In 1988, when everybody thought the only people who would use computers to communicate were adolescent boys with complexion problems, I witnessed some heart-touching acts of spontaneous support and charity—people raising tens of thousands of dollars to help parents struggling with a sick child, shifts organized to sit and read to a dying comrade, and other instances where flesh-and-blood humans reached through the computer screens and changed each other's lives. I wrote on "Virtual Communities" …showed first 75 words of 478 total…

…showed last 75 words of 478 total…grown increasingly abstract, and have increasingly disruptive impacts on what had been former models of "community." Alpha-bets, printing presses, broadcasting stations, Web sites, virtual communities, all extend our minds, disrupt old forms of community, create new ways to relate, remove us further from the concrete world, and make possible empires, weaponry, medicine, democracy, metropolis, agriculture. Bibliography Contemporary moral issues Lawrence Hinman Business ethics principles and practices geoff moore Business and society james post, Anne lawrence