Keith N Hampton

Fred Turner of the Department of Communication at Stanford has just published one of the most interesting articles on a virtual community that I have read in a long time. \”Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community\” is interesting because it reveals the role of offline relationships in the origins and maintenance of one of the earliest online communities, the WELL (made famous in Howard Rheingold\’s The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier). Fred not only provides a detailed account of the origins of the WELL, but explores its roots in the counterculture of the 1960s. Fred\’s account is a great examples of the overlap between online and offline relationships using one of the earliest examples of a virtual community. The above link to the paper will only work if your library is an institutional subscriber, you may want to contact Fred Turner directly for a copy.