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Drawing from ethnographic and documentary data, this article examines the character of the social spaces that white power movement (WPM) activists create on the Internet and the linkages to their real world activism. Specifically, we explain how white power activists use cyberspace as a free space to create and sustain movement culture and coordinate collective action. The WPM's cyberpresence intersects with and enhances their real world activities by offering multiple opportunities for access and coordination. Virtual contact with the WPM community offers members social support, companionship, and a sense of belonging to a community of Aryan believers. We argue that real and virtual spaces are not completely separate spheres but rather closely intertwined. Consequently, virtual spaces provide an opportunity to parallel and extend the type of interaction present in real world free spaces that are so critical to nurturing and sustaining white power movement culture.
Cyberspace is being used to connect all sorts of people, yet the character of those connections is unclear. Some observers argue that cyberspace is a new place of assembly where real world social communities can be established, sustained, or renewed as virtual communities. In The Virtual Community (1993), Howard Rheingold argues the Internet introduced a new form of community that can help bring people together on-line around shared values and interests, and create ties of support that extend their real world collective interaction. Sherry Turkic (1995:267), a pioneer in studies of identity and interaction on the Internet, claims that the virtual realm offers "a dramatic new context" in which to think about human interaction and how connections between people can be made. Communities that are linked through cyberspace expand the ways that individuals can connect to groups by overcoming constraints of time and place, allowing for high volume information flows, and enhancing solidarity among users (Brunsting and Postmes 2002; Diani 2000; Turkle 1999, 1995; Doheny-Farina 1996; Haraway 1991). Skeptics, however, argue that cyberspace creates mere simulacra of community. At best, very weak social ties are sustained in the absence of face-to-face interaction.
As cyberspace becomes a prominent tool used by movement organizers and activists, movement scholars are weighing in on the same questions to understand contemporary social movement cultures. Most of these commentators are critical of the idea that...