As Brian Eno explained pretty well at his Long Now Foundation lecture, the long-term trend in human contact tends to be toward cooperation, rather than competition. Often in our evolution, I think there would have been little to compete about had we not first cooperated. It is as much in normal human nature to want to develop new resources and commodities as it is to acquire existing ones. By whatever medium people communicate, their collective outlooks can be assumed to default to trust at some point. Once you and several other people have come to preceive possible benefits from working with each other in some way, most people will be smarter than to kill the golden goose.
(Of course, there will always be exceptions).

In the US military, great emphasis used to be placed on group cohesion as a determiner of task success. This model is now out of fashion. It has been more and more realized that people will tend to like each other if they are allowed to do their job and to let others do theirs toward a common goal, quite a bit more than the opposite order of contingency. In fact, people becoming too familiar with each other can interfere with their task performance in heirarchical systems.
Peers may become reluctant to keep secrets from each other and may withhold potentially unfavorable information about their close associates from a mutual superior. Just as it is often harder to shoot an enemy soldier when you have heard their name, there may be a temptation to throw one's self on a grenade in order to save someone else, even if you know how to repair the radio and they don't (bad decision).

One thing I absolutely LOVE about the internet is that is allows for maximum task-focus and can be used to minimize extraneous personal information, but that it can also be used in a much more personal way if appropriate. That, and it is fast, yet mostly non-volatile in effect; one can either interact rapidly or contemplate responses at some length.