Slashdot Mirror
Is The Virtual Community A Myth?
In a piercing but cynical assessment of online community, Lockard points (the essay is in the book "Internet Culture") out that cyberspace is by definition expensive real estate. Access requires significant disposable income to cover computer capitalization, the continuing outlays of phone bills, repair and continuing recapitalization. For some, employers pick up the tab. For others, like university students, access is a privilege or perk that comes with tuition.
Nevertheless, utopians mooned over the Net's birth, and the idea of virtual community was one of their earliest delights.
Cyberspace, Lockard writes, arrived "virtually unchallenged as a democratic myth, a fresh field for participatory citizenship." Comparisons to "Jeffersonian democracy" (which I've made more than once) and other universal democratic ideals bespeak a historical naivete and ignorance, he charges, leaving unspoken the hard fact that access capital is "the poll tax for would-be virtual citizens."
Lockard ridicules the "trickle-down technology" theorem which holds that digital machinery will eventually become cheap enough for everybody, just like phones, electricity and cars. That, he says, is pie-in-the-sky rhetoric that completely ignores the gateway stratification and mal-distribution of access incorporated into Net access and modern computing. The individualism and fragmented interests that mark the Net and the Web actually work as an impediment to social cooperation in cyberspace, marking the dominance of class privilege over a truly inclusive community.
Lockard's essay scores more than once. He's right in going after the hype that has surrounded the idea of the virtual community for years now. The tech world is rich and elitist, and becomes more so daily. Apart from developments like open source, which has done much to try and make technology more inclusive (though very few people will ever be able to successfully program) there are few signs yet that the Net is re-vitalizing democracy, or that virtual communities are supplanting or improving upon real ones. online, we see little organized concern for the technologically-deprived, or worry about the inevitable social divisions created by classes of empowered and tech-deprived people. It's already obvious that people with access to computing and the Net will have enormous educational, social and business advantages over those who don't; the latter face menial, low-paying jobs all over the planet.
Lockard also accurately points out that the largest communities forming online are corporate, not individualistic, and their agenda is marketing, not community. He calls the very idea of a "virtual community" an oxymoron.
"Instead of real communities, cyber-communities sit in front of the [late but not lamented] Apple World opening screen that pictures a cluster of cartoon buildings which represent community functions (click on post office for e-mail, a store for online shopping, a pillared library for electronic encyclopedias, etc.)" Such software addresses only a desire for community, Lockard writes, not the real thing.
Materiality is the definition of real communities, and virtual communities can't replicate real ones. He writes, in fact, "... [I]t is precisely this human need for community that is being projected onto cyberspace and exploited, sometimes even with the best of intentions." This comparison is a bit of a stretch, something like comparing Disney World to one's hometown. Apple World never evoked a virtual community, it was just trying to steal some of AOL's business.
But for all the value of this kind of anti-hype perspective, it's too soon to dismiss the idea of the virtual community. Jeffersonian ideals were created by an elite, remember, one of whose leading members was Jefferson himself. The very idea of individual liberty was, at the time, an elitist notion conferred on certain white male property owners (remember, the poll tax and other impediments limited the scope of the trumpeted equality) but not extended to other Americans for nearly two centuries.
Potentially, computing could be used to make voting easier, more honest and even, if information becme more widely available to more citizens, more rational. Online campaigns could, theoretically, be far less expensive, alienating and Washington-centered, as Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura proved a few years ago.
Lockard's argument also suffers from a narrow definition of community. Certainly there are bulletin boards and mailing lists -- from sex sites to San Francisco's WELL, from media-centric gatherings from pet rescue forums to AOL's Senior Net -- that have functioned for some time as very real communities that foster conversation and mutual understanding, spawn friendships, generate support for members in trouble. Topical, community oriented Websites -- everything from Camworld.com, Kuro5shin and myvideogames.com to Slashdot -- function as information or true cultural communities as well -- sometimes for idea-sharing, sometimes for material support and information.
The early cyber-gurus definitely got carried away by notions that everything would become virtual, a mistake now shared by all sorts of panicked businesses -- publishing comes to mind -- and starry-eyed utopians. Cyberspace is definitely a new kind of space, but there's as yet no reason to believe that it won't compliment or co-exist with the material kind. So far at least, virtual communities suggest a Middle Kingdom, existing somewhere in the middle between the utopian fantasies and Lockard's dismissive jeers.
Online people do make powerful connections and the virtual realm does permit us to share information (including software), research and commerce and and encounter all sorts of people in all kinds of places -- something that has never been possible before. But when the dust settles, and if the history of technology offers any clues, people will always hang out with their friends, get drunk. They'll still be logging off their computers to have sex, get married, fight with their parents, send their kids off to school and go to the movies, and seek out the company of human beings to meet human needs. The best virtual communities have always complimented that need, not supplanted it.
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the slashdot killah
I'm not a sociologist, I only know what I see, and I do not see a community in my neighborhood, only people who fear each other(bad part of SF). My little corner of 5 neighbors or so, we are friendly with each other, but outside of that, everyone else seems scared of speaking or more interested in acting "hard". Online, I don't experience that at all, everyone is open and willing to speak(save for the occasional teenager trying to be Eminem or whatever, or the occasional t.v.tard who figured out how to get online). Most people online are friendly and open. Now, if I live on the same street from someone who will not even return a "hello" on the street to me, yet when I go online, I meet all these people anxious to talk to me, which one is a community and which one isn't? Exactly what the hell is a community anyway? It seems to me that scholars, especially those who aren't in one of the "hard" sciences, seldom live in the real world. Instead, they tend to live in realities constructed mostly from thier perspective, which in thier own eyes, is typically seen as God's own truth. The problem with being a scholar is easy to see. Such a perspective is built upon one of an educational existance. This is far from the common man's existance, and thus, is itself elitist. To argue against the reality of technology trickling down, is ludicrous. It is obviously happening, in a very real and tangible way. Every person I know who has been in this industry more than 5 years, can tell you about giving away old parts to people who coudln't afford new ones. Hell, I personally donated my first XT to someone who was taking it back to the philipines for his poor relatives. Most all of my subsequent systems were given away as I upgraded, to people who could not afford to purchase that equipment. Exactly where are all the computers coming from that are popping up in poor countries all around the world? And new computers, today you can get a fully functional system for 500 bucks, and it only seems to be getting cheaper. What is that if not trickle down? But as usual, we have someone who is himself an "elitist", calling others elitist. This reminds me of the campagin between Bill Clinton and George Bush, where Clinton accused Bush of being an elitist. The hipocricy being that Clinton went to Oxford, not exactly the common man's school. Any social group can be defined as elitist, hell, I could say that members of gangs are elitist snobs, because they certainly seem to act and talk like they're better than everyone and don't seem willing to want to share with outsiders. Elitist: It's just another dumb word that pseudo intellectuals abuse regularly for fun and profit. I'll leave idiotic "scholars" to come up with such complete and utter tripe. I myself, will continue to contribute to my communities, both online and off. I was raised on welfare, but thanks to the computer industry, I make more than anyone in my family before me(actually, more than everyone before me combined). Even with my past of having been abused and poor, in and out of group homes, I have felt nothing but welcome and acceptance in this industry, and I resent some snooty English scholar of all things(yeah, I'm just so impressed with the average community contributions English scholars make, uh-huh) saying that my community is elitist. The door to this community is wide open to everyone, and all you need to do to be accepted is to check your attitude and stupidity at the door(granted, this continues to a problem for a small few, but really, it is thier problem, not ours).
I'm not even sure that that is the root of the problem. I think that really there are many people out there, possibility a majority who are able to say, "How does this Internet really improve my life."
When I look at this the major cost of the Internet is time! Many people aleady have a long work week, they are involved in church, school, and (non-virtual) community organizations. Adding a few hours participating in an online community takes away directly from leasure time which is very precious.
ha ha ha, unenlightened one.. as an elitist, I must laugh at your lack of education.
Lockard: I'm old and didn't grow up online. I don't really understand.
If you made it before the net, it's really hard to appreachate just what it's doing community wise.
But perhaps I'm a utopian who doesn't understand either..
Who has time to log on and build virtual relationships in a virtual community when you are working two jobs and trying to raise your family?
I guess I might have read too much into your first post.
I agree that some people have it harder, so what? This country is build in the ideal that anyone can succede, not that everyone will, and not that everyone will be able to easily. This whole "the world has to be fair" this kind of annoys me since, I've had the cards stacked against me too, but I chose to just work harder because of that.
I understand that computers will not guarentee an easier way for inner city kids to succede, but it would sure be a powerfull tool for those that are INTERESTED in bettering themselves. If you don't have they origional drive, nothing is going to help you.
Finkployd
When you have that much time between action and reaction, it really kills off the whole aspect of interaction. Yes, interaction is just a series of reactions, but it happens a lot more rapidly than can occur here, and generally for longer periods at a time. Like right now. I wrote something. You replied to it an hour later. An hour after that, i'm replying to you. We're not discussing anything, like point-counterpoint or anythinglike that. You're stating something. I'm stating something.
I don't know of any telephone based communities (unless you want to call all those 976 numbers communities). Telephones can be used to extend or supplement a real community, just as the internet, through the www, email, irc, aim, et al, can be used to extend a community. But i don't think that the internet is capable of creating a true community. It's only a means of transporting communications. A real community, i think, needs to extend beyond the communication aspect of it, and into the interaction part of it.
The internet isn't a community... Your school could be, in that you interact with people there, and then use other tools to extend those interactions: ie: telephone and email. Your work could be considered more of a community than the internet. Your home town.
The internet is just a medium for communications. It's like saying that a bunch of people that subscribe to the same magazine are all part of the same community. They might be. But not at all because of the act of reading the same magazine.
There are many examples of virtual community. Some are of like minded individuals, and others like muds or mushes can be filled with all manor of individualse. The problem is no accountability. In face-to-face communities an individual who makes to many enemies faces consequencs that effect the indivduals survival. In online communities, the worst that can happen is you be banned from he site/mud/mush/ect. Without accountability there is no chance of a community that emulates face-tofac community.
perl -e '$_=":: Qjvtug ZpQbjryy
No, he's not saying that there's no social reason. He's saying that there's no financial reason. You point out correctly that there is a social reason for a digital divide. Specifically that the information "have-not"s have no interest in getting online. This is true.
On the other hand, your assertion that "only those relative few who have any access to computers can grow a serious interest in computers." is obviously false. When I was growing up, computers were almost inaccessable. But, I was definitely interested as were a handful of my friends. If I could have picked up a 486 PC and operating environment dirt cheap the way you can now, I assure you I would have.
I can add one to that list : I met my girlfriend online! Then again, since that time, we have not been strictly virtual... ;-)
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
No, virtual communities are only about dorks who try to get first posts :)
From what I can see above (and not having read the book, this may not be accurate) Lockard's point can be reduced to:
Internet communities are not physical.
This is hardly surprising, really...
Once upon a time, there really was an online community. Of course, this was before graphical tools like web browsers existed, back when there was a significant barrier to entry to the Internet. When tools for accessing Internet fora such as Usenet required people to use their BRAINS, even if only to remember the keystrokes to make a new posting, the set of people who would ever participate in a "virtual community" was limited to the people who would most benefit from it.
Of course, now that Aunt Edna is online, the Internet has, for the most part, devolved into a giant engine for selling worthless stock in worthless companies making worthless (or no) products to worthless investors.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
While all based on gaming, the communities that surround these games are large and vibrant. With real world gatherings, weddings, and acrimonius disputes, how are these communities any different than a bowling league?
They are not.
Society is constantly changing. For example, in the 1700's it might be preposterous to consider moving from New York to California, leaving your family behind, today it is commonplace. Communities moving to being based on the internet instead of the local coffeeshop or concert hall may sound strange to some, but it is the next step.
Just as there are many real world communities that I find uninteresting (bird watching groups), there are others that are interesting (my old fraternity buddies). There are some online groups that I don't want to be a part of (The Well), and others I do (Slashdot).
The real question that needs to be researched is the difference in the persona you are seen as in the real world as opposed to the persona you are seen as in a virtual community. I have many friends that know me only from online contact. How is their perception of me different than my coworker?
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You can save us a lot of time with this kind of analysis. :)
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Cars? Those are cheap enough for everybody? I don't think so. After insurance, licencing, gas and maintenance, cars, for many people, are a financial burden greater than housing.
I can afford to drive a car, but I really prefer having money to do other things. I don't see a need to drive to work and work to drive.
Help us build a better map!
I also was raised in a lower-middle class family. We didn't have cable tv until I was well into my teens, and there wasn't money to burn on computer hardware. I was able to earn enough myself, at a young age, to purchase my own hardware ... and became member of many 'virtual' communities - first via BBSs, and the larger systems like compu$erve, and then the internet around 1990. My position in the lower earning class didn't limit me in any way. I chose to spend my time and small earning power to learn more about computers, and to fund my time in that particular community. Nearly anyone can sacrifice a small amount of earning power to get online. Almost any hardware will get you there (then and now) ... The only elitist element is the small amount of desire and knowlege required to get you there.
... but the experience is no greater than the BBS days on my previous, albiet limited, systems of the past.
These days I earn much more than my parents did, and interact online with a better class of computer
mx
Did anyone here even bothered to define what they mean by "Community"? How can anyone tell if their favorite site or MUD is a community without defining what a community is?
The researcher states that "Materiality" is part of his definition of community, which means that no matter how interesting and supporting slashdot is - it can't be a community by his standards.
If you claim that slashdot is a community - please explain what is your definition.
BTW. no one, including the researcher (as told by Katz) bothered to *justify* his definition.
Why is "Materiality" necessary to a community? why isn't it? what is necessary? why?
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Ballerinas have fins that you'll never find
First off, the 'rich and elite' web is an actual myth of the net. I've been on it for nine years now, from when I was a poor college student, to an underemployed dishwasher, to a professional sysadmin. Similarly, the people I've met online run the full gamut from living off Ramen so that they can afford their internet access, to highly successful professionals, tending more towards the low end of that spectrum than the high. The influx of 'rich and powerful' folks is recent, it isn't the rule, and costs are dropping, not leveling out.
Second, disproving the claim that virtual communities are a myth is simple. I'm part of a virtual community. Several actually. Most of my friends are on the net, most of my business work is done on the net, I even bought my new car and met my soon to be wife on the net. I find more emotional support, relaxation, and community interaction online than I ever did in the 'real world'.
Lastly, as someone already pointed out, there is nothing about communities that require them to be based in the material. That's just an arbitrary definition imposed by the author in order to add legitimacy to his own argument. Such tactics do not befit reasoned, rational arguments. However, given the dismissive tone Katz implies, I find it doubtful that the author was interested in truth or objectivity. Like most soapboxers, he likely had his mind made up long before he ever started looking for 'evidence' to support his view. Rants and rationalizations disguised as rationality don't impress me.
Eric Christian Berg
Lockard brings up some interesting points, but to say that cyber-communities is not perfect does not mean they will not evolve in the future. The democratic system of government did not exist before the American revolution. Every country on Earth at that time was ruled as an monarch or autocracy. It does exist in varying forms now.
I think that technology has changed the way we interact and the way we impact the real world. I would agree that in some ways virtual communities can be considered an extension of older communities in the form of a communications media. In the past groups communicated in person or via mail and journal publications. Now we do it online.
I also agree that there is no substitute for human contact, but virtual communities have changed the scope which we can have contact. People hang out in chat rooms, people meet spouses, and people fight except we do it with people around the world.
I am currently working on starting a community, which is both real world and virtual, each enhances the other. The question is can my group/community sustain itself, in the form of members and effort, and survive. Hmmm... that's pretty real world; Survival of the fittest community.
Wow, Howard Rheingold, is that really you? Cool.
I enjoyed your book "Virtual Reality" a lot, which I read at least seven years ago.
The way some of these scholars discuss computer topics reminds me of a scene in Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon, when Randy Waterhouse ends up in a debate/argument with his girlfriend's "intellectual" friends. (If you've read it.)
Some people say that Perl is line noise. What about Katzian prose?
