Abstract
As social beings, we strive to obtain a sense of community in our lives. Place-based communities have been seen as the main source sense of community. Today, however, place-based communities do not always meet this need. Individuals may feel isolated and alienated within their place-based communities. Large cities, by virtue of their size alone, may not offer the idealized sense of community associated in people’s minds with small villages and towns. What are the alternatives? One arena in which people are experimenting with new forms of community is cyberspace. Communication technology advances have enabled the establishment of virtual environments where geographically dispersed individuals interact to form communities.
This paper is partially based on a paper by the same title presented at the 6th National Australian and New Zealand Community Psychology Conference: Promoting Action Research and Social Justice, Toodyay, Western Australia, 7th–9th June 1996. We thank Dr. Ros Morrow and Dr Chris Sonn for their comments on an early draft of this paper.
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Roberts, L.D., Smith, L.M., Pollock, C. (2002). Mooing Till the Cows Come Home. In: Fisher, A.T., Sonn, C.C., Bishop, B.J. (eds) Psychological Sense of Community. The Plenum Series in Social/Clinical Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0719-2_12
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