This is a final draft document. Do not quote or refer to this document without contacting Jason Nolan (perms@jasonnolan.net). Contents © the authors. This chapter has been prepared for:

Nincic, V., Weiss, J., & Nolan, J. (In Press). "Virtual Communities" In The Pedagogy of Difference. Peter Trifonas, ed. New York: Routledge.

The idea of virtual community is embedded in a deep matrix of McLuhan's Global Village and the dominant western cultural influence. Although there is space on-line for an infinite number of virtual communities, they tend to reflect real world groupings and organizations based on notions of difference. It is with this notion of difference, variation based on dissimilar characteristics such that groupings resemble communities where members share at least one common interest, that we explore "virtual ethnicity" (Poster, 1998) through the example we call Serbia.web. Ethnicity is one such common intersection that helps define a community. Ethnicity is often tied to bioregionality, common geographical co-location, and it is a struggle to maintain ethnic ties as groups spread across the globe under the influence of events such as those in the former Yugoslavia, and in Afghanistan. Since large movements of different ethnic groups around the world are almost commonplace for diasporic reasons, ethnic groups are often faced with the tension of assimilating to new regions and maintaining a sense of ethnic identity. Many groups cultivate online communities to ensure that their ethnic identity will not be lost by developing, and participating in, on-line communities.

Our example of how a geographically dispersed ethnic community's sense of difference is both challenged and maintained through Internet-mediated communication starts with a discussion about creating virtual community, and with comparisons between virtual and real-life communities (Rheingold, 1993). As educators we are interested in how a virtual community is a "space for pedagogy". We look at the transformative and contradictory elements contained within the creation and maintenance of the community. In particular, we look at the concept of difference as it relates to the tension between assimilation and ethnic identity. This tension is manifested along two dimensions: the use of the Internet to ensure some differences from the dominant community, and how the dominant language of the Net is resisted in order to reinforce this ethnic difference. The example allows us to consider how the virtual community is changed over time as a reaction to external events, ironically, a regional conflict that divided ethnic groups in one region of Europe.

The term "virtual community" has become so widespread in its use that there is a tendency to conflate all social activity into a single concept and not consider the diversity of virtual contexts. Another challenge is characterized by the debate about whether on-line groups can be termed "communities" at all. This debate focuses on the relationship between on-line and off-line communities. Baym (1998) believes there are two issues that should be considered in such a debate: "does on-line community really serve as a substitute for off-line community in any meaningful way?", and "what occurs on-line that leads some people to experience them as communities in the first place?" (37-38) In considering virtual communities, there are several issues or aspects to be taken up: member's backgrounds, role within the community, participatory style, structure of pedagogy associated with the space, resources for structuring the community, and of course, what is learned, shared and experienced.

This suggests dimensions that Rheingold could not have anticipated when he suggested a definition of virtual community that predates the explosion of public involvement that came with the World Wide Web in 1994; "Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on... public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace"(italics in original) (Rheingold, 1993, 5). But, how do these virtual communities begin?

Baym (1998) has studied social uses for Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) and suggests that it is difficult to predict CMC patterns because of complexities of interactions among five factors: external contexts, temporal structure of the group, system infrastructure, group purposes, and participant characteristics. She does suggest that an understanding of a virtual style can be achieved by describing these interactions: participants strategically exploit the resources and rules those structures offer. The result is a dynamic set of systematic social meanings that enables participants to imagine themselves as a community. Most significant are the emergence of group specific forms of expression, identities, relationships, and normative conventions (Baym, 1998).

Groups more associated with social purposes are sites for acquiring information, feeling a sense of community, as well as potential learnings associated with participating in a virtual space. Online ethnic communities have become very important sites for the exploration of how ethnic affiliations are taken up and used as a basis for the creation of online communities. Internet technologies have become increasingly embedded in everyday life (Agre, 1999; Baym, 1998; Bell, 2001; Wellman, 1999), prompting careful inquiry into cultural and social implications of online interactions. Several studies of ethnic online groups were undertaken (Hongladarom, 1998; Mitra, 1997; Stubbs, 1999) with the intention of understanding how the Internet technologies facilitate the creation of "communities of sentiment" (Appadurai, 1996) or computer-mediated "diasporic public spheres" (Appadurai, 1996; Stubbs, 1999). This is especially important in enabling individuals, who are physically cut off from their sense of "home’, to develop common ground with others in the same position. In a sense, it offers the dual situation of emphasizing differences with the dominant cultural group while seeking the comfort of sameness with others.

