However valuable that demonstration in situating my subject, as ethnography,
it is clearly insufficient on many levels. First, it fails to engage the richest material
from a field study centered on the practices and social imaginaries of community,
rather than economic productivity per se. Cyborganic was not only an Internet
business and occupational community. It was also a project to use computermediated-
communication to create the kind of face-to-face community its leaders,
members, and social critics alike (e.g. Kunstler 1993; Putnam 2001) found lacking in
contemporary American society. Though the “milieu of innovation” analysis is
consistent with the idea that cultural factors—for example, communitarian
practices—