ALSO CALLED: Communities, Web Communities, Technical Communities, eCommunities, and Online Communities
DEFINITION: A virtual community is a community of people sharing common interests, ideas, and feelings over the Internet or other collaborative networks. A possible inventor of this term and one of its first proponents was Howard Rheingold, who created one of the first major Internet communities, called "The Well." In his book, The Virtual Community, Rheingold defines virtual communities as social aggregations  … 
Definition continues below.

VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES DEFINITION (continued): …  that emerge from the Internet when enough people carry on public discussions long enough and with sufficient human feeling to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace.

Virtual communities might be thought of as subgroups within Marshall McLuhan's notion of cyberspace as a "global village." Before the Web, virtual communities existed on bulletin board services (BBS) and many still do. Some virtual communities or facilitators of them use the metaphor of a coffee house or something similar to help users visualize the community. In general, there are two kinds … 
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