CRITICAL CONSUMPTION AND VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES

Paolo Dell'Aquila 

University of Bologna
Italy
E-mail: pdaquila@mbox.theo.it

Abstract
Consumption is not simply a product of the alienation caused by global economomy, but also (as for Cultural Studies) a means for the cultural creation of social worlds where objects change from a symbol of estrangement to a intersubjective artifact.
In this paper I criticize post-structuralistic approach on cyberspace and try to verify if the consumer in virtual communities can become more active and intelligent, building social groups and new forms of "collective intelligence".
Then I distinguish non structured groups from the structured ones, in particular, virtual associations which have a common goal and an organized scheme.
These associations often link formal and informal elements, virtual structures (and global dimension) and a minimum level of personal acquaintance. They face the complexity of cyberspace creating specialized sectors and differentiating internal levels, in order to construct a new social order based on vivid empathy. 
In the Italian cyberspace, I observe that identity is not a satured self (Gergen) or multiple playing self (see Stone, Turkle); in these associations, self is always multiple, but there is a common goal and a common ethos which can offer a source for identification. Some of these groups (also created in community networks) can become lobbies to express istances of civil society, particularly for local authorities, regaining "civic sense". A lot of little, self-organizing electronic groups may contribute to the creation of an "electronic republic", if they are linked to the  community networks and to their "glocal" problems.

Key words: virtual, communication, sociology, community, globalisation.

