ABSTRACT
Can people find community online in the Internet? Can relationships between people who never see, smell, touch, or hear each other be supportive and intimate?
The debate fills the Internet, the airwaves, and especially the print media. Enthusiasts outnumber critics, for as the prophet Jeremiah discovered millennia ago, there is more immediate reward in extolling the future than in praising it. Unfortunately, both sides of the debate are often Manichean, presentist, unscholarly, and parochial.
