WHAT IS A VIRTUAL COMMUNITY?

Before I go any further let us look at the definition of Virtual Communities. In his book The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier Howard Rheingold (2000, p.5) defines Virtual Communities as “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".

These “long enough public discussions” which according to Rheingold forms webs of personal relationships in cyberspace can occur within newsgroups, support groups and online fan clubs in a text based asynchronous form.