1. Alienation and Cyberspace 

In this paper, I discuss the relationship between the processes of consumption and virtual communities, referring to the problem of alienation. I will analyse, if in these groups computer-mediated communication causes a sense of vivid alienation or, if the cultural creation of meaning can trasform the floating sociality in more stable social bonds, particularly in the cases of community networks.
      With "virtual or on-line communities [we] refer to groups of people who congregate electronically to discuss specific topics which range from academic research to hobbies. They are linked by a common interest or profession. There are no geographic boundaries to on-line communities and participants anywhere in the world can participate" [Beamish 1995: note 1]. 
According to Rheingold, these groups "are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feelings, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace" [1994: 5]. As regards the process of gradual disappear of “old” network of sociality in post-modern cities, the virtual communities represent "a tool that could bring conviviality and understanding into our lives and might help revitalise the public sphere" [1994: 14]; by them we construct an “electronic agora” and revitalise "citizen-based democracy”. Their principle elements are communality of interests, the sense of shared consciousness and the experience of “groupmind”.
      This assertions has been criticized by many social scientists and philosophers, who sustain that on-line communion represent only the sharing of a synthetic world artificially created by technology. According to Kevin Robins [1995: 150], in these groups "there is the invocation of community, but not the production of a society. There is a “groupmind”, but not a social encounter. There is on-line communion, but there is no residents in hyperspace. This is another synthetic world, and here, too, history is frozen".
Virtual communities, according to these theses, become a means of alienation. Is this true? 
      This topics involves also the human conditions in cyberspace to create a new network in which in a simulated environment. Gibsonian cyberspace, as defined in Neuromancer, is characterized by "a consensual allucination experienced daily by daily by billions of legitimate operators... a graphic representations of data abstracted from the bank of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non space of the mind" [Gibson 1984: 51].
      In brief, cyberspace is a global computer network of information, a city of data, to which any user can access, download file and interact simultaneously with any other user [see also Benedikt (ed.) 1993]. We could distinguish cyberspace and virtual reality, but we are not interested in the second therefore we analyse the environment created by the Net; we will deal with open groups (Bulletin Board System or BBS;  Internet Relay Chat or IRC, Multi User Dangeons or MUD, newsgroups) and "closed" mailing lists (that people must subscribe).
      "In this work, we distinguish “cyberspace” as a generic concept for the imagined “world within” the computer or the social landscape portrayed in the lists of Usenet groups and postings" [Shields 1996: 5].
      This environment is characterized by the simulation and the attempt to transform the physical subjects into virtual avatar, electronic alias freed by any relation to the “real world”. According to post-modern culture, cyberspace wants to make all our society “virtual” and replacing physical bonds with an overflow of signs.
      The logic of digitality creates an order dominated by simulation, by disembodied artifacts of intense seduction (see, for instance, Baudrillard). Information superhighway can become a myth of complete transparence of sign, where virtual identities regain a false “appearance” with which they can play games.
      "We needn't search for some beyond, in a hinterwelt, or in unconscious, to find what diverts discourse. What actually displaces it, “seduces” it in the literal sense, and makes it seductive, is its very appearance: the aleatory, meaningless, or ritualistic and miticolous circulation of signs on the surface; its inflections, and its nuances" [Baudrillard 1990a: 54].
      The rise of new media leads virtual society to its maximum point, with the diffusion also of an “immaterial landscape” [Ferraro and Montagano 1994] and the acceleration of social rythms [see, for instance, Virilio 1986; Sfez 1990; Breton 1995].
      Some authors speak about a “virtual democracy” (démocratie virtuelle) [Scheer 1997], where communities change in unreal objects, that are the floating shadows of the old neighbourhood. Others seek to explore the possibility of "resisting the virtual life" [Brook and Boal 1995] and develop the strategies of resistance to the rewiring of the body psychic.
     The analyses of these theories are often too mechanical and simplified. They don't represent the differences between old media (such as radio and TV) and the Internet. The second generate a two-way flow of communication and does not address to passive audiences as the TV. Users in the Internet can interact and build multidirectional communication, allowing to anyone to write and discuss. 
