Growing Personal Sphere and Online Communities

A public sphere is a well-structured process which creates the public opinion as a synthesis of individual thoughts acting for the common interest. The concept was given by Jurgen Habermas who defined it as "society engaged in critical public debate". Since the public sphere has gone through many changes over the years, now there is a growth in the Personal sphere where people, instead of interacting with society are more self-involved.

A personal sphere is one where one can truly express themselves. Individuals use it to have a secure space where he or she can present themselves however they want and social media through its virtual reality has made it a lot easier. It has given rise to individualism where people can be their true selves or whatever self they wish to portray on the social media network since they consider it their personal sphere. They seek only the knowledge they want. This can be seen in the form of personalized feeds on social media network.

Web communication has increased the personal sphere in the sense that each individual has their personalized feed, personalized apps and people generate personal content to reach others. Social Media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube etc., are a new communication field being used to communicate with the audiences to create online communities.

An online community is a virtual community where members interact with each other primarily via the Internet. Online communities have turned into a family of invisible friends for many people. 

An online community requires members to become a part of it through a particular system and share, discuss, communicate through chat rooms, forums or discussion boards. There are many ways to gather or join online communities and one can be a part of many online communities at the same time. Since the term community describes commonness, people who are part of these communities have something in common such as their belief system or a shared interest. Online communities bring similar people together so they can share information about events, discuss matters or innovate things together. An online community is also a part of a person’s personal sphere since it is through these online communities that one determines their virtual social circle. One has a choice over who they wish to associate with and who they do not.