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Virtual community

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A virtual community is a group whose members are connected by means of information technologies, typically the Internet. Similar terms include online community and mediated community.

The term "virtual community" is attributed to the book of the same title by Howard Rheingold, a technology promoter, in 1993. The book discussed a range of computer-mediated communication and social group technologies. The technologies included Usenet, MUDs (Multi-User Dungeon), IRC (Internet Relay Chat), chat rooms and electronic mailing lists. He pointed out potential benefit of such a group one can belong to via communication technologies for personal psychological well-being as well as for the society at large. (The proliferation of the World Wide Web started after the book was published). However, contemporary researchers such as Roy Pea and Christina Allen, notably at the Berkeley Interface Research Lab, reached conclusions strongly contrasting with those of Rheingold.

Today, "virtual community" is loosely used and interpreted to indicate a variety of social groups connected in some ways by the Internet. It does not necessarily mean that there is a strong bond among the members. An email distribution list on Star Trek may have close to one hundred members, and the communication which takes place there could be either one-way (the list owner making announcements) or merely informational (questions and answers are posted, but members stay relatively strangers and uninterested to each other). The membership turnover rate could be high. This is in line with the liberal use of the term community.

The idea that media could generate a community is quite old. Progressive thinkers such as Charles Cooley, early in the 20th century in the United States, envisioned a nation whose members are united strongly because of the increased use of mass media. Also well-known is the term community without propinquity, coined by sociologist Melvin Webber in 1963. Compared to the idea of community in sociology or anthropology, however, which tends to derive from the willingness of members to help each other in a crisis, the collective hallucination caused by believing the same mass media tends not to be so strong or significant. Still, there are some results with oppressed or geographically divided groups that show that there can be some value in the common use of a single communication medium when the group already knows itself to be oppressed in the same way, or to be subject to the same bodily threats or limitations. The most successful "virtual community" groups are of the mutual support group nature.

The explosive diffusion of the Internet into some of the countries such as the United States was also accompanied by the proliferation of these so-called virtual communities. The nature of those communities and communications are rather diverse, and the benefits that Rheingold envisioned are not necessarily realized, or pursued, by many. At the same time, it is rather commonplace to see anecdotes of someone in need of special help or in search of a community benefitting from the use of the Internet -- if in fact they benefit from this type of connection, compared to other types of interaction they could engage in.

The concepts of epistemic community, computer-mediated communication and social group are generally seen as having more academic validity.

Examples of virtual communities include:

Some of these might be more neutrally described as social software or social network services, without the "community" controversy.

See also

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