The Pros And Cons Of Virtual Communities

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

The Internet has come into people’s life for several decades now. With rapid development of technology, it is more and more convenient to talk with families, friends and even strangers at any time at any place through the internet. In virtual communities is a place to share personal ideas on any topics, technology, fashion, music, politics, sports and religion. There are a number of different communities, such as communities of

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.

First, in “social media as community” there are a lot of reasons about the effects of social media. As stated in the article” Social media has made every relationship persistent and pervasive”.

The community is made into a single entity by their collective thinking and actions. The separate members are no longer separate since they are not given individual identities. They merge into one and think, even speak, as a collective

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

According to Feverbee, there are five different types of communities (Feverbee, 2015). The five types are communities are interest, action, place, practice, and circumstance. Interest is people sharing the same interest or passion. Action is people trying to bring about change. Place is where people are brought together by geographic boundaries. Practice are people in the same profession or undertake the same activities. Circumstance are people brought together by external events/ situations. All these different types of communities are the purposes that brings the community together (Feverbee, 2015). All these purposes are

50), as community building typically requires face-to-face interactions and physical symbols through which people can associate and find shared experience. Though from the advent of the internet, humans began building online communities to connect with like-minded people across the globe, Krotoski suggests the threads binding these communities together are tenuous in the absence of tangible interactions. This quality makes online communities “difficult to measure and therefore to define objectively” (p. 51) implying that digital interactions within a community provide less substance for other members to adhere. Krotoski suggests this thin state of community provides little in social capital in that online, and people only know us by the information we provide, and not information passively gleaned from physical, non-verbal

Collaborative website are virtual communities that encourage and foster communication, interaction among members of a group by allowing them to post personal information, communicate with other users and connect their personal profiles to others’ profiles. Colabo is categorized under collaborative-social network for lecturers and students. In most instances, membership in a web community is achieved by registering as a user of that website. Frequently visiting and interacting with others who use the website makes one’s network stronger. While many social networking website are open to anyone, some are open only to people in a certain age group, or who belong to a specific real world community or occupation.

A community is a group sharing something in common such as, experience, languages, religions, interest, rules, norms, and geographical boundaries. Therefore, the community selected for

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

Communities are affected, and in a sense defined by, forces that affect community members and their space. The forces can range from outside organizations such as the government and large corporations … These components of the community vary infinitely, and thus no two communities are the same; even a given community is not the same over time (Cnaan & Milofsky, p. 1)

What brings people together on the internet? Is it the desire to find a friend and a community or is it the other extreme of finding someone to argue with and release all the anger that has built up inside? Do people not like who they are in real life and find the internet as a place to have a new identity, the person that they have always wanted to be? Or, is it what Rheingold states in his article “The Virtual Community,” “virtual communities treat them as they always wanted to be treated – as thinkers and transmitters of ideas and feeling beings, not carnal vessels with a certain appearance and way of walking and talking” (95)? Maybe it is one of these things or a combination of many

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).

The ability to engage in synchronous communication may represent an important part of the maintenance of virtual communities (Porter, 2004). There are some websites that engage in synchronous, asynchronous, and hybrid (both synchronous and asynchronous) communication (Porter, 2004). Early studies on digital interactivity suggested the immediacy of response was only part of the potential for online interactivity; there also existed the possibility for discussions to