In Fred Turner's, Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy article, he details the evolution of the online community and how it began with a small periodical publication and grew into social networking as we know it today with MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. The Whole Earth Catalog was a place for hippies in the 60s to exchange reviews on products and bits of information that related to their interests and ideals. This evolved to the WELL that would take this idea that lacked in the way of staying up to date and thrusting it into a world of instantaneous communication among users that were geographically distant from one another.
Another thing that came to my mind when reading this was how nowadays we have online forums where we post on topics of conversation and through these threads interact with one another on a certain idea. I draw on my own experience because before Facebook, the way I interacted with people that shared my own interests was on a Taking Back Sunday fan forum, where we would discuss our favorite albums, or deconstructing a song that was particularly powerful in the way of the lyrics and how the song was composed musically. The people on this forum were the mega-fans and certainly not those that would be considered fans by merely just listening to their latest single that they heard on the radio. The counterculture of the Taking Back Sunday fan base can be seen in the same relation as the users of the WELL in the 1980s, and it is that shared experience that drives online communities.
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