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The Virtual Community:
Table of Contents

By Howard Rheingold

Note to readers: I can see that thousands of people are reading or at least looking at each chapter of this book every month. Excellent! I put these words out here for the Net without charge because I want to get as much good information distributed as possible right now about the nature of computer communications. But I am also competing with myself. HarperCollins' paperback edition pays me about a dollar a book. So if you like what you read online, go out and buy a copy of the ink-and-dead-trees edition and give it to someone who needs to read this. Thanks! Your support will help me spend more time cooking up cool stuff to post here.

  • Introduction

  • Chapter One: The Heart of the WELL

  • Chapter Two: Daily Life in Cyberspace: How the Computerized Counterculture Built a New Kind of Place

  • Chapter Three: Visionaries and Convergences: The Accidental History of the Net

  • Chapter Four: Grassroots Groupminds

  • Chapter Five: Multi-user Dungeons and Alternate Identities

  • Chapter Six: Real-time Tribes

  • Chapter Seven: Japan and the Net

  • Chapter Eight: Telematique and Messageries Rose: A Tale of Two Virtual Communities

  • Chapter Nine: Electronic Frontiers and Online Activists

  • Chapter Ten: Disinformocracy

  • Bibliography


  • The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, copyright 1993 by Howard Rheingold, is available as a HarperPerennial Paperback in USA, in the UK from Secker and Warburg, in Germany (Virtuelle Gemeinschafft) from Addison Wesley, in France from Addison Wesley, in Italy (Communita Virtuali) from Sperling and Kupfer, in Japan from Mita Shuppan.