other virtual community.

Weak Ties vs. Strong Ties

Weak ties, defined by Mark Granovetter in "The strength of weak ties" (American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 78, No. 6., May 1973), states that  weak ties are loose acquaintances.  We've seen in our trip through the PSP community that weak ties and strong ties do exist.  A new user on any of the PSP community sites is not aware of the people they are communicating with.  But after associating with the community over time the user does relate with its fellow members.  Weak ties work to the advantage of the community because members can ask a certain question to the community at large and get responses back from those they don't know anything about.  On the other hand, strong ties come into hand when it comes to trust and knowing your fellow homebrew programmer.  There are meetups that occur withing the PSP community and as we saw, PSP programmers do come together in order to meet the needs of the community.  In order for this to happen some form of strong ties must occur.