I've chosen to write my essay on the 'virtual community', whether it is a useful way of understanding contemporary online life. At first I thought I would look into Second Life, which is an online virtual world that encompasses real life activities. You're able to create yourself as a person, interact with others, buy land, create infrastructure, travel, shop. Basically anything. I think it is an extreme example of an online community, but people really do use it today. To understand the topic a bit more, I've looked into the term virtual community. Rheingold (1993) explains virtual community as "when people carry on public discussion long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships". More or less, it is a group of people who communicate via the internet.
http://secondlife.com/whatis/?lang=en-US
I think a 'virtual community' is a useful way of describing online life. In a sense, everything we do online is through communication. Whether it is reading emails, posting comments onto a blog, interacting through social media or playing online video games, the sense of a virtual community is present. But to what extent is the virtual community real? I'm going to explore more into Second Life as the example of and online community and whether this creates a realistic mirror image of life. To start, I'll be researching the Second Life website, blogs and academic articles on virtual communities.
I've started to look at some comments on virtual communities. Someone posted a theory they had about using an online community. He talks about people investing in social capital through online communities. He refers this to playing World of Warcraft for quite sometime. After seeing the same thing over and over, he began to get sick of what he was seeing and doing, but he kept playing because there was friends he didn't want to leave. Everyone he knew in the game, which was 30 or more friends kept playing beyond losing interest just to keep that attachment to their new friends.
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/why-spend-time-on-second-life/
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