The Influence of Media Capabilities on Knowledge Contribution in Online Communities

Online communities (OCs) have historically focused on building knowledge repositories, but as OCs add more synchronous communication, it is important to understand how different communication capabilities influence user commitment, individual growth, and knowledge contribution. We studied 452 members of a popular OC in Taiwan and found that both connectivity (direct user-to-user interaction) and communality (knowledge repositories) influence member commitment, but connectivity has a stronger influence than communality on knowledge contribution and individual growth. We also found that four media capabilities (transmission velocity, parallelism, symbol sets, and reprocessability) have strong influence on both connectivity and communality. These findings suggest that managers of OCs should add software capabilities that help OC members find like-minded members, enable instant messaging among members, and provide richer communication beyond simple text messages.