So, does a newspaper create a community? Does a phone create a community? We might have a community of computers, but do we really have a community of people. Does ICQ, AIM, eMail, IRC make a community?
I think I agree with an earlier post, who has time for community. At least within the old style sense. We only have communities these days by associating with small groups, and how those groups interact with other small groups (6 degrees of seperation and all...). How many of us know more than 10 households within a block of us? And associate with them on a regular basis?
If anything, computers make it easier to stay in contact with certain sets of people. And in someways have become the new form of corrospondence. Where in days of old we sent letters through the mail, now we have email.
Perhaps I'm over simplifying the issue, but in my opinion community is singular in its representation. The communities that I'm apart of virutally either mirror or complement those that I'm apart of offline. In both mediums can be found corporate footprints to varying degrees. However, one aspect of virtual community is that it allows individuals to circumvent those human elements that would otherwise prevent them from participating offline. I would argue that this aspect is beneficial in that it provides a sense of community where noe existed before. What could be bad about that.
Also, is the cost of access is no more unrealistic than the cost of access to any other trapping of Western society. I mean, I'd love to join the local Country Club, as it has the best conditions in which I can partake in the sport of Golf and thereby be a part of the Golfing Community; within which I've made several good friends. Unfortunately, the cost of such a membership is far out of my range. Of course, no one ever argued that Contry Clubs (or Golf, for that matter) would change the world, so I'm not sure the comparison is valid.
Basically, I think Mr. Lockard should lighten up and perhaps under-intellectualize the topic.
Not that I should care what you think, but it does deserve a response...
Actually, I *do* know them well. I used the term "fairly" because you can always know a person better if you've met them in real life. But since I haven't, I know them _fairly_ well. I've been conversing with most of them individually for about 4 years. That's enough time to get to know them. And because they happen to be in other states/countries, I have very good reason to not have met them in person.
Just because you can't hold a few hundred friendships doesn't mean that no one else can. I pride myself on my friendships. You should try it sometime.
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you may quote me
I have been involved in a "Virtual Community" on the 'Net for about 4 years. This community, as I understand it, has developed into what it is today because it is a "community". I have developed friendships, laughed, cried, puzzled, discussed, argued and even experienced many of these things face-2-face.
I agree that the idea of a Virtual Community has been largely hype (certainly with respect to some Business' attempts to develop revenue), however I also think that the concept of "community" is changing. I believe many people hold to the idea that a community is made up of people/places that are geographically local - eg. your neighbours and those living in the same town as you would be classed as a community (we have town names to distinguish between such communities).
Where the 'Net is concerned, this new idea of "community" (described by many as a virtual comminuty) has done away with geographic boundaries - they are irrelevant in many respects.
It could be (and probably is) argued that socio-econmic statues still plays the most important role in defining a community, certainly with respect to towns (housing prices/land value) and the (cost of access) 'net.
I would argue that this is changing, certainly from my experience with individuals I have developed relationships with whilst being a part of one particular community.
-Spudly.
-- "e-idiot: stupidity for the next Millenium."
There are a lot of bulletin boards around the Net that act very much like a virtual community. I have plenty of people who I only know on the Net and we converse on a regular basis. Some of my best friends I know through the Net. Also, Jon Katz, you could learn a thing or two from Jakob Nielsen.
Was it a solar powered Mac SE/30 then? :)
I actually do agree that where there is a will there is a way, but i will insist that such accessible solutions offere a limited subset of what is available to, say, the slashdot croud.
Ñ'
And the internet is not an idea that is strictly tied to any particular herdware/software combo, which is what made it so prevalent.
Ad for controlling the pipes, yes that is an issue. But one that I believe can be resolved, if an independent entity were in charge of such things, that would be funded by the government, but would not have their operational policies dictadet from above.
I think a future where citizenship entitles one to a shell account with 10 megs of hard drive is not all that impossible.
Ñ'
Also, I may be wrong on this, but isn't it rather tricky to find a free ISP that supports linux nowadays?
Ñ'
Internet is lauded as a break from the old school of thought where exclusive clubs dominated. You are who you chose to be on the net, and once the entry barrier is breached, your financial snading matters not at all.
That is both the promise of the net to the masses and the threat to the established order of things.
Ñ'
Because there's only so much you can do with a hotmail account. And what about the talk to censor the libraries' terminals? Right now, the public terminals do offer a limited portions of the internet to the masses, but unfortunately due to privacy and security issues, the experience available at the library is a quite small subset of what slashdotters have come to take for granted.
Ñ'
Whether he likes it or not, there are indeed online communities with rich, vibrant, participation from people of many countries and cultures, widely varying socioeconomic status, and even communications skills. The only difference is that, instead of "community" being defined based on geography, it's defined based on interest and activity. Personally, I think this is a step in the right direction. Surely, lots of things matter more about someone than what city he lives in.
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Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
I almost can't believe I'm reading this. Everybody is not a guru, the majority of people don't need and wouldn't know what to do with a shell account. You are sounding out of touch and elitist... AOL is limited, too and millions of folks are using that with no problem. Library access (minus the Censorware, agreed) is fine. Some is better than none, IMO.
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
I thoroughly agree. MU* of any type, gaming , social, fandom-related, etc., replicate most of the interactions of society. Good and bad aspects, granted, but information and views are exchanged freely, much more freely than in society. Also, inhibitions such as class and race can safely be ignored (though they often are not, much to my regret.) Humans benefit from increased communications, and if they come in the context of beating the crap out of a buncha orcs, then I can live with that! (*grin*)
We're through being cool! Eliminate the ninnies and the twits! -Devo
First of all, the web is not the internet, but this has been said allready. I'm part of a huge gaming community over a service called Kali (best 20 bucks i've ever spent in my life). I go into the chat rooms everyday and talk with friends i've known for over 4 years, but never met in person. We interact through gaming, Duke Nukem 3D, Half-life (counter-strike), Starcraft, Quake 3. People forge REAL bonds by playing games together. There's no better way to become close to someone (or a group of people) then by saving their ass in Counter-Strike, or fragging them in Quake 3. Gaming offers communities more then just talking to each other, it offers people a way of interacting with each other, even if it is with just a skinned marine, for the time your playing that game, you BECOME the marine, or the terrorist, and the others become either your friends or your enemies. If thats not a community, i dont know what is.
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- *Normality Is The Root of All Evil*
Nowhere does he define "culture" or "community" in his article. Nowhere does he acknowledge that, while some claims about a community may be untrue, that that does not nullify the claim that the community is still legitimately called such. The reader is given no indication that Lockard has explored any of several types of community available online (IRC, MUD, Usenet, etc; this is 1997, before the spread of other communities like ICQ and web forums.)
Not making clear what research he has done makes his comments rather facile and easily dismissed. I'm surprised this topic has come up: the book is three years old, and the entire first section has wonderful essays that far more adeptly refute Lockard's essay than anything that can be easily posted here (I recommend Michele Tepper's essay on Usenet and trolling, and the shibboleths of online communities.)
>>(I mean really get any sizeable information out of it that can be access a month or more after a sotry is posted).
:-(
I would disagree, I've gone back and searched for links on slashdot dozens of times. In fact, I was hunting for link at 3am this morning regarding Sun's spontanious rebooting. Guess why I was awake at 3am?
I suppose I'm not too threatening, presently, but wait till I start Nautilus
pundit predicting the immanent death of USENET.
It also seems to me that he has yet to read anything by Sheri Turkel. He obviously fell asleep during his Anthropology and Sociology classes. What, IRC, MOOs, MUDs and other forms of group communication are not subject to the same rules of "in real life" societies?
As for the Internet being "high priced real-estate", I can whip together a 486 box, with Windows 95, a cheap-ass modem, and Netzero for under 100 bux, including monitor.
A friend of mine has 5 kids, one income (can you say tight wallet?) and *he's* on AOL, a PAY service, yet. Please. Being connected has nothing to do with money, and has everything to do with how resourceful you can be.
Indeed, this author of this article is a guy who is a doctoral candidate. He hasn't been out of school since the stone age and probably doesn't know people can connect without ethernet.
This isn't even news anymore. The digital divide is imaginary. The only thing keeping people off the net is that they decided to pay for cable TV instead, fed to a giant 37 inch glass-tubed TV.
Interesting, discussing the existence of online communities in an online community. I post therefore I am.
/. a community (which I so do), there are plenty of other ways to have an online community. I belong to one for old Jeep owners in Arizona. We all met online, talk and share tech ideas and figure out how to keep the old beasts running, and on week ends we go do trail runs, site clean ups and family picnicks. We would never have met each other if it hadn't been for the web.
Anyway, IMHO this entire thesis is flawed. Even if you don't consider
As far as prices not coming down to be affordable to anyone other than the "monied elite", get real. My first computer cost $3000 and was an IBM Model 30-286 with a whole meg of RAM and a 30 meg hard dirve (couldn't afford the 40 meg, didn't figure I would need it). Yesterday I ordered my new computer for $2000 that is a Dell PIII 800 with 256 meg of RAM and a 40 gig hard drive. The graphics card is an order of magnitude more powerful than my first computer. If I was worried about cost I could have bought a used AMD 300 system complete for about $350, which is about the price of a TV. If I were honest with myself (which I am not about to be), there isn't anything that I need to do that I couldn't do on a cheap used system.
I don't really know what the hell this guy is talking about. Maybe this is just an elaborate troll.
Ponzi scheme, promoted by benighted utopians and elitists
Does anyone have a link to a translator, such as Babelfish, than can interpret Jon Katz's articles for us dumb slashdot readers? WTF is a ponzi scheme?
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
Are we all (/. members) not part of a news site gone e-community. People on /. ask each other questions and (usually) value the responses they get. Seems to me that this callibre of respect could only be found in one of those mythical online communities.
-- [insert sig here]
Who even cares if it costs something to be part of the online community? No one can say Harvard fosters no community solely because you have to have money to go there.
This is a manual virus. Copy it to your sig and help me spread!
I would've just said that this guys sounds like he's jealous 'cause nobody loves him.
This is a manual virus. Copy it to your sig and help me spread!
However, those of us who have been on the net from before the time of heavy graphics involvement realize that the communities that have solidified online are surrounded around the chatlines, the IRC channels, the MUDs. People find long-term and good friendships there; social groups of people they are a part of with the same set of in-jokes and politics you'll find in real life groups; and many find love (crushes, dates, or sometimes marriage) there.
People barter information and goods (the post office's rise in shipping reflect this); material possessions are not only the physical but also the virtual web spaces, mail spaces, shell accounts. Understanding the less tangible form of this (information and virtual space) requires realizing that these things are still considered the same sort of possessions by the human psyche with the same sorts of prestige and usefulness to the people that own it as the more tangible material items. I.e., on the net having a large web site (or house on UO, etc) is equivalent to having a large house irl; or having a large mp3 collection to having a CD collection irl. It's just shifted focus for how to access it.
Virtual communities are still communities. They are not as diverse in social class and structure as real life communities, but that does not render them non-existant (else the religious communities within the real world should not be considered as such either). People still act and react to these virtual communities with the same sorts of emotions and ideals.
Gwendolyn R. Schmidt
Certainly LambdaMOO, and the other MOOs I've visited are communities. MUDs even qualify, except that they tend to be focused more on killing monsters and gaining exp than being a community.
On the other hand, he may be correct in saying that there aren't any virtual communities on the web, but thats just a technicality.
The trick with arguments like Lockard's (at least as summarized by Katz) is that they anticipate examples of getting real stuff from so-called virtual sources by redefining the notion of virtual communities to exclude the things from which you get real stuff, and then declaring, again -- and this time by definition -- that virtual communities are a myth. I never liked the term virtual communities, precisely because it is, as Lockard points out, an oxymoron. "Online community" would be better; it avoids the vagueness of the word virtual, but it's not as much fun to say. I can't think of a single "real" community that actually satisfies all my needs and desires -- I participate in many communities, online being the "location" of some of them. Goodness, this is such an old argument. There's nothing new here, except that an English Lit professor managed to publish a collection of the same doubts and issues that surfaced back on EIES2 in the '70s, as Howard Rheingold documented in his Virtual Communities book years ago.
Only the difference being that Americans are called such because the actual name of our country is "The United States of America". And besides, calling someone a "United Statian" just sounds funny :)
I agree that the cost should not be held against it, but for a different reason. Cost cannot be a factor is deciding what is and is not a community. It's a major fallacy on the author's part to assume this. There are many (non-virtual)communities that exist where money is the only thing that defines the community.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
This is all true, but it still isn't a basis for excluding virtual communities from the concept of community. I can see it being used as an argument that the internet is not the sort of community that it claims to be. However, I still don't buy it. Money is not required, it just makes it easier. Anyone can find a way to get on if they tried hard enough.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
The only place with sufficient real-time interaction, social consequences, and communities built over time that I can point to is in the world of MUDs, MOOs, Everquest, Ultima, etc., etc.
Yawn. Almost as soon as the words "virtual community" were first uttered together, Luddites jumped in screaming that there's no such thing. Too bad for them if they don't get it.
...
As usual, they seem to be the sort of people who think that the way things are at the moment of their births is the way things ought to be forever and ever, amen. Enormous cities linked together by high-speed transportation of the sort that's only existed for about 0.1% of human history? Those are communities, sure. But much smaller, more intimate groups of people linked together electronically _can't_ be communities, because we didn't have such things when I was a child, so it's not real! It's _not_!
[glyph of Luddite holding his breath until he turns blue]
Oh, yeah, it was eWorld, not "Apple World." Bad fact-checking makes me even less inclined to listen to him than I otherwise would be
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The statement "Virtual community is a myth" seems like he's saying there's no such thing as a virtual community, which is just an absolutely ridiculous statement to make in Slashdot, since we are a virtual community.
However, his argument for why it's a myth is that the Internet is not equally accessible to everyone.
So is he really saying "Virtual communities don't exist because not everyone can get into them"?
It would appear that his thesis is really "The idea that the Internet created Virtual Communities, where all people are equal, regardless of their situation in the real world, is a myth. The groups communicating via the Internet are more elitist than egalitarian." Why he chose to abbreviate this as "Virtual community is a myth" is beyond me.
Sure there are virtual communities. And they're as stupid, banal, self-serving and self-interested as the real thing. They have the same politics, infighting, and pointless disagreements with other "wrong-headed" communities.
The net doesn't really make us better than we are; a new technology (even a great one like this) won't bring about those kinds of social changes. At best it can help enable them, but for real change, people have to change.
The definition has changed (as all things do). /. ,we obviously don't all live around the corner from each other !
With the net, people don't need to necessarily need to live next door to each other to do this (Any More).
,Collect the whole set !
A "community" is a group of people that share common thoughts or ideas. Most would equate Community to the area around where you live but with sites like
Actually if you break down the words "Comm-Unity" you get people that can make a modem and bus-mouse play nice together !
- Save The Whales
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion, you must set yourself on fire.
Technology is not getting cheaper
yes it is. you can put together a reasonably fast computer for $600 bucks, monitor included, if you look in the right place.
they must become like the TV
the TV is already like the TV.
The slobs who see a digital utopia in our future are always those with the latest widgets
probably true....
- "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything" -Mark Twain
- "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything" -Mark Twain
If we are truly entering an Information Age, then state ownership and state provision of the means of information is nothing less than cyber-Communism. Let the market work and it will drive down the cost and increase the availability of the relevant technology (as it has done with the automobile, telephone, radio, and television).
"If the internet was accessible through public kiosks ... and everyone would be allocated personal space..." this would *not* change the entry cost; it would only change who pays the cost. Whoever (presumably the state) provides these "public kiosks" and "personal space" would pay the entry cost, instead of the user paying the cost.
The internet is not just an idea; it is an idea that is implemented on a particular hardware and software substrate. Routers cost money; fiber costs money; disk space costs money; memory costs money; and software costs money (the Open Source phenomonon to the contrary notwithstanding). So the entry cost *is* inherent to the internet, no matter how you shift the cost around.
