Virtual Teaching and Learning in Middle Eastern Politics

A virtual community is a “passage point for collections of common beliefs and practices that united people who were physically separated. Virtual communities sustain themselves by constantly circulating those practices.”1 Communities are no longer restricted to particular spaces but transcend override spaces. Their reach is infinitely expanded. Communication is the key to virtual communities; and, as the techniques and technologies of communication have evolved, so have virtual communities. Ithiel de Sola Pool “presents his vision of a new world resulting from the social, political, and cultural consequences of communications technology.”2 de Sola Pool’s last contribution to the literature on communications and society is a presentation of the idea of the virtual community by defining the unifying beliefs and practices as information. Harlan Cleveland, former President of the American Political Science Association, echoes de Sola Pool: “the ultimate purpose of all knowledge is to organize things or people, arrange them in ways that make them different from the way they were before.3 Howard H. Frederick argues that world public opinion transcends the old boundaries, placed on public opinion, the boundaries of states. Frederick provides two of examples of the explosion of communication creating a particular type of virtual community, an informatio