Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Following the dramatic loss or decline of real human communities, the highly contentious sociological conception of “virtual communities” signifies a decisive historic break with material human geography and the subsequent emergence of dynamic Net-based “social aggregations” ( Rheingold 1993 ), electronically grounded, complex networks of interactive social and cultural relations. The advent and rapid growth of Internet bulletin boards, electronic mailing lists, chat rooms, MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs, IRCs, forums, and weblogs (blogs) since the mid-1990s has triggered radically new and diverse modes of social bonding, friendship, subjectivity, experience, identity formation, and critical political intervention (e.g., cyborg politics). In particular, social networking sites, such as YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Twitter, potentially empower individual users with surprising (often unpredictable) possibilities to seek and achieve visibility, express themselves, manage their identities, broadcast their opinions, rearrange their lives, and reconstruct their biographies. These popular sites, which are the most characteristic examples of the Web 2.0 (or the “social web”), utilize new user interface technologies and incorporate the user as a first-class object. The users are now both media producers and media consumers (senders and receivers). Virtual communities, ... log in or subscribe to read full text