Be careful what you wish for, because he who pays the piper calls the tune. Or in this case, he who pays the entry cost controls the pipe. There ain't no such thing as a free Internet.
The net has the ability to connect millions of people, each with their own ideas, and mores. Some people wish to explore differnt ideas, and are open to looking about. Some are very closed minded, and they are able to find other simillairly opinioned people. The white racists can find other racists, but what's interesting is the civil rights leaders can go and talk to those very same racists. He is able to step out of his community and safely (usually) talk to somone, or read about a community where he woulnd't have been welcome.
That my friends is the advantage of the "net community". Interconnection for those that wish to look outside their own world.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
;-) OK. Sarcasm aside... if one doesn't participate in an online community (such as /., k5, photo.net, eBay, Weight Watchers (hey, don't laugh->I've lost over 70 lbs with them) but spends their time reading news, watching videos and becoming petrified...to them there is no virtual community.
Now I'll read the lengthy article to see if I can make an intelligent contribution...
Now hiring experienced client- & server-side developers
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
We are all here right? And we all talk about the same sutff. Because we have similar interests we interact. is that a comunity? depends on you definition of comunity. what is considered a comunity is pretty relative. Does geography of space determine a comunity? Or geography of thoughts? Obviously time is involved. We dont think we live in the same comunity George Washington and his friends lived in. Or do we? after all a lot o people think that they have more in comon with George & friends than they do with Caliph and Yussuf in the middle Yemen. How about the american doctors assosiation is that some sort of comunity? They occupy similar space at similar time and have very similar interests and concerns. All i am saying is that depending on you definition and on how strict you are about it will dictate a priori if online comunities are even posible. Once we've answered that then we can go into the world and see if the excist. that is if we believe thay are possible at all within our previously established parameters.
1. Slashdot is an online community. There's your answer, the virtual community is not a myth. 2. Maybe there's something to be said about a digital divide? Maybe we don't want to deal with the undesirables. Let the poor go use their net appliances and access aol. Keep them away from the net proper. Plebeans use aol, Patricians use the net. What, there's something wrong with being part of the elite?!
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
Yep. The state of the art has been, and always will be, expensive. However, second-hand stuff has been, and always will be, cheap. The advance of the Pentium Era (well, I have to call it something! :-) is that now the second-hand stuff is really useful. When state of the art was a 486, a 286 wasn't useable for much more than a doorstop. But now that state of the art is a 1 Gig processor, 2 generations back is stuff like the P233, which are perfectly adequate processors and can do a decent job on all Windows programs, run most games (albeit at low-rez), etc. We're into the diminishing returns stage, where the advances are no longer paying back as much as they did.
The only application that any of us are likely to see for a 1 Gig processor is running games REALLY fast - Office and other desktop apps aren't going to go that much faster with it. So there's no longer any need to buy a faster machine. You're in the situation of owning a Ferrarri in a 20mph limit world - it can accelerate really fast from 0-20, but the top speed is limited by what's being asked of it. If you bought it for racing (games or other serious processing, in the analogy), then you'll get the most out of it. If you bought it for occasional track-days (occasional games-players, to maintain the analogy), then you'll get a bit of fun out of it. If you just bought it to pose around town (the "gear-head") then all you're getting out of it is being able to say "Mine's faster than yours" down the pub.
Grab.
Oh, you mean the so-called 'communities' that Katz's standard pseudo-intellectual ramble was about? Yup, that's a pretty accurate description. Business is trying to turn the Internet into one big shopping mall. Look over there! A plastic fern! They invade EVEN HERE! *sob*
Aaaanyway, communities are a long way from dead on the internet. But they will stagnate and pretty much degrade to reaction ("Hi!" "How are you?" "Fine, you?" "Fine! What's new?" "Nothing. You?" "Same!" {end of conversation}) without anything to _do_. Many communities that exist only for communication or whatever quite literally die out after awhile. Many that originally _did_ do things but fell into idle and decadence did the same. I've seen it happen on a number of occasions.
The so-called 'community' that many internet businesses build try and keep things as impersonal as possible. Sometimes they build into something more, usually they don't. Sometimes they build into personal things, then go right through the other side with nothing more to talk about and fall apart. (See above) At least IRC channels induce some level of personality into the people there; It's not just casual folk, there's a sort of hierarchy of people in each and every channel.
This is why things like muds/moos/m*'s and everquest and things like that will probably make the best communities. People are there to _do_ something, and that's what binds them together. There could be many differing views, but they all share that in common. So there is some homogeneousness in it.. Whoopee, that's to be expected on the Internet. Things are chopped apart by lines of interest, not geographical reasons. This is neither good nor bad, though, as it means there is less incentive to try or visit something new or go to a new community.
Anyway, enough of the ramble.
And it's not the first Katz article in awhile. Oct 1st, twice(!) on Sep 28th, Sep 26th, and Sep 21st are the most recent. I find it amusing how he's very, very close to some level of truth in each, but so far away at the same time. This article included. I wouldn't hold much in his words.
Um sorry, but have you ever watched the Matrix?
There is uh um
...blink...
Ahem *cough*
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
There are some virtual communities that are real. I've made friends in a newsgroup that became frineds in person, when I saw them. Sorry, slashdotters, but the virtual community I spend the most time in is Baen's Bar, a newsgroup that's part of the Baen Books website: http://bar.baen.com/~bar When I went to the World Science Fiction convention a month ago, I wasn't one guy lost among 5,000 science fiction fans. Instead, I had a couple dozen friends I just hadn't seen in person before. If that's not a virtual community that's real, I don't know what is. Fred
I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none. -- Ben Shahn
Funny how PhDs feel like they're qualified to make "expert opinions" on areas outside their specialty. It is clearly obvious that this schmoe is out of his league, because:
Personally, I've been on the Net since my days in the Army, back in 91-93, but didn't start really delving into it until 94. I railed against IRC, chat rooms, virtual communities, etc., until I tried it. I've spent the last six years as a regular on one IRC channel, and have developed lasting friendships, even though I've never met most of these people face-to-face.
Dr. Lockard, please go back to English and leave social commentary to the sociologists, and the Internet to people who actually have experience with it.
blog |
I think the main thing that people are forgetting here is that it's not the fact that computers on the Internet are just physically connected by copper wires, fibre optics, DSL or microwave that makes us connected in a way. I mean, if you really think about the Internet in terms of what actually happens, this so-called "virtual community" hype is just the transfers of zeros and ones from computer to computer and back again.
What makes these "virtual communities" communities is the interaction between people, not software and hardware. It's the human factor that makes the Internet what it is today. This idea of a virtual community is merely an extension of our real-life communities. What people do online is a supplement to what people do offline. People still work, drive, read newspapers, watch TV, play with their kids and their friends and do normal human stuff. They just happen to log onto a website (like Slashdot) for a couple or more hours a day to find information that they are looking for.
The real point of this is that virtual communites are only real because people make them real. Computers are always exchanging data, but it takes people to take that data and convert it to information, to give it some meaning so it actually makes sense. Without people, virtual communities wouldn't exist.
Self Bias Resistor
Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that - 2001: A Space Odyssey
----------
When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is no longer our friend.
No. It's a load of pompus academic hooey, recycled observations of the obvious, and often inacuarate conclusions. John has just rolled it up for us in more of the same, and thrown it out for the /. community to feed upon. Too bad it wasn't shorter--then at least it would be a good troll.
Yeah, i think i know what you are saying.
Maybe what we call virtual communities are more like what we would call social groups in a real community. People with some similar interests, a subsection. The people you choose to associate with.
Virtual Communities are no substitute for the real thing. Yes they exist. Yes they are helpful. Yes they are here to stay and will only grow, BUT they can never fully take the place of a real community. Trying to do so will only lead to an empty existance. We need to take advantage of virtual communities and use them to compliment reality. We also need to carefully keep the virtual world in check.
- w
Jake
Dating: while( 1 ){ call_girl(); get_rejected(); drink_40(); } return 0;
Does anybody out there think virtual communities are real?
You're soaking in it.
--
Internet access is available in libraries in much of the world. There are free services on the 'net which will let you store data there. So you're right, the idea of the internet would not be changed - we're already there, at least in part.
Now, obviously, not everyone can get on the internet, but nearly anyone in america who wants to be on the 'net can be. Even communities smaller than the city I live in (which only has 50,000 people in the city limits) have a couple of machines in their public library.
And really, let's face it, compared to many communities the cost of membership is quite low. The recurring costs are smaller than covering the activities you will act out :) during many if not most social gatherings. Hell, just consider being a member of a coffeeshop crowd, which is perhaps the situation most analogous to being on a chat; Two beverages will run you $3 to $9 or so. One week is then $21 to $63. One month is $84 to $279! So if you're a big drinker of, say, Nevada City Iced Cappucinos, you could stay home for a month and buy a computer along with a Compu$erve account (or similar.) If you're more the generic coffee type, you have to stay home two months (well, one and a half) and you can get an I-Opener and begin paying for service.
In the end it's a matter of priorities. I'm a geek, have been for a decade or so, and computers and the internet are priorities to me. I have three PCs doing various things, a palmpilot, and scads of videogame systems (a couple of which will be net-connected before too many more moons go by.) Even before I had a job I had three computers, though of course they tended to be further behind the technology curve than the systems I have now. For some people, it's their car (well, I spend a lot of money on that, too) and for others it's clothing, or stamp collecting, or sex toys.
I might add that I just sold someone a Mac SE/30 with a hard disk, color printer, keyboard, and mouse for $15. Then my housemate unloaded a Laserjet II on her to get it out of the house. It would make for a pretty crappy internet experience, but you could always log into a shell, and there are free shells sprinkled about the internet.
So how is this expensive? It's either a piece of work, or costs you some cash. But you really can get on the 'net for free or nearly free, even if you're homeless.
Ah, America, the land of opportunity.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes, it is, but you could always put Windows 95 on that same box. Win95 will let you websurf (albeit slowly) on a 486 with 8mb of ram. 16 is highly recommended, and 32 will seem to fly. Even MICROS~1 operating systems cruise pretty good when you go back in time far enough.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Uh, well, that's my point.
Uh, duh. Since time never stops passing, that conclusively means that anything costs you time. Perhaps someone will come up with some cool quantum effect that will let you sleep in a bubble seperated from time, although I suspect people will occasionally be lost into the void until at least a week next thursday.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes, and any asshole can go to the library, get a hotmail account, and a geocities webpage -- All for free. So exactly why do you need money to get on the internet in a meaningful fashion again?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The first step is to define your terms such that what you are denying doesn't exist by definition. Second, based on your definition, expound on what a "real" community is and show how the "alleged" ones don't measure up. Third, focus on who is excluded from participation, make them into a single group, and show how "unfair" this is. Fourth, isolate a large group with "evil intent" and show that they are in complete control.
This is bunko. Slashdot is a perfect example of a "virtual community." Obviously it isn't "real," so it won't meet the definition of a "real" community. That is why it is "virtual"!!
In the US anyway, it doesn't matter how poor you are, you can still use the internet. It is not elitest. The government funds public libraries that are open to anyone free of charge and allows them to use the internet and participate in the 'community.'
Elitest my ass.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Read this comment, above. It points out very well that the "digital divide" has much less to do with money, and more to do with education.
Be nice to your friends. If it weren't for them, you'd be a complete stranger.
Actually I was fanging along for ages on a Minix box lynxing away and the like on my old 386.
Now in 133 pentium world
Never got that crazy PDP-11 I was restoring onto the net tho. It was WAY to hard and woulda involved writing some whacko ASM ppp stack or something. Old machines rock. And *many* of us low-enders are comp-literate.... Oh and the net really is elitist too.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Alot of of modern cyber-hype (Particularly some of the earlier Wired tripe) seemed verry hung up on the notion of this big inclusive body-free community
In many senses, one detects a bit of Marshal McCullan's "global village" concept of the 60's. Infact HECK, I believe that became the Gore-aproved buzzword for net-"communities".
The concept seems(d) to be that on these communities, we would be free of our bodies, and the 'coding' associated with them. No more being white or black. Wheelchair? No problem! girl/boy? Take a pick!. blah. Ergo physical 'codes' that structure power relationships in the meat world would disolve
The reality suggests however that while in a Foucaltian sense , these power thingees are closely related to body politic and the like, in a wierd way we sort of take those bodythings, like some wierd hoarded luggage with us online.
Racism, Homophobia, Right... or left.. politics and all the generalised shiet that derives from our lived meat-bot experiences all turn up, often amplified on the net.
I am not sure whatan organic community would really be anymore, but the sicklysweet corporate "comunities" have as much to do with suppressing dissent by denying the vagrancies of body-politic as they do with making money
Maybe I'm just rambling. :)
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Not necessarily...an SE/30 can have as much as 128MB of RAM inside of it if you can find 8 rare 16MB 30 pin SIMMs, and 32MB with more common 4mb SIMMs in it. Put a decent HD in the thing, use System 7.5.5 (free as in Free Beer) plus Mode32 to cure the 32 bit uncleanness prob, and you have a very capable machine.
The only limitation to such a machine would be the black-and-white screen. But you only need color for the Web, right? OK, there is a Mac port of Lynx out there for text web surfing, there is Eudora Lite for your email, there is Newswatcher for Usenet, Fetch for FTP, Better Telnet for telnet/SSH, and ircle for IRC. Only ircle is shareware and the cost is a mere $20. MacTCP 2.0.6 and Open Transport 1.1 both come with System 7.5.5, and a good PPP dialer can be had in FreePPP.
The modem port only supports 33.6 modems or slower, but since you aren't using the graphical Web this isn't a big deal.
So for less than $100 one can get an SE/30 like the one you sold up and running on the Web. Talk about Still useful after all these years !
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
OK, let me tell you about community on the Internet.
About five months ago, I got an email from one of the people who frequent the same IRC channel as I do. It was a suicide note. It was time-stamped about an hour before I received it.
I dropped everything and fired up my IRC client, and flooded the channel with her suicide note. We didn't know her exact address, but we knew roughly the town where she lived. I got on the horn to 911 in her community. It took some figuring but we were able to figure out which school the girl went to, and then the authorities were able to find out where she lived from her HS's records. The paramedics were able to find the girl in time and she is alive and well now.
The upshot is that now I and a couple of the other people who frequent this chat are now friends in meatspace with the girl...I'm sort of like her adopted aunt. If it wasn't for email and IRC this girl would probably be dead by now.
So don't fsckn tell me there is no such thing as real community in Cyberspace. Don't fsckn tell me that people in Cyberspace don't take responsibility for each other. This is not a fsckn country club or...what was your turn of phrase...chowder society. This is real.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
They hired all these kids with green hair and studs through their tounges who wanted to put up "community sites" that made no business sense. Places where we'd need 1-2 paid staffers for ever 10-20 members. And of course it all was free.
The market spoke, of course, and now the Community Sites are all dropping like flies. The reasons: Only FREAKS want their social life to be on-line, and NOBODY WILL PAY FOR IT. So it's a bad business.
--- Speaking only for myself,
My mother lives on welfare right now, waiting on a settlement from her disability case (factory accident). Four months ago she saved and bought a used Pentium 133 when a neighbor upgraded. Cost her $60. A whopping $10 a month for Net access.
My mother is an aging hippy, a flower child. Absolutely no technical education or training. No one to help her. I live 2000 miles away, so other than the occasional tip over the phone, I wasn't any use.
Yet she's got her Hotmail account running. She E-mailed me saying she liked my web page. She reformatted her hard drive and reinstalled Windows 95 after a bad crash, and has been asking how she can try out that "Linux thing you do."
God forbid she ever downloads ICQ, I'll never get anything done!
The same argument could be made about our eyes and sense of touch as well. That these bio-hardware/software[s] address only the desire for community, not the real thing.
The arguement fails when desire is seen as a force that connects and breaks into old flows and makes new connections. Then the question is not one of lack, but of what is being produced and created. Online software, like eyes and hands, can be used to produce community, or not. - Richard Wilkerson Electric Dreams Community http://www.dreamgate.com/electric-dreams
Is it just me or does denying the existance of a virtual community on /. remind you of claiming that a particular feat is impossible after it has already been accomplished? Perhaps this is Katz's roundabout refutation of the author's argument, which he clearly takes issue with.
