Digital media is responsible for the formation of online communities and creating a society and culture that merges societies and divisions, and thus this form of medium has become more real to humans than reality itself, and virtual reality has taken over human’s ideas of community and democracies.
This essay will discuss how online communities have been developed and how they have in turn created new societies and cultures found online; these new societies and cultures have created acceptance for many people for many different reasons. It will also be discussed how digital media and online communities our affecting our understanding of community and democracy and how this is will affect our local communities.
The most ideal way to define digital media is that it is the different platforms on which people communicate electronically. (Flanzraich par.3) Through digital media online communities are developed and established. Online communities are groups of people who use the World Wide Web to create Internet Web sites, chat rooms, newsgroups, emails, discussion boards and forums to interact with others who share the same interests, or simply to communicate with friends/family. (Owyang par.3)
Online communities could not exist without digital media in particular the World Wide Web. Mark Nunes explains how “The World Wide Web has created a hypertext that offers users the opportunity to connect to networks, computers and servers through a simple lived practice of clicking and pointing.”(Nunes 49). His idea that the virtual world is only possible through a network of interconnecting servers and potential for each user to reach this site from anywhere at any time through the