What is an Online Community?
An online community is a group of people who communicate with one another over the Internet, usually with a common interest. Before the advent of the Internet, there was no such thing as a virtual community. Today, vast online communities inhabit the World Wide Web in chat rooms and game rooms across the globe. The origins of online communities lie somewhere in the beginnings of personal computer use. Small groups of people in colleges, universities, and the military communicated online via message boards and user nets. Common interests brought these pioneers together in the first virtual communities. As the length of the workday grew, and the business world began operating on a 24-hour basis, computer users desired an ability to socialize anywhere, at any hour of the day. Many joined an online community to chat with others who kept nontraditional hours or lived in distant time zones. With the introduction of more sophisticated user interfaces that allowed information and images to be
An online or “virtual” community is a group of people that interacts through media rather than face to face. Put quite simply, if the group uses the Internet to facilitate their communication, the group is referred to as an online communityalthough online communities have also become used as a secondary form of communication between people who know each other in real life. The methods the community uses to interact can vary, including text-based chat rooms, blogs, wikis, podcasts, and discussion forums that use voice, video text or avatars. Different virtual communities have different levels of interaction and participation among their members, ranging from commenting on blogs or message boards to competing against other people in online video games. In essence, online communities require social interaction and communication between users in order to sustain themselves. In 2000, author and community architecture expert Amy Jo Kim proposed the idea of a membership life cycle for online
