ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the digital practices and the kinds of social relationships they help people to form and social groups that they give rise to. It discusses the terms such as 'community' and 'social group' in relation to digital media, using theories developed in the study of intercultural communication. The chapter also discusses the issues of polarization and online tribalism that we brought up above and how the model of online intercultural communication laid out in this chapter can help us to understand these issues. To get a better idea of how the concept of discourse system applies to online cultures, it is helpful to consider an example. Most discussions of tribalism, and most proposals to address it, however, focus too much on the problem of 'information' and ignore the other aspects of culture that we laid out in our model of discourse systems above-things like ideologies, forms of discourse, face systems, and socialization.
