What is a similarity between the growth of the Internet as a community and offline communities
From Internet: Knowledge and Community
According to Bertram C. Bruce, "Self-empowerment for residents develops on the basis of these community funds of knowledge." For a community to grow and establish itself as a unified entity, dialogue between its members is needed to create a knowledge base. While other "funds of knowledge" were established much earlier, I believe Wikipedia is an excellent example of such a fund. If the Internet can be considered a social organism then Wikipedia has provided a framework and staging ground for the self-empowerment of users. The free dissemination and discussion of knowledge combined with the accessibility of the dialogue itself has helped solidify a connection between many users of the internet across the world regardless of their views of specific content within Wikipedia.
Are we able to quantitatively measure the amount of self-empowerment that websites such as Wikipedia gives to users of the internet?
http://moodle.evergreen.edu/file.php/848/chip-bruce.community-inquiry-theory-and-practice.pdf page 11
Adam Goldstein
Merilyn's Response
One similarity between the growth of the internet as a community and offline communities is that they are both changeable circumstances. In Ray Oldenburgs book, The Great Good Place, he refers to a typical suburban home as "easy to leave behind as its occupants move to another. What people cherish most in them can be taken along in the move” (pg. 4). With most people certain circumstances causes them to uproot from their homes and communities and to move where ever it's suitable to meet the needs of their families. This is also true for online communities, it’s just as simple for someone within an online community to cease involvement within these online communities and move on to something different that will accomodate their new preferences.
