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Rethinking Virtual Community: Part Three
So where does that leave the Virtual Community, alive or dead or in between?
The idea remains as powerful as ever, flamers, spammers, vandals, dotcoms or no. Lots of people, from medical patients and programmers to gay teenagers to gamers and quilters are seeking and finding small communities to attach themselves to. But the virtual community clearly needs some serious re-thinking, both in technological and human terms.
Many people online are nostalgic about the idea.
E-mailed chauf:
"I look back to the days of BBS's and the one I frequented the most was like its own neighborhood. You usually knew the various folks... of course some were more visible than others, much like real life. I use the analogy of a local bar.. a la 'Cheers'. That's what many of the local BBSes were like..." Even though there was this computerized place there was still an emphasis on meeting in person at various GT's or Get Togethers. When I was in high school it was one of the local roller rinks. Often we'd have a weekend barbeque at a park where everyone could attend. We also had more deviant activities like Electric Jello parties. Electric Jello is Jello made normally but you'd take out a 1/4 of the water in the recipe and put in Everclear...
" So here you'd have these hammered, underage computer folks! It was a riot ... One of my favorite people I met during these years was a gentleman named Al ... Al was a old biker. He had to be in his mid-thirties when I met him. He was extremely articulate and intelligent and it came across in his postings. He was also an avid game player ... with a bend towards computer war games/simulations. None of us know what he looked like in person so it was QUITE a shock when we met in person. Here was this large, tattooed, long haired biker. It sent my perception of how people are on its ear. I learned to never really truly judge folks by what they look like, rather by their actions ... Virtual communites are possible. They will never replace face to face meeting but they can open the doors to such meetings and communication."
Chauf's experience is typical of many people's feelings about virtual communities. They may work best as a cross between the WELL model and the later information-swapping exchange. The new virtual community has several primary obstacles to overcome:
First, as predicted by almost every sci-fi writer, the megacorporations are moving to dominate the virtual community. the corporate world sees the Net as its primary communications medium, and the key to participating and prospering in the global economy. They have the money, political clout and legal acumen to dominate the network, as is already becoming clear. The Net is not viewed by the outside as being healthy or weak in terms of the strength of its virtual communities, but the rise or fall of NASDAQ on any given day. The idea of a tech boom or, more recently, a tech decline is entirely related to corporate earnings in tech industries and elements online.
The function of the corporate virtual community has tended to emphasize sales, period, and corporations seek to control access, content, intellectual property and usage. But the original notion of the virtual community was very different. Businesses may not actively try to eliminate other kinds of virtual communties, but they end up supplanting or marginalizing them anyway, in much the same way Microsoft or Wal-Mart eliminates its competitiion. In any contest between corporatism and community, the former seems to win hands down every time, which puts the idea of the virtual community in particular danger.
Despite the pressures of the blessedly waning dotcom era, there are things the virtual community can take from business communications. In The Social Life of Information (Harvard University Press), John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid talk about the importance of office communications, especially face to face stories. These kind of human-to-human narrative involves constant story-telling; about problems and solutions, disasters and triumphs and, say the authors, serves a number overlapping purposes. Workers "tell stories about unsolved problems in an attempt to generate a coherent account of what the problem is and how to solve it. They may do this individually, putting their own story together. Or they can do it collectively, as they drawn on the collective wisdom of the group."
F2F stories, Brown and Duguid remind us, are good at presenting things sequentially (this happened, then that). They are also good for presenting them casually (this happened because of that). "Thus stories are a powerful means to understand what happened (the sequence of events) and why (the causes of those events)." This kind of storytelling is indispensable for workers for whom these are critical issues of concern.
The virtual community is just beginning to experiment with the online equivalent of the real-life office environment, mostly in live chat and messaging forms. But the kind of sequential, coherent narrative describe by Brown and Duguid is still difficult online, especially in the text-based, asynchronious communications forms most people use.
In addition, adolescent flamers -- almost invariably young males -- continue to disrupt and distort efforts to create online communities. Rarely as numerous as they seem to be, they cause others to lurk rather than participate, and create the sort of mistrust and tension that make community nearly impossible. They almost demand some form of censorship and moderation, which makes noxious restrictions on speech easier to justify. Successful new weblogs (camworld.com is one of the best weblogs online) are created with an eye towards limiting membership, controlling submissions and the nature of disagreement -- the sort of change that's both sensible and tragic.
