Cyborganic’s central premise was that online and face-to-face interaction are mutually sustaining and can be used together to build uniquely robust communities. The project was to use computer-mediated communication, not to transcend geographical place, but to build a local, networked community. Those who led the project wanted to create such a community in their own lives. But they also wanted to demonstrate the possibilities of using technology in this way out of a sense that others, too, would benefit from Cyborganic’s example and its project to spread the gospel of networked, local community. The project was pursued as a business startup and though that enterprise provided the impetus and framework (both technical and imaginative) for the community, the two were symbiotic aspects of a whole that can only be understood holistically and within the context of the Web industry that emerged in San Francisco in the 1990s.

Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, loc. 131