We’ve already talked two weeks ago about The Individual Cyberpower, we discussed how the information overload affected our understanding to “knowledge”, the communication simplicity and virtual identities, we’ve also talked about the problem of credibility and how internet users started to develop their own ways of judging it. Today we will discuss the community cyberpower, how it is initiated and what makes the online community more powerful than the offline one.
Every human being have a dream, a target or even a problem to solve, and sure there are many others out there with the same hopes, when they start to contact each other, trying to help each other and get united to achieve their shared goal they start the community seed.
Equal Participation
Every community out there is created to achieve something, a better understanding of a new concept for example, spreading a new trend, sharing some knowledge, or even having better discussions, the community in general (not only the cyber community) has the power to do this, so what is more powerful in the online community? I quote here:
“… Communication from many people to many people is close to the norm in cyberspace. This opens participation in decision making, creating the potential for conclusions to be reached in more egalitarian ways than are available offline…
… The inclusion of people in offline decision making is limited by the need to meet together, to speak only one at a time, to overcome the hierarchies of identity…” Cyberpower: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace by Tim Jordan
The ability to contact each other without any time borders, to express ourselves more freely, to speak (many) at a time instead of one at a time, allows us to be more effective and social, speaking freely without any hesitation or limits. Online community strengthen our individual cyberpower and crystallize our cyber identity to give us at the end a credibility that represent us and our community as well.
Information Overload and Credibility
Now the information overload problem has an alternative solution, when we want to search for information online we try to find the community that powers this type of information and see if it can provide us with the desired knowledge, this has solved two problems, the information overload and the credibility issue, not as a complete solution but at least as an alternative one.
Technology has helped the online community to evolve faster and to be of more benefit, new technologies like blogging, wikis and news feeds optimized the information flow between community members and their followers, for example if you want to follow up the web standards news and stay in touch with all its development, simply you have to subscribe to the community leaders feeds and now you are in touch.. if you know what they know then you know everything. The information power again, the core of cyberspace.
Back to credibility, every online community has its own credibility that got initiated by the very first members, and this credibility has been maintained while members are joining and leaving this community since then, but whenever a new member join, he gets his share of this credibility as if it’s a certificate, people will have a better reason to trust him, as long as they trust his community.
Online communities are becoming more popular day after day, many people are finding salvation in it, a place to speak freely, to contact these with the same interests and to achieve a shared goal, recently I have joined the diet contest community, trying to achieve the goal of losing weight and get back in shape with all the other participants from all over the world, this is a live example how no matter what is the goal or how simple it is, there are always a lot of people who wants to do it and start a community.
