Cybercultures & Online Exec Ed

Can we claim to have a cyberculture that defines and bounds our online endeavours? If our bag is online executive education, then shouldn't we be framing our investigations along the lines of existing 'cyberculture' discourse? Key Questions include:

• what is an online community? Is it some form of virtual hot-tub? Can we witness a semi-compulsive practice of checking in occasionally with others who are checking in occasionally in all sorts of online forums? Or is this a fiction?
• is it a body of people who, like me, venture onto the Net for a few minutes between activities or while the bath runs, or between instant messenger conversations, or between meeting with my colleagues & clients?
• are online or virtual communities an illusion, where there are no real people and no real communication - a term used by idealistic technophiles who fail to understand that the authentic cannot be engendered through technological means.
• Virtual community is people all over the business education world gathered around their computers doing everyday tasks?

Borrowing from the cyberculture discourse serves to reframe how I think about and describe the link between online & education. The technohype of the cyberculture discourse throws into sharp contrast the pedestrian pace of our community's (which one is this then?) adoption of ICT.