Bill's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

We’ve entered Block 2 and our subject is Virtual Communities. I read in Howard Rheingold’s introductory chapter to The Virtual Community that the first BBSs opened in the USA in 1979. My own first experience was the Greek BBS I joined around 1992 using a 9.6K modem and an analogue line. Slow as hell. But I still remember how exhilarating it was.

Whether online or not, we can’t help but join some community or other and this points to a human need for communion. It’s no surprise then that a lot of my activity this week revolved around the issue of the virtual community and around my efforts to understand what exactly constitutes a virtual community and which ingredients do you need in order to make this recipe work. I am intrigued by the idea that the sense of a community might just be a collective hallucination shared by its members and I intend to explore this in my ethnographic study. Could it be that our notion of virtual communities is just the result of auto-suggestion, of our deep-seated need to associate and belong?

At the same time, I tried to fuel my –admittedly waning– interest for Twitter by following some of the Top-100 educators that use this service (well, “top” according to this list) and decided to catalogue all my Social Media / Digital Culture / Education 2.0 / Web Studies books in Library Thing. It struck me that although the notion of Digital Culture isn’t exactly new, it is still evolving. This idea that our object of study is in a creative, almost orgasmic state of flux is one of the things I love most about this course.