IDENTITIES AND VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES WITHIN THE NETWORK OF MULTIFACED RELATIONS

Community has been a very important social phenomenon in which people have been involved for centuries. In addition to this, when today's technological opportunities are considered, many factors related to human take place in the internet and virtual world, beyond the real life. This situation has led the concept of virtual community became usable. Internet is not only a network that connects millions of computers all around the world, but also an environment which connects millions of people and thousands of social groups. In this environment, people's chance of accessing to whatever knowledge they want, forming different cultural and social groups and the tools that enable people to form various sharings and connect each other is expressed as social network. Social networks which are available on the internet are not only a media environment but also they are discursive environments in which individuals both actively form a community with each other and construct their identities. The search of identity and in parallel with these researches on identity have become one of the most important topics of the last century. Even, it has been suggested that the search for identity is as powerful as techno-economic change in shaping the history in a globalized world. Despite this, in our country it is possible to say that this subject is usually viewed in a rather superficial level from an ideological/political perspective.