Secession is the rule in virtual space. The Protestant principle: Set up your own place and community if you don't like what you find in ours. No conversation is obligatory. There is no scarcity of virtual "land" to prevent an endless exfoliation of new communities. Because there's always more room, there is no forced proximity to demand that you overhear the neighbors or meet them on the street. Communities can fraction, break off and each fill their own space. Some may be overlapping but many move out of contact. It's happening with magazines and cable channels as well. Segment the market.
Yet even so, you can't avoid politics and economics, because there are always some scarce resources. I may not have to overhear your conversation but we both have an interest in the capacity of Internet connections.
On the net, will the identity of an ongoing conversation be enough to define a community? Doesn't a community also need a place, a setting, something that holds memory and allows ritual and fosters a mode of interaction and a style? Grammar is embodied.
In the one-dimensional community briefly described in Abbot's Flatland, (Abbot 1884), the inhabitants along the line can only hear one another, as there is no second dimension for presenting views of oneself; community comes about through style, loudness, and dominant continuity of voice. When net communities were just in ASCII text the situation was similar, but as bandwidth grows the Internet can begin to provid new dimensions for self-presentation. What will it take to make these into places?
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001