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Rethinking The Virtual Community: Part One
Of all the odd and idiosyncratic groups that built the Net -- the hackers, academics, Defense Department strategists, scientists and engineers -- one of the most compelling and poignant was a cluster of community idealists, digital pioneers who founded early virtual communities like The WELL.
The virtual community is the long-sought but almost-never-found New Jerusalem that's touched the hearts and minds of some of the nicest, most ethical people who've ever gone online. Freenet, mailing lists, MUD's, Usenets and IRC's and IM and (even P2P) systems have mushroomed over the years, but the Virtual Community was supposed to be a different kind of space, a way to use the Network to connect people, to help them know and sustain one another in previously inconceivable ways.
Although almost everyone who has spent much time online has occasionally experienced this sense of community, it's generally proven impossible to maintain in an ongoing or large-scale way, for either individuals or sites. An ideal sought in part by 60s refugees trying to keep their societal dreams alive was done in by the Internet's unexpected success, by the changing economics of cyberspace and by vocal bands of articulate and aggressive adolescents.
One of the articulate prophets for that new kind of place was Howard Rheingold, a WELL mainstay and author of The Virtual Community, the book that laid out the yearning for a humanistic virtual community, rather than one purely technological or informational. The WELL, more than any other virtual space, has evoked the possibilities of a wired community whose loyal citizens meet, argue with, support and befriend one another in their work lives, their personal struggles, even in their deaths. From the first -- perhaps by dint of the particular geographic, political and cultural cast of the people who launched and inhabited it -- the WELL was unique. It still is. Despite the stunning growth of the Net and the Web, there has never been an online place like it. Increasingly, it seems there never may be.
More recent virtual communities are much more "virtual" than "community." Clusters of people collect around networks devoted to certain issues: workplace, sex, gaming, gender, finances, health, parenting. But most are transitional. The seminal idea of the WELL -- using the new network to connect personally with other humans -- feels outdated today, almost naive. Apart from sites like Senior Net, or certain mailing lists and messaging sites devoted to shared problems like cancer, the modern virtual community trades in information at the expense of intimacy. Even the most sophisticated Weblogs exist to trade ideas and commentary; participants may know next to nothing about the people behind the posts.
The idea of community itself is often mythologized, especially in America, where Disneyfied representations of an old-time Main Street have become a standard almost no one achieves in the real world. To suggest the Net has eroded community is foolish: ancient ideas of community have been eroding for generations, thanks to such innovations as the phone, TV, autos and interstate highways. The Net is just another evolution of that pattern, and it's not surprising that the virtual community has been mythologized as well.
Creating online communities is brutal work, requiring a particular kind of energy and commitment. In "Cyberville, Clicks, Culture, and the Creation of an Online Town," published by Warner Books, New York City's ECHO founder Stacy Horn writes about her response to the suggestion that she ought to start some online communities in Boston, LA or New Orleans: "I put the idea aside...I'd have to find people locally to host, build, relationships with local organizations and businesses -- it's an incredibly delicate and gut-wrenching process -- I simply couldn't go through it again and again unless some big huge company paid me a lot of money to oversee the local people they would also pay a lot of money to do the actual work of building a local virtual community from within a physical one."
If everyone online were like Horn or were Rheingoldian -- smart, warm, ethical, community-minded -- then the Net might actually have become the connective environment that Rheingold and others articulated so powerfully. But most people are not, of course. Flamers and corporations and lawyers have thundered online, along with e-traders, role-players, spammers, governments -- everyone! -- with a long list of other agendas, from improved market share to con games.
As Rheingold, one of the founders of Wired Magazine's late Web site Hotwired, points out, it was briefly different, at least in some places. In the intro to Virtual Community, first published in l993 and revised and reissued this year by MIT Press, Rheingold describes how ever since the summer of l985 he has plugged his PC into his phone and logged onto the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) to carry on public conversations and exchange e-mail.
It was, initally, a revelation. "...Finding the WELL was like discovering a cozy little world that had been flourishing without me, hidden within the walls of my house; an entire cast of characters welcomed me to the troupe with great merriment as soon as I found the secret door. Like others who fell into the WELL, I soon discovered that I was audience, performer and scriptwriter, along with my companions, in an ongoing improvisation."
There is something touching about those words, the sense that Rheingold is describing something already from another age, something of enormous promise but, still, a dream unfulfilled. All over the network, individual grassroot community systems have been overshadowed, marginalized, or driven out of existence by the very technology they helped to grow.
Why? In new reflections added to his book, Rheingold notes the enormous damage done by hostile participants of virtual communities who seek attention through aggression and who take up an enormous, disproportionate amount of time and energy online, even when they comprise a distinct minority. In fact, this pattern has probably destroyed more virtual communities than any other single factor.
