Cyborganic, the subject of my study, was a San Francisco community whose members brought
Wired magazine online, launched Hotwired; led the open source Apache project; and staffed and
started dozens of Internet enterprises—from Craig’s List to Organic Online—during the first
decade of the Web’s growth as a popular platform (1993-2003). The imaginaries, practices, and
genres of networked social media developed in this group 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.” While my ethnography examines the symbiosis of
online and face-to-face sociality in the growth of Web publishing, this paper focuses on that
symbiosis at a more micro-level, looking at specific forms and practices of networked social
media in Cyborganic that have become predominant on the contemporary U.S Internet.
Anthropologists have challenged the assumed “isomorphism between space, place, and culture”
(Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 34) and have theorized “technological infrastructures as sites for the
production of locality” without a necessarily geographic referent (Ito 1999:2). Despite this
decoupling and the tendency to associate online sociality with fragmentation and
dematerialization, my Cyborganic study demonstrates that the intermediation of online and
onground can work to consolidate and extend, rather than attenuate, affiliations based on place
and embodiment that anthropologists have long seen as defining sources of identity and cultural
difference.