Rheingold Virtual Communites

I side more with Rheingold's analysis of the value of virtual communities than Andrew Keen's view of them. I tend to respect their capacity for change and more importantly as Rheingold seems to argue, their ability to create community and culture in a media environment in which these aspects of our society seem to be muddled. I found particular interest in then discussion how virtual communities even develop their own slang and language. As Rheingold says, "There is a vocabulary to CMC, too, now emerging from millions and millions of individual online interactions. That vocabulary reflects something about the ways human personalities are changing in the age of media saturation."

This made me consider what are known as Memes. Which is a concept of cultural knowledge that is distributed in a particular way. The internet has adopted the concept in the form of Internet Memes. Through participation on the web, users make popular videos, websites, and stories which develop to the point of being a vocabulary. This video best describes what I'm trying to talk about.

Actually, it doesn't. But you just got "rick rolled". Rick Rolling is a phenomenon on some websites including 4chan.org, digg.com, ebaumsworld, and Something Awful. . These internet communities actually share a great deal of culture across these websites by nature of attracting the same types of users. These collections of memes create a closer knit community in a wide open space like the internet. By having common themes, users are able to relate to each other and make culture-specific jokes and references. While on the surface this phenomenon doesn't seem that relevant, it is important to remember that Anonymous is made up of many members from the same websites previously mentione. This seemingly innocuous culture has actually developed a political aim through the nature of the communities' high value placed on ruthless justice and humor. Sometimes these causes overlap, sometimes they conflict, but they seem to be motivating cultural values, indeed. This demonstrates clearly Rheingold's point that virtual communities create a culture in and of themselves that would be incapable without computer mediated communications (CMC)