QotW 7: Twitties

An online community is where people interact with each other in a virtual world- like instant messengers, IRC etc. Community is an important aspect of life for most people. Cooley (1983) says that all normal humans have a natural affinity for community. He suggests that the primary factor inhibiting the formation of communities, no matter what their scale, is that they are difficult to organize. The structural process that is associated with community is communication. Without communication, there can be no action to organize social relations. The intimate nature of this relationship is best illustrated in the words community and communications. (Fernback & Thompson, 1995)

Through communication and community, it revolves around the issues of brining people closer together, even those that you do not know. One example of such community communication would be Twitter.com. Although it is not as good as the instant messenger (which explains it all, as it is INSTANT), but it is quite cool to a certain extend. Imagine this, you invite all your friends into twitter and start a live update (conversation) of what you are doing. It connects you and your friends together, somewhat like mass chatting or rather what we call as a conference. I never expect it to be so cool, as I have technophobia. However, twitter really amazes me of what it is capable of. Certainly, twitter can be considered as an online community can do what a basic instant messenger could. Things like, making friends, project discussions, sharing of personal information and even making potential mate partners through it.

The concept of community commonly refers to a set of social relationships that operate within specified boundaries or locales, but community has an ideological component as well, in that it refers to a sense of common character, identity or interests. (Fernback & Thompson, 1995) Through twitter, one need not know the other person in order to start a conversation. There are not restrictions in whom or how many friends you make. Its is a place where people from all over the world, come together and experience a completely new form of online community. Twitter is a social networking service that allows members to inform each other about what they are doing and what they think. It allows users to send messages via phone or instant messaging. (Twitter, 2007) However, the sending of messages are only now avaliable on the US and UK (the place where twitter is first founded). Technology is changing in a rapid pace. Who knows that twitter might be the next “hottest” thing to be done in the next 3 to 5 years?

Typical online communities can bring you more cons than pros if one were to view it in the long-run. Why? People of normally sign up for such communities would actually get “hooked” into such ways of communications, thus turning them away from real-relationships with their family and friends (Hiltz and Turoff, 1993). They will lose physcial communication with their friends and kin and end up being the best of friends with their “feelingless” computers. However much, Twitter does not breach this concern of turning your friends and family members into your personal computer. It is somewhat a mixture of social network community, but provides real-time updates that can be send through sms (Short Message Service) via hand phone as well. I believe that twitter and other online communities will make it big in time to come. As not only it brings strangers and strangers together, but also, it aids people by maintaining and strengthening friendships between one and other, regardless of how far you are away from each other.

Citations:

Fernback, J., & Thompson, B. (May, 1995). Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?. Retrieved March 16, 2007 from http://www.rheingold.com/texts/techpolitix/VCcivil.html


Twitter (2007). Retrieved March 16, 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter


Hiltz, Starr Roxanne, Kenneth Johnson and Murray Turoff. 1986. "Experiments in Group Decision Making: Communication Process and Outcome in Face-to-face Versus Computerized Conferences." Human Communication Research 13 (2): 225-252.
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