"For Rheingold the
virtual community arises when people carry on public discussions long enough,
with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships”.
(Rheingold 1993 p. 5)
I agree with Rheingold’s view about online community. It is
possible to bind a relationship or friendship through an online community.
Because finding a community that you feel belonged to in your own society is
not always easy. For example a Gay person living in a society that doesn’t
accept his gender can influence this individual to feel depressed and
alienated. However, meeting people online across the world that share the same
feelings as him might become a huge support for him. I have personally formed a
friendship between people that I have met online. As I’ve mention in my
previous posts, I’ve been raised in Thailand, which is a completely different
society to where I live now. One day I found an online avatar game
(application) that had chat rooms for each region. Most surprisingly was that
everyone in the Thailand chat room were Thai people that lived away from home
like me. After a period of time we shared our more personal social networks
e.g. Facebook and Instagram.
However, forming a relationship through an online community
is not always easy. Because you never know how the person on your computer
screen looks like, what’s their intention or how real they are. Meeting people
online can become very dangerous in some cases. Therefore, you must be careful of
the people who you meet online and most importantly be careful of how much you
expose your own identity online. Source: http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html
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