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It is the fall of 1996, I am surfing a disability web site when I see a virtual community for people like me with spinal cord injuries. By my own surprise, there were an alarming number of us chatting away on subjects such as how we were injured, rehabilitation, sex, as well as others. After a few months of just looking on, I decided to chime in, and a lot of them were giving good advice to help adapt with my new life. While I found this community to be of some help, there are a lot of people who differ in that opinion. Some people say we should be alarmed by the concept of virtual communities however my own experience and observation tells me this is not the case. The reality is these virtual communities provide a valuable service to a lot of people who need it. Virtual communities are groups of people with a shared interest in a hobby, profession, or a product who get and share ideas online. While this is true, many observers argue that we should be alarmed by this as they claim it is not real and how are we to trust someone we interact with. When I tell people that I go into these virtual communities, the immediate response I get is “how do you know it’s safe to talk?” or “can you really trust the other people there?