Sep
29th
Tue
29th
It’s not an easy task to define community, wether virtual or not. Rheingold, more than twelve years ago, made the expression virtual community popular, when referring to the Well,8 a group of cybernauts from the San Francisco Bay Area in rapid development. In that work, virtual communities - in one of its best and most influential definitions - are said to be social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace.9
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8The expresssion became known through the classical The Virtual Community, of Howard Rheingold (published in Portugal by Gradiva), and which has a full downloadble version in the author’s personal web page (www.rheingold.com). The book was first published in 1993, and the Well (Whole Earth `Lectronic Link) is now in its early twenties, for it was founded in 1985.
9Idem, p. 18.
Anabela Gradim (2009) Digital Natives and Virtual Communities: Towards a New Paradigm of Mediated Communication , Estudos de Comunicação, 5
