Virtual communities

Virtual communities-

A virtual community is any place groups of people talk together on the Internet; in mailing lists, in newsgroups, in chat rooms, or on Web sites. Virtual community can also cover more specialized situations, such as long-distance education or shared project work spaces. And it can describe some communications that aren’t discussions, such as posting customer evaluations or answering opinion polls. Whenever people are aware of each other’s presence on the Internet, they’re likely to consider themselves part of a community. As access to the internet has become a lot easier and roughly 78% of the United Kingdom population are on a social networking site of some sort, more and more people are being brought together by the internet. An example of this is a dating site such as E-Harmony. These sites have grown rapidly in the last few years and now around 20% (1/5) of relationships now start online and so more and more people are turning to these virtual communities more often than they would have done a few years ago. This has happened because more and more people are using the internet in their everyday lives and so it is very quick and easy to apply.

One of the most popular virtual communities is Facebook, along with Twitter. Even though a lot of people may use Facebook just to talk to their friends and family, it also has the use of bringing people together such as a girl who is looking for one of her parents who she has never known but now wishes to get into touch with. Stories of these events have made in onto the News sometimes where Facebook has brought people together who would otherwise never have come into contact without it.

Other Examples:

Discussion groups linked to a specific Web site are quickly becoming the standard for site-based virtual communities. Like e-mail and newsgroups, you post a message to a discussion group and read the response later. You can participate in Web-based discussion groups on any site that hosts one, and build your own either by hosting it yourself or by using one of the many free discussion group tools like World Crossing.

Discussions that take place “live” (in real time) in chat rooms are the quickest way to connect with people on the Internet. In addition to traditional chat rooms, there are chat rooms in which you can move through a graphical world and others in which you can build your own text-based world.

A worldwide system of discussion groups, also called Usenet, is the most abundant source of communities. Whatever the topic, there is a newsgroup devoted to it. Like e-mail, you post a message to a newsgroup and come back later to see if you’ve received an answer. Newsgroups are simple to participate in (if you have a newsreader), but somewhat difficult to administer.