What makes a community online?

When we think community we often think of the people we interact with on a daily basis, however when we take the leap into online interactions do we consider these online beings as community members are more like short interactions with strangers and not a true community. I personally believe we've all taken the leap and have some sort of standing in the online world either from social media sites such as Facebook to picture, text, and video sharing medias such as Instagram, Youtube, and Twitter. A community requires a gathering of people for a single or shared ideal or thought. All these medias online accomplish this very well such as Facebook allow people to become friends and have actual interactions be it sending requests to Candy Crush or Farmville. With the ability to leave comments and express one's feelings to complete strangers online these medias online has brought us all together as this whole online community. In the end as long as there are people in the world going online and interacting with one another it can be said that online communities do exist however, without the human aspect of it social medias such as Facebook become an empty space mere nothingness and it is our actions that create these online communities.

Disintermediation .. what do you mean you don't need me

Disintermediation is when technology solutions remove the need for a service provider to act as a middle man. To a point it does make sense as technology becomes better certain position becomes obsolete just as drafting software was created engineers and architects no longer needed drafters to create finalized blue prints and do to changing times drafting became a dying career. As we enter the next 20 years of technology we can expect even more disintermediation to occur. As scary and devastating it is as technology becomes more advanced and less human interaction is needed what are we left to do? are we leading towards a vegetable like state where all actions are inputed into our minds to emulate the sensation of living much like the world in the movie, The Matrix, or are we leading to a world where we slowly become more machine like and live as cyborgs. In the end it feels we are relying on technology too much, and could ultimately lead to our own downfall.
   

Dinosaurs to the Dot.Bomb

Companies rushed to the opportunity to run businesses online during this time frame of the Dot.com sensation. Nearly omnipresent no one foresaw an end to the limitless potential of the Dot.com period however this arrogant outlook led to it's own demise as companies began to declare bankruptcy, which caused certain sites to vanish from the virtual plane such as pets.com as mentioned in class. Overall this raise and fall was compared to toy dinosaurs which illustrated how the dinosaurs were the dominate beings, their lacking ability to evolve to changing times caused them to go extinct just like the companies that fell into bankruptcy.