The Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold

It didn't occur to me to write this book until I was ten years into a life where I spent hours a day online, writing and laughing and cursing and crying with people who were invisible to those around me. In 1992, I tried to convince book publishers that there was really something to the idea that people were using computers as communication devices, were in fact building communities. By the time I was done, I had travelled around the world a half a dozen times, met people all over the globe who I had only known as words on a screen, but who are now family. Since I wrote the book, my critical faculties have been sharpened, and not a little of that honing has been due to the critics who see the idea of "virtual community" as hopelessly and dangerously utopian. I often wonder whether they ever read the last chapter. But I must say one thing: When you think of a title for a book, you are forced to think of something short and evocative, like, well, "The Virtual Community," even though a more accurate title might be: "People who use computers to communicate, form friendships that sometimes form the basis of communities, but you have to be careful to not mistake the tool for the task and think that just writing words on a screen is the same thing as real community."

- Howard Rheingold