The dilemma is that younger Net users are among the smartest, most technologically-sophisticated people online. If they bring hostility, they also bring creativity and energy. Losing them would be an enormous loss. Still, there needs to be a heightened sense of responsibility for the words people post. If the posters don't acquire one themselves, then the operators and members of virtual communities have to start doing it themselves, challenging hostile communicators more directly.
There's also a possible silver lining. Since technology is the most powerful social and cultural force in the contemporary world, ascendant virtual communities have tended to focus on it.But if the tech world really is in a slump, if the explosive growth and pace of technological change slows and dwindling venture capital winnows the dotcoms, advocates for virtual community might once more find some breathing room.
The new online community may have to draw from some of the most traditional, non-tech elements of society: the water cooler, the backyard fence, the tavern, the neighborhood park, even the office itself. All of these gathering spots tend to cement community, forge relationships, provide the human and contextual cues that help people resolve disputes, receive information,communicate in a civil way, learn new ideas. It is precisely these kinds of one-on-one communications forums that are missing in so many VC's (though increasingly, applets for live chats are popping up on places like AOL and everything2).
Maybe online communities of the future could work this way: Napster or a site like this one would exist as an information exchange, but would also build into its architecture a face-to-face component -- perhaps video-conferencing, chat and messaging rooms, local or state chapters that actually meet.
Members would encounter other members when they joined and when they participated in online discussions. Sites could also organize face to face gatherings and activities so that the two major goals of the new virtual community -- community and information -- would both be available. As with any successful community, members would be asked to participate in the functioning of the site -- moderating, writing, reviewing, suggesting topics, relaying information, working on software design, trouble-shooting and problem-solving. Membership committees could consider and respond to complaints and suggestions, which might reduce the instinct for flaming.
The virtual community of the future seems likely to be some version of a weblog that uses the Net's distributed architecture to provode access to information. But communities are more likely to succeed, grow and endure when human elements are also incorporated into their structure. Chat rooms, IRC's, video-meetings and human contact are ultimately as essential to a virtual community as data. Notice that Chauf recalls his friend the biker more than the topics on his BBS. People connect with humans in a way they don't yet connect with data, an idea overlooked in Web design and architecture.
In part, Rheingold's dream of the virtual community -- as embodied by the WELL -- seemed posible because there wasn't all that much to do online. Today, people get overwhelmed with e-mail, chat forums, entertainment and hopping online. The virtual community seems almost an afterthought.
For all its problems and failed expectations, the Virtual Community, one of the most compelling ideas to emerge from cyberspace, still seems a fantasy. The VC needs to be rethought rather than abandoned, redesigned rather than nostalgically recalled.
Next: Your thoughts on how to reconceive the Virtual Community.
The thing I've always loved about online relationships (pun not intended) was that, at least in the past, you had a high hit rate of finding "kindred spirits". In the real world the first thing you experience is a person's height, weight, breath, and so on, and no matter how highly you think of yourself, you're going to make judgements on those things (subconciously or otherwise). But in the online world the first time you meet a person you're running into her thoughts and opinions. Her mind. It's ironic that in the real world people always talk about "I wish people would look past the physical and look at the real me", but when a medium is available that enables people to do that, they denounce it as too impersonal.
The reason why BBS junkies tended to bond as communities was because they were not "virtual" communities, they were actual communities. Before the Internet came along, free BBS's were, by necessity, local. Since you were dialing a local number to log in, and were not connected to a national network (for the most part), you could be sure that the people you were chatting with lived within about 20 miles or so. You all saw the same concert last Saturday, you are all dealing with the same weather, and you could trade Bob Dylan bootlegs by visiting each other at home. Gatherings could be frequent and informal.
That's why there is really no such thing as a "virtual community", because a community, by definition, is people living together. Anything else is (at best) a weak similacrum of a community.
Most of the BBS's either evolved into mom-and-pop ISP's, or moved to the web, or simply faded from existance... and most of us are fine with that. The old stereotype of lonely nerds gathering together via telecommunications is gone, not because it was wiped out, but because it is no longer needed. "Nerd" culture is mainstream culture these days: Larry Ellison and Bill Gates are exactly the sort of guys who regularilly had their heads shoved into toilets when they were kids, and now they take turns being the richest man in the world. Computer gaming has become a multi-billion-dollar industry. We exchange e-mail with our parents and grandparents. 65% of Americans are Star Trek fans.
The BBS's died because nobody needs them anymore. We already have friends and communities, we don't feel the need for a "virtual" one.
Oh yea... By the way, somebody should tell you this and it might as well be me: The WELL was never cool. Sorry to be the one to burst your bubble.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.