Overcoming dichotomy in community relationships

The potentials of the Internet either as a community creating tool or destroying tool has been focusing more or less on the notions of the traditional dichotomy between Toennis' Gemeinschaft / Gesellschaft concept. Though those two concepts are coexisting elements of relationships in a given social grouping rather than absolute nametags (e.g. Bender), this dichotomy is commonly applied in diverse forms to dichotomize the networks of online individuals into personal versus functional relationships. But it has been argued that communities consist of much more complex relationships than this. And when we turn our focus to the online, such complexity become even more salient because more flexible forms of associations are technically feasible via the open structure of the Internet. Then the question is, how should we segment the gradating spectrum of the relational characteristics? My thoughts in progress are about the need to put more subtle levels into what is actually shared in a community at the various stages and its sub-activities.

Be it the classic functionalist Parsonian AGIL-model or networked individualsm of cultural tastes, communities can exist because their members share some common points together. Then, what parts (and how much of it) of an individual's personality and goals are shared? And how does it differ in various stages of being in a community? For example, an online community could only require a commonness of being a resident of Madison to become a member. But to stay a member requires clearly some other forms of commonness, such as being up-to-date with local events. In many other cases, even specific cultural tastes and political viewpoints exist as conditions to stay part of the community, which is often not explicit or even different from the conditions given at the stage when one enters the group. Also, the required commonness differs among the activities inside the community. For example I don't need to share a lot of political background when I have a chat about yesterday's TV program with other members of my community. But if the same community with the same people want to organize a social movement for a new referendum, commonness of the political views is required. I think this difference is important especially in context of online communities because the relationships are very flexible and it is easy to decide what parts of one's personality/identity to disclose or not.