Answer a few questions about community for me!

Hey guys! I decided to do my course project on MyFitnessPal as an online community..if anyone could help me out and don't mind sharing a little bit about your personal journey through the site I would really appreciate it! you can respond with a posting or message me privately if you prefer



The following are quotes are from two different scholarly works defining what a community is, after reading through them please answer the 3 three questions that come after.

“Millions of people on every continent also participate in the computer-mediated social groups known as virtual communities, and this population is growing fast..”

“People in virtual communities use words on screens to exchange pleasantries and argue, engage in intellectual discourse, conduct commerce, exchange knowledge, share emotional support, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, find friends and lose them, play games, flirt, create a little high art and a lot if idle talk. People in virtual communities do just about everything people do in real life, but we leave our bodies behind.”

“Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace.”
- Rheingold

“The most basic understanding of the community refers to individuals in immediate periphery of one another. In this model, direct physical contact provides a commonality for members of this group. The communities function as social groupings that perpetuate a shared identity through a commonly held value system.”

“The definition of community as conceived by Esposito is founded on the existence of a shared fundamental lack that binds individuals. The community is a totality of persons united not by ‘property or a possession’ but by the opposite, ‘a debt, a pledge, a gift that is to be given, and that therefore will establish a lack. The subjects of community are united by an ‘obligation’ (Esposito 2010: 6) Rather than something held in common, it is the integral absence of this that obliges the members of a community to be united.”
-Mueller



1. With the definitions of community that I’ve provided you with, would you consider MyFitnessPal to be an online community? Why or why not?

2.Have you established personal relationships with other members of MyFitnessPal?

3.Do you think being able to converse with other members of MyFitnessPal and having a sense of community helps you to achieve your fitness goals?