Developing Regional Communities in Turkey

Virtual Communities (VC), as defined by Rheingold (2000), are the social groups formed in the cyberspace when enough people carry on public discussions long enough and with sufficient human feeling. VC enabled by the ICT technologies are formed in two ways. Either their members can be actively engaged with each other and tightly coupled in e-mail discussion and communication groups, or they can be the passive observers of the Web pages and thereby loosely coupled with other members of the community.