| Popis: |
What makes a successful online community? This is a question that would probably not have much meaning to someone in the early 1990. At the time, use of the World Wide Web had just begun to spread, first across college campuses and then among the general public in North America and Western Europe. A more common question, and one that Wellman and Gulia (1999) asked, was do online groups even call themselves communities at all? This chapter examines how much has changed about how we perceive online community since 1995: the people we converse with, the reasons for communicating online and the pitfalls encountered. It also introduces Cypris Chat, a virtual world community within Second Life that stubbornly clings to Internet first adopter values and goals, a group that reminds us that an online existence dominated by social networking sites has its alternatives. |
