VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES

What is a Virtual Community?


I had the same question when I first heard of a virtual community; in fact I didn’t even know that a community could be virtual. The first thing I did was I went to my handy-dandy wikipedia.org and it gave me all the dish. According to them a virtual community is also know as an e-community or online community. It allows people to interact through different communication technologies such as: newsletters, telephones, email, online social networks or instant messages rather than face-to-face interaction.

It’s funny that they would say newsletters because I don’t really know anyone who writes a newsletter at least not on paper. Since the Blogs came on the since I don’t believe I have seen a paper newsletter. My friends went to Italy for a six month long internship and not once did they send physical letter to there friends and rarely did they send letters to there families. Instead they sent emails to everyone letting them know about their blog. We became a community by posting comments on the messages and pictures that they would send. I think I’ll do the same thing when I move after all there is only so much you can put on Facebook before it begins to look cluttered.


While I was looking up Virtual Communities on YouTube I came across this guy talking about online communites. I thought some of his comments were hilarious. My favorite quote was, “I have the power to turn my computer off; I cannot turn my friend off “ if you want to see more CLICK HERE!
He talks about how his friends on the internet know him better than anyone he actually knows for real I thought that statement was interesting, if he can know people for real than how real are the current relationships that he has with the people he talks to on the internet?

Let me know what you think.