Romeo and Juliet Essay
...equent collaboration of the community participants. Without frequent collaboration, it causes a community to die out. To work jointly with others in an intellectual endeavor is important in order to keep the collaboration within a community. I think another form of collaboration is when community members voluntarily contribute their time and knowledge for their communities. According to Joseph Cothrel and Ruth Williams, in their recent article, "Online Communities: Getting the Most Out of Online Discussion and Collaboration," found in a web-site called "Participate," I learned people who actually contribute to posting information in communities range between 5% to 15%. Their article also mentions how community members need to have "personal attributes like passion, a desire for recognition, and a sense of obligation that comes from past experience as a "taker" make some people want to give back to the community. In my opinion, contributing information online may be of great advantage in the future because contributors build more popularity. Therefore, the time and procedure it will take to create a community will take much less effort. Third, Rheingold states, "it is important for a community to have an establishment." An establishment can be a business, company, firm, house, outfit, workplace or institute that promotes or develops the community.In addition, Howard Rheingold interprets an online community as: "Virtual communities are 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." Rheingold's statement grasped my attention because it summarizes what and how an online community can develop and maintain. According to the America Online dictionary, a social aggregation is a group, body, or mass composed of many distinct parts or individuals, or the collecting of units or parts into a mass or whole. For this matter, we are dealing with two or more individuals that form a group online for a wide variety of purposes. For example, one can join a virtual place to discuss his/her daily issues and questions or a group of people in a work place can join different groups with the same goal to exchange thoughts and ideas to succeed in a project more efficiently and effectively. In fact many companies are now taking more advantage and giving additional priority to form and maintain these professional groups online. In Rheingold's article, he uses one of his experiences in the introduction, which was the time his daughter picked up a tick. He noticed a blood-bloated thing sucking on his baby's scalp, and they weren't sure how to remove the tick. His wife left a message to the pediatrician and Howard logged on to the Internet (it was eleven o'clock evening) and got his answer in minutes and removed the tick from the child by the time the doctor called back. This specific experience taught me to believe there is an enormous advantage to an online community, which is the speed of the information combined with the superior accuracy that can be received, depending on the community. I learned a community is more of a social place where people can interact and share information and experiences. According to Judith Stefania Donath, in her book, "Inhabiting the virtual city" wrote, "People on the net should be thought of not only as solitary information processors, but also as social beings. People are not only looking for information, they are also looking for affiliation, support and affirmation. If we view people as social actors, then we should view the net as a social technology. A social technology is one that makes it possible to find people with common interests, to talk with them and listen to them, and to sustain connections with them over time." Joseph Cothrel and Ruth Williams interviewed people who worked together online. Their initial definition of online community is: "a group of people who use computer networks as their primary mode of interaction." But I noticed users were more apt to say they were participants in communities of practice or communities of interest. Alertly interested in finding out the future, the things people most associated with community were a sense of commonality: common interests; purpose: or objectives and felt the social element was critical to distinguishing a community from a mere group of individuals. Williams and Cothrel also emphasized: Online communities are made up of people, and people in organizations have goals that transcend the forms of communication they use. In asking respondents about the purpose or mission of these communities, we often encountered the difficulties inherent in trying to distinguish between" "on-line community" and "community. From what I have discovered, online communities are similar to that of real life communities because it involves dealing with relationships. It allows the opportunity for people to socialize, exchange thoughts, plans, and most importantly, information. In Similarly, Amy Bruckman, in her article, "Finding One's Own in Cyberspace," explains, "The Net is made up of hundreds of thousands of separate communities, each with it's own special character." Bruckman compares real life communities to virtual ones. She uses a restaurant or bar as an example of a real life community. Amy Bruckman said, "It's a lot harder to find a good virtual community than it is to find a good bar. Often, one may be able to determine a type of bar simply by observing the type of cars parked out front or to look in the bar window: How are the people dressed?" Unfortunately, we don't have the opportunity to visually observe a virtual community like a real life one, so Amy Bruckman recommends doing online searches if you are looking for a particular online community. But I also realized how computers are man made tools to help society progress simplicity where time spent on developing relationships is dramatically reduced. When comparing the possibilities for meeting a certain person online to real life, it's almost impossible. Humans are social beings; therefore, we need to look at computers as a social machine. Search the web, books or articles and you will find dozens and dozens of dis...