Hi All, In regard to the recent series of interesting posts about the usefulness (or otherwise) of community in thinking through/analysing virtual social relations, I'd like emphasise that I think it would be a large mistake to discount community altogether as a theoretically unproductive term. Community is undoubtedly one of the most 'slipperly' of terms - it certainly retains an inherent definitional ambiguity. This makes it an infuriatingly difficult term difficult term to employ productively in social research. This is partly because community has always been tied to normative prescription as well as empirical description. Yet the most important point about community is that it pervades everyday life. I'd go so far as to say it seems to be indispensable to social discourse. Thus, as Peter Hamilton put it in his perceptive introduction to Cohen's (1985) classic study (The Symbolic Construction of Community), community would have long ago been "discounted as grist to the scholarly mill were it not for the remarkable hold that the idea of community exerts over both the intellectual and popular mind" (p.7). It is for this reason we should be careful about discounting community. People manifestly believe in community and use the term in their everyday discourse. In this sense community motivates, sustains, and structures social action. If we are to fully understand the development of online sociability, therefore, in many instances (where the term is employed 'in the field' by users themselves), we need to understand, following an interpretive epistemology, how users of the technology understand the term. This will undoubtedly be context specific, but it is also central to how the technology becomes actively used. In this respect the positive normative overtones of community often come into play. For example fears of 'community decline', whilst difficult if not impossible to verify from an objective perspective, often motivate residents of localities to become involved in online initiatives (and structure how they then interact online - the topics they deem 'relevant', the goals of the online group etc) - this was certainly the case in the community informatics initiatives I studied in Birmingham (UK). Best, Ian Goodwin Senior Lecturer MA Communication Studies/ Graduate Diploma in Digital Media School of Communication Studies Faculty of Design and Creative Technologies Auckland University of Technology Private Bag 92006 Auckland 1020 Aotearoa/ New Zealand Telephone 64-9-917 9999 x 7734 Email ian.goodwin@aut.ac.nz