Internet Sociality

Abstract

This chapter offers a cultural epidemiology of digital communities, describing how these groups emerge, bond, and come to develop shared embodied experiences. We argue that online communities, while seemingly novel and often “strange," can offer insights into fundamental mechanisms of human sociality albeit on an unprecedented speed and scale due to specific affordances of cyberspace. After framing this argument, we outline a noncomprehensive anthropological survey of online communities of interest. Our hope is to provide a model for how online communities grow to share interphenomenal experiences despite lack of face-to-face interaction, and how this might inform our understanding of ordinary social cognition.