Thick and Thin Communities
According to Giddens ( 1990 ), virtuality is a product of modernity that constantly
‘displaces’ individuals from the places and everyday life with which they were
familiar: individuals are re-located in different contexts, in which “familiarity and
estrangement are recombined”. Similarly, Rheingold ( 2000 )—to our knowledge the
fi rst author having introduced the concept of virtual community —describes this
concept connected to the Internet as an alternative reality, with capacities to transform
society (Delanty 2003 ). When referring to virtual communities, he only considers
non-existing offl ine communities, exclusively rooted in cyberspace. This
means that, for him, virtual communities are ‘communities on the Net’: they do not
have their counterpart in everyday life. Even further, the downfall of communities
can be compensated by a virtual one (Delanty 2003 ). In this vision, if virtuality is
the opposite of reality, it follows that a virtual community on the Web cannot be
regarded as the same as—or even similar to—a traditional offl ine community.
According to Zhang and Jacob ( 2012 ), because the online environment can only
provide the illusion of reality and because a virtual community exists online, it is
not part of the real world and thus cannot be understood or even discussed as a real
world community might be.
However, a different and interactionist perspective about virtuality and reality is
provided by Castells ( 1996 ), who includes the concept of virtuality as a part of the
real world. New communities like virtual ones are built out of networks of social
actors (individuals, families or social groups) (Delanty 2003 ). In our global network
society, spatial communities are replaced by spaceless ones in the virtual space
constituted by the Web. Castells affi rms that “localities become disembodied from
their cultural, historical, geographical meaning, and reintegrated into functional networks,
or into image collages, inducing a space of fl ows that substitutes for the
space of places”. Social relations are not changed by the global network society
itself; rather, by the individualism inherent in society.
To sum up, in both authors’ visions, communities can be defi ned as personalized
communities embodied in networks and centered on the individual. But where
Rheingolds refers to virtual communities as thick , Castells would defi nitely speak of
thin communities. With ‘thin’ we refer to a virtual reality that is an addition to the
offl ine reality, whereas ‘thick’ can be seen as an equivalent of the offl ine reality. Thick communities are often composed of strong ties : frequent contact between
people who personally know each other. Weak ties are often related with thin
communities: they are online ties between persons socially and physically distant,
not bound into work structures or circle of friends.