The artist's renditions of key participants in the research analyzed in this paper were used in a presentation at AEJMC to underscore the imaginative nature of electronic communities and the process of studying them ethnographically. That is, we know nothing of the empirical validity of the drawings. The artist, who worked for a web design company in Houston, Texas, based them on print-outs of online interactions, and did not even meet the ethnographer until after the drawings were made. Nevertheless, they have symbolic validity in that people who have communicated but not met face-to-face do tend to visualize each other on the basis of their aural and/or textual interactions. In virtual communities, those imaginative personas are often all there is, and for groups like alt.cyberpunk, constructing them is clearly a community-defining activity.

Each of the illustrations is accompanied by a short biography of the character, composed by Mark Giese.

Appendix B1: SweetPoly
Appendix B2: Sourcerer
Appendix B3: Lisa and Sym
Appendix B4: Zeitgeyser

[Appendix A]