virtual communityArticle Free Pass virtual community, a group of
people, who may or may not meet one another face to face, who
exchange words and ideas through the mediation of computer
bulletin board systems (BBSs) and other digital networks. The
first use of the term virtual community appeared in a 1987
article written by Howard Rheingold for The Whole Earth Review.
In The Virtual Community (1993), Rheingold expanded on his
article to offer the following definition: Virtual communities
are 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. This article and book are cited as the
foundational works of cyberculture studies. Many subsequent
commentators have contested Rheingold’s use of the word
community and the terminology used to describe the technosocial
phenomena of persistent computer-mediated relationships; social
media and participatory media are also used to d