      Cyberpunks, in fact, analyse the technological modification and their impact on the body. For them "the world of cyberspace is itself a urban environment - “a simulation of the city's information order”, in which “the city redoubles itself through the complex architecture of its information and media networks”... a digitized parallel word which from “above” might appear as a rationally planned city" [Featerstone and Burrows (eds.) 1995: 11]. The conclusion of these writers are often contradictory, because they support a logic of vivid communication. In these kind of reflections, "Computer are arenas for social experience and dramatic interaction, a type of media more like public theater, and their output is used for qualitative interaction, dialogue, and conversation [Stone 1995: 16]. At the end of the mechanical age, there is almost a continuum between human and machine: the embodied subjectivity becomes more varied and flexible, surpassing the horizon of the flesh and the constraints of physical body, freeing the pure flow of communication.
     This experience is more typical of MUD and IRC where people can shape again their environment, maintaining their anonymity. In these places we can see a “presentation of the self” [Goffman 1969] that varies continously. In American or in Italian contest [Stone 1995; Turkle 1997; Cesareo (ed.) 1996] multi-user dangeons are environment in which identity is contingent, multiple and strictly connected to a certain contest.
     Also IRC presents these features. In these cases we find again false selves that interact vividly without knowing with each other. They are forms of technosociality [Aa.Vv. 1996] in which an ambience (or Stimmung) creates a floating social bond [Maffesoli 1988; 1993a].
      The emotions shared by some anonimous people can originate a virtual tribe that live on the hic et nunc and is detached by the physical boundaries.
     "Les nouvelles possibilités des reseaux informatiques permettent l'émergence de nouvelles formes communautaires (électroniques ou virtuelles) fondées sur l'empathie, sur l'éphémère et l'instantané, sur les affinités intellectuelles; détachées de toute contrainte physique, territoriale ou de statut sociale" [Lemos 1996: 33].
     These groups form and reform on the basis of temporary modes of identification in a virtual environment. The principle element is communication, or the relational aspect of the message, which have a strong emotional appeal [Boccia Artieri 1995; 1998]. In virtual encounters multiple personalities act as they were in a theater, creating multiple selves with different (and contradictory) goals. The sense of immersion in this reality is strong and vivid [see Mantovani 1995] and every participant express their wishes and fears.
     This experience is similar to that of the narcissism analysed by Lasch [1981, 1985], with a retreat from reality to a phantasy world in which there is no boundaries and it verifies the acting out of more active and primitive instinct and desires. 
     MUD and IRC allow everyone to experiment new identities and roles, the possibility to represent those aspects of the self hidden in the real life [Turkle 1997]. In this sense, Poster's assertion is true: "...the Internet seems to encourage the proliferation of stories, local narratives without any totalizing gestures, and it places senders and addressees in symmetrical relations... But invention is central to the Internet, especially in MUDs and virtual reality: the production of the unknown or paralogy, in Lyotard's term, is central to the second media age communications" [Poster 1995: 38].
     The changing realities represented in technosociality are driven by the need of expressing innovation and difference, problematizing every point of view. A lot of thinkers represent cyberspace as a rhizomatic and a heterachical space without a centre and a top [see Deleuze and Guattari 1980; Aronowitz et alii 1996]. MUD and IRC can be defined also as a non-lieux [Augé 1993], a context that takes off a netizen his personal, relational and historical identity. The surmodernité, according to Augé, is a process of hyperproduction of events and spatial places; it conduces also to a subjectivist vision of the world [see also De Carli 1998; Parrella (ed.) 1998].
     Some kinds of virtual worlds respond to a psychotic state of mind, theater in which hallucination and realities collapse into each other and the selves retreat to their original onnipotence confusing the boundaries between the external and internal fantasies.
     This is the effect of using anonymous accounts and to start potentially every interaction from the beginning. What prevails here is the magic power of aesthetic dimension, that is, the possibility of creating new masks and social attributes [Mantovani 1995; Maldonado 1997].
     If Baudrillard exagerates his analysis talking about a “fractal subject”, we can however sustain that in MUD and in IRC there is a production of hypercommunication that fragments the self.
     The direction towards we move wants, on the contrary, overcome the post-structuralist “communicative paradigm” for a theory that binds communicative relations and physical presence, in search for non alienated groups in cyberspace [see Cipolla 1997: 458].
     "A community is bound by place, which always includes complex social and environmental necessities. It is not something you can easily join... The net seduces us and further removes us from our localities - unless we take charge of it with specific, community-based local agendas. These agendas are currently under development in many communities through the community network movement. If we do not, as communities, as a society, support this movement, we risk the further disapperarance of local communities within globalized virtual collectives of alienated and entertained individuals" [Doheny-Farina 1996: 37].
     If, as we have seen, some cases of virtual groups can fragment the individual in non-lieux without space, time and physical contact, in other cases (virtual association in community networks) we find also non alienated forms of virtual life. We are going to understand the “virtuous cases” in which people construct more stable social bonds in cyberspace.

