Notes:
Rheingold notes that Ray Oldenburg proposed in The Great Good Place that there are three essential places in people's lives: the place we live, the place we work, and the place we gather for conviviality.
Rheingold observes: "One of the few things that enthusiastic members of virtual communities in Japan, England, France, and the United States all agree on is that expanding their circle of friends is one of the most important advantages of computer conferencing. CMC is a way to meet people, whether or not you feel the need to affiliate with them on a community level. It's a way of both making contact with and maintaining a distance from others."
To take an extreme example, it might be interesting to exchange E-mail with an axe murder but few of us would like to meet one in a dark alley.
Horn notes that magazine publishers don't understand the medium. Indeed, she says, "The magazine metaphor is all wrong for cyberspace." She suggests, "It's closer to talk radio." She also observes: "The hosts have enormous influence over style ... Style fleshes out the picture that content alone cannot provide. It communicates feeling or nuance, it says something about the speaker." (p. 96)
