VIRTUAL COMMUNITY

The collocation ‘virtual community’ yokes together a hyper‐modern concept (the virtual, in the cyberspatial sense), and a more ancient one (community, in the sense of the quality of people holding something in common, and possessing a sense of common identity). In Keywords, British socialist intellectual Raymond Williams recounts that from the seventeenth century (in English) ‘there are signs of the distinction which became especially important from the nineteenth century, in which community was felt to be more immediate than society’. (Williams 1976 p.65) This sense of community as being somehow more organic, more human than externally imposed forms of social organization informs the discussion around the word in the context of the Internet, too. Williams concludes his essay on the word by remarking that