Essay on In what sense are virtual communities real?

The functional unit of our society today is centered on the Internet. In our day and age, people are prone to isolation because all communication can be performed online. We are missing key human interactions and our technology is shaping

First of all, a virtual community becomes a real community by serving people’s needs. Facebook or Instagram is a business place that shop owners can advertise their stores, products, or their working teams. Each owner needs to hire employees, yet he or she cannot afford to pay for a career post. The owner establishes a

In “Stop Googling. Let’s Talk.” by Sherry Turkle a Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been studying the psychology of online connectivity for more than 30 years. For the past five years, she has been focusing on topics: What has happened to face‐ to‐face conversation in a world where so many people say they would rather text than talk, families, friendships and romance. She has also studied schools, universities and workplaces. Among this topics she has talked and provided studies on how we have become distant from “who we are.” She reports that we as a society have lost a lot of virtues as a society such as a lack of empathy for one another, solitude, and communication with one another. As the “digital world” continues to grow we as a society continue to grow with it and apart from one another. Sherry also emphasizes that we

Today’s young adults have a lack of communication with friends and family because of technology such as social media, video games or television. In our society, parlor walls can be seen as those commodities. The large flat screen tv’s or IPads are today’s enthusiast. “Social media in our country and the globalizing world has become the voice, eye, ear, heart, and memory of the individuals. It has aspects which strengthen, weaken and include communication between the individuals and also it provides convenience for time and place.” This, according to TNS Digital Life Research that carried out a study in 2011 and held 1.938.059.098 people that were online. Researchers were able to test how many people prefer to communicate through social media or rather be involved in some sort of social media instead of actually going out and interacting. These studies show and give a glimpse of how many people are more interested to spend time on social media instead of building new relationships. Bradbury’s society and our society and similar because of the lack of communication we have because of some aspects of technology that are similar, which are the parlor walls and social media, television and video games.

Stanley Eitzen decries the increasing loneliness that has come with advancement in technology and modernity. For instance, the writer asserts that the present day generation is socially inactive as compared to the past generations. Generally, the apparent isolation that people have found themselves in can be largely attributed to technology. Often times, people find themselves using their mobile phones and computers as opposed to engaging in personal face-to-face communications. In effect, this increases communication between individuals but largely reduces intimacy. Other than technology, the types of modern lifestyles that people have embraced have led to isolation, as people tend to live in social and racial settlements. The state of isolation, the author argues, has many disadvantages as it leaves individuals susceptible to unlawful organizations, such as terrorist groups and evil cults. I wholly conquer with these sentiments.

Community A community is a group of people interacting in a meaningful way with regard to something they share in common. It used to be that a community, in order to function as a group and interact, had to be in the same geographic location or at least within driving distance. Since the internet has now become so widely available we find that people with common interests and goals are reaching across vast distances to interact with each other. There is even language translation software available that can translate other languages into one's own.

Author, Senior editor of The New Atlantis, and fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Christine Rosen, in her article “Virtual Friendships and the New Narcissism,” analyzes if technology can provide what it promises- “a surer sense of who we are and where we belong.” Rosen’s purpose of her article is to argue that social networking sites are doing more harm than good. Rosen uses multiple studies and quotes to present her argument.

Social media is a revolution that has taken the world by storm. So many times we miss out on important happenings due to a strayed second from online. Whether it is homework a teacher has posted on MyCourses or the latest breaking news released on twitter, without constant eyes on the internet, we are bound to be left behind and disconnected. The topic of being connected is dissected by Lucy Marcus’s article, “What It Means To Be ‘Connected’” and Steven Krause’s article “Living Within Social Networks.” These articles both dive into the question of what it truly means to be connected with the outside world and the online world. Marcus believes that now is an important time to be connected more than ever on both social media and real life (124). In contrast, Krause asks the readers whether internet connection is ultimately making them lonely and

The authors of “Assembling Social Space” argue that everyone, no matter where they live, is locally and globally connected to people who do not necessarily live near them through media and technology. Wiley states that we are all globally connected, but live in a local way (Wiley, 2015). Living in a technology-driven society, we are able to stay connected with people and have access to resources from all around the globe. The thesis is that as individuals, we are all locally connected within our environment and ultimately globally connected due to the interconnection of these two types of societies. This is important within the field of communication because it explains how individuals are able to be locally and globally connected with people from all over the world.

The second major trend to be aware of is the virtual community - a social network of individuals who interact with each other without the constraints of geography, time zones, political or economic situations, weather, or demography all that matters is that they are able to come together to form a culture in which they

Technology is one main reason why people have disengaged from social life and become more isolated. People have learned that they do not need to actually talk to someone physically to make a new friend. This is a problem because the idea of going up to someone and starting a conversation will slowly become unknown. This will consequence in the extinction of the traditional human interaction people used to have. Turkle believes that when people use “the advantage of screen communication,” and technology to reach out to others, there is a downgrade in the quality of the relationship (Turkle 374). There is no certainty in knowing if someone is being genuine or if they are even who they say they are online. People have learned to use technology

In her blog “ The Fakebook Generation,” later to be published in the New York Times on October 6, 2007, Alice Mathias enters the topic of the most used social networking service worldwide, Facebook. Mathias debates on Facebook’s claim of being a forum for “genuine personal and professional connections” (438) and tries to influence her readers to ask themselves if the website really promotes human relationships. Alice Mathias, a 2007 graduate of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire has wrote several more columns before, in which one of them was even awarded the Waterhouse Research Award.

Communities are all about groups of individuals who share something in common. This makes going on the internet seem like an odd way to find more communities, form new ones, or strengthen pre-existing ones. The internet however is full of communities. Communities can be based upon religion, location, ethnicity, an interest, or a personal matter. The internet itself is “a global distributed data communications network” (Kirmayer, Raikhel, & Rahimi, 2013, p. 166). This is what makes the internet so full of communities because communication is the key to putting multiple individuals with commonalities into communication, which is the basis of any community. Online communities differ from communities that exists off the web in a couple of

The second concept I want to talk about is virtual communities. Virtual communities are social groups whose interactions are mediated through information technologies, particularly the internet. Like modernism, virtual communities are very dependent on technology and the internet. Since science and technology has advanced in the past decade, people don’t need to go to different places to meet different people and can meet others over different social media platforms or even video games. Sometimes, those people met over the internet can become very close friends. For example, I play a lot of video games and I have acquainted myself virtually with many people playing those games. Some of them I even ended up meeting in real life and are still friends with today. Virtual communities have become such a social norm, that soon, people will have friends all over the internet. I think the aspect of virtual communities is good for society, because it allows people to have a greater awareness of other cultures all over the world. With more insight of how other societies and cultures operate, there is a greater chance to expand one's own social

Social network sites (SNSs) such as such as Friendster, CyWorld, and MySpace allow individuals to present themselves, articulate their social networks, and establish or maintain connections with others (Ellison, 2007). These sites could be used for work related situation, romance, connecting with individuals with shared interest, or creating a connection amongst college students. Facebook enables its users to present themselves in an online profile, accumulate ‘‘friends’’ who can post comments on each other’s pages, and view each other’s profiles (Ellison, 2007). Individuals can write on the wall of friends, send private message, comment on posts, as well as chat via instant messaging. Much of the early research on online communities assumed that individuals using these systems would be connecting with others outside their pre-existing social group or location, liberating them to form communities around shared interests, as opposed to shared geography (Ellison, 2007).