Online Communities: The Good, Bad & Ugly!
December 9, 2006
Humans are social animals, and the said aspect has become a part and parcel of their daily lives. As they go on through life, they tend to stick within communities, relate themselves to their peers, create friendships and form various cliques. It is with these communities, cliques, peers and friends that they interact and communicate, and drive a sense of satisfaction and completion. This sense of contentment is driven by the acceptance that individuals derive from those that surround them, and this acceptance even forms an important part of the famous Maslow pyramid of human self-actualization. It hence becomes a little surprising that as technology and the Internet tighten their grip over the world; the level of human interactions continues to decrease. Online Virtual Communities are now the rage, and seem to be slowly but surely creating an ever growing niche for themselves.
It is not surprising that technology has given us the freedom to sit on our PCs and still be able to interact with someone possibly in
The What!
The most definitive description of an online or a virtual community revolves around an online, Internet or Intranet based community, existing through the interactions of the individuals within that community, all of whom communicate solely through the internet. These online communications attempt to simulate all of the intricacies of a face-to-face physical interaction, and allow for an exchange of conversations, ideas and opinion without any constraint with regards to geographical location. As a result of the said freedom, online communities are able to take on a number of personas. They can be development oriented, as showcased by the massive online communities that collaboratively produce open source code, or they can be based on the need for social networking, such as Orkut and its likes. Online communities can even be entire virtual cities, such as the Warcraft Universe.
Just as they can be utilized for a number of areas, a virtual community can be structured to allow for different degrees of social interactions. The participation of the individuals within the community can range from simply adding comments to forums and blogs, to having interactive conversations in chat rooms, to competing with players from all over the world in simulated gaming environments such as Warcraft or X-Box Live.
Typical to human psychology, some of these communities further break up to form cliques and communities within communities. Some of the newer more popular communities are [Read more]
