virtual communities

A virtual community is a group of people that interact thyough community media such as letters ,telephones etc,rather than interacting face to face usually for educational or social reasons.Virtual and online communities have also become a supplementary form of communication between people who already know each other in real life ,the traditional definition of a community is of a geographically circumscribed entity .(neighbourhood,villages).Some online communities are linked geographically ,and are known as community websites ,a virtual community is a social network with a common interest ,an idea ,a task or a goal that interact in a virtual society across time ,geographical or organizational boundaries and is able to develop personal relationships.Different vitual communities have different levels of interaction and participation amongst their members ,this can range from adding comments or tags to a blog or message board post to competing against other people in online video games.Virtual comminities often divide into cliques or even seperate to form new communities .Douglas Mann says that people love virtual psedo communities for various reasons one of the reasons is that people love technology,secondly computer and software firms like Apple and Microsoft have invested millions in new communites technology so they have to convince people that it has a useful purpose ,thirdly ,ecomm and cellphones allow narcissists to avoid making commitment to given time and spaces .People can even change their identities in a virtual community and be whoever they eant to be ,I personally find the idea of pretending to be a man or a woman when you are not quite stupid.why not just ne yourself?
People can virtually communte and work at home ,fourth ,e-comm saves shy and reclusive people from struggling through the process of overcomming their shyness,through what used to be called ''character building ''.In a virtual community a person can be whatever they want to be ,an individual can lie about their identity ,their sexuality ,their age and even where they come from ,a person can even lie about their ethnicity .A virtual community is a community that is open to the world, and because it is open to everyone ( the world ) it has differnt characterists that one which is closed by a password provided only to qualified individuals .