| Abstrakt: |
The article examines whether virtual communities can have features that are inherent in real life communities. Until the 1950s, sociologists feared that rapid modernization would mean the loss of community, leaving a handful of transitory, disconnected, weakly supportive relationships. Since then, more systematic ethnographic and survey techniques have demonstrated the persistence of community in neighborhood and kinship groups. Sociologists have discovered that such neighborhood and kinship ties comprise only a portion of people's overall community networks because cars, planes, and phones can maintain relationships over long distances. Members of virtual communities take for granted that computer networks are also social networks spanning large distances. The Internet is only one of many ways in which the same people may interact. It is not a separate reality. People bring to their online interactions such baggage as their gender, stage in the life cycle, cultural milieu, socioeconomic status, and offline connections with others. |
