The virtual Internet community
It can be seen from the foregoing discussion that speculation on network
communities can attain quite theological dimensions. At precisely the
time that Alain Touraine made his sociological claim that social systems,
as systems, no longer exhibited transcendent ‘universal unifying values’,
some cyber-utopians wanted to point to the Internet as providing just
such values. However, this is not true of a growing body of empirical and
analytic research which has been conducted from the mid-1990s onwards
and which has sought to unravel the specific forms of connection and
bond which the Internet makes possible. Such research can be divided
into two clear methodologies and premises. One body of research merely
extends demographic sociology to include questions about Internet use
(Anderson and Tracey, 2001; Di Maggio et al., 2001, Howard et al., 2001;
Nie and Erdring, 2000; Wellman, 1999), whereas the other form of
research focuses exclusively on Net communities in their various forms
(e.g. Baym, 1998, 2000; Rafaeli and Sudweeks, 1997; Smith, 1997). The
demographic researchers proceed much more from a behaviourist
‘impacts’ paradigm, asking questions like ‘are on-line identities consis-
tent with off-line identities?’, whereas the virtual community studies are
interested in the sui generisqualities of the new medium, exploring
whether a new medium allows for new ways of behaving and new iden-
tities which bear no relation to, or cannot be meaningfully compared to,
off-line identity.
For these latter researchers, ‘virtual’ does not mean immaterial and
spiritual. Virtual communication might be disembodied, but it has a definite
architecture and technical infrastructure which is material – a network
rather than a matrix.
Rather than run headlong into announcing a mythical universalism,
the empirical research on Net communities has taken the Internet as a
model for specifying a set of social dynamics which can be distinguished
from either ‘broadcast’ (as the first media age) or face-to-face communities.
Certainly, it is easy to differentiate ‘virtual Internet communities’
from face-to-face communities. They are, as in Dempsey’s second type of
community discussed above, made up of persons who do not necessarily
know one another but have a sense of belonging together (Foster, 1997:
24). And the fact that such communities are entirely disembodied in no
way lessens the solidarity of such a community in the Durkheimian sense.
Despite the fact that audience communities are able to constitute a
mediated ceremony, as we shall see, the term ‘virtual community’ has
only attached itself to the Internet. Clearly, audience communities qualify
as ‘disembodied communities’ in which persons still feel a sense of ‘belong-
ing together’. We saw, however, in Table 5.3 in the previous chapter how
this feeling of ‘belonging together’ is mediated by different agents (tech-
nical infrastructure: Internet; and technical plus human infrastructures:
broadcast). Both Internet and broadcast also exhibit some of the qualities of194 COMMUNICATION THEORYHolmes-06.qxd 2/15/2005 1:03 PM Page 194