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What is an Online Community?
An online or "virtual" community is a group of people that interacts through media rather than face to face. Put quite simply, if the group uses the Internet to facilitate their communication, the group is referred to as an online community – although online communities have also become used as a secondary form of communication between people who know each other in real life.
The methods the community uses to interact can vary, since there are many different means of communication used in social software, either separately or in combination, including text-based chat rooms, blogs, wikis, podcasts, and discussion forums that use voice, video text or avatars.
The use of the term "community" to describe such groups has been debated, since the traditional definition of a community focuses on geographic proximity (i.e., neighborhoods). Proponents of online communities typically dismiss such criticism, noting that the emphasis should be placed on the word "community" rather than its modifier, and that communities exist by virtue of a common interest shared by a group of people.
Using this logic, then, an online community can be defined as a group of people sharing a common interest, idea, or goal that interacts via the Internet (regardless of geographical and organizational boundaries) and is able to forge relationships.
Different virtual communities have different levels of interaction and participation among their members, ranging from commenting on blogs or message boards to competing against other people in online video games. In essence, online communities require social interaction and communication between users in order to sustain themselves.
In 2000, author and community architecture expert Amy Jo Kim proposed the idea of a membership life cycle for online communities. Kim posited that members of virtual communities begin their lives in a community as visitors, or "lurkers." People then typically break through some sort of barrier before becoming novices and participating in the community. Their prolonged activity and interaction with other members leads to the next phase, where they become regulars. If they break through yet another barrier, those members become leaders, and then finally (after a period of time), they become elders. This life cycle can be applied to many virtual communities, including blogs and wiki-based communities such as Wikipedia.
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