What makes a community and does tech provide those things

Online communities: fact or farse We must ask ourselves one major question in the conversation about online vs/and In Real Life communities. The first thing is that we must decide whether or not we would define a community as a group of individuals that are working to together in an effort to achieve a common goal or just a passing association of individuals. Both exist but personally, I do not consider people trolling one another in an effort to be counter-productive a community. So a lot of spaces on sites like Reddit or 4chan that exist primarily as a source of online griefing would be realized in reality as just a room of people facing their respective walls, screaming as loud as they can in an effort to only out-scream the other people in the room. But that being said, places like crowd funding websites and even forums that exist to create a better understanding of other's opinions, despite whether or no not they share your viewpoint, are what I would consider a community. Now I know that sounds like I'm saying that the only way a community can exist is by creating a "kum ba yah" circle, holding hands and swaying while someone else almost know how to play the song on the guitar, but discourse is only productive if all parties are willing to at least listen. I have had hundreds of perfectly constructive conversations and heated debates with people who would otherwise be diametrically opposed to me, but we were able to interact with civility because we mutually respected each other's opinions and, more importantly, their humanity. A community can come in many shapes and sizes, but what is true is that when we recognize each other's personal soveriegnty over themselves we, as humans, can create communities virtually anywhere.