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
Your first assumption that $50 per month is inexpensive, is a bit of a stretch. If you equate that to the actual effort required to generate that much cash with an entry level job, or equate it to a commodity (say 50 loaves of bread), I think that someone earning minimum wage might be more inclined to eat for the month instead of spending 10% of their monthly take-home pay on bytes.
Your second item presumes a certain amount of technical ability, knowledge and that perverse drive that leads people to tinker with stuff they've salvaged. The intersection of people without access due to economic factors and those people that are able to cobble together a homebrew solution is quite small.
You miss the point of the article, that the concept of utopian virtual communities is flawed for the same reason that utopian meatspace communities don't happen: there's not enough to go around.
Not A Sig
And many of us, even online, are trying to develop an immunity to this infection.
themusic
But over the several months there, I've found it to be a community--what I would call an imaginary community, the most positive sense of that word.
The people I know from all over the world, whose comments to my posts I value; whose conversation I value; whose presence I miss--all are the hallmarks of a 'community'.
themusic
I'm sorry, I cannot agree with that. A digital divide always exists, which is itself a reflection of the society out of which the internet grew.
Technology, any technology including the internet, evolves in conformity with the political economy that governs its society. This is not new.
Publics kiosks, any more than universal voting, would not alieviate the situation. There is a cost--always.
themusic
However, I am also mindful of the vast divisions that rend our society, and are reflected in the implementation of any technology. The notion of 'common carrier', once applied to telephones, in an effort to describe a simple means of exchanging information, is no longer applicable when the phone company is a conglomerate, seeking to promote its other divisions.
While individuals may not make money from latecomers, the companies that do business on the internet--and are transforming it structure--do.
Individualization, personalization--and their ilk--are just new ways to market. And the point-to-point nature of the internet is the natural culmination of the political economy of the twentieth century--and corporations are now flexing their muscles.
themusic
Remember that this is in Berkeley, in the Bay Area, a place filled with people who are into providing services like this. In fact, I doubt that even outside of Berkeley there are many services like it in the Bay Area. I live in Berkeley and had never heard of it.
My point is that if such a service is rare here in the Bay Area, how widespread is it going to be in the rest of the nation, where available computers and net connections, as well as the community ethic that drives such a service, are not often found? If I lived in East St. Louis, could I get a free computer and net connection from a local group?
This is just one reason, among many, as to why there can be no digital equivalent of our offline communities. When so many people have access barriers, utopia is far off. And besides, how the hell are you supposed to have a community without personal, face-to-face interaction?!?!
You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
-John Lennon
I've been using BBS's since '84, the internet since '93. I've gone from 300 baud to 384 SDSL. I've also gone from Seattle to Brooklyn in '89, so I've seen the wash of technology, good beer, and pretentious coffee ... the last two being incentives for sharing public spaces, come east. As a subscriber to CoEvolution Quarterly in the early '80s, I was victim of the earliest virtual community hype.
Now, not all venues are for everybody. Enough people will say "Bars aren't real," or "Coffee houses aren't real," or "BBS's aren't real." Hey, it's what's real for you. Me, I have better discussions, on average, in bars than online. But I've had some great, transformational discussions online. Some people do the same thing through the mail (Jefferson, for instance).
And I work in open source, which would be totally impossible if I didn't know my way around the online community in order to solve the inevitable problems. Same as electricians can benefit from knowing their way around the guild hall - but with so many specializations in programming and sys admin, there's no way you'd find the right knowledge if we built guild halls instead. And I pursue my academic-related hobby online, taking remote courses which lead to conference attendance where I have real community with folks who would normally be far outside the circle of friends I make through other friends and bar going.
I just don't see the divide. I've gotten better at making conversation with strangers generally because of online experience, as well as offline. And at turning strangers into friends. It's all community, and this guy saying that one of the places it's important to me to hang - online generally - isn't 'real' enough in his book. Well, isn't he just hipper enough to know?
As for the notion that it's too elite a club, sorry but alot of the people I know in systems administration are the sorts of guys who a generation ago would have become auto mechanics - you've got to take an interest in how things go together and come apart, and how to tune them for performance - very much the same attitude bias. With my SDSL I host a handful of Websites that get hits from around the world - pretty accessible publishing if you ask me. It costs a bit more each month than my car insurance. Expensive if you're in the half of humanity living on $2 a day, but then they don't have cars either.
Cars - there's a technology that destroys communities, all in all. But the notion that there's no community advantage to cyberspace is just bunk. Of course, there were always those who argued against bars and coffee houses too.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
and his resume at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~lockar d/c v.html
is very interesting reading.
As a former doctoral candidate at Berkeley, I hasten to point out that: ... whatever they can find. That technology is ruining our real relations. That online publishing ruins the ability to learn from a written text. Etc. And why? Because they're scared, they don't want to understand, they don't want newness, they just want another latte and the New World to go away.
- Mr. Lockard shares Berkeley's radical dream of politics and community. The real substance of this dream is being able to sit around writing armchair articles about community and politics (see resume above, and Howard Rheingold's much-more-real take on things, HR comment.).
- Academia's 'community' is a sham several orders of magnitude greater than "Virtual Community." Lockard is part of a priviledged (if deluded) few who get to think about "democracy," etc., while enjoying access to libraries, publications and resources that are not available to the common public -- even the Web public.
- The real issue here is access to knowledge. Abhay Bhushan said, that when he wrote ftp, he thought of making any piece of human knowledge available to anyone on Earth. The Internet has always been committed to that. The humanities, like the medieval Catholic church, have always been far from it.
- Most (humanities) academics are glorified gatekeepers to knowledge, whose jobs are fundamentally threatened by the InterNet. Mr. Lockard and others get to lead a genteel life of sitting around in cafes and chatting with students, etc., because they know where information is in hard-to-search publications, where it is buried in libraries, etc. The essence of their work is digging through those publications, taking notes, and remembering how to get to things -- in essence, knowledge management. On top of this, of course, the usual rigamarole of initiation to knowledge, interpretation to students, etc. -- just like the Catholic church had when the Bible was in Latin and 'interpreted' to the people.
- The Internet threatens the jobs of academics in the humanities. It is sad but unsurprising that the humanities have not embraced sharing knowledge online like the sciences. If everything in Berkeley's libraries were online, humanities students would start reading like programmers -- I mean they would have thosands of pages of documentation always with them, and easily find what they needed, instead of spending hours in libraries, looking for and pouring over MeatSpace texts -- and quickly outpace their professors, who have spent years learning that "X is discussed on page yy of T," and other jobs that can be aided greatly by computer automation. But if the public would suddenly have instant access to this information, professors would have more to think about than where to buy their next latte.
- Academia is much harder for the poor to access, than the InterNet Access problems to the InterNet??? Huh? Compared to what? Lockard is missing free email kiosks for the homeless in Budapest and net access in 80% of public library in America. He clearly has no comprehension of what the people who do real work creating the InterNet think about, or the dedication to the sharing of knowledge that permeates everyone who has been involved. No doubt he has a publish-or-perish deadline for his next article, but his thourough ignorance of the history of internet technology is insulting. (I suspect this is because the limited line of knowledge his professors feed his doesn't include much writing by Berners-Lee, even if it is easily available on the InterNet). So much for "access problems."
- The Internet is several orders of magnitude more accessable than academic knowledge, especially in the humanities, who call themselves 'guardians of democracy.' Or was that "guardians of knowledge?" Simply, the InterNet is the most democratically availabel communications medium ever, and Lockard doesn't even bother to touch the wordwide communities it enables -- from programming collectives to Yugoslavian dissidents -- and the very real effects it has on their lives. See Rheingold. Enough said.
- And if the InterNet isn't a democratic enough community, it's academia's fault. Exactly why isn't Lockard committed enough to sharing knowledge, to put his article online (scientists regularly flout copyright restrictions). Academics are supposed to create community, share knowledge, foster understanding. But they -- especially they in Berkeley -- don't do this. Why? It threatens their jobs, their ability to get published in their old boys' networks, their career advancement, their sense of superiority in handing out knowledge, and their very way of life. To wit,
THE REAL SHAM HERE IS ACADEMICS' COMPLAINING. The InterNet represents a real opportunity to democratically distribute knowledge and access to community, but instead of getting on with that real work, Lockard and his acadmic masters complain about the fact that it is elite, that it is corporate, that it
I don't think the Internet is "simply a new tool". Not in the sence that it only allows you to do the things you used to do but faster.
Because of the Internet I am now able to communicate with a community of people with similar interests to myself. Prior to the Internet I didn't know anyone who liked my area of interest.
The Internet now allows people to contribute in ways which previously didn't exist. Say you wanted to put forward your ideas prior to the Internet - how would you do it without massive cost?
The Internet allows you to learn about what you want to, rather than having TV dictate what you learn. I think the term 'Virtual' sounds like 'unreal'. I think 'online community' is a better term.
Online communities center around people with similar ideas and similar beliefs, rather than similar geographic location. These communities are not replacements to offline communities, but are at least a welcome new addition.
A few people brought out some ideas on BBSes, and I think that should be emphasized.
I'll bet our esteemed friend didn't have the privilage of being involved in BBS communities just a few years ago. Its not his fault that the internet is pretty disassociated. Certainly there are examples of people on the internet uniting with common interests, and creating some kind of structure to cater to that. Never to the degree that BBSes did however. It was almost as if the limitations of the day made the system stronger; can't use long distance? Have a smaller more intimate community; Don't have high resolution graphics? Make ansi an extremely evolved artform.
From todays perspective, the Web is a very commercial, very business centric medium that caters to the creation of money almost exclusively, look at slashdot, probably one of the more community-oriented sites on the web today, still has banner ads to make extra money. This attitude runs rampant (and was NOT present in most BBS comunities of years passed) and explains why there are no community sites - because the 'community' doesn't often run them.
Theres my disjointed rant
eof
-f
I don't think there are virtual communities that exist on their own,but I know for a fact that there are some that compliment the real world. Take for example the one I'm involved with, rec.moto.harley on Usenet. It's set up like a 'virtual bar and grill' and the regulars hang out there quite a bit. But they also get together in real life. Locals ride together,meet for national events,and once a year they have the Meet In The Middle,where memebers from all accross the country get together to see each other IRL. They've even gone so far as to set up an auction site to raise money for one of the members who became a quadripalegic after an accident. In fact,when I PCS'd from the Pentagon,there were more folks at the going away party the local netscum threw for me than there were at my shop party.
I don't believe that there are any pure virtual communities,but there certainly are extensions of the real world in cyberspace.
==== Warning:this poster contains subject matter that may be offensive. Flaming discretion is advised.
Title says it all, really.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
IMHO, we are living in a period right now that closely resembles the 14th and 15th centuries in many ways (but on an accelerated time scale), and it will be remembered as such 500 years from now.
Congratulations, you've just drawn a conclusion based on a sample size of 1.
:).
In reality, of course, a wealthy family is far more likely to be online than a poor family, both in terms of ability to purchase or otherwise acquire access and in terms of time actually spent (i.e. time available to spend) online. How many people living below the poverty line bother to build homepages? Thus I suspect that the online populous is at least skewed more towards the wealthy than is the rest of the world. Exact numbers are, of course, unknown, as I'm sure we're all well aware (it makes this argument a lot harder
I think that this is more of a serious flaw than a a minor affliction. It is all dependant on what you view a community as being. If you assume that a community is a collection of people who interact in an effort to attain certain goals (whether they be for the individual or the community), while acquiring a sense of common identity, then the 'virtual' community is very, very real.
UBU
Looks like our author is still just living in a fantasy.
Just to back MsGeek up a little here -
I was there that night and I can honestly say the concern and shock everyone was expressing was genuine. A couple people even had to leave the channel because they couldn't take it.
If you're looking for "responsibility and stewardship," look no further.
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
Eep! How'd you know it was me?
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
what ever happened to virtual reality ? it was supposed to be in every home in like 1996, that was said in like '89 ...
oh well... i'm late sometimes too, but i haven't seen anything about that in years, cept like, 3d glasses that came with my asus 6800 ...
Runnin' On Empty
nice. thanks.
Internet killed the video star,
i could live a little longer in this prison
The internet is a perfect place for everyone and anyone to act like they would like to act in real life, and be who they wish they could be. Given this, which geeks do you know wouldn't want to have social and democratic enlightenment?
Ok, not everyone can be online. Free-access community projects aside, it must be admitted that the IT industry doesn't want to sell stuff cheap. I just think of all that 80x86 hardware out there and it makes me wonder at a system that says they isn't worth fixing.
But the stuff is getting cheaper, and -- Open Source willing-- there Internet will bring F/free things to the poorest of the poor. The thing is, they need to understand why they want to use it. I don't think that everyone is destined to be an Industry Professional, but there are FOR SURE some cool and deadly programming minds wasting away in the mud of some third-world slum. If we could only get to them in time...
I think the key to refuting this guy's argument lies in asking not WHETHER the reality of Virtual Communities measures up to all the gushy hype pushed by Utopians and the Marketing Department, but how much further it takes us in terms of sharing knowledge and culture.
Any community I have ever considered myself a part of (and I have moved around a lot in my life, so I may be atypical) has generally formed around my taking on some corporate role (student, infanteer, DJ, writer, geek). By "fitting in", I had access to the modes of communication allowed in that sphere... the artificial protocols of culture. The customs. The lingo.
It was never a matter for me of how often or in what way I communicated with the community, it was what I learned in the process. Technical manuals and poetry taught me as much as hanging out with people, the difference being the mediation of experience between me and the people who created the book.
The mind in void isn't necessarily going to get rich or fall in love, but the dis-location of identity from the material world does present some irresistable Truths... the Hands on Impertive and certain "self-management"/anti-bureaucratic koans come to mind.
Nobody who has ever felt the rush of flaming a loser back in BBS days, or watched the Web grow with the Great Sucking Sound of the late 90s will need to be convinced of the democratic value of technology. We're just worried that a lot of anti-democratic decisions are going to be made with all the profits. In our system, $1 = 1 vote, so making a bunch of people rich is good, it's just better that the bell curve spreads out quickly.
The people who really get the concept behind the weak moniker of "Virtual Community" understand its about sharing and making things better.
The techno-lust, elitist tendencies, and big egos of the new Elite represent the worst of the last century. The "us vs. them" stance in this domain is not innovative at all. But at least there will be a larger Who's Who for the new ruling class, and more voices can hardly be worse than less.
This is the first time I've ever felt really compelled to reply to something on SlashDot, to be honest I've never read such nonsense in my life. Mr Lockard is just hunting the popular to gain himself recognition and while this works in most cases, he has unfortunately gone off on too many tangents and attacked things unrelated to the virtual community and thus, made quite the fool of himself. I'd just like somebody to tell me what closed source projects have to do with virtual communities and how it's being elitist to people who probably don't know about it or care either way. Yet I'm running off on tangents just as he did, I don't plan on making that mistake aswell so I'll simply stick to virtual communities. They don't exist? The technology is too highly priced? People are elitist? Alright, to the politicial theorist, these things may happen because of the way the market and economy are. Yet for once, let's look at the facts today shall we? First of all, we have the WebTV and WebTV Plus, which are cheap enough for anyone to purchase. I'm part of an online community that often communicates via mail, there are over a hundred of us and we believe in tolerance and have an "anyone's welcome!" belief. Over the many, many months it's been in operation, there hasn't been a flame, an accusation nor has anyone been kicked out. So, in essence, in our group we have people from almost every walk of life using high end PCs to WebTVs, talking about things from religeon to favourite snacks and just having a great time. Considering the above, virtual communities don't exist? Pshaw! Look around you Mr Lockard, your problem is with people, some people aren't capable of a community online OR in life. Yet there are those that are capable of community online and lifewise. Next time, less generalization, more facts! The net in its own nature speaks volumes to me of the falsehoods propogated there.
