Chapter 6: Digital Tribes,Virtual Clans

Anthropologists ascribe a variety of definitions to the word “tribe.” Most are agreed, however, that a tribe is a small society that has its own customs and culture and that these define it. Tribes are different to clans in that tribes consider themselves totally separate, whereas clans are large kin groups that are retain their distinctiveness, while remaining a part of the larger tribe. Tribes make up an entire society and clans in turn make up the tribe. In this chapter we examine the culture of the virtual learner, and to serve its purposes, I shall use the terms clan and kin group more or less interchangeably to represent subcultural groups. These constitute the larger societal groups that I shall refer to as tribes.