Editorial

摘要

The term 'community' suggests full commitment and trust among its members. This special issue illustrates that a community is not that communal as the term suggests. Private relations will always be stronger than the sense of collective membership. This special issue targets the junction between the social and the individual. However, it is clear to read from trends like 'sharing', 'open source', 'creative commons' and 'crowd-sourcing/funding' that the internet inherently stimulates to lower the borders between territories. Its effect is that web-citizens meet a large variety of options, tastes, cultures and diversity in mentality as well. The question in this special issue is whether this contextual given also affects human sentiments like tolerance in learning, respect for privacy, gender, ethnic background, etc.? Intuitively, the authors in this field, they expect that similar to the transition for rural to urban communities, the internet infrastructure will promote new aspects of mentality and sentiment. We may say that 'life on the web' is still in its infancy; we still live in the digital country-side. But now and then we take a modernised train and after one hour trip stare into cosmopolitan boulevards, without understanding how citizens can live and survive there. We see the fluorescent commercials on top of the buildings, but have no idea what they refer to. We see the extravaganza of exquisite shops and supermarkets, we feel the hot air escaping from its gaping doors, not understanding what to get from it other than frightening high prices. This is the psychology of us visiting web gatherings nowadays: as villager we see the city as decadent and obsolete. At the same time, back in our village we see that already the local grocery transformed into a convenient store..... In other words: yes, web communities may seem to be redundant compared to face-to-face communication. However, looking back from before the radio and telephone arrived, the same parallel can be seen: no societal need for tele-communication was felt before Marconi and Bell opened the technical option. Once the radios and telephones arrived, they did not just conquer its added value; it also transformed humans and societies to make use of it. Similar with social media and web communities; it will be very hard to imagine how we managed to live without them quite soon.