Steve Magruder
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
OK. Then, I refuse to call you a Canadian. Instead, I dub thee "Parasite del Norte".
And BTW, religion sucks ass. Your inane critique noted.
Steve Magruder
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
I bet I know more about Religions (east and west) and Governments (east and west) then you think you know about "democracy".
Bully for you. I readily acknowledge the arrogance of "non-USians" who believe that Americans don't know "stuff." But I also have nothing to prove to a total stranger who inanely believes he is engaged in intellectual competition with someone he does not know in the very least.
Steve Magruder
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Steve Magruder
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
I don't believe you.
No, you don't know them fairly well, you just know some nicknames' thoughts posted at certain times for certain subjects. That's all. If you would actually have met all the persons you think you know well, you would understand that you didn't know anything about them.
How much do you know about an author of a book by reading his novels ?
I don't think that any communities are truly cost-free. It either costs you in money or time no matter which community you are part of. Most of the ones that come to mind are more expensive than net access. Equality, freedom from discrimination, freedom of speech, anonymity are the things that "real" communities often lack - these are easier to come by in the "virtual" communities....
I, like many people here, I think, began their computer life on local BBSes.
/. has come closer than anything else since BBSes to give me a sense of a "virtual community."
These BBSes had a very strong feeling of community, and many of the people I know from a BBS, I am still in close contact with today. When I was a kid, they were almost my only social life.
When BBSes began to die, that saddened me a lot, and I missed the sense of community. The point of this whole post is that
Joshua
The internet has been commonly available for about 5 years. That's not enough time to judge its impact. Could any predict life AFTER the industrial revolution, DURING the industrial revolution. Heck no. Half the people were busy expounding on the wonders of the modern age, and the other half were busy expounding on the horrors of the modern age.
No such thing as a virtual community, outside of those driven by marketing? What then, pray tell, is slashdot? What are news groups? Already, people are getting sick of marketing-driven sites -- what will happen 20 years from now.
Technology will never trickle down to the poor? More people use computers now then ever before. In Canada, the average phone:persone ratio is 1:1 -- it took 100 years, but it happened.
Virtual communities will never replace real contact with people? Of course it won't. Why would anyone want it too? How else would people have relationships or procreate (or recreate)? The virtual community allows you to extend your relationships beyond geographical boundries. It's a world where you nobody knows you unless you want to them too -- so you cannot be judged by race, or gender, or religion unless you choose to be.
Here, you are only judged by the intelligence of your posts.
I can spell. I just can't type.
What is reality anyway?
How can I be sure I am not an artifact living in some virtual reality?
Slashdot may be only a dream I made up...
Or did the Matrix put it in my mind?
Join KWSN - The coolest SETI team!
Ni!
Right here, right now, we have a virtual community.
/. *likes* it. The white guys can speak for the colored ones, the rich ones for the poor ones, the smart for the stupid, and it's all framed in this nice, civilized interface so the community can debate its own merits without its members changing in any real way.
/. is a classic community. It's filled with people who all think alike--and believe others should think exactly like them. Like all communities, those who don't follow along (you know, the stupid ones) or the ones that can't follow along (you know, those peasants getting sprayed in Columbia) are naturally excluded. There's no elitism in this; it's just how things are.
And that's how
Just like the real world......
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, The Histories
Excellent. We have a summary, by someone who has never read the original essay, complete with an ad-hominem attack, of another summary.
There is a Virtual Community (albeit much hidden) existing on the internet replete with more interaction than you can shake a CueCat at. It's called Onlive Traveler. http://www.onlive.com It's a 3D Virtual Reality Chat program that features animated and expressive avatars as well as realtime audio communication between users. The avatars lip sync to your voice and even mimic certain actions like blinking. I am a member of this community and I have been using Traveler for 3 years now. You can't even imagine how real it is and how 'different" it is compared to all the other chat programs around. The University of Texas in Austin even hosted a Traveler server in ActLab (Advanced Communications Technology Lab) which was run by Allucquere Rosanne Stone who was mentioned in a /. article the other day. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/08/25/171022 1&mode=thread
Actlab no longer runs their Traveler server but
while they did I found it interesting that they
had their Psychology Students using Traveler
and coming in to attempt to provoke users and
other like stuff in order to study our reactions.
Virtual Lab Rats
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
No, virtual communities don't exist. Neither does Joseph Lockhart.
I usually do not know anyone when I move to a new area when contracting, everyone I truly know, is online, or part of my "virtual society" or whatever. I meet people the same way. For what I do (misc contract programming, admin, etc.,etc.,etc) this is the only real way for me to keep in touch with me and for those people to keep in touch with me. So I would have to say yes virtual societies or whatever exist... since the label describes my social existence and lifestyle and so many other peoples that I know.
...hmmm Scientifically that would prove it true and not a myth wouldn't it? Just wondering...
I'm not using one yet.
I'll be one of the first to agree that a physical presence for shared experiences is a great thing to have, and I think it pretty easily establishes the idea of 'community' more than a string of text can, for most people.
The caveat is that the 'virtual community' was designed by people who either were ahead of their time, in realizing that you didn't need that flesh-to-flesh contact to establish a community or set human interaction, or unable or unwilling to perform same in the real world they had their backs turned towards as they typed and programmed away. They learned they could exchange wonderful ideas with each other, make friends, and socialize in a way that wasn't burdened by the overhead of communication in the physical world; no body language misinterpretations, no encrypted voice intonation, no social graces to be forced into, just pure communication. If such overhead is wanted, it can be added quickly and cheaply. IMHO, LOL, etc.
What happens then, I would think, is that without the need or inclination towards physical interaction, they found their own ways to establish relationships and communications with other people (arguably, one of the key ends of a 'community' - community and communication share the same root word, after all).
Nowadays, though, we're trying to bridge the gap, and what seems to happen is that one side of the gap, all these geeks, nerds, techies, etc. claim that what they and their predecessors have established is their own version of 'community', their own rules for social interaction. And they don't mesh with those that think that you have to have a handshake and a hug to proclaim someone friend.
The truth is, both sides are right. It is wonderful to have people to go to a movie with, help try out a new restaurant, or just hang out with. But (and this is coming from a geek at heart), sometimes you just want the direct communication, without the overhead (which can be much more important to those who etablish these 'virtual communities'). So, you pop online, drop in IRC, ICQ, AIM, whatever, and bug around with the 'community' you've established.
When did I get stuck in tirade mode?
Funny that this issue comes up, 45 minutes ago I was reading the latest issue of Blink, Earthlinks monthly spam... *cough* magasine. It had an interview with Dr. Drew of MTV LoveLine and www.drdrew.com fame in which he mentioned that in such a dysfunctional and disconnected world (In the emotional regard, not what we may at first think. ;), online communities are an extremely effective way at making "connections" with people. Anyone who has heard Dr. Drew wouldn't question what he says, I would personally kill people for him... oh wait, that sorta thing's already been done, whatever.
Regards
Yeah, wouldn't it great if you could meet people online and in real life. If you're looking for a date try personals.yahoo.com, i'm sure you can find someone close by you.
...they were called BBSs.
Gee I miss the good old days.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
Well, I'm white too, but I am realistic enough to know that people who live in the inner cities are not afforded the same opportunities as affluent whites from the suburbs.
I grew up as an affluent white in a suburb of Cleveland. I really never had to worry about having a roof over my head and where my next meal is coming from. I got to play around with computers as a kid because my parents could afford to send me to local community college's "College for Kids" program. But the fact of the matter remains that I was afforded opportunites that those in the inner city were not, pretty much because of the color of my skin (and to a lesser extent, my gender.)
While I commend your friend from breaking free from the inner city I would say that the anecdote you have provided only proves what I was trying to say above: that there is a problem in the American inner city and no supply of 486s, free ISPs and Linux cds is going to afford the people in inner cities the same opportunites as the majority of those who inhabit "virtual communties."
Sorry to go off topic, but I wanted to correct the misconception that those who complain about white privelege are automatically not white.
Brandt
Here's what you have to do--
1. Go to your local salvation army and find a 486 that someone donated.
2. Get your hands on a copy of RedHat linux. (Don't worry kids--you can download it for free!)
3. Compile the linux kernel on your 486!
4. Dial in to the nearest free ISP (Never mind the fact that your single mom works 3 minimum wage jobs and still can't afford to pay for a phone!)
It's that simple!
Let's get real. The above would be funny if it weren't pathetic and true.
I love it when priveleged whites in the suburbs think that they live in the same America as those in the inner cities.
Brandt
S I T E
great comedy company.
A community is a vibrant, living, multi-purpose collection of people. Clans, MUDs, and UO all only exist because of one reason -- to play the game. They are just Saturday afternoon D&D clubs taken to the extreme.
open mind: teaching computers the stuff
Anyway, your Jeep club is a real community. You use the internet as a tool to strengthen the relationships in that real community. Sending a message to a relative doesn't make her a virtual relative - it just strengthens the relationship.
open mind: teaching computers the stuff
When you can ask google and get better and quicker results?
-- Anne Marie
You know, back in the early 90s, I subscribed to a local chat BBS with 25 nodes. I knew everyone there, we had parties together, pursued insightful discussions, flame-wars, general conversation. It considered it a community of sorts. It was a lot of fun and I met some good people. There were all sorts, not just 'techo-elitists' though there were plenty of those. I miss it even now. However, I don't really see anything like that today. I talk to different people via IRC and napster and such, but I rarely see the same people twice and things change daily. So I guess my response to this article would be, virtual communities have existed, but in truth they have perhaps fallen to crowds of semi-anonymous users. I don't feel like I'm really 'part' of anything anymore. Even Slashdot, where I see some of the same people posting frequently. As an aside, I think Signal 11 might come back just to comment on this. It seems to be part of his gripe.
infotropic 'That which does not rise to consciousness, comes to us as fate.' -Jung
Personally I think that net and web access is just a means for people to think that they are really in another community when in fact they are not. What I have found is that there is little substance to the argument. Social elites are in the business of making more barriers not of allowing open access.
PejVHF8LRIgynjB0dqjTuH4/8A-Z9#sSQV74sR>S4983w0cSM
I have been with slashdot since the days before it was purtchessed by Andover and taco was running it off his ISDN connection. I just wanted an account since I have been out of the country for a few years.
Please if you are going to flame do it with reasoned opinions and not with classless foppishness.
PejVHF8LRIgynjB0dqjTuH4/8A-Z9#sSQV74sR>S4983w0cSM
That's why you have various social groups congregate around similar ideas. For example if I don't like the crime rate where I live I move to an area with lower crime and a more pleasing demographic. Virtual communities reflect this as well for many of the same reasons.
PejVHF8LRIgynjB0dqjTuH4/8A-Z9#sSQV74sR>S4983w0cSM
That was my pet peeve in school that people had to dumb down many of the actual writing that was in some of the better classics for the truly stupid. Try looking at http://www.dictionary.com or something it usually helps.
PejVHF8LRIgynjB0dqjTuH4/8A-Z9#sSQV74sR>S4983w0cSM
Anything that gives us a reason to pull funding from The Palace.com is FINE by me! :)
Take that Avatar and shove it up your Paradigm!
-- Why oh why didn't I eat the Blue Girl?
Lockhard seems to consider the venue to be more important than the basic principle. The word "virtual" is really a foolish word. Do I virtually sit here typing? Of course not...I am breathing and wishing I had more coffee and wondering why I promised myself I would go down for the oplympics but did not... The real online communities (since they are not virtual) are just as vibrant and controversial as communities in other spaces (living rooms, cafes, community halls). These online venues or places which survive if they meet these basic cornerstones: 1.) They must cause interest in a central idea - Is Napster a community? Maybe. Sure...people all want free music....but what is the central idea? Any community that centers itself on an idea that interests people will survive. Slahdot is the idea_lab. It is a classic think tank. It survives on multiplicity and articulation. The communities that create their own interest may last a while, but they will soon die if the idea behind them does not create thay interest. 2.) They must be self-sustaining out of need - The community will exist because it must exist. Slashdot is needed as a forum for double-think. A land of swimming ideas...waiting to crawl from the soup into companies and other communities, burning issues, finger food. Seniors must have community, people must have ways to trade recipes, loved ones must grieve the loss of their relatives. If the community serves a self-sustaining need, it will survive. 3.) It must have a populace with identity - Why else would slashdot cajole the unholy into spending the time to get a login...all to not be deemed a coward? It is a statement. It says...to play here...you must have "identity". Lake_Eyre as meaningless as it sounds, yet still betrays something created by me...a semblance of me in some small way exists in that identity. That identity found in the form of avitars, logins, anything that makes Susan from Delaware different from Jane in Pemona. Anything that gives each member a platform from which to engage. 4.) It must have personalities - People in a real community must be engaged in that community through difference...debate, discussions and argument create personality. The populace must have an identity and a reason to become involved. How long does a community of people who hate United Aitlines last? Sure...maybe you post a few beefs and you are done...but does that make Untied.com a community? I think not. How would slashdot work if not for the credit received from good penmanship? Jon Katz is a perfect example of how personality is required for community. Whether I abhore him or revere him, his articles divulge his personality, his ideas and he acquires a stature albeit good or bad for me and only me. I do not exist for him until now, but for me he equates to community. 5.) It must have a creator - A true community is nurtured and born from a singular or group idea that evolves into a community. I know that there are communities out there that have been created by companies and other communitites created by people. Reagrdless, although seemingly obvious, a community must be created and it must be accessible by at least a few people. That does not mean that a community is for all. Does Lockhard not equate the cigar houses in Britain as distinct communities? They are simply closed communities to all who are not English gentleman. That does not mean that they go against Jeffersonian or democratic ideals. The founders simple get to decide what is allowed and that is the micro version of democracy. A community is a tiny state unto itself if you will. These creators get to decide who may join the community and what role they may play. Right down for instance on slashdot to where they vote the article might be read or unread. This pentagon, forms what I believe is a community. It works for both the group of men smoking Gitanes and playing Bocce on a Paris street all the way down to a guy in a drilling rig hat playing Mech commander in Boise. It is not a matter of venue, but of the five requirements above.
If they aren't real...why do people get married after meeting online, or form lasting friendships...or develop ideas? Are these not the finite forms of reality? Does this medium excuse a person of good manners or allow them to betray themself any more than in real life? Not really. Sure you can "pretend" a bit better online...but it is funny how text unwittingly weeds out our personality isn't it? You don't know if I am a man or a woman, and so the medium is different and dunfamiliar. However, you are not concentrating on that...you are concentrating on my idea. It is simply a different way of splicing reality. No less a community than in a different venue wouldn't you say?
Joe Lockard kindly replied to my query if an online version of the article was available:
--
This piece was first published about five years ago under another title, 'Selling Brooklyn Bridge in Cyberspace'. It's in [The E-zine -w] Bad Subjects at: http://eserver.org/bs/18/Lockard.html The essay was revised and republished as "Progressive Politics, Electronic Individualism, and the Myth of Virtual community, in Internet Culture, David Porter [ed.], Routledge, New York (1997), pp. 219-232.
--
I believe Joe was partly responding to Howard Rheingold's book "The Virtual Community" which is available in full text at http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/
The problem with so-called "communities" on the Internet is that they're really just associations. Clubs. Chowder societies. Nothing passes between the members but talk, and while talk is an important part of community it's not the end. The ends of community are responsibility, stewardship, and protection of shared resources. Perhaps you're making a sweeping judgement based on your own experience, which can't be too good if you believe what you're saying about "chowder societies". I've read MsGeek and SomeGuyFromCA's posts, and I am a member of the community they are from. And I have to tell you that they fit the definition of a 'community' as you put it a whole lot better than most real life communities I've seen. I'm not the person in question, nor was I there the night they're talking about, but I can relate to that event on a personal level that I'm not going into. The upshot is that these people, this so-called 'club', actually *cared* that I might do something permanent to myself. Additionally, when people have been in less dire circumstances (being shafted by careless corporate crud, for example, and getting a C&D notice for no apparent reason), uproar followed by definitive action to defend the person in charge and, more to the point, get the problem dealt with. Support network and strikeforce all in one. If that's not responsibility, stewardship and protection of shared resources, I don't know what is.
