ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides an overview of Internet Relay Chat (IRC), including a brief outline of its historical development, as well as some explanation of why the author elected to study social relations on IRC rather than on that form of synchronous computer-mediated communication represented in so many online studies: multiuser dungeons. It focuses on the role of the body in online interaction, and shows how some individuals in cyberspace are reincorporating the corporeal into their online interactions and, in so doing, complicating certain dominant understandings of the erotic and the sexual. The book attempts to synthesize the author's online observations and experiences into some concluding, but not necessarily exhaustive, inferences. In attempting to complicate particular truisms in contemporary Western culture by extrapolating from online social relations, the author hopes to make evident how rich and fertile a terrain cyberspace is for the social scientist.
