UNDERSTANDING VIRTUAL COMMUNITY THROUGH LANGUAGE: A CULTURAL HERMENEUTIC EXAMINATION.

This article examines a specific virtual community through its texts, with an eye toward understanding how the hermeneutic activities reflected in these texts lead to the success or failure of virtual communities. Textual communication is pivotal to understanding virtual communities, for it is how participants create shared meaning and culture. Individual understandings may be unique, or may be congruent with the understandings of other individuals, subgroups of individuals, or everyone participating in the virtual community. Coherence, or the relations of textual units to each other within the text, describes the set of formal and informal constraints or rules that govern the creation of texts, enabling readers to make sense of them. Reference, or the relation of textual units to nonliterary events, describes the ways in which events and objects in the world enter into the discourse of the community. Invention, or the relation of textual units to other texts, is a measure of the social readability of tex...