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A community is "a body of people or things viewed collectively".[1] According to Steven Brintgregates of people who share common activities and/or beliefs and who are bound together principally by relations of affect, loyalty, common values, and/or personal concern – i.e., interest in the personalities and life events of one another".[2]
Jenny Preece suggested to evaluate communities according to physical features: size, location and the boundaries that confined them.[3] When commuting became a way of life and cheaper transportation made it easier for people to join multiple communities to satisfy different needs, the strength and type of relationships among people seemed more promising criteria.[3]
Since social capital is built of trust, rules, norms and networks, it can be said that the social capital of communities has grown. The lower entrance barriers to the community have made it easier to be a part of many different communities. This goes hand in hand with Don Tapscott's theory of how the digital society has changed collaboration and innovation to a world of co-creation.[4]
From birth to death, people are shaped by the communities to which they belong, affecting everything from how they talk to whom they talk with.[5] Just like the telephone and the television changed the way people interact socially, computers have transformed communication and at the same time created new norms for social capital.
"A virtual community is a group of people who may or may not meet one another face to face, who exchange words and ideas through the mediation of computer bulletin board systems and other digital networks".[6] Along with the fact that computer usage has spread, the use of virtual communities have grown. Rheingold defines virtual communities as "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". Michael Porter describes a virtual community as "an aggregation of individuals or business partners who interact around a shared interest, where the interaction is at least partially supported and/or mediated by technology and guided by some protocols or norms".[7] Virtual communities consist of "people with shared interests or goals for whom electronic communication is a primary form of interaction" and have created new forms of collaboration.[8] "The most skilled and experienced members of the community provide leadership and help integrate contributions from the community as a whole. This way, virtual communities can use the voluntary motivations that exist in a community to assign the right person to the right task more effectively than traditional forms".[4]
According to Benkler, we can "see a thickening of the preexisting relations with friends and family, in particular with those who were hard to reach earlier".[9] "Also, we are beginning to see the emergence of a greater scope for limited-purpose, loose relationships. Although these may not fit the ideal model of virtual communities, they are effective and meaningful to their participants".
The heightened individual capacity that actually is a driving social force have raised concerns by many that the Internet is further fragmenting the community, making people spend their time in front of their computer instead of socializing with each other.[9] Empirical studies show, however, that we are using the Internet and communities at the expense of television, and that is an exchange that promotes social ties.