Rethinking Virtual Community: Part Two

In the early 90's, the Net was relentlessly criticized for everything from undermining authority to promulgating porn and depravity, even aiding and abetting nuclear terrorism. The handful of writers and journalists defending the idea of cyberspace sometimes got myopic about it, romanticizing ideas like the Virtual Community and the impact of the network on politics. The dotcom era made everybody a bit more hard-headed. Today, online communities increasingly focus on information and data, not human interaction. But the idea of the Virtual Community has never been redefined, and needs to be. (Second in a series).

When author Howard Rheingold wrote The Virtual Community in 1993, "the common wisdom of that time... was that only socially crippled adolescents would use the Internet to communicate with other people. Perhaps I put a rosier tint on my portrait of online socializing in reaction to the stereotype. Perhaps prospects for life online were brighter then, seven years before the dotcom era. And perhaps I've grown more critical of ideas I once proposed, out of more prolonged exposure to their shortcomings."

It's difficult now to describe the climate of the 1980s when the the culture of online communication came under a recurring barrage of media and political criticism for undermining culture and authority, and promoting unchecked depravity and destruction. There was Time Magazine's famous child-porn cover, and the movie War Games, in which a young hacker nearly triggered a nuclear war. Before corporations figured out how much money could be made, much of the country was scared witless by computers, and their fear translated easily to the Net. The journalists and first-generation Net advocates Rheingold refers to were constantly forced to defend the Net against attacks from the offline world, a state of intense cultural conflict that did promote myopic views.

The virtual community has changed incalculably since. E-commerce overwhelmed the idea of information liberation, and technology itself became the point, rather than a byproduct or tool. Enormous new v-communities did emerge, but for profit: sex and auction sites, financial services and retailing, Go.com, Yahoo and AOL. Social technological movements like Open Source and file-sharing also created revolutionary kinds of communities, systems and Weblogs, but for the most part concentrated on information-sharing, peer-review and other information changes and services. Information -- more of it, and ever-cheaper -- became the point of most communities, as well as the driving force behind the growth of the Web. Technology was no longer the only the means, but increasingly, the end.

Where Rheingold wrote about communities in which people connected with one another, these new sites helped people connect to information. In fact, non-utilitarian communication is often greeted with contempt: if it's not about technology, it's a waste of bandwidth. It's almost as if the next generation of e-dwellers understands, without having to be told, that life online offers one kind of community, the offline world another.

(Note: Lots of people e-mailed after the first part to offer examples of some virtual communities that work: Typical were messages like the one from Nancy, who wrote: " I belong to one -- the Delphi textside service. For years I have conversed, gotten help, commiserated, con-congratulated with these people from all over the US and the world. They are my family. When Delphi went Web only (except the telnet textside service is being allowed to die a natural death) they almost lost me. The Web doesn't work very well, IMHO. I want a nice text console! It feels right, like the old BBS I used to use, now defunct. I love my Delphi family. Occasionally we meet in the flesh, but we have been meeting virtually since 1984 (I joined in 1994).")

John Lester of Massachusetts General Hospital wrote that " I have been running a community for people suffering for Neurological disorders at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital for the past 5 years. We have about 30,000 posters and 400,000 regular readers, and it is thriving. It has literally saved human lives."

" ... More and more, my community members are meeting in the PHYSICAL world. It is truly amazing and beautiful."

But health problems bind people together in a particular way, and people who are dealing with them form some of the most powerful virtual communities. For others, it's more problematic. Rheingold himself grasps the central questions that always gnaw at the idea of the virtual community: "Is the use of the phrase 'virtual community' a perversion of the notion of community? What do we mean by community, anyway? ... Is the virtualization of human relationships unhealthy? Is online social behavior addictive? Most important, are hopes for a revitalization of the democratic public sphere dangerously naive? Will Internet-based publishing and communicating decentralize the distribution of political power and influence, or will many-to-many-media be dominated by a few?"

Questions like this reflect the particular context in which idealists like Rheingold operated and encountered cyberspace. Contemporary Net dwellers might pose a different set of questions, more practical and technological ones. Rheingold and his generation were deeply influenced by the 60s, whose sweeping and sometimes profound social evolutions are taken for granted by younger Net users.