Attempts to grasp the social and cultural implications of online interactions frequently emphasize the need to perceive computer technologies as one of the major supporters of the hegemonic process of globalization . There is an assumption that technologies emerge out of dynamic social processes influenced by, and also influencing the culture from which they came. This approach urges us to gain insight into the dynamic interplay between culture and technology by reflecting on the technology’s "cultural background" (Coyne, 2001; Dodge and Kitchin, 2001; Noble, 1997). "Computer culture" could be used as a referent for the complex social, economical and cultural matrix that computer technologies promote and encourage. The critical challenge of treating computer technologies as an important cultural force of globalization comes from several researchers (Pargman, 1998; Keniston; 1998; Voiskousky, 1998). They pointed out the potential embeddedness of cultural practices into computer hardware and software. Seen in that way, Internet technologies could shape and reconfigure offline ethnic practices when participants move online. However, seeing the Internet network only through its globalization trends disregards the issue of active appropriation of cultural products (Appadurai, 1996)– how they are locally used, with what purpose, and how they are integrated in "local" cultural repertoire. That very struggle between the global and "local" cultural trends could be seen by closely viewing the daily life of ethnic online communities using that very globalizing technology for the creation, and maintenance, of their local cultural presence.

Serbia.web is a generalized pseudonym for a variety of virtual community locations operating for those interested in Serbian culture, language and related issues. These locations of community are often dynamic forms of conflict as well as political struggle that reflect, if not mirror, the real life environments from which the online groups find their members (Bell, 2001). Though the online Serbian community may be itself undertaking an important struggle for identity and cultural expression, this struggle is not without its own inherent challenges and dangers. The various online media that make up the collective discussion on Serbia, and issues important to diasporic Serbs, represent an example of a particular kind of online community. And there has been a great deal of attention given to diasporic community involvement in CMC environments centering on the "Wars of the Yugoslav Succession" which locates the on-line experiences of various diaspora from the region in a growing post-national cultural experience (Stubbs, 1998; Stubbs, 1999). It is both ethnic and cultural, and most importantly is an online manifestation of a community that transcends the boundaries of both real life and virtual manifestations. Serbia.web represents an example of a virtual community that manifests itself across various online technologies such as web pages, Java-chat, IRC and email discussion lists. It is founded on an external cultural experience. As well, this community has grown in ways unanticipated by its founders as a result of external events and influences.

It could almost be said that the experience of Serbia.web is somewhat mundane, concerned with the same collective and individual matters that all online communities are faced with. That is, if it were not for the Kosovo crisis. The quantum leap in activity in and around the online community reflected the chaotic and kinetic nature of the real world events playing themselves out. During the Kosovo Crisis (spring 1999) the number of the participants increased fantastically, averaging over 300-400 active participants, up from an average of 15-30. Some Internet statistics placed the community web site in the top 1000 web sites on the Internet by number of hits during the crisis.

Real life and death consequences were being taken up in a manner that just is not seen in most other virtual communities. The real need not only for information, or even sharing information, but to be able to verify information from a variety of sources, and bring together the variety of experiences and information from the members of the community was necessary for so many in order to develop the most coherent picture possible of what was actually going on half a world away. Once the real life crisis ceased, the activity level decreased somewhat, but has since maintained itself at a level much higher than before the conflict, a recognition of how communities coalesce around times of threat or stress to its members, and that the threads of a community may often go farther and deeper than is easily discernible on the surface.

Strongly reflecting real-life experiences, especially in times of stress such as war, Serbia.web could be an example that supports the argument by Fernback and Thompson (1995) that virtual communities "seem more likely to be formed or reinforced when action is needed, as when country goes to war, rather than through discourse alone." As an "ethnic virtual group" this online community is comprised mostly of immigrants, coming from Yugoslavia, who emigrated within the last ten years. They are, to follow Mitra’s (1997) suggestion—a "new wave" of immigrants, "scattered across the Western hemisphere, working in similar professions but spatially distanced from each other" (p.57). The ethnic communities coming from less populated countries are especially vulnerable to cultural assimilation by host countries, not only due to their geographical dispersion, but due to also the impossibility of being meaningfully represented in the official host media. Used as an alternative media, the Internet allows immigrants to create a culturally specific space, to exchange information that could not be exchanged otherwise, and to create a social network that could offer relevant and understandable environment.

