A virtual community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals. One of the most pervasive types of virtual community includes social networking services, which consist of various online communities.
Online or virtual community is the gathering of people, in an online “space” where they come, communicate, connect, and get to know each other better over time. From that point on, the rest is up to you. Your community will be what you and your members make of it!
Virtual communities, or online communities, are used for a variety of social and professional groups interacting via the Internet. It does not necessarily mean that there is a strong bond among the members, although Howard Rheingold, author of the book of the same name, mentions that virtual communities form “when people carry on public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships”.
The embedding of virtual community in the experiences of our everyday life, its reflection of the influence on the communication practices, and patterns of identity formation makes online community a colossal research enterprise, which requires continuous investigation and theorizing.
With the objectives of creating social networks, personal contacts, friendship, romantic relationship and business networks, virtual communities have been flourishing now days. The new digital technologies are enabling people to form virtual community that consisting individuals, groups, companies etc to interact and collaborate with each other without being affected by geographic, political, traditional barriers and influences.
Social network services are one of the most ubiquitous virtual communities in the current digital world. The organizing features of these social networks lower the transaction costs for finding and connecting with others who may share one interest or concern. Besides in the same case reuniting families living in different parts of the world, the digital connection sometime also enable communication and collaboration between different people, communities and firms that might note otherwise take place.
Other factors like online transactions, online dating, information and knowledge exchange are among the most motivating factors that allow groups to form and to be sustained primarily through ongoing communication processes, this has been mentioned by many writers (Bagozzi and Dholakia , 2002).
Anyone who wants to join virtual community usually can join by just registering freely. But it is not deniable that sometimes registration fees might be requested. It is also possible to drop out from the virtual community besides the ability of the participants to choose the degree to which they participate.
The participants in the virtual communities have opportunities to choose their level of participation, for example, they can choose to be lurkers (whose appearance online is totally unobserved by other members), or choose not to speak, or choose to speak as actively as possible (Hagel and Armstrong ,1997).
And virtual communities provide the opportunities towards marketing values so that participants would get competitive advantages in whatever they participate to.
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