Online Community

Online communities in the digital world are made up of avatars that are assumed to share passions, lifestyles or beliefs. This is harder to do in the outside world with all the bias and criticism being forced into peoples heads so its been a concern that people will step away from social interaction and go to an isolated, depressed and alienated state of living. By hiding traits such as race, gender and sexuality will create an atmosphere of brotherhood which ultimately meet the audiences purpose and creates a equality between unknown users.

## History

Online communities started off in 1973 as a text based chat room, Talkomatic for PLATO system was the first to be created. Email discussion lists were the next to come along, it was used to send messages to a large group of subscribers. Conversations and discussion lists are continuously sent, replied, and received by all subscribers. It is difficult to say exactly when this technology came out but MSGGROUP was projected to come out in 1975, it was assumed to be the first email discussion list out for the public.

Online games was the next big movement in 1975, especially for gamers because the purpose of a lot of the games put out is for the challenge and showing your dominance when mastering. Offline gamers match with the same people or robots so when they get to mastery level the fun of being challenged is over. Broadcasting multiuser dungeons, multiplayer games and virtual worlds pulled gamers in with the infatuation of playing against worthwhile people and obtaining mastery level across the world.

In 1978 the Bulletin Board System, BBS, was created from the largest blizzard in Chicago's history. Used for posting downloadable files as well as message boards for one person to use at a time. Piggy backing off of the BBS system, from the 1980's to 90's Usenet was created. At first they looked at it as being the first discussion group not to being tied to one BBS server. Usenet ended up housing different interests that were reached by newsreaders like Deja News. A big chunk of users were chased away by other online services and spam that was going around.

Communities at first were about the sharing of ideas and interests, social networks are more along the lines of showing "me and my friends and what we're doing -- and who their other friends are, and whether they'd like to be my friend too."  To this day in the twenty first century, social networks have done nothing but grow. From SixDegrees.com and Friendster going out of style by 2002, they have inspired other sites like MySpace , Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Whether these go out of style or not there will always be an improvement or a new and better network to show your life off on. In todays world we thrive on stalking on other peoples lives; celebrities, friends, people we want to be and people we hate. Reputation is the most important asset you can have today, being able to show off your identity and what is great about you, can obtain more friends on social media. On the flip side you can also find a career in cites liked LinkedIn, which are specially made profiles about experience.

## References

1. Horrigan, John B. “Online Communities.” Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech, 31 Oct. 2001, www.pewinternet.org/2001/10/31/online-communities/.
2. Lake, Matt. “Timeline: The Evolution of Online Communities.” Computerworld, Computerworld, 15 July 2009, www.computerworld.com/article/2526581/networking/timeline--the-evolution-of-online-communities.html.
3. “Becoming More Accessible on Social Networks.” *Kikolani*, 17 Apr. 2013, kikolani.com/becoming-accessible-social-networking-social-media/.

1. ↑ www.pewinternet.org/2001/10/31/online-communities/
2. ↑ https://www.computerworld.com/article/2526581/networking/timeline--the-evolution-of-online-communities.html