Virtual Encounters: Community or Collaboration on the Internet?

THE AUTHOR EXAMINES THE WAYS IN WHICH VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS ARE rewriting traditional Western ideas of community. Founded on assumptions about consensus, rationality, and collectivity, the traditional definitions do not translate well to virtual spaces like the Internet. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theory of rhizomatics provides a conceptual framework for the author’s discussion of how social practice on the Internet is founded instead on radical encounter and collaboration. As a space of diversity and fragmentation rather than normative, unitary social formation, the Internet is a fundamentally postmodern construct.