Monday, November 29, 2010 @ 12:34 AM
Question 1: Discuss the impact of the virtual communication in the dynamics and structure of real life community.
What is the meaning of virtual community? Virtual community can be define as a social network of individuals who interact through certain media and at the same time crossing over geographical and political boundaries in order to achieve and pursue mutual interests of goals. It is means that an individual who using certain media such as cell phone or internet to reach their goals like share their feeling and opinion, to make new friends, to get information, or etc.
Virtual communities are distinguished from many face-to-face communities by several factors, whose are open boundaries, relative anonymity of computer-mediated interaction, and possibility of great social diversity. Open boundaries means that there are no limitation in the virtual community, everybody can come together to get what they want without anybody care about where they come from and they can get any information or having interaction with people who is comes from others country. Relative anonymity of compute-mediated mean that people in the virtual world do not care about how you look like, while possibility of great social diversity means that people are more willing to accept you in the virtual world and there do not have any grouping such as racial, religion, gender and many others.
In the others hand, real life is a world that have boundaries, as an examples, people who live in Malaysia can only interact with Malaysian. Next, people in the real life will easily grouping people into different categories based on how a person look like, their racial, gender, religions or even their hair color. Since the differences between virtual communities and real life are existence, the communications of people in the virtual world will bring the impacts to the dynamics and structure of real life. Basically it can be divided into two types which is the positive and the negative of impact.
First of all, we discuss about the positive impact. Since the freedom of expression is more ‘popular’ in the virtual life and people are more willing to share in the virtual world, it caused an impact to our real life. People are used to be say whatever they want to say in the virtual world, so when they are coming back to the real life, it become a habit for them as well. They will more willing to share compare to the previous and they would like to express their opinion because it became a habit when they are having the virtual communication with others. This happened especially in the Asian because normally Asian will think that they should that too direct because it will hurt others, but after they having virtual communication online, their perception will change.
Next, we will talk about the negative impact which is people’s social or language skill will being diminished. Since people familiar to the virtual communication which is less require of social skills, people may lost their own social skill in the real life. Real life communication is different from the virtual communication, it require the social skill especially when you wants to know a stranger. The first step to know someone is very important in the real life because it decide whether can you proceed to next step or not in order to reach our purpose. Besides, virtual communication is just require people to type out the words, and people are usually using those ‘short form’ words to communicate, it will let people practiced as usual in real life especially teenagers. People in real life may just say out the short form word directly such as they will directly say out ‘ASAP’ instead of as soon as possible.
Apart from this, there have another negative impact as well. The impact is people will reject the real life communication when they are prefer the virtual communication more than the real life communication. Due to the virtual communication do not require social skill and it is more easily for people to communicate with each others, people may like to use virtual world to communicate and over time, people may become antisocial in real life. When ones think that virtual communication is better than real life communication, they will tend to fully depend on virtual communication even those they can tell the person face-to-face. It can become a social problem in the society but not just the individual if the situation is too serious.
As a conclusion, virtual communication brings impact to our real life in both positive and negative aspect. Virtual communication is bring a lot convenience to people in term of communication part, so people should appreciated it and use it wisely to avoid bring the negative consequences to our real life interactions.
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