Community is a highly contested concept, and in the milieu of mass media, it is even more highly fraught. The book is a community formation narrative, adding to our common database of emergent community practice on the Internet. The book bolsters our understandings of the substantive processes involved, particularly those of boundary formation, spatial dimensions of communities, and how communities are always both embedded and emerging entities. Finally, it deals with the question of how seamless and/or disruptive the new technology of the Internet is vis-a-vis our traditional practices of community formation and maintenance. We are interested in a problem with communities based in media fandoms. Eventually, the artist will quit making music, the movie will cease to have sequels, or the television show will get cancelled. What happens to these communities when their basis of interest goes away? Is the bond of community enough to keep them together? Why do people fracture into other groups? Why do some hold on to the one-for-all-all-for-one mentality? chosen offline, or do they stick by the friends they made in the community, who would not ordinarily be their type? In the last couple of years of working with this community, the ways in which one gauges when a community ends, and when it merely morphs into some other kind of interpersonal phenomenon have been at the forefront of our research. The book is ethnographic in method, and deals with community concepts such as networks, geography, boundaries, and politics.

Community is a highly contested concept, and in the milieu of mass media, it is even more highly fraught. The book is a community formation narrative, adding to our common database of emergent community practice on the Internet. The book bolsters our understandings of the substantive processes involved, particularly those of boundary formation, spatial dimensions of communities, and how communities are always both embedded and emerging entities. Finally, it deals with the question of how seamless and/or disruptive the new technology of the Internet is vis-a-vis our traditional practices of community formation and maintenance. We are interested in a problem with communities based in media fandoms. Eventually, the artist will quit making music, the movie will cease to have sequels, or the television show will get cancelled. What happens to these communities when their basis of interest goes away? Is the bond of community enough to keep them together? Why do people fracture into other groups? Why do some hold on to the one-for-all-all-for-one mentality? chosen offline, or do they stick by the friends they made in the community, who would not ordinarily be their type? In the last couple of years of working with this community, the ways in which one gauges when a community ends, and when it merely morphs into some other kind of interpersonal phenomenon have been at the forefront of our research. The book is ethnographic in method, and deals with community concepts such as networks, geography, boundaries, and politics.

This title is a study of electronic culture, it describes networked computer culture. Through case studies and ethnographic observations, it discusses how and why people develop interpersonal relationships through the Internet.

Featuring several all-new chapters, revisions, and updates, the Second Edition of A Cultural Approach to Interpersonal Communication presents an interdisciplinary collection of key readings that explore how interpersonal communication is socially and culturally mediated. Includes key readings from the fields of cultural and linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and communication studies Features new chapters that focus on digital media Offers new introductory chapters and an expanded toolkit of concepts that students may draw on to link culture, communication, and community Expands the Ethnographer’s Toolkit to include an introduction to basic concepts followed by a range of ethnographic case studies

"This book provides interdisciplinary perspectives utilizing a variety of research methods to uncover the fundamental components of computer-mediated communication (i.e., language, interpersonal relations/communication and information technology) which will be discussed in the following section"--Provided by publisher.

The internet has changed the way we communicate and so changed society and culture. Internet, Society, and Culture offers an understanding of this change by examining two case studies of pre and post internet communication. The first case study is of letters sent to and from Australia in 1835-1858 and the second is a study of online gaming. In both case studies, the focus is on the ways communication is created. The result is the definition of two types of communication that are lived simultaneously in the twenty-first century. One type of communication is from before the internet and relies on the body having touched and created a message-for example, by attaching signature-to stabilise the nature of sender, message and receiver. Internet-dependant communication is different because no identity-marker can be trusted on the internet and so individuals' styles of communicating are used to stabilise the transmission of messages. Being after the internet means having to live these two contradictory forms of communication.

Today, students are more familiar with other cultures than ever before because of the media, Internet, local diversity, and their own travels abroad. As such, traditional intercultural communication textbooks which focus solely on the ′differences′ approach aren′t truly effective for today′s students, nor for this field′s growth. Using a social constructionist framework—which explores how culture is constructed and produced in the moments in which it is experienced—Inter/Cultural Communication provides today′s students with a rich understanding of how culture and communication affect and effect each other. Inter/Cultural Communication improves upon current textbooks in four significant ways: (1) It provides a differences approach and a social constructionist approach; (2) It explores the consequences of cultural moments on immediate communication and on larger scale social issues; (3) It is descriptive, not prescriptive, of how culture is communicated; and (4) It introduces intercultural topics, rather than interpersonal topics. Weaving multiple approaches together in order to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of and appreciation for the diversity of cultural and intercultural communication, this text allows them to become more aware of their own identities and how powerful those identities can be in facilitating change—both in their own lives and in the lives of others. In addition, the book will help students deal with unfamiliar cultures and understand those with whom they come in contact when they travel, in their communities, in the workplace, in their home, and online.