2. Glocalism and the return of local identities

In order to speak about the free-net and the groups allocated in them, we have to consider the rise of "information society” and its consequences. 
     In our society, in fact, information is coming to occupy a central role as the “key strategic resource” on which the organization of the world economy is dependent. The importance of a “service economy”, underlined by all the most important post-industrial theorists [Bell 1973, 1983; Touraine 1970, 1975, 1980] priviledge the role of those professionals in health, education, research: a new “intelligentsia" that manipulate imformation and program society.
     The knowledge experts are disposed towards a planning of social change. As a consequence, computer and communication technologies provide the infrastructure which enables information to be processed and distributed. The new media (satellite broadcasting, cable, video) and on-line data providing information have an explosive growth. The “informatisation” of the economy is facilitating the integration of national and regional economies. Thanks to immediate and effective information processing and exchange, economics has become truly global, and with this has come about a reduction in the constraint of space. The boundaries erected by geographical location are being pushed further and further back (and with them too the limitations once imposed by the time) owing to the creation of information networks linking together town, states and continents of the entire world.
     With the new sophisticated telecommunications and video conference all constraints of space have been dramatically limited and data can be transformed and sent in real time [see, for instance, Naisbitt 1984, Cesareo 1985; De Masi (ed.) 1987; Toffler 1987; Crook et alii 1992; Webster 1995].
     In Italy in the early 80s this process gave birth to a “communicative society” [Cipolla 1997], dominated by symbolic significances. It was a media-satured environment, in which life was quintessentially about symbolisation, about exchanging and receiving messages. The triumph of fashions indicated the relevance of “appearing”. In these years material culture has become more and more a reservoir of meanings and images [Ewen 1988; McCracken 1988; Carmagnola 1989; Secondulfo 1995; Di Nallo (ed.) 1997].
     Hence the importance of aesthetics and the differentiation of life-styles in consumer culture. Life become a “work of art” and there is a stylization of everyday life [see Lash 1990; Koslowski 1990; Feasterstone 1991; Lipovetsky 1983, 1992].
     The process of globalisation interact with these tendencies, creating a multidirectional environment, allowing a two-way flow of communication [Leeabaert (ed. 1991; Mazzoli and Boccia Artieri 1995; Gilder 1995; Negroponte 1995; Mitchell 1995; Maldonado 1997]. We will see (in Italy in the next years) the birth of teleputer, the fusion of TV, telephone and computer [Gilder 1995], which will strengthen the appeal of the new media. 
     The consequences of post-modernization are, from one hand, the creation of new tribes, dominated by an ethics of aesthetics [Maffesoli 1988, 1993b] such as multi-user dangeons. From the other, on the contrary, we experience the re-birth of local communities in free-nets and other spaces.
     As we see in sociologists like Giddens [1994], globalisation is a dialectic phenomenon, in which global and local are strictly interwoven. Nowadays has been invented the word “glocalism”, that signifies a global outlook adapted to local condition.
     "Almost needless to say, in the world of capitalist production for increasingly global markets the adaptation to local and other particular conditions is not simply a case of business responses to existing global variety - to civilization, regional, societal, ethnic, gender and still other types of differentiated consumers - as if such variety or heterogeneity existed simply “in itself”" [Robertson 1995: 29].
     Glocalism involves the problems of multuculturalism and the re-birth of local community [see also Featherstone et alii 1995; Cesareo (ed.) 1997]. According to Featherstone "the changing global circumstance as a result of the process of globalization has provoked a particular Western reaction to the situation in the form of postmodernism, which has engaged in a far-reaching questioning of its own tradition, albeit generally conceived in internal terms and not addressed to the spatial relations of the West to the rest of the world" [Featherstone 1995: 12].
      Robertson and Featherstone see glocalism in different ways, but they agree on the fact that all cultural messages (and communications) are received and interpreted by local groups; the same producers of global culture (such as CNN or Hollywood) increasingly tailored their products to the differentiated local markets. In post-modernity (or late modernity, as we wish to say), the universal networks conveys also information and life-styles which can be adapted to the perifery. Modernization and its ambivalence [Bauman 1996] provide a field for the clashing of different cultures and the situation becomes (especially in the recent years) increasingly polytheistic and pluralistic.
     "Hence globalization makes us aware of the sheer volume, diversity and many-sideness of culture. Syncretism and hybridization are more the rule than the exception" [Featherstone 1995: 14]. There is the problem, however, of what kind of identities can grow from globalism. The danger is the production of defensive images and culture against universal messages. As note M. Castell, with globalization "there was production of meaning and identity: my neighborhood, my community, my city, my school, my tree, my river... But it was a defensive identity, an identity of retrenchment of the known against the unpredictability of the unknown and uncontrollable" [Castells 1997: 61].
We believe that local community can product also new types of identities, with new subjects which, from culturally-constituted worlds, construct new meanings and values [see for instance McCracken 1988]. 
     The same Castells in The Informational City [1989] noted that in contemporary societies, face to the growing of fragmented identities, easily prone to a fundamentalist affirmation of their identities, there were also forms of civil participation that restore the meanings of local societies in a new functional logic. Local governments must reconstruct a flow of information, fostering citizen participation to reconstruct the meaning of a locality against the communicative universalistic flow of information. "Citizens' data bank, interactive communication systems, community-based multimedia centers, are powerful tools to enhance citizen participation on the basis of grassroots organizations and local governments' political will" [Castells 1989: 353].
     Community networks have this function: they help the associations of civil societies to develop their own point of view, without any totalizing perspective. To avoid tribalism, in real and virtual life, is necessary to start a virtuos circle which reconstructs a local-based form of communication and significance. This is also the process we have in contemporary italian lifestyles: the ability to mix global elements (coca cola, etc.) and local tastes, to use transnational products with a personal way of using them [see Cutolo 1989; Lipovestsky 1992; Weil 1993; Morace 1990; 1996; Dell'Aquila 1997].
     Against the "informatisation of life" [Webster 1995: 217], the spread of global networks that destroy individual liberty, we see also social relations which help the citizen to interrogate about the public sphere. "Bolletin boards, rapid and cheap communications and the felicitous use of camcorders can extend and ease the exchange of information and do much to encourage discussion and debates" [ivi: 134].
     Internet can help to realise this utopia for its characteristics of interactivity. De Kerchkhove [1993, 1997b] speaks of a connective intelligence, created by the world-wide web. He thinks that the wired connections on line between several minds can develop the possibility of human conscioussness. This is not always true, as we have seen talking about MUD. The concept of “collective intelligence” is, on the contrary, strictly connected to some physical-located space and to an organized structure. Lévy [1996], for instance, proposes a scheme to hold virtual communities and help them function. His project is detailed but too limited, because he imagines that a virtual democracy can function without any physical referent. The possibility to create self-organized groups of users with the skills to solve all problems doesn't solve the problem of "electronic democracy”. A community of users often desappears when the themes discussed are not more interessant. As we will see, only the reference to a concrete reality, the creation of a structure can help us to revitalise forms of “planetary mind”. 
     Culture, meanings and ways of life aren't things to be produced and destroyed continuously, or they become only the reflections of the communications about global culture. We must so point out the importance of the physical interactions between two or more men, their background knowledge and their sharing assumptions.

