"A federal judge at a FCC workshop said "Community is like pornography, I don't know how to define it, but I sure know it when I see it." "When we talk about communities at FE we are not referring to any aggregate of people, but to the quality of communication among them," said M. Scott Peck (Both quotes from Community Building, Renewing Spirit and Learning in Business.)."
(http://www.fullcirc.com/community/definingcommunity.htm)
Successful online communities (as in real world communities) depend on the quality of relationships rather than the number of relationships. Maybe social networking assists in the identification of potential alliances whereas community building occurs through the distillation of the social networking process by reducing the potentials to only the most potent relationships.
One of Facebook’s admirable qualities is the overt privacy restrictions: you can’t be a person’s friend until they have been notified and have approved the friendship. All along the way, there are various encription and password barriers that prevent people from stalking others. In other words, there is a real respect for people’s privacy.
I don’t want lots of friends – I just want a small number of friends with whom I can enjoy wonderful friendships. The better the quality of these friendships the less time there is to develop additional friendships.
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