Community Rx: Add two friends twice a day. Preferably before meals

In Amy Bruckman's "A New Perspective on 'Community' and its Implications for Computer-Mediated Communication Systems," she offers a prototype-based perspective in defining a community. A perspective which, rather than labeling a "community" by its collocation or rules of inclusion and exclusion, are defined based on their similarities and differences in "focal" members. These focal members are the determining factor when categorizing community members or prototypes.
Bruckman goes on to disclose that cultural constructs can alter the way in which certain focal members are categorized. Within these prototypes are radial categories or genres that resist categorization to a central case; a central "mother" category and its radial categories of "stepmother, adoptive mother, birth mother etc."

Note:
Bruckman cites that with the advent of telecommunications and the automobile, sociologists have recognized that interpersonal ties can exist over a broad geographical distance.

This got me thinking of a couple of online communities like pillowfightday, meetup or thelek whose sole mission is to aggregate individuals to a specific geographic location. These sites aim to get its community members out of their computer chairs and into the real world. In class, Karen mentioned a study in which anti-social students who started using Facebook as a social outlet no longer felt alone and depressed but socially accepted and popular. In reality, their friend count had remained the same, zero. In fact, they were now more depressed then before having 700+ Facebook friends. Have we found our online communities’ enchanting promise for social proof to be just a bunch of smoke?