Keeping in touch

Wikipedia defines an online community as a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as newsletters, telephone, email, online social networks or instant messages rather than face-to-face, for social, professional, educational or other purposes. After reading this definition I realized that I am an active participant of an online community that I share with all my friends from back home.
After our freshman year of college one of my friends decided to set up an email listserv for my entire group of friends, this way if one of us had something to say to everyone we could just send an email rather than having to tell everyone individually. This utilization of the internet has been very helpful and convenient over the past 3 years. At least once a week I receive an email from one of my friends with funny stories, websites I should check out or even just updates about how their lives are going. Keeping in touch with all my friends can be very difficult, but our listserv makes it extremely easy for all my friends to stay in touch and to know what's happening in eachothers lives. No matter how busy I may be I always have time to write a quick email, whereas if I had to talk to each of my friends individually it would be much more difficult to stay in touch.
The listserv I share with my friends is a great thing becuase it helps us maintain our relationships no matter where in the world we might be. I have friends that go to college all over the country and many who have studied abroad in the past. Without the internet and our listserv it would be very easy for them to lose touch, but with our listserv I can go a month without talking to a friend personally and still feel like we talk all the time. Our listserv also helps us maintain our friendships and cohesiveness. When we all return home for the holidays it feels as if we have been together the whole time because we have been communicating as a group and not just individually. We can get together and talk about things that happened to us at school as if everyone had actually been there to witness them. This makes us all feel closer to one another and helps us maintain the same type of status that we did in high school when we all used to hang out together every day. This way there is no catching up to do when we see eachother. Without our listserve it would take so much time to catch up with one another that by the time we were all caught up the vacation would probably be over already.
I am very grateful for the online community that I am a part of. It gives me the convenience and flexibility to share what I want with a large amount of people without sacraficing valuable time that I could be committing to schoolwork. When college is over and everyone is back home we will likely disband the listserv, but once everyone moves away again it will be an extremely valuable tool so that as the years go by we all stay in touch and maintain the closeness that we already have for so many years.

Wellman, Barry and Gulia, Melina. Net Surfers Don't Ride Alone: Virtual Communities as Communities. August 1997. http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/netsurfers/netsurfers.pdf.

Various. (6 October, 2008). Virtual Community. Retrieved 13 October, 2008, from Wikipedia Web site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_communities