We hear all sorts of predictions about how the Internet will enrich our individual lives and promote communication, tolerance, and thus community in our society, but are these promises realistic? In her essay “Welcome to Cyberbia,” M. Kadi argues that they are not. Instead, she maintains, the Internet will lead to more fragmentation, not community, because users merely seek out others with the same biases, concerns, and needs as their own. The point is an interesting one, but Kadi seems to overlook that the Internet’s uniquely anonymous form of interaction could actually build diversity into community by lowering the barriers of physical appearance in communication.
Writing on the Internet, we can be as anonymous as we like. Unless we tell them, the people we communicate with do not kn
A world without physical bias may be an unreachable ideal, but the more we communicate with just our minds, the more likely it is that our minds will find common ground. Logged on, we can become more accepted and more accepting, more tolerated and more tolerant. We can become a community.
The Internet’s anonymity has a flip side, too: just as we cannot be prejudged, so we cannot prejudge others because of their appearance. Often in face-to-face interaction, we assume we know things about people just because of the way they look. People with athletic builds must be unintelligent. Heavy people must be uninteresting. People in wheelchairs must be unapproachable or pathetic. Perhaps most significant, people of other races must have fixed and contrary views about all kinds of issues, from