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face-to-face communication, but in inverse relationship: interaction without
reciprocity (Internet) and reciprocity without interaction (broadcast).
What is valorized in Internet communities is that they are ‘interac-
tive’ (Willson, 1997: 146). Interactivity becomes foundational for the spec-
ulation of virtual community and, as particularly the second media age
theorists argue, for community in general. We are reminded by Rheingold
(1994) that virtual communities are a compensation for the loss of tradi-
tional communities around the world. The loss of these communities
has been postulated by Stone (1991) as a ‘drive for sociality’ – ‘a drive that
can be frequently thwarted by the geographical and cultural reality of
cities’ (111).
What is denied in the metropolis is communities of a ‘face-to-face’
nature, and their attenuation is seen to be compensated for by the elec-
tropolis, which, whilst distinguishable from these communities, is largely
thought within their terms: ‘More and more commercial, political, media,
and social interaction occurs in cyberspace every day, supplementing and
enhancing face-to-face meetings. A new class of acquaintance has emerged:
virtual friends and associates – those we feel we know well but have never
met’ (Whittle, 1996: 230).
Because ‘virtual Internet communities’ are delineated within the
face-to-face paradigm, they work to emphasize every quality of on-line
communication which is intrinsic to face-to-face communication whilst
explaining those qualities that are absent either as a loss, or as compen-
sated for in other ways. What is retained by the utopian theorists of virtual
Internet communities is an homogeneous sense of an agora in which inter-
action can take place, and, of course, interactivity itself, which is raised to
an ideology of the modern period. 13
Rheingold (1994) is an early paradigm example of this view. For him,
cyberspace has the potential to be a place which ‘can rebuild the aspects of
community that were lost when the malt shop became the mall’ (24–6),
named variously as the new ‘social commons’ or the ‘electronic agorae’. The
fact that an agora that is global in proportion can replace the malt shop does
not present problems for Rheingold. This is because an agora is only limited
by its exclusion of interactivity. If the virtual community can facilitate the
latter, then, no matter how many participants, it still qualifies as an agora.
Of course, for second media age figures like Rheingold, the actual
agorae of pre-media society are scantily theorized. What are projected and
idealized are those geographical communities, antedating broadcast and
the culture industry, that managed to thrive in urban life and rural centres
in various forms of ‘third places’ – the market, the promenade, the street
and the arcade. But the confluence of mass media with the ‘automobile-
centric, suburban, fast-food, shopping mall way of life eliminated many
of these “third places” from traditional towns and cities around the
world’ (Rheingold, 1994: 25).
For other second media age theorists, like Mark Poster, the agora, a
foundation of ancient Athenian civic life, is deemed distinctive in its