Ya know what? I think i agree with him, because, i've been in enough of those porn chat rooms with the girl just kinda sittin there to realize that it's all fake, it's a damn government conspiracy....
I'm not saying that god doesn't exist, merely that he is not necessary - hawking
this guy doesn't know what he's talking about.. Half of the things he uses to claim its not a community, have never been claimed to MAKE a community.. He says that because we 'log off' to do certain things, thats part of what makes it not a community.. Well, the town I live in, is a community. I go outside of my town all the time to do things. Shop, play, learn, etc. Not EVERYTHING can be done in your community.. it wouldn't be a community it would be a compound... or some type of religious cult. He also claims that the internet is only for the elitists... and thats balogna.. I paid about 600 dollars for a computer, which I can do everything I want to do online. IRC, web surf, read news groups, and login to a unix shell. All of that is a part of my community.. my realm. I know plenty of 'poor people' who spend more than 600 dollars on a bicycle.. or especially on a CAR... I don't think its quite the utopia, that sci fi books would write about.. But it certainly does have characteristics of a community.. or SEVERAL communities. people form together, and do stuff.. for one reason or another.. and yes it may contain commerce (too much if you ask me).. but thats PART of a community. After all.. you can have all the good will, and love, and voting, and all that stuff that you want.. but If you can't buy your groceries, and your bedroom furniture, how long will your community last? (I think the internet would be fine with a hell of a lot less commerce, but that doesn't make it a non-community..).
~fin~
-- "I feel a strong disturbance in the for.."\*Segmentation Fault*\ (core dumped)
The web only has "forums" not true communities. There is no real interaction on the web, just reaction.
...because no one knows how to work and be with one another, they just know how to anticipate and react to the actions of each other. It's a difference.
However, what is interaction but a long chain of actions and reactions? Perhaps the delay inherent in the Net is only now causing people to realize that.
And the difference is... ? While it's true people aren't physically with each other, does this really matter? And if they aren't, then is a telephone call "interaction"? And if it is, then why isn't a Web-based forum?
----------
I guess he hasn't looked in the phone book too much. There is an organization which takes computer donations, refurbishes them, adds a free internet service provider, and gives them away for free to neighborhood damilies that would not be able to afford them otherwise.
The interesting fact is that the limit of their output is not hardware, but time, to do the refurbishing. They have a warehouse of donated computers that they just haven't gotten around to yet.
Of course this isn't the most common situation, but it's happening more and more. Is that elitest?
Steve VanDeBogart
> Usenet started dieing after the emergence of many of the sites like slashdot and it's use of a very unreliable protocol for transporting
/. ever appeared on the scene. (And AFAIK, /. was the first web site to offer a manageable reader feedback area where people could read & comment on each other's posts.)
> information around.
Yes and no.
Usenet was showing a drop in traffic long before
Why this is, I can't say; but I have seen the more serious usenet groups (e.g. comp.mail.misc) fall from several dozen post in a day to less than 10 over a period of a couple of years. Part of this (speaking from my impression) is probably due to spam, part of it due to scaling problems (to offer a full newsfeed in 1996, you needed more than a T1 line to suck all of the articles down -- & many ISPs are falling back to a strategy of contracting their newsfeeds to a third party, & only sucking down those newsgroups that its users read), & part of it due to competition for eyes with the web (``comp.mail.misc? What kind of URL is that? I always go to www.jesseberst.com for all of my computer news! I just click on the links & he tells me everything I should know").
On the other hand, mailinglists seem healthy & just as vibrant as ever -- at least from the half dozen I am subscribed to. Spam is more easily dealt with, you don't get as many trolls or off-topic posts, but you still have 100% of the kooks & characters the Usenet cabal established for you in 1990!
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
In addition, where you might currently see an elitist forum distanced by technology, years down the track it may well seem mundane. Imagine a similar description made of a city 500 years ago. There was no way for country folk to visit the city, interact with the city, be part of the city. They couldn't afford to live there, they couldn't afford to travel there. Was a city some elitist clique -- you bet. Is it now? It depends where you live. Plenty of places in the world are still at this struggling level, but for myself travelling 200km in a day is nothing. Travelling half way 'round the world only takes 19 hours.
So, you might see the 'Net as a private club house, but I might see it as a public meeting place. There are no fixed lines, only distance from your self.
I met this great girl on a newsgroup in 1992, and we've been happily married since 1997! I know a lot of couples who met on the net. Some net relationships work, some don't.
Troll.
Canadian Troll.
I think it might have more to do with the fact that is sounds like he worked his butt off learning and absorbing all he could, instead of whining about his "disadvantages".
Anyone can go from any class to any other class in this country. It's not feudalism where you are born a peasant and must stay that way. Sure it's not going to be as easy for everyone, some start out with disadvantages. But if they spend all their time complaining about their disadvantages instead of working that much harder at learning useful skills, no amount of help will make them successful.
Finkployd
I love it when priveleged whites in the suburbs think that they live in the same America as those in the inner cities.
(note: I'm white, so in your eyes this may invalidate my entire comment)
I know some inner city youths who were in drugs, stealing car stereos, street fighting, etc. One of them decided to try to make something of himself, so he got a job in construction (after interviewing for two years trying to get in somewhere, and getting a GED at the same time) and worked till he had enough to go to a semester of college as a provisional student. He currently completly supports himself and alternated between going to college and working to pay for it. He now has a pretty good job and lives a much better life.
You know what else, he does all this without resentment toward those who were more "priveleged" than him, and doesn't constantly dwell on how hard he had it. Maybe that is what would fix the inner city. Looking at life as a challange to create your own "priveleges" instead of "I was born disadvantaged, so I'm not even going to try and be successful...someone else should help me"
Finkployd
This guy needs to remove his head from his sphincter.
:) No elite here anymore.
I know people who are poorer than dirt who manage to afford a cheap (or recycled) PC and AOL access.
PC prices are continually falling, and internet appliances are available for even less. There is absolutely nothing to indicate that web access will not eventually become as ubiquitious as access to a Television.
I would like to see this guy back up his claim that web access will remain limited to the elite. It may have been in the past, but it is no longer.
Just look at the trend in the quality of slashdot postings over time
-josh
The web only has "forums" not true communities. There is no real interaction on the web, just reaction. Without ongoing interaction, there can't be any form of community, because no one knows how to work and be with one another, they just know how to anticipate and react to the actions of each other. It's a difference.
Yes, community, just like anything "e-" or "i-", was just another buzzword that caught on as web companies were trying to figure out a way to make market valuations seem fair, so they'ed spout "but we have this great community aspect going for us".
dotcoms are dead. their buzzwords should die off as well.
On another tangent, is it me or is the first JonKatz article around here in a LONG TIME?
It is really funny reading through these posts, half of the people are being intelectual about it and the other half are defending their chatrooms because they can go there to get cyber-layed because no one talks to them in the "real world". Aside from it being funny, the whole idea of a virtual world is miscontrued. Virtual communities are merely extentions of reality, you're not talking to a video game, you're talking to real people. I can do the same thing with my ham radio. Go outside, get drunk, stumble. Its fun.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
A big product of there is http://www.cybertown.com/main_nsframes.html. IT is really cool after you set up an avitar of your own. You can shop and chat and do all sorts of things, including buying a virtual home and have a virtual job.
Okay maybe this is not exactly what they guy was talking about. But he did say 'virtual communities' and did not really define what he meant. Sure you can infer, but that only leads to speculation.
Hey I have virtual friends. People I have only chatted with on line does that count? I do have real frineds too though.
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
Some points:
Just like they used to only sell cars to the very rich, or electricity to those who were close to town? These don't sound like long-standing problems to me. (Although in the case of electricity, it did take some government intervention to get it all the way out into the country. Government intervention to provide 'net access to all is no less plausible, especially if much of the world's business begins to be done over the net.)
Well, if you can define the terms of the debate such that by definition they are irreconcilable, then why did you need to write a book about it? Community is a meeting of minds, not bodies, and the net is the closest thing yet to a real meeting of the minds. Sure, it isn't everybody's mind yet, but give it time.
I have to agree with the KatzBot on this one - this naysayer is way off-base. Access to the web will bring about "social and democratic enlightenment", it just may take a while. And it seems to me that it's moving a lot faster than any previous comparable social change.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
--The more you know, the less you know.
So, I've been part of an online community for two years. Help with their web page. We've held get-togethers to hang out. Two of my friends are being "tutored" by me in job searching. I got together with others at a convention. Sounds like a community to me. What people miss is that virtual communities are reflective of and become "real-life ones." There's no division, the two blend into each other. The Internet is just another tool. We'd be better off focusing on what the Internet can do then arguing minutate of definitions on a hideously personal and subjective subject such as this. Now getting people more technical access, THAT'S a worthy goal.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
2600 turned their theoretical community based on the magazine and their internet presence into local real communities by encouraging meetings in public places.
--
RumorsDaily
So far at least, virtual communities suggest a Middle Kingdom, existing somewhere in the middle between the utopian fantasies and Lockard's dismissive jeers.
With nearly all utopian fantasies and dismissive jeers. The never seem to be as good as the utopiast envision, but never as bad as the alarmist worry about. It's always a mediocre medium and humanity trudges on.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
At least media wise.
The Internet makes it very cheap to publish information, but relatively expensive (at the current time) to consume it. This turns the existing situation on its head, where its cheap to buy information (by owning a radio or buying a magazine) but expensive to distribute it (by owning a radio station or being a publisher).
So the first order effect is to create media empirelets like Slashdot out of financial thin air.
Of course, nobody at Slashdot takes out my garbage (unless the sanitation engineer reads it on his free time). We need real communities to live in. But to discount virtual communities completely is to discount entirely the importance of information and ideas.
I am not as excited by the prospect of the virtual communitity as I am at the prospect of the information enhanced community. We're seeing it now with retailers putting in Intranet terminals so shoppers can browse for products not on the showroom or get information about them; town services such as licenses through self serve kiosks and over the Internet; newspapers going on line, and even blue collar workers are getting Intra and Internet access. Cities and towns routinely have websites, which while pretty bad right now, but imagine if every town web site was running a Slashdot style forum. I/T could lower the cost of entry to politics the way it has to publishing.
Of course, there's still the problems of the have nots.
There is absolutely no question in my mind that the cost of a fairly powerful information terminal (perhaps something like a current generation palm pilot or Apple's ill fated eMate) will cost less than $50 in about two years. Most of the information have-nots in this country already have televisions which cost more and will benefit them less.
The bigger problem to entry into this information enhanced society will be literacy and education. People who lack these cannot exploit the information technology enhancements made to normal civic and work life. However this problem is nothing new. The poorly educated are already marginalized.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I would not be complimenting you if I told you that you used the word "compliment" in place of "complement"; rather, the complement.
-russ
p.s. Jon, you're a native English speaker. You have no excuse.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
"Materiality is the definition of real communities, and virtual communities can't replicate real ones."
This is circular. It's not an argument, it's an arbitrary definition. I don't think that materiality has anything to do with community, and it's not fair to redefine words to make an argument.
Also, internet access gets cheaper every day. Many people can use the internet from libraries for free. So, that's bogus, too.......
Not that it matters, because inclusivity is not a measure of a community. (It may be a measure of a utopian community, but they don't call it utopia for nothing).
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
Pray tell, how is going online today expensive?
What, at the minimum, is needed for anyone to go online?
1. Access
2. Interface
Access would be a phone, and a local dial-up ISP. Almost everyone has a phone. Only the extreme poor don't have a phone (why, I cannot understand, since a phone - for local calls only - costs about $30.00 a month - surely one can budget for that amount). Local dial-up ISPs can be found that charge less than $20.00 a month for access. What are we at now, $50.00 a month? Have several people chip in on a single account (yeah, I know most contracts prohibit this, but it could be done anyway) and phone, and you might be looking at $10.00 a month for 5 people.
Now, the interface. Computers are expensive you say? NONSENSE. I can go down to my local trash bin and damn near pull a complete system from the garbage. If I wanted to actually shop for something, I could go down to a local electronics recycling place, and buy an old 486 and a modem for about $100 - or a VT100 terminal and a modem for less. Heck, for even less - go to a garage sale, pick up an old TRS-80 or Commie, hook up a cheap 2400 baud modem, some comm software, and your TV (everyone has a TV - even if they don't have a phone, they have a TV).
THAT IS ALL THAT IS REQUIRED.
Provided all you are seeking is information - information that might (just maybe) help you out of your situation, and into something more profitable. Get a simple shell account, use Lynx to browse the web (hell, it is healthier for you that way, anyhow), and Pine/Elm for email.
If all you are wanting is porn, or some other consumer crap, then you are SOL.
The internet can help everyone - and anyone can join the discussion. For plain information, it doesn't take anything (much of anything) to use.
Unfortunately, it is getting harder to find plain dial-up shell accounts...
I support the EFF - do you?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I have to ask - what class did you start out in, before you went to art school. Did you start out educated class (not rich, necessarily)? How did you get into computers in the first place?
The fact that you went through poverty does not necessarily mean that you didn't still start out with intangible class advantages that let you use the cyber community to get where you are.
-- I'm not evil, I'm
I was involved in the old Genie online service. My portion was the Science Fiction Round Tables, which become a real community where F&SF writers could talk to their peers and fans about their lives and work.
Genie died, but the community migrated to the web, at dm.net and sfrt.com. I suggest that an online community able to last over 10 years and outlast its orginal home is real!
*sigh*
In the examples Katz quotes the author as citing, he's absolutely correct. However, those examples are almost completely irrelevant.
And more irritatingly, there's all this red-herring crap about whether or not technology is accessible to which people. Look: a community of rich, privileged people is still a community. "Community", which has been often and is here being used as a catch-all feel-good word, is ANTITHETICAL to inclusivity. The experience of community arises among people who have a higher-than-default sense of connection with one another, and a correllary to that is that in comparison, they have less sense of connection to the people outside the group. That "sense of connection gradient" basically defines a social wall between "us" and "them", whether in a village or a chat room.
And a quick review of any basic anthropology text will reveal that a sense of community has little to nothing to do with democracy or liberty. Also irritating about this essay (at least as reported by Katz) is that the people who wrote most rapsodically about the experience of community available on line (Dibbell, "A Rape in Cyberspace"; Reingold, "Virtual Community") were not arguing that community would bring democracy, or any other political system, to the world. They were putting forth the argument from observation that the experience of community -- a sense of belonging, an on-going densely connected graph of interpersonal relationships, the evolution of a distinct (sub)culture -- could happen in a virtual environment.
We take this for granted now, but once upon a time not so long ago, sociologists wrote, and I kid you not, that the idea that geographically distributed people might be able to form "community" (an idea first broached when air travel became cheap and readily available to certain classes of the 1st world society) was impossible.
Yes, it is disgusting how corporate interests have tried to appropriate the term "community" to apply to their feeble, sterile websites, and try to sell people a concept of community which is no more community that a listening audience is a "family". But that was never what any of us who were interested in this topic were talking about.
And basically, it sounds like either this author is a jerk who knows nothing about what he's talking about, or a jerk who has an ax to grind. The first is the case if he really fails to understand he just told many thousands of people "your subjective emotional experience didn't happen, your experience and voice is invalid, this social-emotional relationship you are in has no value" -- of COURSE those people would be insulted and feel attacked. The second is the case if he knows that, and still wants to tell many thousands of people "you're wrong about what you experience" -- the term "community" is a politically charged word, and it looks like he is trying to wrest control of it.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
Frankly, I think it's vital. But I think in real life (so far) it's worked the other way around: a geographic group of people develop a virtual aspect.
I live in the Boston area, and know at least 2 "half-virtual" communities (am in one) off the top of my head. I expect there are more. Not being wholly virtual, they aren't necessary visible to the entire net. They don't necessarily want to be innundated with non-local members, so why advertise their presence as such on the www? Also, bluntly, they don't do real-time chat, or exist on web pages: they exist in email.
