Resumen
This article states focuses on the role of asynchronous learning networks (ALN) as a virtual classroom. Despite lack of physical space, virtual facilities of an ALN allows students to exchange emotional support, information, and a sense of belonging. Computer-mediated communication can enable people with shared interests to form and sustain relationships and communities. Compared to communities offline, computer-supported communities. The Internet provides information and social support in both specialized and broadly based virtual communities. Due to its reduced social presence, the Internet will never replace face-to-face meetings for engendering and nurturing primary group relationships. It is possible to make friends, even close, personal friends, online, but it is less likely. There is no On the other hand, the Internet can provide emotional support, companionship, and a sense of belonging when real hugs are impossible.

Resumen
The developed world is in the midst of a paradigm shift in the ways people, organizations and institutions are connected to one another. The social system at work and home and elsewhere have moved from being bound up in hierarchically arranged, relatively homogenous, densely knit, bounded groups to being social networks. Unless hostilities following attacks on New York and the Pentagon near Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001 ultimately yield substantial domestic and global reorganization of the social order, this turn toward a networked society should continue. However, there is still a significant possibility that the global response to these attacks will lead to less mobility of people and goods and a general drawing back into the perceived safety of bounded groups. In a networked society, boundaries are more permeable, interactions are with diverse others, links switch among multiple networks and hierarchies are flatter and organizational structures more complex. People in networked societies live and work in multiple sets of overlapping relationships, cycling among different networks. INSET: Survey2000 and Other Data Sources.