Research question:

How the online neighborhood is constructed with the geographical concept , and what kind of neighborhood it is？How people would engage in this online neighborhood?

 

The concept of neighborhood always implies the geographical boundaries and social ties (Hipp et al., 2012). City groups serve as a geographically based online-community, providing an environment of people in one city, helping each other and building social interactions. It has a geographic component which serve the notion of the neighborhood. The group titled with the geographical symbol makes borders to separate other groups of hobbies and other places. It helps express the common identification with the area in public symbols (Schwirian, 1983). It also focuses on the closeness and information flows with members (Hipp et al., 2012). Thus, the city group on Douban integrates the basic elements of the neighborhood, conducting a virtually ecological environment of neighborhood.

 

Shanghai is a big city. People live in different districts always have to suffer the long distance between each other. Thus, the online group provides a public sphere for people to conduct social interactions. While the perception and people’s lived experience may seem to be abstract, the emergence of new digital platforms has made us understand it in new ways (Pink, 2016). 

 

From another aspect, the geographical label online is conducted with the symbolic metaphor. The geographical concept changes from the real world to a virtual label. The sphere created by the lable has a weak border which people could define by themselves. Thus, interaction systems get unstable for the weak emphasis of the borders and the recognitions of members and their interactions may be blurred. Here, if these changes bring new self or relationship-constructions?  According to Crick (2012), the self-construction in digital world is not isolated activity but rather locate at the dynamic interaction between self and others.

When the interaction happened under the virtual geographical concept, what does it mean to neighbors and how do they feel and behave?