Social Networking

A virtual communityi or online community is a group of people that primarily interact via some form of mechanism such as letters, telephone, email or Usenet rather than face to face. If the mechanism is a computer network, it is called an online community. Virtual and online communities have also become a supplemental form of communication between people who know each other primarily in real life. A computer-mediated community (CMC) uses social software to regulate the activitiesi of participants. Significant socio-technical change has resulted from the proliferation of Internet-based social networks.^[1]