ABSTRACT
By the mid-1990s commentators such as Rheingold saw in computermediated communication (CMC) the chance for a new form of social interaction, in which relationships were not limited only to those people one physically met. Like-minded people in cyberspace could form ‘communities of shared interest’ and relationships that were unconstrained by time and space (Rheingold 1993a, 1996). Some also thought that the virtual environments within which CMC took place could be seen as small ‘societies’ in which new behaviours were emerging (Dibbell 1996, Reid 1994, 1996). For the Electronic Freedom Foundation (www.eff.org), CMC offered, and still offers, the potential for an effectively ungoverned hyper-individualistic liberal ‘e-society’.
