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.

Media and communication influence, shape, and change our societies. Therefore, this first chapter aims to explain the implications of digital communication for our societies and the relationship between media, technology, and society. The chapter introduces the concept of society from a sociological perspective and explains how societies change because of the effects technological developments have on them, and vice versa. It illustrates this interplay with the example of digital divides.

In order to explain the significance and changes of public communication in a digital society, the chapters zooms in on the media landscape and explicates the difference between new media and old (or traditional) media. It pays particular attention to the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, as his work remains a cornerstone when studying the relationship between media, technology, and society. The chapter then outlines the discipline of media linguistics and explains how media linguistics can help to make digital media and digital communication more tangible. It focuses on three key terms crucial for understanding public digital communication: multimodality, media convergence, and mediatization.