Mutual Shaping of Users and Technologies in a National Virtual Community

In this essay I analyze how technologies and users relate to each other in a national virtual community. I argue that a mutual shaping perspective is best suited to capture the complexity, unpredictability, and recursivity of the interactions among technological features and users ’ discourses and practices. Drawing from recent developments in the study of computer-mediated communication, multidisciplinary technology scholarship, and social psychology of nationhood, I show the mutual shaping of hardware capabilities, national identities, collective remembering, software configurations, and coordination practices that took place during my investigation of the Argentine Mailing List. People have migrated for centuries. Those who have desired to remain in contact with their places of origin have relied heavily upon communication technologies. In this sense, migrants have used material objects such as letters, newspapers, telephones, and television sets to reconstruct what it means to be a member of a territorially, historically, and culturally located community in situations of geographical displacement. More recently, émigrés have increasingly used various