Why Online Communities Are Redefining the Concept of Local [OPINION]

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When we talk about community, we talk about places and spaces. But online communities transcend geography.

That tends to mess with our heads. In trying to understand the new, it helps to fall back on the old, using metaphors drawn from familiar sources. Cities have streets, blocks and neighborhoods. Why wouldn’t virtual worlds have the same?

In the '90s, when we started to colonize cyberspace by the hundreds of thousands (and then by the millions), virtual cities became all the rage. Academics and technologists argued, in all apparent seriousness, that we would click on a 3D picture of a supermarket to go shopping, then wander our avatars down virtual streets to go to our next task.

Yahoo bought GeoCities -- a collection of homepages organized by neighborhood. AOL and Tribune launched Digital City. Corporations from Citigroup to SAP moved into virtual terrain.

These city metaphors all failed. Why? Because they proved utterly unnecessary. The older generation, who might have used them as a crutch, found them unwieldy. And digital natives moved directly into new neighborhoods that they built from scratch --- forums, message boards, blogs, and ultimately social networks.

And yet we keep falling back on the notion that online communities -- entities like Facebook, Twitter, even Mashable Follow -- are "places." They occupy mental space, if not physical space. Look no further than XKCD’s famous map of online communities, which attempts to chart where we live our lives online in whimsical fashion.

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