The Pureness of an Embodied Community

Our final project is the creation of an active lifestyle living center for retired citizens. The creation of this community has very little relevance to Webb’s article, as it deals with aspects of virtual communities and our community is a pure embodied community.
Webb's article deals with the culture of the avatars that are used to depict the members of a virtual community. Avatars are not a part of our embodied community because the members of the community will be represented by their actual physical appearance because they will physically interact with each other, as opposed to interaction via an electronic medium. This gives each member of the community an accurate depiction of the other members of the community rather than a depiction that can be altered to fit what the other members of the community want to be view as. Webb’s article also focuses on the difference of communication in a virtual community as opposed to an embodied community. Communication of a virtual community can often be offensive and vulgar because members of the community often have an anonymous identity to protect who they are. However, in an embodied community the communication is between those who know each other, and therefore, language and communication is often kept more civil and polite.
The idea of members of a virtual community being able to hide their true identity gives virtual communities a sense of almost being fake because the members of the community are not themselves, but in fact are merely representations of people who do not exist. This makes the community bond between the members to be weaker because they are not sharing everything about themselves. Our purely embodied community gives all of the members the chance to be part of a community will people who they know and can physically interact with. By staying in the realm of embodied communities our group was able create a community that does not have problems with people hiding their identity, or problems with the members acting in such a way that they would not at if their true identity were know. The embodied community we have created is much more pure and strong than any community that can have anonymous members.