HI all, it is christmas and I had the chance to read through all post on this interesting thread... I hope I get it all in the mail, which was going through my mind while reading the posts....... 1. On commuity and commerce..... while most posts treated the two as separate issues, that overlap sometimes, few if any saw them as integral parts of each other.... and I thought more of economics than of commerce anyway.... so while reading the french anthrpologist Louis Dumont came to my mind.... he wrote a lot about communalism, esp. in India, comparing the individual ideology of the West with the communal of the east, ie. India... the castes etc..... and he talked about embedded and diesembedded economies..... where the economy and also commerce are part of a community/society......... where I run into the problem of defining a community......Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft ..... 2. I found myself agreeing with Jonathan.... on why research what is a community at all, why bother..... well... bein g in Northern Ireland for the past year I came to the point where I was sick of the work community... it is everywhere and everything..... but never really defined.... having different references and sizes.... the c. of NI, the catholic c. and soforth..... but it is sometimes important to say this is a community according to this or that theory and set of rules or it isn't .... for example..... acknowledging a certain status to a given group (identified by language, ethnicity, (sub-) cultural feature, you name it...) is important... which group is acknowledged which one isn't.. you gets the money, state, territory, representational space (esp. in Cyberspace, David Silver's article in Race in Cyberspace edited by Nakamura et al.... made this pretty clear and is a good example)... so definition and ackknwoledgment are forms of distributing power......., that is why it sometimes is important to see if some entity is a community in the abstract sense of us researchers...... 3. Communalism, communitarianism, community has been mentioned.... they have to do with belonging, boundaries... but also with control, control of you is in them and how thy behave, what they do and are made to do..... social control, and we should not forget this part.... offline or online.....it is about the control of discourses, behavior, power and also money... and in comes the ecomomy or commerce.... This would be my take on community for now.... we certainly could evoke the discussion we had on the air-meet list about ethnicity or race here... which would establish a community and why under which circumstances... but I want you to enjoy christmas and not read posts that are too long anyway...... Best to all of you enjoy the rest of the remaining year and talk to you next year. I will go sort of offline until then..... nilz