The dispersal and multiplying of identity that seems likely on the Net may have the effect of nullifying public discourse. Certainly Kwinter thinks so when he says that
Because the Internet is an entirely engineered space adjacent to, and entirely removed from, the concrete material world, the normal constraints of friction, viscosity, noise, and the general panoply of resistance and reactivity that characterize responses to gestures in the material world are nearly absent from it. For this reason, aggregation patterns, unlike those traditional ones unfolding in richly articulated, complex, material social spaces, here free-fall, in the absence of cohesional counterforces, into micro-user groups of unbelievable, even shocking narrowness. ... More social and intellectual atomization, just what is needed for todayÕs fragmented, creolized, ghettoized world in crisis. (VC 100)There are serious dangers in further encouraging small groupings that talk mainly to themselves. Yet that fractionating of the market and the discourse may turn out to help resistance rather than a docile consumption of identity.
Protestant churches have lived for centuries with a social dynamic not unlike what is feared on the Net: if you don't like what's going on in our group, secede and form your own. This certainly presents serious problems when it would be good to have the churches speak together, but it has not created a set of docile little groups with no interest in the situation in the larger society.