On the one hand, it could be argued that instead of accepting its passive social position of slow assimilation (additionally fostered by relative geographic distance of its members), the ethnic virtual group actively uses the Internet to meet a variety of cultural needs of its members in fostering and maintaining a sense of difference in terms of representation, language and collective identity. The emotional investment of the people in community, the amount of time they spend communicating, offering each other comfort, sharing information, and organizing meetings offline—all these practices suggest what we could think of as active moments in creating a relatively homogeneous community. On the other hand, participation in the ethnic community does not necessarily imply some fixed correspondence between feelings of belonging to real-life ethnic group and active participation in online community, nor address the differences in how members’ feel about belonging to a specific real-life "ethnic" group. In some ways, "ethnicity" taken up in online environment could be seen as a "membership card" that Internet participants could use to gain entrance to a community as a way to resolve their offline isolation, or feelings of difference from the dominant group. The complex relationship between real-life ethnic membership and virtual ethnic membership is additionally facilitated by the possibility of "passing" or performing as a member of an ethnic community by using the Serbian language as a marker of ethnicity. The ethnic performance is possible because many non-Serbians belonging to different ethnic groups from the former Yugoslavia region are able to use the Serbian language to actively participate in the virtual community even if they do not "actually" belong to real-life ethnic group. This highlights the potential range of differences in "ethnic" participation as to actual intentions, needs, and feelings of online participants.

Another active moment where online community participants take up "ethnicity" is more closely related to the Internet medium itself. Many characteristics of the Internet and its related technologies for online communication should be seen as important mediators for conveying interactions of online community (Baym, 1998). In that sense, the communicative practices of the online community members are shaped by characteristics of, for example, the computer conference forums or IRC software—especially the software support for the Roman alphabet and the Roman characters used in the English language.

The issue of the English-based Internet software is becoming increasingly important when seen in the light of the constant increase in the number of online participants coming from non-English speaking countries and recent immigrants settled in the English-speaking ones. It could be argued that the English-based Internet environment discourages or even disables communication in languages other than English (Nolan, Chapter XX in this book). However, as the Serbia.web example suggests, the English-language prevalence on the Internet has been challenged on the local community level. This would have required a prior sophistication in the use of computers or a necessity for some to learn to make the adaptations. The community’s members use the English-based software to communicate in Serbian, the language shared by all community members. Even if the majority of community participants probably know English (working and living in North America and Australia), many others in the community live in Yugoslavia, and elsewhere in Europe where English is not the dominant language. Though the written form of Serbian language uses the Cyrillic alphabet, online community members easily shift to its Roman character version (both written forms are taught in Yugoslavia), adapting the written form of the language to the environment. Political changes imposed upon the Serbian language after the Second World War required that both Cyrillic and Roman methods of writing the Serbian language be taught in schools. This means that the restrictive influences of the Internet and ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) character set have had on the writing of languages was not necessarily felt by the Serbian community because of the earlier change dictated by political influence.

By comparison with the English alphabet pool of letters, the written "Latin Serbian" requires five additional letters. To participate in the conference forums or use the IRC technology, Serbians use only the 25 letters Serbian and English share out of the 30 letters in Serbian. In that sense, the Internet communication technologies "force" the community members to exclude five letters in writing. Even if there is a possibility to change encoding and use, for example, the Cyrillic encoding in online asynchronous communication, that is not easily done because it requires the change of the font encoding settings by all participants. A similar tendency in using a "restricted" version of language other than English in the online environment suited for communication in English is suggested by Pargman (1998) in his study of a Swedish-speaking online community using MUDs (Multi-User Discourse) collaborative virtual environments.

It is important to note that online communication software requires the use of commands in English, because Serbians do not have the "localized versions" (Keniston, 1998) of software programs and operating systems in Serbian language. Consequently, for online participation in the community, the Serbia.web members simultaneously use the English-written commands with the online-adapted (Roman character set) Serbian. This interesting mixture of languages suggests the specific process of negotiation between the global and the local – seen here in the particular context of the online environment. The persistency of online participants in adapting the Internet technologies to their community’s goals (in this case the use of Serbian language) suggests that this constructed language-hybrid environment is neither an obstacle to communication nor seen as restricting the expression of cultural identity. The use of the Serbian language in this context is therefore not to be perceived as a gesture of isolation and deliberate segregation of the virtual group from other virtual groups. It can be argued that, by using the mother tongue of the participants as the major language of communication in the community, the virtual group creates a culturally inclusive space—to include all Serbian-speakers, many of them living in non-English speaking countries. In some contexts, Serbian is not a language of political and cultural choice, but rather the only language that participants share in common; in this context, English is just not an option if the goal is to be inclusive. And most importantly, it was this Serbian-based environment, especially during the Kosovo crisis, which offered the participants a version of "home" (Mitra, 1997, p. 70), and a "safe refuge". This allowed participants to share experiences of stress, fear, and anger with those, from the same country of origin, who are perceived as empathetic regarding events so far from the countries in which they now live. During the time of crisis, the virtual community served as an arena for verifying information , as well as for frequent emotional arguments fraught with nostalgia, and supported by anger, fear and loneliness.

