A Critical Review on Some Key Terms Taken from The Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold

This paper aims to review and re-examine some of the key terms taken from Howard Rheingold’s book The Virtual Community, which was published in 1998. Even though it has been 2 decades since this book was published, Rheingold’s ideas are affective and applicable to the current research on virtual community. As the first man who invents the term ‘virtual community’, Rheingold provides a number of significant contribution and offers more room for the further studies on virtual community, as well as virtual world. Rheingold’s foresight on the understanding of virtual community has great impact on the current studies of the virtual world.