What is an online community?

Twitter140 characters or pictures that you share with a network of friends. You can follow just about anyone, celebrities and even politicians.

Everyone from

To…

Has a twitter!

What’s so great about it?

• Bradley’s research Twitter shows that news and current events can be sourced literally as they happening via twitter (2008).

• Beers explains that this leads to a ‘deeper and more interactive’ relationship with important issues (2006:110).

Facebook

• A website originally created to share the American college experience has been a worldwide success. We can connect with friends and people from all different spans of our lived, not matter how far away!

What’s the appeal? • Boyd also states that though ‘only the lives of the rich and

famous were deemed important enough to share’ the Internet has changed this forever (22).

• Papacharissi dubbed Facebook a ‘glasshouse’.This thing we think is so private actually holds onto your information. He also explains that our online identity is created through the websites we participate on.

• The online identities are constantly becoming a more important part of what makes us who we are.

Facebook

Gross and Acquitsti’s work shows that those who we have as our friends online might notbe the same as the people we call our friends In real life.

How time on Facebook is spent

• Pempek, Yermolayeva, and Calvert stated that:• “students use Facebook approximately 30 min

throughout the day as part of their daily routine. Students communicated on Facebook using a one-to-many style, in which they were the creators disseminating content to their friends. Even so, they spent more time observing content on Facebook than actually posting content.” (1)

Personal Blogging

• Then there’s the vast variety of personal blogs, online diaries that can be shared with the whole world. There are many different mediums including image heavy blogs like Tumblr and Video blogs on Youtube. Readers can interact with the author via comments.

Blogging

• Guadagno, Okdie and Eno explain: ‘those women who are high in neuroticism are more likely to be bloggers’ (2007)

• Yang-Jangl’s findings bring up the idea that instead of isolating people, blogging and online communities are finding new ways to bring people together (2008).

Why share it with the world?

• ‘It seems that the benefits of using blogs as an interpersonal communication channel outweigh the perceived costs of abdicating ownership or control of one’s personal information.’ (Stefanone and Yang-Jang 2008)

So there you have it!

• There we have it, a look into the world of online communities, and why they are so important!

So what are you waiting for? Get in board!