Introduction

pp. 1-11

in: Tobias Boos, Inhabiting cyberspace and emerging cyberplaces, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

The introduction gives a concise overview of the development of the World Wide Web and the Internet and discusses the key concepts of the book: community, cyberspace, and cyberplace. Furthermore, it introduces the most important literature, which the author reviews in Chaps.  2– 4 and outlines the main focus of the book. Additionally, this chapter contains a short description of the case study presented in Chaps.  5– 9, an analysis of the web pages of the seventeen neighbourhoods of Siena. These neighbourhoods, the contrade, claim to be ancient communities, and each has its own specific geographical area within the city centre. The contrade started inhabiting cyberspace in the late 1990s.