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3 I ride my bicycle briskly along the gray streets of Ha Noi toward its town center. A young Vietnamese American graduate student in my second session of long-term field work in Viet Nam, I head first, as usual, to the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Aside from using their resources for research, I also frequently access the Internet with their sole computer. [It is 1996, one year before Viet Nam established its first permanent international Internet connection, so Internet cafés are nonexistent and home computers exceedingly rare, let alone ones with Internet access.] This one computer is my only connection to the information superhighway. One of the first things I routinely do is check postings from a Usenet-based virtual community named Vietnam Forum (VNForum).1 I and the other international members joined VNForum because of our common interest in Viet Nam. On this particular day I come across an article written by an overseas Vietnamese high school teacher discussing Hồ Chí Minh’s life. The teacher’s analysis is thought provoking and evenhanded, a rare state for postings because anticommunist sentiment remains high among the exile community, causing most Vietnamese Americans to criticize the former leader of communist Viet Nam mercilessly in their writing. A week after reading this post, I am taken aside by one of my handlers2 and presented with a printout of the Hồ Chí Minh piece along with some other random postings on VNForum. “Problematic” portions of the essay in question are highlighted in yellow for my perusal, and my interrogators demand that I explain myself. I simply say, “I did not write that,” which is true. Since it is an unacceptable answer, I am threatened with fines and even deportation. (Field notes 1996b) Social Transformations from Virtual Communities 66 Chapter 3 T he event described in the passage above speaks to the obstacles that many in Viet Nam and in diaspora experienced in their initial attempts to connect with one another via the Internet. Creating lines of communication and sharing ideas between Viet Nam and its diaspora had been challenging in the decades following the Viet Nam War. Isolation lessened with developments in information communication technology (ICT) beginning in the 1960s that evolved into the proliferation of Internet access in the 1990s (Abbate 1999).3 From the early 1990s, ICT aided transnational connections and communitybuilding activities, allowing dialogue where none had previously existed between Vietnamese Americans, Vietnamese nationals, and other interested persons.The Internet gave rise to our current “network society” shaped by religion, cultural upbringing, political organizations, and even social status (Castells 1996). This chapter examines the first of these transnational virtual communities relating to Viet Nam, VNForum.4 An influential, moderated Usenet list, VNForum consisted mostly of overseas Vietnamese intellectuals and professionals as well as international scholars and Vietnamese government affiliates.5 VNForum developed modestly in 1992 through the work of its Vietnamese American founders, Hoanh Tran, a lawyer, and Tin Le, a computer programmer . They facilitated transpacific exchanges, for example, providing training support in the United States for some of the first Vietnamese computer science engineers. These engineers subsequently set up companies with computer servers in Viet Nam and helped the early Vietnamese information technology (IT) community link to the rest of the world. In addition to building the virtual community through friendly postings and online networking projects, members of VNForum promoted real-world social and political change in Viet Nam. As Barry Wellman sees it, “Internet communication has benefited from and facilitated the social transformation of work and community, from groups in little boxes to globalized, ramified, branching social networks” (Wellman 2002, 95). This chapter discusses a notable sociopolitical movement that emerged from VNForum, the No-Nike labor rights campaign. This movement organized via the Internet and collaborated with the Vietnamese government and overseas Vietnamese for labor rights. It was one of the first acts of international cooperation among these parties. Additionally , we look at how VNForum strategically evolved into Vietnam Business , another virtual community. Having more Vietnamese representation than VNForum, VNBiz better represents the diversity of Vietnamese political thought and the transformations taking place within the country. Finally, this chapter tells how VNForum’s cofounder Hoanh Tran, joined a legion of bloggers and used the Internet to reach Vietnamese through the creation of Đọt Chuối Non (http://dotchuoinon.com).6 This happened during Viet Nam’s aggressive crackdown on dissident bloggers within its borders. Early events in the development of ICT in Viet Nam, the...

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