Virtual communities

Virtual Communities What does this mean? Rheingold (1993) defines virtual communities as "social aggregations that emerge from the [Internet] when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace" (p. 5). According to Rheingold and others, the notion of virtual community is not to be dismissed as a technological, cyberpunk fantasy in which people increasingly live in what Mills (1959) terms "second-hand worlds"; chained to their …

…coming together, and equal access to the conversation among those participating, we find the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. Indeed, each of the "advantages" could be construed as a disadvantage: appearances do matter; conversation should not be based on solely efficiency; and some ideas are more useful than others. Even such proponents of virtual community as Rheingold (1993), Schwartz (1994), and McClellan (1994) maintain that face-to-face meetings can be valuable in the formation of a true sense of community.