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"Building Community in the Virtual Workplace Jennifer L. Carpenter "Work is a profoundly social activity. The design problem of cyberspace has thus become how to develop information systems that support work socially." -- Prof. David Hakken, SUNY Institute of Technology The Internet is more versatile than any other interactive medium available to us today. It enables us to communicate with friends or with total strangers, with individuals or with large groups, using our real names or remaining totally anonymous. The Internet is not simply a medium, like the telephone or mail system - it is also a place, a virtual community where people meet, engage in discourse, become friends, fall in love, and develop all of the relationships that are developed in physical communities. Yet, the very characteristics that make the Internet community unique - physical distance and the potential for anonymity - are the greatest obstacles to its success. Peter Kollock of UCLA's Center for the Study of Online Community explains, "The key challenges the Internet community will face in the near future are not simply technological, but also sociological: the challenges of social interaction and social organization. This is not to diminish the difficulties of creating new technologies, but rather to emphasize that even these tasks will pale beside the problems of facilitating and encouraging successful online interaction and online communities." 1 Nowhere are the social challenges of the Internet so pronounced as in the virtual workplace. More and more companies today rely on telecommuting to reduce overhead costs, increase productivity, and improve employee morale. 2 While technology and communications companies such as AT&T, Pacific Bell, Hewlett Packard, IBM and Cisco Systems have allowed telecommuting for years, financial services firms like Merrill Lynch and Arthur Anderson and retail companies like Levi Strauss, Pepsi Co., and Sears & Roebuck have recently instituted