A virtual community can be defined as a group of people that initially communicate via the Internet; it is formed out of social interaction in cyberspace. This does not necessarily mean that there is a strong bond between the members, however they share common elements, for instance each community has a particular language and culture. Each community also maintains a shared history and identity. These elements encourage togetherness and promote active participation of members in these virtual communities. Social interaction is created around a commitment among community members to exchange knowledge and experiences. This exchange of knowledge and experiences among different members does not necessarily produce trust, but it exposes them to the possibility of connecting with each other and the development of social ties. Trust is then negotiated on the basis of these ties. Most virtual communities grow slowly at first due partially to the fact that the strength of motivation for contributing to these communities is usually proportional to the size of the community. As the size of the members increases, so does the attraction of writing and contributing, this can be seen through the communities of Bebo or MySpace.
Bebo was set up a year ago by Micheal and Xochi Birch, in only a year it has more than 23million users, in August MySpace (according to various reports, the busiest internet site in the world) signed a deal guaranteeing Google $900million in search related revenue over the next four years. The amount of personal and business related interest goes to show how much these sites have become a part of so many people’s day to day lives. General virtual communities, like MySpace and Bebo, may be the most recognised but there are any number of very specific sites which hold forums and share information on anything from running (www.deadrunnerssociety.com - “a discussion group for people who like to talk about running”) to zombies (www.zombiehunters.org - a site where people discuss the best ways to deal with “zombie outbreaks”).
It’s not all fun and games in virtual communities, according to website www.criminallawyergroup.com , a trend for virtual stalking has become apparent, this has instigated a Chicago criminal defence lawyer to begin following these guidelines from the Illinois Criminal Code: 1. A person commits cyber stalking when he or she, knowingly and without lawful justification, on at least 2 separate occasions, harasses another person through the use of electronic communication and:
2. As used in this Section: "Harass" means to engage in a knowing and wilful course of conduct directed at a specific person that alarms, torments, or terrorizes that person. "Electronic communication" means any transfer of signs, signals, writings, sounds, data, or intelligence of any nature transmitted in whole or in part by a wire, radio, electromagnetic, photoelectric, or photo-optical system. "Electronic communication" includes transmissions by a computer through the Internet to another computer.
On the other hand, in the tragedy and chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina, survivors were in many different places and were unable to communicate their whereabouts or contact loved ones. A group of people, led by a hacker called David Geilhufe, noticed that information was being posted randomly on blogs and news sites. They put together thousands of volunteers to screenscape this information from the net and put it all in one place - www.katrinalist.net. In a single day they had gathered information on roughly 50,000 survivors.
People in general are fairly social beings and it is motivating to many people to be responded to directly for their contributions. Most on line communities enable this by allowing people to reply back to contributions. When researching this topic, a friend of mine came to mind (please note, names have been changed to protect the innocent!)
‘Peter’ discovered virtual communities when he was sixteen (six years ago) and he says now that he feels that he became ‘addicted’ to the sites that he was frequenting. At the peak of his on line days, he says that, given a choice between interacting socially in the real world and in the virtual world, he would always choose the web. On night he logged on at 11am and stayed online for 13 hours. This was his most extreme case but he would be online for around six hours every night, even when friends called around to visit. And he would sometimes have the television on at the same time. ’Peter’ says that when he looks back at that time, he feels that it was a bit of a waste but that it kept him out of trouble, he adds that his time in chat rooms helped him to develop social skills that he felt he was lacking due to being home educated and that it gave him some confidence in the real world.
Check out http://www.google.com/search?q=%22blogger+syndrome%22 for an amusing take on C.B.S. ( Compulsive Blogging Syndrome).