I Love Online Communities

I'm going to try and prevent this from getting too long, because I can honestly talk about online communities for hours. There is an absolute beauty in online communities that can be a little hard to see from the outside, but when you're a part of one it can be the best feeling in the world. I became a part of one (or two, sort of - there's a lot of overlap. I can count myself as part of either one community or about twenty. It depends how specific you feel like getting) at the beginning of high school, so I did what I count as the most important part of my growing up with it. Or something like that. [Note: This is potentially about to get very nerdy. I apologize in advance.]


I'm going to cut down the beginning fourteen years by saying one thing: In the beginning of everything, it was all because of Harry Potter. Yeah, I became a part of online communities because of a book series. It sounds a little silly that way, I guess. Anyway, when I was thirteen I found the community behind Harry Potter in first a podcast, and then a year later Wizard Rock, and through that I learned of a Youtube channel run by two brothers called The Vlogbrothers. The Vlogbrothers are a brother duo named John and Hank Green, who made several videos a week about a variety of topics - sometimes things like, yes, Harry Potter, sometimes they wrote songs about Quarks, sometimes they talked about the political situation in Nepal, sometimes about the financial crisis, and about a lot of other topics as well. Back in 2008, there were only about 300 or so of their videos online, so after about a few weeks (I'm a slow watcher) I was completely caught up. To someone who might have felt a little lost, here there were a group of people that didn't judge you for anything, unlike the outside world. This group of people referred to themselves as Nerdfighters, or people who are made out of awesome and fight to decrease worldsuck. (A longer, very good definition can be found here.)

Sure, you could only really interact through your computer screen, and maybe they lived on the other side of the globe, but here there were instantaneous friends in which you had things in common. And so instead of having this face to face interaction, we turned to Twitter and Facebook and Youtube and Tumblr and all over the corners of the Internet. The numbers of people grew and keeps growing. But online communities like this are fine with expansion, and no one would ever be turned away. It is because of my involvement in Nerdfighteria (as it's called) that I found myself spending so much time on Twitter and Youtube and online and why the Internet matters to me so much. I've spent a lot of time in various online circles and I find social media absolutely fascinating. Just the way that it's been able to bring people together is incredible, to unite people with one common purpose or lots of common purposes or just to make friends. There are many different aspects of social media - as some people have said, it's a good way to keep up with the news. But it's also a great way to stay active in online communities, to be able to talk to people in other countries who you can't text on a regular basis, and to spread information far and wide. Twitter has just been transcending the Internet to where it nows leaks out into regular life, and that has been helping these online communities leak out into regular life too and make a difference in the world in a way they might not have been able to before.

Why did I feel inspired to make this post? Today, the Vlogbrothers celebrated 1000 videos. 1000! I've been watching their videos regularly for four years now, have met them several times in real life, and I can definitely say that they (and online community as a whole) have changed my life. The Vlogbrothers have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, started a nonprofit, created conferences and brought together online community in real life, and have brought so many people together. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.A short montage video of the last five years is below:

This is just one online community. People have created other communities, off of this one and just on their own - or maybe a better phrase would be that they've come together. People from all over the world, people that may not have met in a million years before the invention and popularization of the Internet, have come together to raise money for things to believe in, to create beautiful art and music and writing, to share in the endless joy that is life. And honestly, without social media, the growth would probably never have happened.

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Listening to: It's Time by Imagine Dragons (seriously that is such an awesome band name)
Exams/Papers So Far: 0/1
Last Movie Watched: The Avengers