3. Virtual communities and wired neighborhood

The approach we want to propose here to understand how virtual communites can work for a while without becoming alienating, is derived from the the analysis of A. Ardigò, G. Mazzoli, C. Cipolla, G. Morra. Ardigò [1988] describes the possible effects brought by new technologies upon three different contest: social systems, (and their - human - environment), social organizations and persons. He searches for a theoretical standpoint to understand how using new technologies to obtain a bi-directional flow of communications. Computer-mediated interactions must develop more communicaitve and open interchanges between persons and social organizations. We have seen that in many virtual worlds the micro-interactions become fragmented and close to every interchange with macrosystems. These are case of floating technosociality, where the lackness of the micro-macro link provoke alienation and superficial relations.
     According to many thinkers [see Ardigò e Mazzoli (eds.) 1989; Ardigò and Mazzoli (eds.) 1993; Mazzoli e Boccia artieri 1995], the ability to construct a feedback-loop communication between actor and the system (and a global city) can be reach only in two directions. The first is to optimize the man-machine communication. This is possible, following Luhmann, reducing the complexity in the system/environment relation [1990; Luhmann and De Giorgi 1994]. 
     From one side, a virtual organization must be well organised to face the risk of a growing complexity of cyberspace, where every interactions can be negotiated (or virtualized, according to Lévy [1997]). On-line groups must give themselves some goals, selecting specialized sectors and differentiating internal levels to face complexity and solve different kinds of problems.
     On the other side, virtual communications must allow individual his life-experience, both as a sensitive entity and as a physical body. This enriches man in sense knowledge and sensations. Without empathy and vivid experience no community can work and survive for long time. 
     Both system's integration and individual empathy are necessary to product a more stable group. This is a reason also for the need of re-locating community in a physical space, as we see also in Rheingold book [1994], where he speaks about the WELL, which is undoubtedly a West Coast group.
     In Italy we have some experience such as Peacelink (http://www.peacelink.it), which is a network whose participants believe in the values of peace and solidarity. His social founders are few friends that have given place to a lot of discussions groups (mailing-lists).
     A well-known exemple is, on the contrary, Città Invisibile (Invisible City; http://www.citinv.it), an association structured in an assembly, a council and a kind of bench, which can control internal communication and punish the transgressors. Città Invisbile is divided in five functional areas, all operating trough mailing-list and web pages. This is the most structured community in Italy, who can interact also with real associations and provide them web and e-mail resorces. It has realised a lot of projects through conventions with traditional organisations, which use Città Invisibile to make politics on the web. From one side, this association acts as a diversified interface between a traditional and a virtual place; from the other, it is composed by members who know themselves and meet themselves also off-line. Città Invisibile organises meetings in real life, but all his decisions are made on line. Even if its members are dispersed all over the world, the most important know and meet themselves (sometimes quarreling).
      Another important experiences are the lists originated in Milan and Bologna community networks. The first (Rete Civica Milanese) is a system of Bbs which offer bureaucratic and information services. Its creativity is represented by the multiple conferences to which every user (regularly registered) can participate. Nobody can be anonymous; so he has more responsibility for his behaviour.
     Also in Iperbole everyone must register himself with his real name. This network offers a lot of services to the netizen and has a populated newsgroups on most important local (and national) themes [see for instance BCNet and RCM 1997]. The RUR report [1998] describes Bologna as a holistic digital city, where the service of information and the possibility of participation is strictly linked to local dimensions.The effects are a "virtuos circle" in which cybermarketing, transparency and the promotion of "virtual communities" improve the developments of a "electronic agora". Iperbole, with over 34.000 user, can promote on-line reflections about a lot of political problems.
      The models of work can be represented also by "Città Invisibile": they have created a federation of associations, whose contributions are differentiated and diversified. The style of work of this association, is based on an organization of small, specialized, groups, which can face and solve different problems [Garavini (ed.) 1997; Picci 1997]. At the same time, also community networks offer citizens not only the transparency of the amministration, but also the participation of everyone to the decisional processes and the management of some services [Rodotà 1997: 36]. Probably a well-organised association can be more efficient to realise common goals, even if it is very difficult to have a balance between his openess and closure. In Italy we have few experiences to make a decision about this topics [see Belloni and Rampazi (eds.) 1997; Di Spirito et alii 1996; Metitieri and Maniero 1997]; we can only recognize that the sense of identification in association is more strong [Donati 1991; Cipolla 1997].
