Long Way – Point Six – Community

The word “community” originates from the Latin words cum = together, among each other and munere = to give something. It is a group of people that share the same space, the same interests and the same wishes. As the sociologists said, the physical contact belongs to the community. However, how can we apply the term – community – to the Internet as something like that and to a virtual world like Second Life? Are there the communities? Can be found people or their embodies, i.e. avatars there, ones that make to unite themselves for soever purpose to create the community?

Yes, they can. They are called Groups and really they unite the SL residents with similar interests, maybe only to inform members about some event, exhibition, party, etc. The physical contact is probably not necessary and it would not even work in SL. Nevertheless, the groups have its enormous advantages like the groups in other social networks, e.g. Facebook or MySpace. Also the discussion groups common in Internet work the same way. This advantage is to inform all members immediately in a given time. This info receives all members whether they are online or offline. The so-called multimessaging is the second advantage. Unfortunately, it sometimes becomes corrupted into prattle about nothing or into simple bothering spam.

There are plentiful amount of SL groups and even if their number is limited to 25 maximal. Sometimes it is not even enough and one has to leave some whether he/she wants or not. Some groups have a huge amount of members and I think that Czech and Slovak communities do not fall behind them. For example, the community www.secondlife.cz has 10 345 members now. And I think that my list of groups does not differ from other ones. You only want to go shopping in the interesting shops; you want to visit favorite clubs; you want to trade the interesting stocks connected with SL world or you only want to have some friends group.

Community is maybe something like family, you are member of or you would like to be a part of it. Community, it is maybe your friends or your enemies. Simply, community is necessary and in upshot it is essential to survive in SL.

(It has been finished yesterday by watching the final sequence of the movie from Wim Wenders – Paris, Texas.)