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T he Internet has undergone tremendous transformations since the introduction of the Mosaic browser in 1993 by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Mosaic, the precursor to Netscape, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and other graphical browsers, opened up the Internet in ways that were never imagined by most of us. Use of the Internet has exploded over the past decade, with penetration in the United States estimated as high as 70 percent. One of the auxiliary consequences of the explosion of the Internet has been the radical transmutation of our conceptions of sociability. The Internet has become the site not only for the composition and recomposition of new, intriguing, Internet-specific identities; it has also given vent to the recrudescence of hitherto premodern social formations such as the tribe and all the consequences that come with this. Electronic tribes have existed since well before the present Internet explosion. Personally, I was involved in an e-tribe, or virtual community , in 1986, nearly a decade before the introduction of Mosaic, which started the present revolution in communication. The e-tribe I was part of at that time was a group of computer and media enthusiasts who connected to each other via a primitive bulletin board system, which ran on a repurposed computer that lived in the dresser drawer of one of the members of the group. I am not sure anyone knows the exact date that online tribes began, but we do know that the WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link) began in 1985 and continues to this day. The beginnings of the WELL, the development and the problems encountered in its evolution, are well documented in Howard Rheingold’s The Virtual Community. INTRODUCTION Where Is the Shaman? jim parker 2 Electronic Tribes Even these early efforts at building community on the Internet are well over ten years after the first introduction of e-mail on ARAPANET and other precursors to the Internet. One of the interesting questions addressed by this volume is, what is an electronic tribe? What is the difference between a tribe and community? And what is “virtual” about these concepts? Webster’s online dictionary has a definition of “virtual” that includes existing on a computer network. In the chapters that follow, you will be exposed to all sorts of electronic tribes, those that exist in e-mail lists with very few members, those that follow the more traditional format of a message board that can be found at the WELL, and even tribes that are less formal than the e-mail lists but use the Internet to accomplish the goals of the group. At the upper end of participation, the reader will encounter MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games), where literally millions of people can interact with each other online. When I think of tribes, I think of the tribes I encountered in the media of my childhood. These tribes could be either Native Americans or the tribes of Africa. Certainly, to me, a component of this type of tribe was the interdependence among members of these groups. They were often isolated by factors such as geography, language (though, of course, on TV and in the movies everyone spoke English), and dress, and differed from other tribes or larger groups in terms of religion, housing, and worldview. The reader will come away from this book with a better understanding of what a tribe is. How does a tribe differ from a community or a culture? The authors in this book present a variety of approaches to the concept of tribe and explore the ramifications of these approaches. As the title suggests, the work explores the implications of Internet communication. Just what are we moving toward in terms of human interaction ? Is the Internet bringing us closer together or leading us to lives of isolation where our only connection to other human beings is through the pixels on a computer screen? In many ways the Internet seems to be taking us closer to Marshall McLuhan’s Global Village, but just what will that Global Village look like? Will the humans come to a greater understanding of each other, developing relationships that span the globe, overcoming the barriers created by cultures, languages, and distance, or will we retreat to tribes of like-minded individuals who, given the marvels of technology, will find it easier to contact each other? Do we reach out and explore new worlds or retreat into imaginary worlds of our own creation? Certainly, we live in...

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