Review of Cyberchiefs: Autonomy and Authority in Online Tribes
Books on the sociocultural and political impacts of the Internet have typically focused on the advances online communication makes possible or the good things in modern culture that the Internet is pushing aside. Proponents of Internet culture highlight the failings in traditional systems of power and cultural production that online communities can overcome; critics emphasize the good things in those systems that the Internet is undermining. In Cyberchiefs: Autonomy and Authority in Online Tribes, Mathieu O'Neil instead explores the ways online communities recreate the failures of offline culture.
O'Neil, a researcher who works in Australia and earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from a French university, approaches online social systems from the perspective of critical theory. Other scholars have used critical theory to explore the Internet in terms of communication and knowledge production—in the case of Wikipedia, for example, "Wikipedia, Critical Social Theory, and the Possibility of Rational Discourse" argues that Wikipedia is a close approximation of Jürgen Habermas's ideal of rational discourse—but O'Neil focuses instead on the twin concepts of autonomy and authority.
The first half of Cyberchiefs develops a conceptual basis for understanding online authority. In the second half, O'Neil presents four case studies on individual "tribes" with very different authority structures: the anarcho-primitivism website primitivism.com, the political blog community dailykos.com, the free software community of debian.org, and our own free encyclopedia project wikipedia.org (specifically English Wikipedia).