Cyborganic was an intentional community that formed in San Francisco in the early
1990s. It was a neighborhood cooperative, social clique, artist organization, professional
network, business enterprise, and social project in which I was a participant observer for
approximately ten years. Cyborganic members brought Wired magazine online; launched
Hotwired, the first ad-supported online magazine; set-up Web production for CNET; led the
Apache open source software project; and staffed and started dozens of Internet
enterprises—from Craig’s List to Organic Online—during the first decade of the Web’s popular
development (1993-2003). Cyborganic engaged the Web as a platform for self-publishing and
featured some of the earliest online diaries before these were called “blogs,” most notably, Links
from the Underground, started in 1994 by Justin Hall, a “founding father of personal blogging”2
and Brainstorms by Howard Rheingold. Cyborganic members’ production and consumption of
new imaginaries, practices, and genres of networked social media figured in the initial
development of Web publishing and prefigured contemporary phenomena such as Facebook and
a host of other media collectively known as “Web 2.0.”3
For example, Dominic Sagolla, a key
informant in my Cyborganic research, co-created the micro-blogging service Twitter in 2006.
My study of Cyborganic examines the complex symbiosis of online and face-to-face both
large-scale, in the regional history of the Bay Area and growth of the Web industry; as well as
small-scale, in new forms and practices of technologically mediated sociality. As ethnography, it
illustrates concretely the abstract conceptions of subjectivity I engage in my concluding
discussion of the posthuman. By situating Cyborganic geographically and historically, and
looking at the way new media technologies were integrated into the daily lives and experience of
my informants, I work to show in vivo the formative role of place and embodiment in the social
construction of networked media. The mutuality of onground and online I detail in the
Cyborganic case corresponds to the theoretical conception I will later present of the human
subject as a material-informational entity, simultaneously a construction of material and social
worlds