My experience online has included years of habituating virtual communities patterned on the electronic frontier motif as defined by Rheingold in the subtitle to his book, The Virtual Community. He offers this definition of the subject:
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. (web)
When I first found community online, I lived a rather isolated life in a small rural town, not given to readers or writers. I was looking for people who talked about more than the crops when I found a small out-of-the-way bulletin board where I got to know a handful of people all using colorful pseudonyms. The anonymity fascinated me, as did the apparent familiarity between the users. Periodically, the community collapsed under the weight of animosity and strife, however, I was hooked on the concept of leaving messages and returning later to find replies. It seemed to me as if I was writing a book where responses could appear on pages of glass.
I looked further until I found some of the large public communities of the late nineties where I connected with many of the people I still communicate with on a daily basis. The experience has enriched my life in numerous ways and the friends I met there followed me from that small town in Arkansas through a divorce, relocation, jobs, and life and server changes. They have been consistent voices in my life as my children grew up and I returned to school to finish my degree , while those friends from Arkansas have not.
For this project I set out to find a forum of a different type. I wanted to see if community exists in a place fo...
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...he corner, I just invoke my telecom program and there they are. It’s a place. (p. 47)
The virtual neighborhood requires not only a place (url) but also inhabitants who walk the streets on a regular basis. It requires attendance, care and feeding by people who write and read together over time. It also requires people who seek community in a cluttered world.
References
Baym, N. K. (1998). The emergence of online community. In S. G. Jones (Ed.), Cybersociety 2.0: Revisiting computer-mediated communication and community (pp. 35-68). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Norris, P. (2004). The bridging and bonding role of online communities. In P. N. Howard & S. Jones (Eds.), Society online: The internet in context (pp. 31-42). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Rheingold, H. (1993). The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. [ch. 2]
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