What makes virtual community appealing and so interesting is that it allows people to gather by topic, interests, attitudes, or tastes, or some commonality besides geography. So efforts to start virtual communities based on no more basis that "people who live in this town" tend to fail.
The two half-virtual communities I mention above both have themes other than merely "we all live here". They have more profound connections between the people.
So to my mind, the question is "how do you help existing communities become half-virtual, to reap the benefits of virtuality?" (there are many), not "how do you found new virtual communities and have them transcend virtuality?"
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
Access requires significant disposable income to cover computer capitalization, the continuing outlays of phone bills, repair and continuing recapitalization.
So does a real community. In fact, a real community costs more than a virtual equivilent. Why? Continuing outlays of rent/utility/luxury bills, repair and continuing recapitalization, and don't forget the time involved.
Virtual communities, or whatever else you choose to call them, most definitely exist. I regularly contact at least a hundred, probably a few hundred, people and know them fairly well. But I've never met them in person, and so they are a virtual community.
the end.
_______________
you may quote me
I've wondered if there would be any use and/or acceptance of a web site designed to connect the "virtual" communities people have based on interest to the real ones the live in. A place where you register with your location, then can join topic or interest based groups, and you'll be directed toward people that are geographically close to you.
As nice as people are to talk to online, sometimes you want people to go to a movie with, to dinner with, invite over, or the like, and no matter how much to talk to someone from across the country online, they just can't fit in there. Maybe a way to help alleviate the lack of community people feel in more urban areas?
Does anyone see any use, anything appealing, about this idea?
---
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
I'm a Net Admin working in a small town hospital in eastern Oklahoma. My previous job was in sales and tech support (such as it was) at the local Staples. While I did have my share of snobish, well-to-do customers, the bulk of them were "lower class" trailer park folk. You know the kind, they live from payday to payday, and the concept of saving money is as foreign as personel hygene.
When I would ask them what they intended to do with the machine second most common answer (the first being "Play Games!") would be "I'm gonna get on that internet, so I can get e-mail and see who won the tractor pull up in Tulsa." There are people in this world (and most of them live here in Oklahoma) who, no matter what it costs them or if they can afford it, WILL buy a computer and WILL get on the net. Trust me, I've seen people who couldn't even spell "computer" buy a machine so that they could have net access (well that and play solitaire).
Yes, it's somewhat disturbing that people could join a group where they hear only what they want to hear. On the other hand, in many communities conversation isn't only relegated to one specific main theme, and conversation can wander into any human interest, which allows individuals to grow from the perspective of others.
This sounds somewhat like doublespeak. Are you telling me you don't listen and respond when others communicate with you -- online or otherwise?
It takes effort to build relationsips; you can push people away just as easily in real life.
Exactly. It's pretty hard to talk about things other than the game while in it. I've played everquest a few times and there is conversation, but it's not at any level that I woulc consider of any depth.
Exactly, the guy is full of shit. Perhaps he should stick to analyzing themes in Shakespeare or get a real education.
Obviously the author has never played any online games.
1. If the "virtual community" is a myth, then how does he explain the player run towns in Ultima Online ?
2. There used to be a tavern on the Lake Superior shard that was called "Silk's Tavern". PK's would stop by and NOT actually kill anyone, since it was a "neutral zone!" A couple of Game Master's noted the popularity, and "blessed" it - they helped decorate it and made the decorations permanent. i.e. trees, shrubs, plates, bar stools, etc.
3. MUDs have had virtual community for YEARS.
4. Look at all the "clans" forming in the first person shooters. ie. Quake, etc. They have their own "small community." They "hang-out" in practises, and get together on the "clan matches." The larger community, are the game web sites, focusing on their specific game. i.e. After Looking Glass closed down, some "amatuer" level designers have produced some great Theif scenarios. If there was no community, then there wouldn't be any "excitement" about new levels.
Granted, the virtual communities in cyberspace has less "power" then the Real-World, but it they are just as real (since REAL LIVE players are involved.)
First of all, before I post my real rant, I'd like to point out that so-called Academic communities are also nothing more than a ponzi scheme perpetuated by a bunch of elite snobs who think that their colleagues are the best damn people on earth and true enlightenment stems from free access to their published works.
Potentially, computing could be used to make voting easier, more honest and even, if information becme more widely available to more citizens, more rational. Online campaigns could, theoretically, be far less expensive, alienating and Washington-centered, as Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura proved a few years ago.
Right, right, and right. But, how does this constitute a "virtual community?" Looks to me like this is an example of the internet being used to improve life in pre-existing communities.
Let's think about it. Were there radio communities in the early 20th century? TV and telephone communities in the late 20th? "Hey, I got this new telephone thingy, now I can meet all KINDS of new people!" No. I think the idea that a new technology can magically create a community IS rather pie-in-the-sky.
However, the telephone in particular has helped me maintain community ties that I made otherwise. For example, I live 2000 miles away from my parents now, but I'm still able to talk to them in real time. It's nice.
In a sense, the same thing is happening with the internet, especially email and IM. My parents don't use those things so much, but my friends from college do (who I also rarely see in person). I've already had 3 people contact me via email in the past 2 months to come out and visit. Have we formed a "virtual community" because they emailed instead of calling?
I'd say no. We just used the internet as a tool to maintain our friendship. And that's how I like it. Enough with this argument that the "digital age" is somehow replacing whatever came before. You don't form virtual communities, you virtually reinforce the communities you've got.
Oh, please, Jon. AOL is about as community as virtual communities get. So what if everyone on AOL is a luser and not at all 37334? That's how real communities are, too; full of dummies. If there are online communities, this is what they look like. And to argue that the opposite is true - that virtual communities somehow bring out the best and brightest, well, that just confirms the essay's thesis: we're a bunch of elitists. Which way will you have it?
(Why the hell isn't this "+4, Insightful"?)
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
An esteemed colleague of mine met his now-fiancee online too, and she just moved to the same city to be with him. Wedding scheduled for the Summer of 2001.
That said, many online relationships dissolve. I wish you two the best.
--
For some, the participation in an online community constitutes their leisure time. Yes, it may become a problem, but then, so can just about everything else.
--
As usual, the writeup "above the fold" shown on the front page is vague beyond usefulness, or potentially misleading in a way to spark controversy.
The first thought is "Hey, community exists wherever people go to hang out!" Don't flip that bozo bit yet.
The article that follows the Read More link isn't about 'virtual community' the way that eBay and slashdot and EverQuest and MUDs are about 'virtual community'. Those are virtual communities, and they each have their own intrapolitical issues to deal with, but have tenuous relationship to the world as a whole.
The article also isn't about such hybrid political 'virtual communities' like Napster, where the politics inside the community are widely debated as politics outside the community.
What the author is hitting on is the effect of online communications on the non-virtual community, i.e., the net's promises of Jeffersonian (enlightend) democracy.
I don't think this is even talking about virtual community. It's talking about community via the net . It's not discussing the formation of subcultures or other communities, it's discussing how the net affects existing community, either as various states, or nations, or as the human race.
In short, if I read "virtual communities are a myth," I'd scoff. If I considered whether the Internet has really affected the way the world works politically, I'd give pause to think about it. The answer isn't necessarily so cut and dried.
[
So, you're saying that there's no financial or social reason why inner city youth aren't booting Linux?
If you've climbed up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs far enough to have shelter, and your daily bread, then you're already far better off than many. If you've got a stable family or social structure around you, you're better off still.
It's only once you have stopped scraping for shelter, food, love and self-esteem that you can begin to look at cognitive development.
Only those relative few who have any access to computers can grow a serious interest in computers. Those who haven't had consistent, constructive access to computers will probably find more application in a portable CD player, than in a Linux distribution on a discarded 486.
Elitism in the 'digital divide' doesn't necessarily mean "small top minority." It just means "not the small bottom minority."
[
From what I gather from the quasi-review, it seems that the author is arguing that because the net is the province of the tech elite that there are therefore no communities.
Firstly, I would argue that it is not necessarily the case that the "tech elite" own the web. While technophiles are pretty much by default net users, it does not follow the net users are exclusively tech elite.
It certainly is true that there is an income level cutoff for the majority of computer use, however this is also true of many other commodities that give people status and access (think automobile). Computers are significantly easier to access these days (as mentioned in schools and through employers).
My family and my wife's family are almost (except for her brother) entirely wired, in spite of over half of them not being technically inclined. Even my often broke, bad luck magnet uncle is wired, as he is very active in his community (his online community has a large intersection with his RL community).
I see no evidence that the authors assertion in this regard is correct. Given the behaviors of certain people with @aol.com emails, I'd say that a large percentage, possibly a majority, are not techs.
Secondly, even if the first argument was correct, it does not follow that an exclusive community is not a community. So what if all you meet are fellow geeks (as unlikely as that is)? What is to prevent these geeks from forming a community? From IRC i have regular (daily) contact with people from germany, norway, netherlands and england. We swap jokes, give book recommendations, make fun of "Survivor" etc. What's not a community about that (and I haven't even mentioned communities centering around gaming, like quake clans, and everquest guilds)?
In conclusion I'd have to say this author has his head up his ass. If he'd spend some more time actually relaxing and having fun online instead of technophobic ranting, I think he'd actually see the world in a more accurate light.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
Thanks for pointing out that the "entry cost" is not merely financial, but also one of education. A functional computer can be purchased for little more than the cost of a television now, and I bet most people in this country have a television. Whether they are likely to spend that amount of money on something that requires learning to use is another question.
Lockard ridicules the "trickle-down technology" theorem which holds that digital machinery will eventually become cheap enough for everybody, just like phones, electricity and cars.
Lockard makes it sound like money is the main impediment, but methinks it is something else.
And BTW,
Democracy2 is probably one of the most unoriginal domain name Ideas I've heard since goat.sex.
Cheers
There's a reason that only ~%2 of the world is online.
Stop your USian centric rhetoric.
For those of you who don't have the attention span to read a whole Katz article, let me put it into a few bullet points.
Bottom line. Katz does a decent job of explaining the argument that "The Virtual Community" is a myth, and then debunking it. Unfortunately, this is something most of us already get, already being members of at least one "Virtual Community".
Every weekend I go over to my friend's house, and hang out with her, and her roomates. We are a small group of people, with some very obvious differences, but I think we may be a community of a half-dozen.
Some people may have a feeling of community here on /. But not all, If so, we wouldn't have 6 posts claiming to be first every time a new article shows up.
BUT I believe that some here do feel a sense of community. I'm working on it, but not yet.
One last thing, regarding elitism and the "Digital Divide." Many people say RTFM, well, it's hard to read that stuff sometimes, and they don't answer questions right away, you have to figure out where the answer is. If people were really into making technology for all, they would lend real help, not just give out URLs.
And the reason that people in the projects don't run a "FREE" OS on a 486, is that there is no way to get it. Where is the only place to get Linux for free? The Internet. That means you already have a working computer with a stable connection. There will never be a truly free OS until the cd's are as available as AOL coasters.
Those who don't know me, probably shouldn't trust me. Those that do know me, DEFINITELY shouldn't trust me.
Without a doubt, costs exclude some individuals from this "virtual community." But what about the community of individuals in high priced neighborhoods or business communities? Are these not real collections of indviduals who interact in a manner that defines their community structure? The "virutal community" may be an exclusive community, but exclusivity does not make it not a community.
I think the logical danger that this argument runs into as well is that by the same standards that a "virtual community" could be considered not a community, so could a material community. For example, if members of the community, in the process of living their lives, go to the grocery store and say, "Hi!" to each other from across the parking lot, there is no material interaction. There's visual contact (across the net, no problem). There's auditory contact (across the net, no problem). The only place we fall short on the net is physical contact (often not done in "real" communities) and olfactory contact (done only when the people in your community miss baths and forget their deodorant).
Another great example of a virtual community is UNCENSORED! BBS which has been dialup since 1988 and both dialup and Internet based for years, up to this day.
A simple Google search will turn up many, many other BBS systems, and the successful ones can claim to have a virtual community right there.
---
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
But not only are "virtual" communities real, they're something far more significant than is generally acknowledged. In the case of MUDs, what we see is an interesting new way of communicating between people. What I find fascinating about MUDs is how they distort communications, and how such concepts as idioms and body language map to the new medium. For instance, such things as different "socials" (pre-cooked strings in response to commands like 'grin') and other behaviours that would normally seem mundane take on a whole new meaning. The difference between the 'smile' and 'grin' social, for instance, is vast, but you'd never see that otherwise. Different ways of communicating with people, through private and global communication, by moving around and doing various other things, evolve new forms of humour and new ways of feeling the presence of other people and objects. It's true that most MUD players don't think this, but I think they are generally getting it anyway whether they know it or not. MUDs and computer-based communications in general provide an interesting medium for playing with interpersonal relations and the relationship between people and the world around them.
I think from this perspective it is easy to see why Timothy Leary came to see "cyberspace" as a way to get to new levels of reality, much like LSD. To neglect the reality of this is silly, all you have to do is play MUDs for a while and you'll know what I'm talking about.
... between real communities and virtual communities is that in real ones, there are a bunch of people with both similarities and differences, and they HAVE TO live together.
You can have butch lesbians at the convenience store in line behind Jimmy Swaggart. And the checkout guy is a deadhead or whatever.
Virtual communities are basically groups of people with 'like' interests. More homogenous. In fact, people like virtual communities _because_ they are a contrast to real communities. They aren't the same thing. Two different beasts w/2 different purposes.
I always find it interesting when nay-sayers peek into a given area without benefit of having any *real* grounding in the subject (doctoral canidate in English Lit is somehow a social scientist with a technical background?) So it is with great wonder that I can't figure out why he hasn't learned from history?
Oh, wait, they don't teach that in public schools anymore...my mistake.
The crux of what's troubling our poor, frustrated bard: technology -- *ALL* technology -- causes a "speeding up" relative to our surroundings:
Increases in efficency have only led to more thinking and scheming of how to get even more from a given tool, or how to build "the Next Great Thing!"
So, to steal a line from the late, great Clara Peller: "Where's the Beef?"
A virtual community is still a community of *people* -- whether it's neighbors who meet online in a chat room to discuss a Neighborhood Watch, or if it's a group of people scattered all over the planet discussing the newest PC game. "Virtual" just indicates that they aren't meeting in The Real World. Back in my day, we used to call that "writing a letter to a friend." Any shared space -- physical or metaphysical -- can be used to exchange ideas (or gossip or bullshit or whatever)...kinda like what your supposed to do when you matriculate at university.
Look at any active web board, mailing list or other online "community" and you'll see many participants trying desperately to create something for which they'll have joint responsibility. They'll want an "official" webpage, an archive, an award: anything to give them a sense that they're doing more than talking.
So, are there real online communities? Sure. Look at the Open Source movement, a community of people who talk a lot, but who also build things for which they're jointly responsible: code bases, archive sites, indexes, FAQs, etc.
Why do you consider yourself part of a community in the neighborhood where you live? Is it because you talk to the people there and share the same hobbies with them? Hell, no. If you met most of these people anywhere else you might not give them the time of day. It's because you have a common interest in protecting what's yours: your houses, your kids, your streets, your peace and quiet.
-- He's fantastic, made of plastic....
They don't care what race I am, or who I am, for that matter, they just help because they're protected by their anonymity, just like I am.
As for social enlightenment, I can get all the info I want on the web, but what I listen to is my choice. I feel better informed thanks to the internet. You might disagree.
BTW, what would an English-Lit PhD know about the online community (said the French Lit Major).
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
How many businesses have now jumped on the bandwagon and put up web sites hoping to rake in the big bucks?
Most of them.
How many of those sites have failed?
Most of them.
Whats the problem? People are buying into this whole "virtual community" as a something great and new. In fact, those businesses that eventually succeed online are going to be the ones that realize that the Internet doesnt mean you have to change your whole business. The Internet is simply a new tool to do the same thing you have always done. Just like the fax replaced mail for most written correspondance, so is email replacing the fax and the phone, and the Web is replacing catalogs (and trips to the store).
