Mediated Communities in the Age of Electronic Communication 1

The electronically mediated communication has transformed our notion of the relation between place and community. With a greater proportion of our communicative acts taking place via electronic media, physical co-presence, the co-located interpersonal relations are diminishing as determinants of the nature of human interactions. This paper argues that the electronically mediated communication contributes to the construction of new, mediated forms of communities which are based on the interaction or operational synthesis of virtual and physical communities. The appearance of these new forms of communities leads to a new conceptualization of the relation between self and community. The aim of this paper is to show that the medium of the mediatization and new conceptualization of community is a specific pictorial language of electronically mediated communication, the semantic structure of which offers new opportunities to grasp and understand the complex notion of new mediated communities and to adopt the idea of a new global, community building language in local and national communities. 1