The study of cybercommunity is inevitably linked to the development of the internet amid other cultural phenomena, and cybercommunity as a cultural practice has clearly reached a point of critical mass. The concept of online community has become increasingly diluted as it evolves into a pastiche of elements that ostensibly ‘signify’ community. This study grapples with the concept of community in cyberspace and suggests alternative ways of characterizing online social relations that avoid the vagaries of ‘community’. Based on interviews and a theoretical consideration of online community, it finds that the metaphor of ‘community’ in cyberspace is one of convenient togetherness without real responsibility. This study suggests a symbolic interactionist approach to the examination of online social relationships that is free of the controversy and structural-functional baggage of the term ‘community’. It suggests that community is an evolving process, and that commitment is the truly desired social ideal in social interaction, whether online or offline.

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Several surveys attest to growing public concerns regarding privacy, aggravated by the diffusion of information technologies. A policy of self-regulation that allows individual companies to implement self-designed privacy statements is prevalent in the United States. These statements rarely provide specific privacy guarantees that personal information will be kept confidential. This study provides a discourse analysis of such privacy statements to determine their overall efficacy as a policy measure. The in-depth analysis of privacy statements revealed that they offer little protection to the consumer, instead serving to authorize business practices which allow companies to profit from consumer data. Using public good theory as a foundation, policy implications are discussed.

Building upon work that suggests an oral cultural dimension to cyberspace within real-time chat modes, this article supports that contention by examining traditional oral folklore as it exists within the textual context of the online environment. Specifically, this study is a formal analysis of online discussion groups devoted to the perpetuation and analysis of a particular type of oral folklore - urban legends - and the cultural significance of their existence in the online realm. As mediated human communication becomes more and more non-linear, decentralized, and rooted in multimedia, the distinction between orality and literacy becomes less evident and less important. The proliferation of urban legends online demonstrates the idea that cyberspace can serve as a locus for a primary oral culture and its attendant humanity and sociability in a simultaneously textual environment.