They are the people who are capable of
rapidly exchanging ideas and information via
this network. This new 'person-to-person'
interface induces both excitement and
despair. Many of the people who have met
each other via Internet have never met each
other in reality. Often they don't know at all
what the persons looks like with whom they
exchange useful or misleading information
and interesting or trivial opinions on a more
or less regular basis. However, without this
Internet they would probably never have met.

People who meet each other this way do so in
a new world which is 'almost real'. It is a
social world of 'people without bodies',
because during the encounter and
conversation the inhabitants of this 'virtual
world' leave their bodies at home. For some
peculiarities of the human species this is a
huge handicap. Many of our day-to-day
worries and of our greatest pleasures are
after all connected with the corporality of our
existence. We have to feed our body daily to
keep up the biological system, we experience
it as pleasant when we feel good, when we
see something beautiful or feel something
nice, when we are caressed tenderly or when
we come, when we eat something very tasty
or smell lovely odours.

People who meet each other this way do so in
a world which is 'more than real'. It is a
social world of 'people who communicate'.
Human beings are animals who make and
exchange symbols. Internet facilitates our
exchange of symbolic information and thus
enable us to to become 'more human', or at
leat more specific human. These symbolic
interactions occurring in virtual worlds are
not more nor leass realistic than those
occurring in the 'real' world. Communication
of human symbols (digitalised texts, souds,
stationary or moving images) generates a
feeling of social presence in the participants.
They start feeling related to people who share
the same interest or hobby, to people who
share the same preferences, or who oppose
the same injustice. All social and pychological
effects of this computer-mediated
communication are comparable to those of
the well-known 'face-to-face' communication.
The main difference is that with
computer-mediated interaction we're able to
reach by far more people than with our
one-to-one communication (mass
communication media are organized almost
completely 'top-down' - 'one-to-many'
communication - and are therefore in the
hands of established elites).

Internet includes many communication
media, but in any case it's a medium which
enables 'many-to-many' communication.
Besides, via Internet we can communicate 'at
a distance'. Once somebody has gaind access
to Internet he or she can communicate with
anybody linked to this open network,
everywhere in the world. We need not move
our bodies any more if we want to
communicate with somebody who lives at the
other end of our planet. We don't even have
to be 'present' behind our computers at the
same moment. We can retrieve information
relevant to us when it's convenient:
'just-in-time'.

CyberSociology is the study of social action of
human individuals in virtual communities and
networks, organizations and personal
relations. These new virtual entities are no
longer defined by geographic or even
semiotic boundaries. Instead, communities
and networks, organizations and personal
relations are being constructed in cyberspace
on the basis of common affiliative interests.

Cyberspace is an illusion, it is a consensual
hallucination that is not anywhere in our
physical reality. It is a no-place that exists
only within headspace. Cyberspace is
something that cannot be demarcated in
geographical terms at all. It is a reality that
can be localized 'nowhere' and yet its
presence is felt 'everywhere'. It is a new form
of social reality that is a challenge for
sociologists who don't recoil from analyzing
such ostensible 'metaphysical' realities. One
thing seems to be sure: more and more
people define and experience cyberspace as
real. And sociologists ought to know that "if
people define situations as real, they are real
in their consequences" [W.I. Thomas].

Nowadays sociology is developing
somewhere in this virtual reality. And just
like their colleagues in other disciplines,
sociologists are spending more and more
time in this new reality of electronic
communication that is "just like reality" --
they share the same hallucination with other
netizens, in a way that is fully interactive and
mutual.

The virtual reality which has developed in and
through the Internet is a peculiar
phenomenon. These peculiarities of
cyberspace are the subject of the sociological
explorations in this electronic book. At this
stage of the project I can only present some
notes and quotes on the peculiarities of
Internet, which might be interesting for
social scientists. They could be building
blocks for a sociology of the Internet:
cybersociology.

The sociology of the Internet is by definition
a 'work in progress'. Never completed and
always on the move. Cybersociology is a very
youthful discipline which shows all the
characteristics of adolescent behavior. She is
uncertain and impertinent, wants very much
and is able to do so little, searches her own
identity and is opposed to the status quo.

Cybersociology is an inconvenient,
troublesome discipline because it has to
shoot at fast moving objects with a
permanently changing character. It can be
compared with the problems of earlier days
when new continents were discovered.
Suppose that, more or less by accident, you
discover that there exists a new continent
and you put the first foot on this unknown
territory ('a small step for a man, but a big
step for mankind'). However, you don't know
precisely what you have discovered: what
does the territory look like, what are the
possibilities and limititations for cultivation,
what are you going to do and what do you
have to abstain from, and whose territory is
this anyway? These are the kinds of questions
that have to be solved in cybersociology. The
answers will come up, but only if we are able
to find some well-defined questions.

Cybersociology is by definition an
interdisciplinary science that should not be
afraid to meddle with problems and issues
that used to be analyzed by other social
sciences. Cybersociology can only grow up
when she knows how to combine several
disciplinary perspectives: historical,
anthropological, technological, economical,
sociological, cultural, psychological and
political perspectives. This looks like an
impossible and certainly a very ambitious
task. But that's quite normal for a
youthful-puberal, troublesome-innovative
science of the virtual social reality.

And finally, cybersociology is a programme
and a challenge. It is a research programme
that operates on assumptions that still have
to be clarified and for which the theoretical
foundation still has to be laid. That's exactly
the reason why cybersociology is a challenge
for social scientists who find it exciting to get
into a plane that travels through a space that
doesn't exists in our physical reality, nobody
knows how long it will take and where the
plane will land. For these are at least three
peculiarities of cyberspace:

 1.It is a world in which we are able to travel
    in one twinkling of an eye - that is with
    mouse click - from one place of the earth
    to another: distance does not play a role
    in computermediated interactions and
    communications.
 2.the times that count in cyberspace are
    highly accellerated and strongly
    individualized.
 3.nobody knows what the virtual social
    reality which is established via the
    Internet will look like in the future. The
    possible futures of the Internet totally
    depend on how people will act and react,
    how they organize their operations and
    transactions, and how they can realize
    their own needs and interests, aspirations
    and phantasies in cyberspace.

The mission of cybersociology is to study
these and related peculiarities of virtual
social interactions and communications,
networks and communities, organizations and
institutions, societal figurations and
globalized cultures. Virtual space is a
structuring main point with effects on all
societal fields. Virtual space creates a virtual
working-method, establishes virtual
inequality and class systems, realizes a
qualitative structural change of the political
public realm and changes cultural patterns
and life-styles. Cybersociology is the science
which concentrates on the transition of
industrial to informational capitalism and on
the the new virtual forms of society and
societal processes developing in it via open
electronic networks. Therefore
cybersociology is, in a certain way, nothing
else but a sociology of the Internet: