** My Intellectual Flakes **

The hybrid or blended community has been a question dwelling in my head for a while. I am quite interested in the relationship between the online and physical part of the community. The term “online community” is too general. I like hybrid community better since it emphasized the complex online/offline relationship. Essentially, there are two types of hybrid community:

• A physically community extending to online space
• An online community extending to physical sphere

The type of hybrid community to my interest is the former one. These type of hybrid communities stem from the physical s  are drastically different from the online communities. First, the use of anonymous or false identity is rare. Since people already know each other in real life, the online identity basically mirrors their real ones.

I like the way to conceptualize online/offline relationships as the online and offline representations of a community. Then, the question arises here is how the online and offline representations of a community interplay? Are they overlapping or alternating each other?

Some envisages the hybrid community as two parallel layers of a community. These two layers are not independent of each other, but related. However, online representation is not just a copy or analogue of the material world. The virtual world could afford new ways of representations.