Requiem for the virtual communities. Long life to the social networks!

Within a broader study, published in the book Drugs and Women, we conducted a research on the Internet, drugs and women. We have thus tried to go back to the same online communities explored for other research on drugs and the Internet, conducted 3 years ago. However, among the 7 communities analysed, we have observed online that most of those active in 2009 have become extinct. From the remaining websites and in those that have changed domain, various social media channels have been opened. This may mean that the discussions have moved to external social networks, and that websites or parts of websites dedicated to forum and not to other services were closed. Only two websites still have a virtual community: the first one provides content, information and services, but also a lot of pornography, while the other one has the structure and functioning, in fact, completely identical to a social network based on user-generated content. This seems to indicate the possible end of virtual communities as they were encoded by Rheingold [1994]. As already shown in the 2009 study, those who participate in discussion on a social network site could not perceive themselves as specific members of the community, but as users of social media that can provide them contact for other pages in which they intervene, to which they adhere or for which they click “I Like”. The user does not even have to looking for news or information but simply subscribe to the RSS feed to receive news on his custom web page or smartphone [Vergani 2009]. If the feeling of belonging disappears as geopolitical-identity phenomenon in more technologically integrated society, we might imagine that the same is happening to the "traditional" online communities. Finally, we wonder if in the web it is occurring something like a passage from mechanical solidarity community to organic solidarity society.