N o t h i n g a b o u t m e

Friday, March 16, 2007

Com125 QotW7: Online Tweet

Com125 QotW7: Online Tweet

Online virtual communities are where people interact with each other virtually without any physical contact. The internet has flourish and the online community has been growing bigger and bigger every single day. Cooley (1983) says that all normal humans have a natural affinity for community. That is the main reason why people tend to be affiliated to online communities. A sense of belonging as the collective culture of the modern day individual tends to be driven by group economics. Strength in numbers as the Romans would call it. Wellman and Gulia (1996) said that a community is “more than the sum of a set of ties” meaning that it not only connects but it also affects.
Like Friendster, Facebook and Wholivesnearyou.com, Twitter is another form of the online community which has recently just sprung up. On signing up I found out that most of the online communities have something in common. Each of them allows you to have a ‘friends’ database and from there you can view your friend’s friends thus making it a global networking community. Twitter is a new improved version of the modern day friendster and facebook, where users are able to log on and actually engage in a conversion via a forum where your actions and shoutouts are recorded for everyone to read and respond. Twitter is not doubt an online community as it brings various individuals together for a common purpose, social networking.
People who have signed up tend to spend most of their time online, chatting and making new friends, finding love and setting up relationships. Their involvement in these on-line relationships, turn them away from real-life relationships with family and friends (Hiltz and Turoff 1993). They lose the physical interaction of meeting people as most of their communication is via the computer. Twitter I find is more like a virtual bridge between 2 individuals, not only can it function like any other social network website but they are able to provide real-time updates of tag boards which are then sent to your mobile phone. A more refined version of the old websites, Twitter truly has come a long way and proved to be more than just an online community but an online nanny. Where friends are able to monitor postings at the click of a mouse.

References
Cooley, C. H. (1983). Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.
Virtual Community. (2007). In Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia. Retrieved March 15, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Virtual_community&diff=115277136&oldid=115277042
Wellman, B. & Gulia, M. (1996). Net Surfers Don’t Ride Alone. Retrieved March 15, 2007, from http://www.acm.org/~ccp/references/wellman/wellman.html
title=Reputation_management&diff=113442073&oldid=111797891
Hiltz, Starr Roxanne, Kenneth Johnson and Murray Turoff. 1986. "Experiments in Group Decision Making: Communication Process and Outcome in Face-to-face Versus Computerized Conferences." Human Communication Research 13 (2): 225-252.

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