1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

that will pay out $10 million if you're abducted by aliens--provided that you can produce a signature from an Authorized Onboard Alien on the claim form. Click another way, and you find yourself in Partenia, the virtual diocese defrocked French bishop Jacques Gaillot set up after he lost his standing in the church. Peruse the lovingly detailed coverage of the longest court case in British legal history, the McLibel trial, the story of two self-defended leaflet writers who in the process of defending themselves against allegations of libel have managed to bring out a whole lot of information McDonald's would probably rather they hadn't. The case, which has been written up in the British press with a kind of gleeful admiration, lacks only Court TV, a white Bronco, and a bloody glove to be Britain's answer to the O. J. Simpson trial. Or, more soberly, study the medical images of Chinese patient Zhu Ling, a twenty-one-year-old musician whose friends got permission in 1996 to post her medical records on the Net in the hope that someone, somewhere could identify what was wrong with her before she died in a coma. Eighty-four experts from around the world did: she had thallium poisoning, from which she is now slowly recovering with help and advice from doctors worldwide. [1]

Switch to text, and you might find a bunch of actors batting out HamNet, a version of Hamlet acted--or rather, typed--out on Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a sort of worldwide text-based CB radio where anyone can set up a channel at any time. Written in the local lingo of arcane computer commands and shortcuts and performed live on February 6, 1994, from the offices of London-based Demon Internet, HamNet rendered the famous monologue as "2b ............. or not 2b... Hmmmmmm... :-( Bumm-errrr!!)" I feel sure Shakespeare would have approved of the ASCII art stage decoration and felt flattered by the excited post-first night chatter. [2]

Or perhaps you like to weave your own fantasies in the collaborative text-based role-playing worlds called MUDs (for multi-user dungeons, after the role-playing games from which the idea came), where over time you become part of a community in which you can have adventures, build a house, and even get married. This sounds weird to people, but loosely it's the online equivalent of organizations like the Society for Creative Anachronism, which, while attempting to recreate the Middle Ages in the present as they should have been, joins people into fantasy marriages, households, and baronies and encourages the perpetuation of skilled crafts such as lace-making and calligraphy.

All these areas have one thing in common: a feeling of community. Those daily postings slowly and incrementally add up to human relationships. Like any bar or club, some people stand out, some people lead, some people irritate, and some people (actually, by best estimates, about 90 percent) just sit back and watch the ebb and flow.

What makes a community? One could argue that Net-based communities are so loosely bound that they barely seem to notice if one member, even a long-term regular, disappears. But the closeness and emotional support that's found in some online areas can be real and compelling, especially as your real-life friends join the services you use and intermingle with your online friends.

Howard Rheingold, in The Virtual Community, surmised, quoting Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, that "You aren't a real community until you have a funeral." [3] I might have believed this if Rheingold had stuck to the WELL, the unusually close San Francisco-based electronic conferencing system of which he is a founding member. But when he moved on to the 1991 death of a regular on the London-based conferencing system CIX, [4] which I use every day, he lost me. While it was certainly true that a small portion of the CIX community grieved deeply over the loss of this particular motor-biking CIXen (as CIX users are often called), another group still describes the departed as "an odious little shit." What enraged this portion of the community was not just seeing people who had hated him the week before posting long eulogies, but that they