Practicum 6- Chambers

For my 6th post I would like to talk something we discussed earlier in the semester. After playing Second Life for the duration of this semester I have thought about the idea of a community. This is something that came up during my practicum presentation. From lecture we saw that a community is any social group whose members reside in a specific shared locality, share government and often have a common culture. It has come more and more apparent to me that Second Life as a whole is one big community. Members of Second Life reside in the virtual world and from there are broken down in to sub communities based on interests and activities. The idea of a virtual community comes to play, which is the social aggregations that emerge from the net when enough people carry on public discussions long enough with sufficient human feeling to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace.  In Second Life this is very apparent through group chats in which people are familiar with one another and discussion current happenings as from there, relationships start to develop which can lay the ground work for a new community. So although I am still not sold that friendships truly exist on Second Life, I have come to realize that communities form through group interactions and although I consider Second Life as one big community, there are many other communities that branch off from that.