Perhaps as the means of communicating -- especially IRC's and IMessaging programs -- make messaging so simple and instantaneous, the sense of a distinct new way to communicate erodes.But it wasn't always so: The WELL, for example, was very much a reflection of San Francisco at the time, a magnet for idealists and cyber-hippies as well as digital entrepeneurs. Many of the early WELLbeings, as they sometimes called themselves, were not particularly interested in technology; they sought the community that technology might make possible. Clustered in the Bay area, they also created a significant non-virtual component to life on the WELL. They were always meeting one another at parties, picnics and public events; having affairs; having feuds; recommending books and movies and dentists and restaurants and chili recipes. This seems oddly squishy to most large open media communities operating today, or even to smaller, more individualized weblogs, but it's not long ago that many computer users were drawn to the idea of using the online tools to strengthen their personal lives and relationships.

That sensibility is perhaps the single biggest casualty of the dotcom era when it comes to virtual communities. As the number of Net users has multiplied and become much younger, online communities have become more entertainment-driven, bigger and more impersonal. Contemporary Net users have fewer illusions about the virtual community, a different understanding about what the Net is and isn't good for. They don't necessarily expect to make close friends and share their deepest feelings online. They are skeptical, cynical perhaps, about humanist ideals for cyberspace.

And the virtual community faces a daunting list of ethical problems. In the third edition of Computer Ethics, Deborah Johnson of the Georgia Institute of Technology lists a few ethical issues facing online gatherings of people: vandals, trolls and script kiddies who damage sites; theft and extortion; flaming and spamming. She might also have added issues relating to misrepresentation of identity, intellectual property and accuracy. Into the Second Generation Internet, there is nothing like consensus on how to deal with any of these issues.

Then, too, there is growing dichotomy in the economics that different kinds of virtual communities face. Communities on the Net aren't like hippie communes: they are expensive to design, operate and access. They need to have some financial as well as social underpinnings, especially in the age of AOL/Time-Warner, when commercial "communities" offer access, information and all kinds of other services as a carrot for buyers.

One of the ways in which younger Net users separate themselves from their elders is by seeing themselves as apolitical, cutting-edge technologists. Perhaps this is because so many of their elders talked incessantly about revolution, but didn't manage to make one. They, on the other hand, are creating a revolution and don't seem to know it.

Next, Part Three: Redesigning the Virtual Community.

Comments

Commitment Affordances

[goliard]

It's the dedication that usually isn't there - one person usually holds the bag for a while, then it collapses when he/she leaves. You need a large base of committed people to bring it together - the larger, the better. So that if one person cannot contribute, others can.

True, but you're missing an important point. Most technologies on the Net are terrible at providing collaborative access, so even if there are individuals willing to contribute, the tech often foils them.

Pertinent example: Say Jane Random wants to collaboratively run a 'blog, and has a couple of friends who are eager to help with content. Jane can't afford the connectivity cost of running her own server -- and besides, none of the cable modem cos in her area sell fixed IPs -- so she's looking for a service on-line which will sell her vhosting and which will allow more than one account to access her web directory.

Sounds simple, doesn't it? But most ISPs make no provision for that, unless it's a "business account", which costs just as much as the cable access. For "home users" they sell one shell account, which alone can access the files to be served to the web. Now, provided Jane is savvy enough about such things to ask her ISP about setting up a permissions group, she now has the problem of getting her friend to pony up for accounts at the same ISP. The cost has just been shifted to her would-be collaborators.

Now, let's say Jane has a friend, Hiro, with a T1 to his house, running his own web server, and he owes Jane a favor. Jane goes to Hiro and ask if he will serve her collaborative 'blog for her. Hiro says he would be happy to give Jane a shell account on his machine and vhost her page, but he doesn't really know Jane's friends and doesn't want to give them shell access. He tells Jane that he's looking into Zope, and if all goes well, as soon as he gets around to it, he'll set something up. Someday.

All for a simple collaboratively maintained webpage. Not even a chat system like /, just a single stupid page.

So much of the net works that way though. I belong to a club that has constant problems with this. We have plenty of high-tech volunteers willing to help, but, dammit, if a web page needs to be updated while its owner is at Comdex, there's really not a thing the rest of us can do. (And our servers seem to have a preternatural ability to detect when their admins are out of town.)

This goes for listservs, too. Dunno about Mu*s.

If there were more and better ways for people to collaborate (especially in groups) on-line, community would be much easier.

It's not community if you only communicate with one another. You have to be able to work together, too.

