Dissenting Equals Moral Cultures in Cyberspace: Sanctuaries of Sexuality, Conflict, and Subversion

The reviewer notes that this work (Campbell, 2004) is a study on cultural formation, the social organization of virtual channels, and gay male identities in cyberspace. The extents to which these early predictions about life in cyberspace are valid are explored in Campbell's work. He adapted ethnography to investigate computer-mediated communication in three gay male virtual channels: #gaymusclebears, #gaychub, and #gaymuscle. The study had three goals. One was to investigate the online disembodiment thesis; that is, "the notion that there is an absolute demarcation between the real and the virtual, and therefore, a radical disjuncture between experiences in cyberspace and those in the physical world" (p. 11). In this regard, the study showed that the body is tagging along with the mind into virtual realities. Psychologists interested in human consciousness and neurophysiology (Damasio, 1999) might find the claims invalidating the thesis of a mind-body split in this study insightful. The other goals were to verify whether "offline social relations inform and shape social practices and online behaviors" (pp. 6-7, 11) and "how online practices relate to or reflect offline social and political context" (p. 7). Campbell brings the debate about the nature of social development to the level of comparing offline and online communities. The colonization of cyberspace has started, and he is informing us about its social processes. The reviewer only regrets that Campbell does not reflect on his own feelings on these topics with enough depth. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)