As the semester has gone on, I've questioned whether I consider this forum as a "community." According to Howard Rheingold, a virtual community is defined as "social aggregations that emerge from the net when enough people carry on...public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace." Initially, I considered this fan board to be a community because every now and then, the posters would acknowledge each other and ask each other questions.
Now after looking at the forum for over eight weeks, however, I noticed that very rarely do posters ever respond to one another's questions. Maybe this is because they don't know the answer, but it could also be because they don't read what others have to say and simply state their opinion without reading prior posts. It could be that my boards (Real Housewives of ATL and Real Housewives of BH) are special cases, and perhaps maybe other boards focused on different shows are more interactive.
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