Virtual Communities What does this mean? Rheingold (1993) defines virtual communities as "social aggregations that emerge from the [Internet] when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace" (p. 5). According to Rheingold and others, the notion of virtual community is not to be dismissed as a technological, cyberpunk fantasy in which people increasingly live in what Mills (1959) terms "second-hand worlds"; chained to their computer terminals, experiencing life through dehumanizing technology rather than through human contact and intimacy. People in