Howard Rheingold’s essay on “The Virtual Community” claims that cyberspace can change how we experience events in the real world. People are influenced by their interaction with the virtual community. Those who normally do not keep in contact with friends from high school in reality can do so online by simply posting on their Facebook, using Instant Messaging, or sending an e-mail. Computer-mediated communications (CMC) make these forms of communication possible. In fact, virtual communication is no longer limited to written conversations. Programs such as Skype enable people to hold a conversation computer screen-to-screen. Rheingold uses CMC to do video conferencing. Use of virtual communities has become a part of his daily life to the extent that the distinction between his “online” and real self is small. It is possible to blur the two in terms of which conversations occurred online or offline. When using video conferencing or video chat, you are behaving like your “real” self but using CMC to facilitate it. However, with forms of CMC that do not require that component, it is easy to create an “online” self because no one initially knows your identity.

The technology that makes virtual communities possible can be used “intelligently and deliberately by an informed population” (RDC 275). We constantly invent creative means of delivering information digitally via broadcasting websites such as YouTube. According to Rheingold, “big money will find a way to control access to virtual communities” as it has done in the past (265). Thus, we must take advantage of the freedom of the Net now, before these “big boys seize it, censor it, meter it, and sell it back to us” (265). It is all too easy for monopolies to profit from repackaging products that consumers must buy as a result of limited access. Since no one controls it yet, the Net enables ordinary citizens to gain enormous leverage. Though this is useful for people to do things they cannot normally do in reality, it is dangerous if a person deliberately harms others using social or political leverage.

In “The Virtual Barrio,” Guillermo Gomez-Pena expands on Rheingold’s critique of the power of big money:

“Capitalists” were rootless corporate men who utilized mass media to advertise useless electronic gadgets, and sold us unnecessary apparatuses which kept us both eternally in debt and conveniently distracted from “the truly important matters of life.”(282)

Consumers love new technology because they are innovative and amusing. It is not a matter of needing but wanting. “Capitalists” have discovered ways to advertise their products through traditional and creative methods. Children fall for these enticing advertisements because the gadgets look “cool.” In the world of advergaming, companies can brainwash kids into buying their products. Exciting games promoting their gadgets seduce the children, who continue to buy these unnecessary goods. By going online, you are more likely to purchase a product because you are exposed to it for a longer period versus watching a brief television ad. Furthermore, interacting with the product through an online game is more effective than mere visual exposure to it. Companies will continue to implement creative strategies to lure in consumers as long as our society encourages the purchase of unnecessary gadgets. We do not need iPods but they have overtaken our generation. What’s next?