MIND.MASH. are my online friends for better or for worse?

‘Why don’t you come out into the real world’, is what Mum would say when I had been staring at Habbo Hotel for hours on end.

Now, I’m quite a young one, so virtual communities online have been familiar to me since dial up. However, since coming across the the world of Howard Rheingold, I have been questioning if these online realities are for better or for worse.  I think that sometimes we can lose focus on core values when we’re anticipating the future.

Rheingold is a writer, teacher and figurehead in the field of modern technology and its implications on communication. He is also the well known as the author of Virtual Communities (1993). Much of his work identifies the opportunities that virtual communities can bring for democracy and equality. These opportunities can be attributed to the world-wide population that we have access to  because of the internet and also because of the impossibility of face-to-face prejudice when meeting people online (Rheingold 2008 p. 03). He also appreciates the limitations of these communities as well “you can’t sell it as a substitute for participation in a family, taking part in voting in an election, or living in your apartment.” (Watts, 2003)

WATCH: The video for a good introduction to Rheingold and what he's all about, not to mention his fantastic fashion sense . 

One of the aspects that intrigued me into the works of Rheingold was the promotion and involvement within his field. You don’t always see Doctors on street corners handing out free sunscreen for the greater good.  Rheingold has established ‘Rheingold U’ a completely online learning community that offers 5 week courses about media. He really gets the students involved and immersed in the community by providing live sessions and then taking the discussion across multiple platforms including wikis, blogs and forums. As a content member of an online university, I admire his efforts and I’m sure the courses would be very stimulating.

“...students prefer Facebook groups because that's where they live” - Rheingold’s Twitter November 12th 2013

 I fell in love with my fiance essentially through an online friendship so I for one, should be very bias for virtual relationships. Surprisingly, I tend to swing the other way. It saddens me when people disengage the reality around them and I think overtime it can cause quite some damage. One of my closest friends spent a majority of her teenage years absorbed in a counterculture community on Tumblr, essentially ignoring her stay at home mum. Nowadays, she and her mum and distant and the people she sometimes felt close with, have logged off.

• TELL ME: I’m easily persuaded and I love hearing other people’s opinions, so tell me- do you think virtual communities are bringing people together for the better? Or, are these virtual relationships unreliable and shallow imitations of reality?
• CHECK BACK: Next Monday I’ll reveal my plan of action for making the best out of virtual communities online. 

References:

L4LTV. 2009. Howard Rheingold. [video online] Available at: http://youtu.be/xMSzgiiSGPQ [Accessed: 13 Nov 2013].

Rheingold, H. 2013. Untitled. Howard Rheingold, [blog] 12 Nove 2013, Available at: https://twitter.com/hrheingold [Accessed: 13 Nov 2013].

Rheingold, H. 2008. Virtual communities - exchanging ideas through computer bulletin boards. Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 1 Available at: http://jvwr-ojs-utexas.tdl.org/jvwr/index.php/jvwr/article/viewFile/293/247 [Accessed: 13 Nov 2013].

Watts, M. (2003). Interlude: A Conversation with Howard Rheingold, Founder of the Well, an Online Community.New Directions For Teaching And Learning, (94), 69-74