Contesting Community Online: Virtual Imagery among Dutch Orthodox Protestant Homosexuals

Abstract Whereas substantial scholarly attention has been paid to the online presentation of self, symbolic interactionist approaches are largely absent in the literature on virtual communities. Instead, recurrent questions are whether communities can exist online and if specific online venues qualify as communities or not. Inspired by symbolic interactionist perspectives on urban settlements, this paper aims to move beyond these dichotomous questions by studying how different meanings attached to an online venue (‘virtual imagery’) can be understood from offline experiences. In a case study o... Mehr ...