      Doheny-Farina notes that sometimes community networks (in USA) are too chaotic and impersonal, pointing his attention to the Neigh-Net. "Whether it is better to develop a dedicated net on the neighborhood level, to create neighborhood centers in larger nets (as the NCF does now), or to achieve some sort of hybrid is something for community net developers to test and neighborhoods to decide. What is important is that community nets - in their drives to build and to enlist members and to keep out with the ever-changing technology - keep their focus on the micro-community" [Doheny-Farina 1996: 181].
      The suggestion of Doheny-Farina are to think incremental and to start by small groups to product actions more and more global. We mustn't forget to respect community's tradition to construct a stable virtual places.
     It can be necessary to include all the volontary associations and to formulate a blueprint for local community. We must understand the spirit of community [Eztioni 1983] to rebuild new forms of communication.
     Casalegno F. e Kavanaugh [1998] comment these theses explaining that an individual has his roots in a real, physical environment, and without that he can be only isolated and alienated. The dimension of the domus, of a life-world in whcih everyone live, is extremely important. A community network is always in relation with a territory, with a culture, an history, and so on.
     Important is also the interaction between real and virtual space to understand the importance of the boundaries between the first and the second. Maffesoli [1992, 1993a] and Casalegno speak about the genius loci, the collective emotion (sentiment collectif) that creates a space. In cyberspace the members of a community find new social goals and shared feelings. Other two dimensions are communication and the man, with his personality. We think that the process of empathy is strictly connected to a physical presence and to a life-world. They can also generate new groups, changing the old traditions, but without them is impossible the encounter and the creation of more stable meanings.
     An organised group (such as an association) is more compact in its vision and lifestyle, but also other "electronic communities" can grow communicating via Internet, around a certain persons who share the same cultural roots.
     This is the dream also of an "electronic republic" based on the models of direct democracy of Athens as seen also by Jefferson. According to Grossman [1995: 45], in fact, "Jefferson envisioned an America of independent yeomen-farmers in small, self-contained political communities who would deliberate among themselves, decide their own affairs, and govern themselves".
     The ideal of re-create some small self-organizing community is a utopia, but describes efficently the dream of a "collective intelligence", differentiated in little entities working transversally, which govern themselves. In Italy we haven't seen such a realities (if not in very small cases), but probably in the future some change can encourage it. With a federalistic reform it would be possibile to strenghthen the movement of community network (as in the great cases analysed by Schuler [1996]). The final goal would be the creation of an "electronic commonwealth" [Abramson et alii 1988] with a plurality of modern agora that would become also a self-organizing system in continuous interactions.
     In such a condition probably also identity would change. Community networks provide often a strenghthening of civic sense. The netizen feel themselves more involved in their local neigh-net and regain a major wish to participate.
     If MUD and IRC make identity an experiment [Turkle 1997; Belloni and Rampazi (eds.) 1996], in the new contest man can acquire more ethic sense. The "protean self" [Lifton 1993] is always a homeless mind, but with a more interest in public affairs. This is a general trend towards more critic form of consumption, that in Italy we see in new lifestyles. If the Italian landscapes lacks of "civic sense" [Donati (ed.) 1997a, 1997b; Belardinelli 1997], then also community networks can give a contribution in rethinking the sphere of ethic goal and the development of the politics. 
     I don't believe that in cyberspace we can find only the satured self described by Gergen [1991], with multiple personalities without any link to each other. Despite all cyberpunk theories, we sometimes observe the birth of more critic and intelligent self, that are reflexive but also in search for new context of identification. In a group in which he can express istances of social, also identity transforms itself into more ambivalent actors and not into a cyborg mask [Haraway 1995].
     So the self in this group is alway fluid, multiple, but also integrated, ironic and a little more ethic [Turkle 1997]. We can recognize a form of ecology of consumption as I have studied in my previuos book [Dell'Aquila 1997]: a lifestyle more sensitive to the interrelation between human, natural and technological environment. In this process we see a more balance relationship between global and local, between social system and life-world [Boccia Artieri 1998]. The netizen, as the other consumer, can select better the cultural meanings deriving from mass-communication to create its own ethics and self-image. There are also thinkers, who speak about a "virtuous hedonist" [Cutolo 1989; Morace 1990], capable of transforming his life into a work of art, without forgetting social bonds. Consequently we hope that the new netizen's condition will be that of an ironic, multidimensional flâneur, who doesn't disregard his life-world and his civic duties.

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