Two things

[doonesbury]

Uno: When you say "building online communities is expensive", that's not exactly true. Building online communities *can* be expensive, and many, many companies have spent billions, possibly trillions altogether, to create communities. The problem is, a community really is a set of people with common interests, the dedication to commit to working together to share, enhance, and grow through those interests, and a "space", some common resource, that they can call their own.

All three of these are necessary: obviously, no people, no community. No dedication, no one will work on stuff, and it falls apart. No space, nothing people can identify with that community.

The first one's easy; people love comminities, always want to join them. The last is just a space. Contribituing code, money, time, energy is something people want to do, if it gives them a chance to belong, grow, etc. It's the dedication that usually isn't there - one person usually holds the bag for a while, then it collapses when he/she leaves. You need a large base of committed people to bring it together - the larger, the better. So that if one person cannot contribute, others can.

Money isn't necessary; look at where slashdot *started*. Not where it is now. Look at ain't-it-cool-news. Look at Yahoo. All started through dedication of a few individuals, common interest from lots of people who were willing to add/grow/develop, and then it started to grow.

Second, on your final point: "They, on the other hand, are creating a revolution and don't seem to know it." That implies one thing: that we care about making a revolution. Hardly; I think most geeks care more about the standard things, being accepted, belonging to something bigger than themselves, enjoying themselves. These web pages, these online communities, dang near all of it - was created for our own interests, our own pleasure, because we wanted something and didn't see it existing.

We aren't creating a revolution, we're just tired of the old rules and have decided to make up new ones.

Impersonal?

[jeroenb]

One of the reasons most virtual communities, especially websites, seem or are unpersonal is because of their (unexpected) immense size. I don't think CmdrTaco expected Slashdot to be as big as it is today, although its current size definately makes it a lot less personal - lots of newsposters, more regular commentposters to really define a "regular crowd" and the amount of news has reached the point were I sometimes only skim through the headlines.

I think this is partially caused by a huge demand for these virtual communities. Again, Slashdot-visitors might be easily divided up among 10-20 websites that all have a different approach to the geek/free software/linux theme, but most of these alternatives simply don't exist yet, so everybody ends up hanging around here and the few other good sites on this topic (such as kuro5hin.)

This could very well change in the future, as more and more people kick up their own virtual community and people move to ones that are more fitting to their personal tastes and opinions.

A pleasant chaos

[Alien54]

In the aftermath of the american revolution, the founders of the american republic argued long and hard on how it was to be set up, and how to get it right. It was a vital national debate on how to do it right. Political ideology aside, it can be that the result was "designed by geniuses to be run by idiots".

I can agree with this. Despite the quality of the politicians we do have, it has done fairly well, more or less

The Internet has not had any such saving grace. While the underpinings have been designed by geniuses, it has all to often presumed a certain amount of maturity and education and responsibility.

This has not worked well. There has not been the same level of responsibility in the broad population of the net, in the social engineering of the net, and now we have what we have. It has not been designed to be "run by idiots". And it winds up with all kinds of idiocies.

As a famous sig line has said, "Oh my God! It's Full of Spam!"

The Internet Community did alright up until the infamous "September that never ended" - then it was overwhelmed.

I have heard of several options, but I am not sure of any of them. The struggle toward a virtual community survives in well enough small town sized populations, where it is possible for poeple to get to know each other after a while, and where there are common concerns or values that folks can relate to.

But when you get larger, it turns to chaos. Between the people with their own political agendas to those who treat the whole thing as their personal playground (and how dare you try to steal their toy), it is chaos.

A pleasant chaos perhaps, but chaos none the less.

I guess the best you can say is: "Welcome to life on Planet Earth!"

i have a dream

[Bill Fuckin' Gates]

I too, am "dreaming of cyberville", a Virtual Community. My Virtual Community would be exactly like the current, real community, but with one important difference: JonKatz would not be allowed in. My Virtual Community would be surrounded with an indestructable sound-proof fence which would save our tender ears the horror of listening to yet another poorly-written, overdramatic rant by a wannabe geek with a trenchcoat fetish. My Virtual Community would have a team of elite ninja which would patrol the grounds on the lookout for Katz, and kick him in the balls if found. Squarely in the balls. My Virtual Community would be free of the pain and destruction which tempt Katz's mind, and the tender yound boys which tempt Katz's body. The residents of my community would discriminate against no man for his race, color, or creed. These residents would only shun a man if he could be conclusively proven to be none other than JonKatz, the harbinger of doom and Satan's own personal mascot.

There would also be free donuts.


See you in hell,
Bill Fuckin' Gates®.