Riddle me this (or just answer the questions)

If you leave a comment on this post, you agree to be quoted in an article I’m writing about online and offline communities for PresenTense. If you aren’t Jewish then answer the questions for whatever sort of online community you are a part of, pretty please.

The big questions the editors want me to answer are: How do online Jewish communities function differently than offline communities? How has the online sense of Jewish community changed what it means to be a community? How do online Jewish communities transition offline into the “real world”?

1. What was your first online (Jewish) community? What did it do for you? What was it like?

2. What online (Jewish) community to you identify most with? What’s it like? What do you get out of it?

3. Have you ever met your online (Jewish) friends in the real world? What was that like?

4. How does your online (Jewish) life compliment or complicate your offline (Jewish) life?

5. Do you have an online life that you consider separate from your (Jewish) life?

6. A professor I met in Israel this summer said that Judaism and the internet were completely incompatible, how would you respond to him?