ABSTRACT
Amidst all the excitement and speculation over the Internet, hopes have been staked on technology’s capacity to revitalize civic and community life in America. The proliferation of online communities, in particular, has been regarded as a possible counterbalance to the trends of declining social capital observed by Robert Putnam in his book, Bowling Alone. Instead, the type of social connectedness that online communities may tend to cultivate bears a greater similarity to Philip Rieff’s vision of the therapeutic culture—that is, they may tend to enhance the well-being of the individual at the expense of the community. The shift that Rieff calls “the triumph of the therapeutic” describes an inversion of the relationship between an individual and a collective, or social institution. Since the impact of the “triumph of the therapeutic” is mainly located in the individual, any form of community—whether local or non-local, face-to-face or computer-mediated—becomes equally subject to appropriation as a technology of the self by a therapeutic individual.
