Goa Trance and the Practice of Community in the Age of the Internet

Abstract

This article considers the online dialogue of an electronic mailing list devoted to discussion of a genre of music called Goa or psychedelic trance. Attending in particular to the ways legitimate participation is policed in this online forum, this article argues that the debate over the social potential of computer-mediated communication demands an attention to actual discursive practices and contexts in and through which online claims to community are articulated. Community must appear not as an already objectified standard against which novel social forms can be judged but a discursive context for the production of social identities and relations. As such, it is to the connections between textual productions of self and community and the online contexts or genres in which those categories are given life that we must turn in addressing the enormous affective investments in internet talk evident today.