ABSTRACT
Print capitalism has long allowed people to imagine “community” across space and time.1 Yet, within the past two decades the Internet has enabled geographically and socially isolated individuals to imagine communities on an even larger scale and density. Although some skeptics assume that Internet surfers passively traverse pre-ordained structures, such a view obscures the ways in which Internet users commandeer this new technology for their own needs and desires.2 In addition, such a perspective obscures the fact that some of the people most active online would find it difficult, if not impossible, to find each other offline. In this chapter,3
I explore how HIV-positive individuals in Japan use the Internet in order to share information, seek support, and socialize with other members of a highly stigmatized group. Like all communities, the HIV community is neither homogeneous nor monolithic. While HIV patients share the same illness, they differ in almost every other conceivable way: age, occupation, sexual orientation, and socio-economic status are but a few of the most obvious distinctions. Such diversity must be taken into account, while also recognizing that many People with AIDS (PWAs)4 share an intense desire to meet each other outside of the hierarchical structures to which they are routinely subjected. In contrast to the traditional mass media, which usually reduces HIV/AIDS to a mere “spectacle,”5 the Internet allows PWAs to gain some measure of control over how they are represented and to establish horizontal ties which foster a sense of solidarity, rather than exclusion. At the same time, the diversity of HIV-related sites is testimony to the different issues around which PWAs are mobilizing.
