A hybrid community is one that exists simultaneously in the online and the offline environments. in such a community, the online world and the offline world can spill onto each other in ways that strengthen each other. We selected one such hybrid community (one based on rehabbing houses in a decaying inner city) and applied Denzin's method of instances, supplemented by prior participant observation in the locality, to conduct a virtual ethnography of community building across the online–offline environments. Applying the analytic technique to 1,559 emails, we identified the ways in which communication and support within the hybrid community unfolded over a period of time. We concluded that an online community anchored in a common, material, offline reality blends the two worlds together in ways that are meaningful and useful to community members.
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