Can Virtual Communities Really Work?
What is a Virtual Community
A virtual community has been defined in many ways and the literature on this topic shows a change in the definition over time, from when they were first discussed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, through to today’s definitions of e-commerce virtual communities. Our definitions of virtual community change because technology is creating more possibilities for communication and we, as users of those technologies, are developing our understanding of new possibilities and philosophising about how technology is effecting human to human and human to machine interactions.
Howard Rheingold, an American writer on virtual communities since the early days of the use of the term, defines a virtual community as:
Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace.
Howard Rheingold compares virtual communities to a feeling that is “a little like a neighborhood pub”. I think this serves as an adequate definition of a virtual community from a social standpoint, and allows us to discuss whether it really works as a substitute or supplement to reality, and in fact allows us to discuss what reality is and whether virtual communities really work.
Virtual Communities and their Social Function
Howard Rheingold, in Whole earth Review, makes two interesting observations about virtual communities and the nature of communication in them:
"virtual communities are very much like other communities in some ways, deceptively so to those who assume that people who communicate via words on a screen are in some way aberrant in their communication skills and human needs. And Ive learned that virtual communities are very much not like communities in some other ways, deceptively so to those who assume that people who communicate via words on a screen necessarily share the same level of commitment to each other in real life as more traditional communities" .
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