- Summary
- Contents
- Subject index
Like its predecessor, the best-selling CyberSociety, published in 1994, Cybersociety 2.0 is rooted in criticism and analysis of computer-mediated technologies to assist readers in becoming critically aware of the hype and hopes pinned on computer-mediated communication and of the cultures that are emerging among Internet users. Both books are products of a particular moment in time, and serve as snapshots of the concerns and issues that surround the burgeoning new technologies of communication. After a brief introduction to the history of computer-mediated communication, each essay in this volume highlights specific cyber societies and how computer-mediated communication affects the notion of self and its relation to community. Contributors probe issues of community, standards of conduct, communication, means of fixing identity, knowledge, information, and the exercise of ...
Chapter 8: Dissolution and Fragmentation: Problems in On-Line Communities
Dissolution and Fragmentation: Problems in On-Line Communities
The proliferation of virtual communities in recent years has resulted in the creation of new social spaces, and new forms of interaction and identity formation. While virtual communities have been the focus of much research, the majority of these assessments have left many assumptions unarticulated and have avoided the question of what it means to fail in cyberspace as a virtual self and as a virtual community.
Those failures are the chief subject of this chapter. The histories written of a number of on-line communities catalogue a variety of communicative failures: incidents when breakdown in the ability of the community to collaborate disrupted the social fabric. In examining instances of virtual ...
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