There can be no doubt that social interaction on the Internet can have cultural characteristics, and can foster a sense of community among participants. This sense originates in the idea of communities constructed through imagination, argued by Anderson and Cohen.
The manifestation of cultural characteristics such as symbolic communication, language and shared ideology exist as a direct result of the uniquely human construction of the network.
After considering the evidence provided by other researchers, and through my own research, I find myself in general agreement with Elizabeth Reid. While her research was limited only to Internet Relay Chat, it is my opinion that her conclusion could also be broadly applied to all types of community found on the Internet. She concluded that IRC should be considered a post-modern phenomenon because it deconstructs social boundaries, and enables participants to construct their own community and culture.
I believe that this is partially true. My research experiences and opinion lead me to conclude that while participants in electronic communities are certainly ‘doing things differently’, there is no convincing argument to suggest that they are living a separate, unique culture. However, they are certainly participating in social environments on-line which affect their perception and reality of social interaction off-line. In my view, the fundamental fact that their bodies remain in the physical world, no matter where their attention, self or ‘I’ may wander, means that they cannot separate from the embodied culture which they live.
One frequent question asked by social theorists is whether one can be a member of two cultures or communities simultaneously. It seems that the better question might be to ask whether in fact one could avoid belonging simultaneously to more than one culture or community.
In the context of the Internet, the answers to these questions are, respectively, yes, and no. By considering the individual to be the hub of their particular and unique culture and community relationships - their culture of one - the anthropologist on-line can only gain by concentrating research efforts in the ‘places’ where individuals overlap, and the ways in which personal and social forms of culture and community are constructed in such non-places.
The Internet and Cyberspace constitute a fascinating new anthropological field, and one which merits much deeper investigation. The blatant sociality of the medium and the effects that this has on other aspects of social interaction, as well as the controlled and limited forms of anthropological phenomena such as ethnogenesis, can help anthropologists to understand more about the need for such social characteristics, and the ways in which culture is manifested in limited media. Such a focus can only be beneficial to the discipline.
Turkle argues, in conclusion, that the investigation of virtual worlds, sociality and identities inevitably raises “fundamental questions about our communities and ourselves … [a]lthough it provides us with no easy answers, life on-line does provide new lenses through which to examine current complexities”.[1]
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