Digital unity or tribal echo chambers? Paradoxes in online residential communities

Online residential communities are increasingly shaping everyday civic life, functioning as ambivalent spaces that simultaneously foster neighborhood cohesion and intensify social polarization. This paper examines how these digital neighborhoods operate as double-edged civic arenas, where interactions among residents influence their sense of place, community, and citizenship. In an increasingly polarized social context, the study offers a critical perspective on how civic life is enacted, contested, and reshaped through hyperlocal digital platforms. Adopting a conceptual and interpretive approach, the article draws on paradox theory to make visible the tensions embedded in online residential communities as civic spaces. Rather than treating these tensions as problems to be resolved, the analysis foregrounds their persistent and relational nature. Through illustrative vignettes, the study captures how civic paradoxes are enacted in everyday digital interactions and how residents continuously navigate them in practice. The analysis reveals that online residential communities, shaped by platform logics, surface three interrelated and enduring paradoxes: Belonging versus Boundary, Heritage versus Future, and Voice versus Harmony. These paradoxes permeate residents’ lived experiences across the intertwined dimensions of sense of place, sense of community, and sense of citizenship. They are not resolved over time but are repeatedly reenacted as part of ordinary civic engagement. The vignettes illustrate how residents navigate these tensions through temporal, spatial, and integrative strategies, highlighting the fragile, contingent, and context-dependent nature of civic participation in digital neighborhood spaces. This paper contributes to services marketing literature by conceptualizing online residential communities as dynamic civic spaces in which paradoxes evolve through digital infrastructures and require ongoing navigation to prevent imbalance. By introducing a paradox lens, the study extends existing understandings of third places and service ecosystems, offering a nuanced account of how civic life unfolds within digitally mediated neighborhoods.