What makes a community? Does tech provide?

Community:

1. a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.
2. a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.

Above is Google's definition of community, and that is easy enough to grasp when you think about it. So what makes a community is people living and working in the same place or have things in common. So when thinking about what makes a community we think about neighborhoods and cities due to people living in that commonplace and sometimes having characteristics in common. Now we should look at it in a way to figure out if technology provides that same sense of community. I will say that yes technology does provide that same sense, and here is a big example...Facebook. There are over a billion people that have a Facebook account these days and you all live online in the same place and there are many things that many different people have in common. That's why there are groups on facebook so that those who have an interest in hat wearing kittens can all talk about it. To me there is Reddit, in which you join subreddits, specific reddits, to talk about and enjoy things that you like and have in common with other people online. One day once VR starts getting more and more advance and common there will be literal communities that you can walk around and talk to people you see online. So to answer the overall question a community is a place where people live or work together and/or have common interests and have a feeling of belonging, and you can get that through technology online.

Convergence

Convergence is an interesting thing that I have learned about in my technology class. It is basically when two technologies sort of come together to perform similar tasks. These things have distinct attributes that are involved: data throughput, access, computational speed, and memory usage.

• Data throughput: it has to do with the rate at which things are processed and how fast data gets transferred to wherever.
• Access: How people are able to get a certain technology and whether or not they'll use it.
• Computational Speed: This one is interesting because you have to think about Moore's Law, in which it states that computational speed will double every two years or so. I feel that it may have slowed down on the every two years department but it still speeds up quickly.
• Memory usage: This one sometimes is hard to explain to some people. By that I mean explaining cloud storage is one that sometimes I'm not sure I understand but basically it combines wireless technologies with computer storage and that's really what convergence is about.

Dot.Com to Dot.Bomb

This is quite the interesting story, so much happened in such a short time. Well I'm not sure if 10 years is such a short amount of time but it didn't seem that long since I was a kid when all this happened. Regardless of the actual amount of time the Dot.Com to Dot.Bomb phenomenon was shocking to say the least. To me it was this way because out of nowhere there were all these companies that today some people including myself never heard of until they are told about it from somebody who was involved, and in my case my Professor.

There were companies such as Prodigy, which was owned by Sears and IBM. To me that's just a crazy combination to think about in today's age but they did exist, and craziest part was that they were worth more than Boeing. There were many cases of companies who were being overinflated due to all of this fake stock that was selling because nobody was really regulating the IPO's or paying attention to how much money these companies actually had. In theory all of these tech startups were worth millions and millions but in reality they didn't have hardly any of that. Although things were looking good in the online tech industry because everyone was getting overexcited about what was happening and their capabilities online the market became flooded with people trying to do the same thing. Then in about March 2000 the financial market in New York collapsed due to bad investments in all of these over hyped tech companies. Then nobody was wanting to buy into these companies and the market just was for the most part done with except for companies like Microsoft.