Nowadays, according to Zygmunt Bauman , community is perceived as "the last remnant of the ancient utopias of the good society." But while communities no longer exist in reality, they still survive in the virtual world, and individuals join them by choice, not by chance. Is it right to consider these as true communities?
From real to virtual
In his famous work " Community and Society ," Ferdinand Tönnies drew a distinction between the two different forms of association. Community is "organic" because relationships extend from the family to the neighborhood and are based on intimacy and habit , without specialization of roles. Society , on the other hand, is characterized by relationships based on interest and calculation that follow a mechanistic pattern based on exchange: " no one will want to grant or give anything to another unless in exchange for a reciprocal service or donation ." Today, " explosive communities " exist that offer individuals the opportunity to come together only temporarily and only for a specific purpose or goal. Bauman believes that uniting to pursue a common cause is impossible because individual interests cannot be combined. Everyone is interested in pursuing their own goals without being hindered by others. From this perspective, individualism becomes an institutionalized value. New means of mass communication and the ability to communicate with people from all over the world have encouraged the formation of online communities where people interested in the same topic or theme discuss and exchange ideas on blogs, forums, and chat rooms.
Virtual communities
First of all the virtual communities they differ from traditional communities due to the absence of physical proximity: the interaction takes place online and it is unlikely that the individuals who compose them will have meetings in reality. Furthermore, they are ephemera because they can easily become exhausted after the conversation on a given topic is saturated and because the individuals who compose them could to lie on their identity and on the actual degree of involvement in the topic discussed (for example, a paedophile could pretend to be a young girl and enter a chat room about topics discussed by young people). Online everyone builds their own relational network according to one's interests and values. Consequently, interacting online helps strengthen the new model of sociality based on the individualism typical of our time. The word "community" derives from the Latin "communities" which refers to giving understood in a reciprocal sense. Therefore, considering online communities as real communities is unsuitable, firstly because of the lack of physical proximity and secondly because, being connected online, there is no possibility of truly sharing. consequences e responsibility as would normally happen in a traditional community.
Valeria Zanapa