We would like to caution that it would be an oversimplification to perceive Serbia.web as a stable, homogeneous and, permanent community; a location where diasporic elements share their communal sense of difference from the external communities in which they reside. Though casual observers may see it in this manner, a closer look reveals that the appearance of stability is due to the well-defined community infrastructure, and not homogeneity of thought or purpose. This infrastructure can be understood collectively as the set of online environments and tools that facilitate communication. This included the development of a set of rules, Netiquette, to be adhered to by all members, and sanctions for those who did not. Even the stability of infrastructure should be understood in relative terms—Serbia.web changed, albeit gradually.

The non-homogeneous character of the Serbia.web is better revealed if the community is understood as the complex web of overlapping small communities, or as the network of interconnected online groups, many of them temporal, and only some relatively stable. From the insider perspective, the "ethnic" virtual community is a chaotic mix of Serbian-speakers, residing in different countries, and "bringing" into community differences regarding knowledge of languages, beliefs or attitudes, and social or economic backgrounds. All those offline characteristics are played out online—frequently they are the basis for the further differentiation of Serbia.web into a variety of sub-communities. The great strength of this community is the diversity of new cultural experiences that the Serbian members have had in their new countries that inform and influence how they share, and make sense of, issues from 'back home'.

Existing as part of the broader Internet culture, the "local" character of the ethnic virtual community should be thought of in relative terms. As noted earlier, the Internet culture offers the local group the computer infrastructure with embedded practices of use, established meanings and forms of expressions, rules for online management and, the constant flux of new technologies that shape and change an already established community network. Even if organized locally and (self)excluded from other online communities by the language barrier, the local community experiences ongoing changes. The inclusion of new technologies for communication, the disappearance and emergence of sub-communities, the departure and arrival of community members—all suggest flexibility of the Internet environment for accommodating everyday challenges for cultural and linguistic expression.

This struggle is an active and constructive process that requires conscious attempts to initiate and sustain communication with members of one's own language and culture, versus being an attempt to maintain one's own heritage. It could be argued that this practice of "localization" could lead to the further ethnic segregation and even deeper marginalization of ethnic groups. However, taking into account the range of options that an ethnic group could possibly have, the active participation in the online community using the mother tongue in online communication may be the group’s most proactive choice. This virtual community could offer, at various times for various participants, possibilities to build a "social net" and change the imposed position of a "submissive, silent, and isolated" immigrant.

Serbia.web reveals some of the tensions involved in the duality of assimilation/difference both between the dominant culture and the ethnic community, and also within virtual community itself. "Virtual" sites are seen here as created social contexts in which participants, drawing from different offline and online resources (experience, cultural patterns, language, computer/Internet knowledge) explore and negotiate cultural meaning. Virtual ethnic community is thus perceived as a pedagogical location that "teaches" online participants—by its social organization, by its rules of online behavior, and by its modes of access.

And in this manner, the technology itself is a site of contestation in how a community tries to differentiate itself from the dominant cultures, virtual and real. The ability of digital networking technologies to serve a variety of social purposes, to be incorporated in a particular language environment, and to provide spaces for social organization suggest the importance of inquiring into virtual sites. These are points of intersection between IRL and virtual communities that have a bearing on the success of online community. Perhaps the important ingredient in Serbia.web was the talent base of sophisticated knowledge and skills that enabled so many channels of communication to operate and to revise the technology to suit the community. This in itself may set this group apart from most other ethnic groups. What is needed is further inquiry into the activities of other virtual ethnic groups in order to understand how the online community provides a "space for pedagogy" in this duality of assimilation/difference between the dominant and ethnic communities.

Finally, it may be appropriate for us to comment upon the contribution that the study of virtual ethnic communities makes to the purposes of this volume, Pedagogies of Difference. First, the inclusion of discourse on ethnic difference expands the original categories of interest-race, class, gender and sexuality. At the least, concentration on ethnicity expands the conversations about race. Second, in the hope of bridging the various theoretical orientations/positions (feminist pedagogies, critical pedagogies, anti-racist or post-colonial pedagogies, and gay and lesbian pedagogies), one should consider theories and practices from cultural studies, popular culture, and virtual culture. For example, through the ability of individuals to change identities, virtual life represents a potential liberating space for different pedagogies. At the least, virtual communities represent an additional layer for studying, and understanding, pedagogies of difference.

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