Existing businesses already have a real community of their customers. Dont redo everything, youve obviously done something right to this point. Simply give them another alternative in how to do business with you.
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
'nuff said. More politics than you can shake a stick at.
I eat the flesh off the living, and I vote!
On the net you can meet people who are far away. I communicate with people who live in Serbia, in Croatia, in Austria, in Greece... You can get a very different view of what's happening in the world (e.g. in Serbia) when you have contacts like this. And on the internet, these sorts of contacts are easy (relatively so) to make.
Sure - they are people, too, but that's one thing which is a lot easier to forget when you just read newspapers and watch TV news. There *is* a different quality of these communities.
For example with the naming controversy over the republic of Macedonia - wouldn't it be interesting to ask a Greek friend or two what they think? And then maybe a Macedonian? How would anyone go about this *before* the internet?
Forgive me for being cynical. In the corporate world, the only group of people are a group of people to be advertised to.
Of course there is! /. is proof enough for me.
Indeed, these people should have read USENET news over the past decade to see that people ordinary people feel no commitment to the internet. DotComs are dropping like flies, which seems to underscore this. Conceivable that the utterance "Your momma is a troll and your papa flamebait" is an observation rather than insult.
I did wonder if the
Primative: Around the fire
Prior to 1920s: Around the dinner table
1920s-1950s: Around the radio
1950s-1990s: Around the TV
1990s-?????: Around the computer
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Personally, I would throw this moron's dissertation in the trash can.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Well, when asking "Are virtual communities real?" just examine the meaning of the word virtual and you'll see the difficulty. Virtual _means_ not (quite) real. Quasi-real, if you will. Having a certain functionality or aspect of the real thing, but being sort of a simalacrum.
I'd say no community that is solely virtual is really complete. I can think of several communities who have alot of their dialogue and commerce in a "virtual" way. The contemporary a'capella society of america was one of the first I ran into (or realized this about). I came into contact with it through usenet (rec.music.acapella), but quickly was introduced into a local organization, and attended conventions. There was a real a'capella community that transacted much of its communications virtually. But you could -- and this is key, you very likely WOULD -- get to meet others face to face, if you reached a certain point of participation.
(One of my Math teachers saw the "scientific" community this way, too: he had one-way virtual dialogues with Newton and Euclid. And he even saw religion this way, too: one way dialogues with Isaiah, Luke, and others).
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
I, too, regularly converse with a bunch of people I have never met IRL through e-mail. Most of them are "friends of friends" that got sucked into our e-mail lists. There is an old joke about the difference between a friend and a best friend. A friend is someone you can call to help you move. A best friend is someone you can call to help you move ... a body. I kinda define "community" the same way. If these people I have never met were coming into town and needed a place to crash, I "know" them well enough to invite them over. I would like to meet them all face to face. If I need something (information wise), I would never hesitate to ask them. In a way, they are like virtual neighbors.
I might add that I am fortunate enough to live in a real neighborhood community where I know most all of my (physical neighbors) and we spend a lot of time gossiping on the porch or the front yard, have block parties, pick up each other's kids from school and babysit if the need arises, etc.
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
although more compelling than one to many communications (ie. television, radio, etc.), the killer apps of the net lie not in the expediency of communication or even in the newfound routes or options, but in the shared concept of information - that is - that no idea ever dies in our whirlwind. we have afforded ourselves the ability to communicate from the many to the one, and to actually have the receiver be the principle of that equation. YOU are your own community, and any virtual community is merely a part of your individualistic outlook, communication and information circle. the focus is on the individual in our new world, and i say this feeling very lonely in this basement office on this cold fall day.
S I T E
great comedy company.
Virtual communities like Slashdot exist, and they closely mirror the meatworld communities out there: we have assholes, snobs, suckups, and all manner of other lowlifes, as well as the sorts of people who make community participation worthwhile. The only problem is that, because the vitual community so closely mirrors the outside one, they both will suffer from the same inability to make the real political change that everyone seems to crave. It's different, but deep down, it's just the same. Wake me up when history stops repeating itself.
-- Anne Marie
They have an abundance of time, not of money.
Not bloody likely. If they're poor and not working, then yeah... they may have time. But they probably won't have any inclination to learn anything. If they're of the working poor class, then they probably have the inclination to learn, but they don't have the time or money since all their time is wrapped up in trying to make enough money to stay afloat. My family was somewhat like this.. except we were more of a lower-middle class, paycheck-to-paycheck living family. Still are really. It's very hard to get out of it once you're there. Any unforseen problem can start you on a downward spiral too, which makes you spend your time trying to get back to where you were before. Families that are worse off than mine was certainly aren't likely to have the time to devote to learning computers when they are spending their time trying to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads. I got lucky when the company my mom worked for threw out some old computers and we got one of them (286/12mhz(IIRC), 1 meg of ram, CGA monitor, 10MB HD). It was the summer before my senior year in HS. If it weren't for that, I might not be typing this right now.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I flunked out of art school. Twice. Having no skills and no ability to hold down "normal" jobs, I used to live off $400 a month in the early nineties. That's $4800 a year, so far below the poverty line, I couldn't even see daylight from where I was.
$150 of that went to pay my share of the rent and utilities every month. $20 of what was left went for a dial-up shell account at a local ISP. I used a 5 year old Macintosh (with a black and white screen!) to get email, read news, chat on IRC and log onto the local BBSs. Two years later, and I had saved up enough ($500) to buy another five year old Mac, this one with a color graphics card and a monitor, and whoah! Web browsing!
In this day and age, all the computer equipment you need to get you online can be had for less than $100 if you shop carefully. Operating systems (Linux, *BSD, BeOS, QNX, Mac System 7) can be had for free. Net access is $15/month, or free if you can put up with the advertising.
So, tell me again how online access is open only to the "monied elite".
I'm now a Unix sys-admin and collumnist for online Macintosh trade journals. I make more money than my parents do. I would never, ever, ever have had the opportunity to make something of myself without net access, and without the support and advice of people I know only through the internet.
The "cyber community" is NOT the private reserve of the priveledged, and has done more to level class structure in the United states than anything short of the civli rights movement and the Emancipation Proclimation.
Think on that.
SoupIsGood Food
But I see where the author is coming from - this virtual community of friends can't affect in any meaningful way my physical environs. They're not part of my meatspace community, and to some extent, they sap my intellectual energies away from the people and institutions of proximate geography I might otherwise be more involved with, but for the internet.
Therein lies the danger - when people abandon their physical community for a virtual one, they leave their meatspace quality of life in the hands of other interested parties. This is how crack houses happen, how fundamentalists get elected to school boards, how zoning laws institutionalize race and class distinctions - smart people who could make a difference just don't pay attention. A virtual community is fundamentally no replacement for a real one.
Don't get me wrong, I don't lay the blame at the foot of the internet exclusively, so much as I do at our society's increasing tendency towards isolation. I do think internet use can be empowering, especially when used for grass-roots media (I love what the folks at indymedia.org are doing, even if I'm not thrilled with their hysterical tone at times - but then "they" are a loose collection of volunteers, mostly, and they still manage better coverage of many issues than professionals). I don't buy the hype of its grand transformative powers, though - the same things were said about television. ("But it's a one-way medium! The internet is different," I hear you say. Tell me about it in 10 years when you can't find an ISP to host your controversial web page about [whatever] because of liability concerns. So you can host pictures of your cat. Real empowering.) The internet, like the real world, is what we make of it - no more, no less. If we try and substitute virtual interactions for knowing your neighbors and local politicians, though, we're going to wake up with a headache one day.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
There are technological boundaries to be sure -- despite the great strides we've taken, the web is by its connectionless nature an awful way to build responsive, interactive tools -- but communities as such have largely ceased to exist in the wealthy, technologically-advanced, highly-mobile cities of the western world.
The question I don't think anyone is asking is whether the majority of people even want a community. Atavistic throwbacks like Jon Katz (and myself, for that matter) dig the idea of place and history and community, but I don't think most people do, or they wouldn't live the way they do. Those who do want community have their work cut out for them resisting the centrifugal forces of the modern world. Whether it's possible on the net misses the bigger issue of whether it's possible in the world anymore.
--
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
The problem with the discussion about this article is that there's no shared definition of what "community" means among the posters. I participate in several things that could be broadly described as "virtual communities", but are very, very different beasts.
/. and nearly impossible in a group of this size. But it still clearly has elements of community.
/. community norms...
/. is a community in that it's a place where a specific group of people with a common identity (broadly, geekdom) post information of common interest to other people like them, and "discuss" that information. I put "discuss" in "quotes" because there's no extended dialog- one post per user is the norm, maybe with a followup for clarification. What's missing the the element of personal relationships- most "communities" are really best defined as a conglomeration of personal relationships between the participants, which is almost nonexistant on
I am on several mailing lists that consist primarily of former friend and peer groups from "real life". I graduated from college six years ago, and despite the fact that we are spread across the country and world, the group of close friends I had there interacts on a daily basis using one. We support each other in times of trouble, carry on deep conversations as if we were all hanging out in some bar, and generally keep up with what's important in our lives. This very much is a real-life community of personal relationships that has been strengthened by Internet technology.
These are just two examples. They are both radically different from each other, but fall under the broad definition of "community". I bet that the author of this book has a very specific definition of what he means by "community", and I'm guessing that it's something entirely different than the two communities I've described above. Unfortunately, what this definition is was not communicated clearly in Katz's review. I guess the lesson is not to get your panties in a wad over someone else's interpretation of a work on a complex topic like this... read it for yourself before spouting off.
Of course, this wouldn't be true to the
Yeah, and the largest phone systems belong to corporations, too. That doesn't invalidate the telephone as a mode of community interaction.
I think what they essayist missed here is that "virtual" and "community" are both stand-alone concepts. A community is a group of people who are interrelated, one way or another. "Virtual" (in the sense it is being used here) is the way people communicate. The "virtual community" isn't going to "replace" regular community any more than literate communities (remember, near universal literacy is a modern phenom) replaced spoken communities.
Computer literacy makes a similar gap in society now as traditional literacy has made in the past. And, consider, even now, the literacy gap between economic classes. If that gap hasn't gone away, do you expect the computer litaracy gap to vanish so easily?
-- I'm not evil, I'm
So you're saying that the ignorant clerk at the deli counter, who doesn't even know that "1/4" isn't the same as "0.4" can:
1) Learn how to install, config and navigate Linux
2) Figure out how to set up ppp or whatever to connect to a free ISP
3) Know a 486 from Ru486
4) Accurately differentitiate "1/4" pound of PCs from "0.4" pounds of dirt
It's not really fair to use the economic yardstick, since even the dumbest can find a job and make enough to buy a bargain PC at Best Buy, with one of those Compuserve or MSN rebates, almost for free*.
The difference is in training and education, (note: not to be confused with intellectual, elitist, Jefferson-wannabe) to even know how to get tied into the internet. Let alone they don't just babble away in an AOL chatroom, rather than ponder deep thoughts (Steven Hawking, f'rinstance). Once their online, see if the interation with Anonymous (or not-so-anonymous) people thoughout the internet turn them into a gaggle of enlightened souls.
*Free now, but $480 over the next two years...
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
He seems to point at the "Digital Divide" as a major reason why online "communities" are for the elite, the wealthy. What hogwash. 1) Linux is free. 2) There are free ISP's. 3) Linux runs well on old 486's and pentiums. 4) 486's and pentiums are dirt cheap, cheaper than a portable CD player.
Go Lakers!
However, this is not something that is inherent to the idea of the internet, rather it is a flaw that evolved during its implementation.
If internet was accessible through public kiosks throughout the world, and everyone would be allocated personal space to use as their own hard drive, the idea of the internet would not be changed. Just becasue currently you must have your own computer to participate, does not mean that the principles of open communications have failed to provide uniform access to the underpriveleged. Rather, it can be said that no scheme has been developed yet to tap the full potential of the equality offered by the open information system that is the internet.
Ñ'
I'm getting virtually nothing done here at work while I read slashdot. I think that counts too.
You have to understand that the internet is only really the internet when it includes all that one can accomplish with an IP address to meet their needs with. Unattented access to various sites on the internet is one of the things that is extremely nice. Many times I have not have the patience to spend hours looking for something on a web site but sent my trusty web spider to look at it for me. I get all the information and can grep it and look for anything I need. I can print it out and save it for future use and make a great deal of discovery at a later date and all of the data is preserved. I can obtain software that will enable my comptuer not to remain outdated as far as it's functionality. I can garner information from disperate sources that I wouldn't have access to save for the internet's use of IP addresses. A bunch of windows boxes with IE on them dosn't constitute access in the strictest sense. It's also incompatable with the nature of what people really mean when they say online.
PejVHF8LRIgynjB0dqjTuH4/8A-Z9#sSQV74sR>S4983w0cSM
I've done some thinking and research -- direct observation, experiment, and scholarly -- about this issue. The uncopyedited version of my new chapter for my ancient book, The Virtual Community, is at http://www.rheingold.com/VirtualCommunity.html The new MIT Press edition, including the new chapter and an extensive bibliography for those who care to look at the actual social science research that has been conducted, will be available November 1. http://mitpress.mit.edu/book-home.tcl?isbn=0262681 218
The short answer -- it's easy to be glib about the subject, easy to theorize from your armchair, and easy to miss the big picture. I don't claim to have a black-and-white answer, but I do claim to have made a serious attempt to elevate the level of discourse to include the many ambiguities and shades of gray that seem to be lost in the usual "it IS community/it ISN'T community" debates.
Well.. I have the same set of people, whom I have never met in person, who I speak with on a daily basis about a great deal of things, for the past 5 years or so. Are they not part of my 'virtual community'?
I order supplies at work online, and deal with sales people virtually all the time. I almost never talk to them on the phone.. aren't they part of my virtual community?
I've never met my stock broker in person.. I look at my account online, email him, and talk to him on the phone (good to do SOME things on the phone)_. Isn't htat kind of virtual?
And I videoconference with our head office 4000 miles away. Isn't that 'virtual'?
Lockard addresses several ideals about online communities. Some of these pertain to whether the Internet will be the Great Leveler, producing a classless, commonly-owned, universally accessible forum for communication. Lockard says this is false.
Fair enough. The Internet is not free. Getting connected requires owning or accessing a certain amount of equipment, having a certain amount of free time to spend online rather than working, a certain level of technical skill, and basic literacy. The same could be said for living in Wellesly, Andover, Concord, or any of the other upscale physical communities surrounding Boston. The median household yearly income in Massachusetts is about $29K; the average asessed tax value of houses in Concord is around $394K. This is not inclusive. I wouldn't call them diverse communities, either.
"Cybericity does not replicate material communities in a parallel world where we can reformulate communality." I also agree with this. I don't use the Internet to get closer to my physical community. I use it to get information about it. For instance:
The Internet does as much for physical community building as the phone book: I go there to find information, which might lead me to go out in my neighborhood. It doesn't create social relationships by itself. I have to go interact.
Why should online communities mirror geographical ones? Yes, it's important to participate in my geographic community, and it would be swell if folks used the Internet to strengthen participation. This isn't the benchmark for whether something constitutes a community.
Community is a social process. Lockard is correct that it is more than a mere "electronic affinity group". There are websites I check frequently, like Slashdot or the Boston Globe, and then there are communities I belong to. The distinction is whether one treats the site as a source of information or as a group of people whose input you want.
For instance, I've run a mailing list for women martial artists for about four years. Some posts are for information, like "how do I train after knee surgery", and are posted because someone out there has that information. Others are for feedback ("I'm facing this situation, what's your take on it") or just social ("wish me luck on my belt test"), because the poster wants to talk about it with her peers. That transformation from information source to peer is what makes it a community.
So, in summary, Lockard is right that the Internet is not a panacea to the inequities we see in society, nor is it revitalizing involvement in our neighborhoods, though it does contain some elements of that. He is incorrect that a community requires a physical presence.
On a tangent, I've been pondering over what conditions foster community. Some factors are:
Any thoughts on this?
--tangram