When we
think of community, the neighborhood where we grew up immediately
comes to mind. But community has come to define a more diverse
structure that can be bound by interest as well as geographic
location.
We will
be looking at different kinds of communities and how the virtual
needs of these communites are addressed.
The term
'Virtual Community' is attributed to Howard Rheingold in his 1993
book of the same name.
Today
the term has come to mean variety of social groups connected in
some ways by the Internet or the World Wide Web. These groups
can come together for a brief time to solve a problem or they
can be as diverse as thousands of members of a listserv.