Communities of guitarists have existed and evolved in parallel with the instrument’s long and varied historical development. Technological progress in the twentieth century saw two major milestones for the guitar: the invention of the electric guitar, and the birth of the internet. This chapter explores the shift of guitar-based communities to virtual spaces starting with email groups, internet forums, and chat rooms. These communities serve similar functions as real-world communities by sharing knowledge and resources as well as providing spaces for discussions and performances. Peer-to-peer file sharing regenerated an old form of guitar-specific written notation: tablature. Then along came social media, which changed the entire music industry, including online guitar communities. Many of the world’s largest and most visited websites, Facebook, YouTube, X, and Instagram, are havens for guitar communities no longer defined by geographical boundaries. This has had enormous consequences as cultural and aesthetic expressions, particularly in the form of guitar performance practices, are now freely transmitted globally and instantaneously via virtual networks.

1 Introduction

 1.1 Defining Cyber Racism

 1.2 New Terms in Research on Cyber Racism

2 Themes in the Early Research on Cyber Racism

3 Where We Are Now in the Field of Cyber Racism – Current Themes

 3.1 Cyber Racism as Intragroup Communication

  3.1.1 Online White Supremacist Communities

 3.2 Cyber Racism as Intergroup Communication

  3.2.1 How Do Opposing Camps (Racists and Anti-Racists) Engage with Each Other in Online Debates?

  3.2.2 Effects of Cyber Racism as Intergroup Communication: Ideological Polarisation

 3.3 Experiences of Cyber Racism: Research from the Perspective of the Targets

4 Newly Emerging Themes: Racist Narratives about COVID 19

5 The State: Governments and the Regulation of Cyber Racism

6 Future Directions and Conclusion

The chapter ’Virtual Furever Homes’ shows the background of digital spaces and community building by using examples from cat-related digital spaces. The evolution of participatory culture and the development of technology have influenced the way we form online networks and communicate with each other. The chapter explains the concepts of virtual communities, communities of practice, light communities, and affinity spaces. As digital spaces form around narratives, it uses the shared story of the mediated narrative approach to categorise the types of cat accounts that make up the cat-related digital spaces.

Netnography is a specific set of related data collection, analysis, ethical and representational research practices related to ethnography. Unlike ethnography, in netnography a significant amount of the data is collected in a naturalistic manner from researcher engagement with a digital experience, such as interacting with a virtual world or with others via social media communication. This chapter explains netnography and illustrates how it might be useful as a stand-alone method, or part of a multi-method approach, to help psychological consumer researchers investigate a range of important real-world phenomena.