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196 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
openness, unregulated by the state or church, and an arena for unfettered
political expression. With the growth of cosmopolitan cities in early
European modernity, the agora typically contracted to institutions which
became normative for embodied interaction – the cosmopolitan coffee
house predominates as the most significant continuation of a public agora.
But also, as Poster (1997) points out, ‘the New England town hall, the public
square, a convenient barn, a union hall, a park, factory lunchroom, and
even a street corner’ may perform agora-like functions (217).
Roseanne Stone (1991) takes up the virtual-community-as-agora
thesis so sweepingly that she constructs an entire genealogy of virtual
community, including its mythologies, that dates from well before the
Internet itself.
As Ostwald (1997) outlines it, Stone’s ‘phenomenological view of
the spatial and the experiential’ is divided into four epochs of virtual
communities.
The first epoch brings together intellectual interchange, which survives
today in the university: ‘the academic community of the journal has, like
any other community, strict laws and customs. Communications between
members of the community may be rigidly ordered to meet accepted
forms of language, referencing and format’ (131).
The next epoch of virtual communities derives from mass media: ‘In
this epoch, the virtual spatiality of radio and television connect people
together through perceived experiences and the illusion of participation.
Like the academic community spatialized within the journal or paper, the
tele-visual community creates its own particular variations of language
and presentation’ (131).
The founding moment for the third epoch was when the intranet net-
work, Communitree, went on-line in May 1978. An asynchronous bulletin
board capable of facilitating CMC, ‘Communitree was a rudimentary pre-
cursor to the global news-nets where hundreds of thousands converse
daily and exchange data in a free-flowing system’ (131).
Epoch four in Stone’s virtual community is based on Gibson’s
‘Matrix’, a form of cyberspace in which the communion of selves attains
its fullest expression. The mere existence of multiple selves in cyberspace
(the socialization of virtual reality) guarantees an interactive freedom
unparalleled in the other epochs.
Stone’s epochs provide a somewhat more nuanced way of thinking
about modes of communicative association. But what is common to all of
these epochs is that agorae of interactivity are their recurring basis.
Whilst Stone distinguishes between different agorae, and describes
the kinds of community they make possible, the nature of interaction
which takes place within them is left untheorized. As in the case of second
media age thinkers, it is often supposed that interaction is a matter of
speech, or, at least in the Gibsonian Matrix, an exchange of consciousness.
But does community always require a reciprocity and the exchange
of consciousness? This view is certainly a pervasive one, for which the