vitual communities

A virtual community, e-community or online community is a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as letters, telephone, email or Usenet rather than face to face, for social, professional, educational or other purposes. If the mechanism is a computer network, it is called an online community. Virtual and online communities have also become a supplemental form of communication between people who know each other primarily in real life. Many means are used in social software separately or in combination, including text-based chat rooms and forums that use voice, video text or avatars. Significant socio-technical change may have resulted from the proliferation of such Internet-based social networks. furthermore, online or virtual community, can they really be regarded as a communities where people base their lives?
First, lets attempt to describe some of the discourses of a community.
A community is made of of people, who live together geographically, they interact with each other almost on a daily bases, they interact with each other socially, physically and verbally. This is thus a traditional distinction of a community. When Don Ihde describes an online community, he describes it as a community where people don't necessarily have to interact physically in order for them to be called a community. They are called a community because of the social interactions that occur between them all. He further goes to argue that, within the traditional definition of a community whereby there is also physical contact, he says that, "it is possible for one to feel a lot more closer to someone in cyber space whom they don't necessarily have a relationship with them or rubbed shoulders, than to a stranger sitting next to you in on the subway and yet you are there physically"; can one then really not give the online community the benefit of the doubt, and give it real existing space. These communities have transcended globally, and the world has become one global village, through communications using the new media. Cyber relations form part of the new media and new technologies have made it possible for people all over the world to be able to interact with each other using text or email, video calling or even using the multimedia. The global village being all the continents and their coutries comming together to form one whole big global village where they interact with each other using means availed to them by the new media.

We also refer to cyber space as hyper reality. This term has been created by the American population whereby they have used their over active imaginations to create spaces whereby they use their imaginations and they immitate the real thing tho make their own thing. It is also said that they are proud of their 'fakeness' and they say that if you can't have the real thing, then why not fake it? One would then consider that and then come to a conclusion that virtual communities are fake! but can you call someone's original work fake, since it did originate from their intellectual span, and though it is in hyper reality?