Internet researcher Elizabeth Reid of Australia, in an essay reprinted in Communities in Cyberspace (edited by Mark Smith and Peter Kollock), describes how some early BBS's -- she cites "CommuniTree" -- were intended to be free, open forums for intellectual and spiritual discussions. This community, she writes in a selection called "Hierarchy and Power," collapsed under an onslaught of messages, often obscene and hostile, posted by the first generation of adolescents with personal computers and modems. (Understandably, there is something about adolescence that doesn't care for free, intellectual and spiritual discussions.)
In Cybersociety 2.0, a collection of essays about digital communication and community (edited by Steven G. Jones), Reid and co-researcher Beth Kolko write in "Dissolution and Fragmentation: Problems in On-Line Communities" that it's the ease of individual expression -- the "singularity of on-line personae," that can be the greatest threat to online communities. "It has been all too easy for virtual communities to encourage multiplicity but not coherence," write Reid and Kolko, "with each individual persona having a limited, undiversified social range. This cultural schizophrenia makes the virtual community brittle and ill equipped to evolve with the demands of circumstance."
Other Net students and scholars have also found what many members of virtual communities know: efforts to control discussion, mediate disputes, or reach broad consensus often fail, breeding alienation, paranoia, anger and more controversy as online personae and positions harden in the abscence of moderating social forces like face-to-face, or even voice-to-voice contact.
So this more or less remained the plight of the virtual community as one after another struggles to maintain order against a culture that still, mysteriously, engenders endemic alienation, hostility and narcissism, even among intelligent and articulate people.
Besides, the world shifted into Net overdrive after the publication of The Virtual Community, the author notes ruefully in the new edition. In the 1980s, when he and a handful of journalists began writing about online society and culture, only a few technophiles, scholars and researchers grasped the point-to-point, many-to-many-possibilities of digital architecture.
At the time, the total online population numbered in the tens of thousands. Less than a decade later, "the Internet has made it possible for hundreds of millions of people to transform civilization's most powerful institutions -- commerce, politics, science, scholarship, entertainment, education, health care," Rheingold writes. "Our world has changed profoundly and swiftly, in large part because of the phenomenon this book described -- the sudden emergence of the Internet as a new communication medium."
Yet the change, he candidly acknowledges, was not the stirring revolution and reinvention of community he hoped for and expected.
Next, Part Two: What is a "Virtual Community," anyway? Note: You can purchase Virtual Communities at ThinkGeek.
Building a community, real or virtual, is hard work. The really enduring communities have been ones that provide a mechanism to exclude unwanted outsiders. This seems a bit contradictory, but it is the reality. The community is open to those who share its ethos, it is closed to those who will not share its ethos, and it ejects those who attempt to disrupt it. This is much easier in real world communities. The obnoxious teenager can be shunned. Body language, side conversations, polite hostility, and other powerful social tools can be used. The truly anti-social personalities are eventually ejected. Usually the social pressure of being openly unwelcome suffices. Sometimes the police are employed. This also has a beneficial side. The social reactions are usually modulated. They begin with discrete corrective suggestions. They escalate to the combined carrot and stick of rejection for bad behavior and acceptance for good behavior. This can change those who are open to change. But there is a powerful mix of nihilism and solipcism at work in US and European cultures. Contemplate the horrifying changes to things like childrens sports. Where at one time (long ago, but I am old enough to remember it) these were a method for teaching children how to manage anger and conflict without becoming anti-social and violent. It taught the social skill of "Good Sportsmanship", albeit an ideal that was rarely acheived. The usual achievement was grudging politeness despite frustration and anger. Today it too has succumbed to the solipcist hostility and the nihilist willingness to destroy that which you cannot win. The virtual communities have it much harder. It is extremely hard to eject the destructive players. It is extremely hard to provide the gradual responses and discreet (un-embarassing) feedback for inappropriate behavior. And its openness makes it more attactive to those frustrated anti-social personalities that have been ejected from real world communities. These people share the human desire to be part of a community, but have yet to learn the skills needed. They flock to the wide open access of the virtual community and thereby increase the stress on it.
Rheingold notes the enormous damage done by hostile participants of virtual communities who seek attention through aggression and who take up an enormous, disproportionate amount of time and energy online, even when they comprise a distinct minority. In fact, this pattern has probably destroyed more virtual communities than any other single factor.
That's Katz quoting another author, but it's still a good quote. The general trouble with virtual communities is that they don't have any prequisites for participation. If I want to talk about, say, OS design, then I'd like to talk about it with people who have some kind of background in that field, even that background consists only of being widely read. I don't want blind advocates butting in all the time with cookie cutter opinions. I also don't want to talk with people who think they know a lot, but mostly have a lot of misconceptions and lack well-roundedness. For example, you can't talk about OSes with someone who only knows Windows and Linux, especially if that person seems to think that Linux is some entirely new concept in operating systems that came out of the blue to rock the 1990s.
I enjoy writing, and discussing writing with other authors can be interesting, even via email. But talking to people of the "I have a great idea! I just need to know how to sell it to someone who can write it for me!" mentality is draining and no fun. No contact with other writers would be better than that.
I guess overall I'm tiring of having to be my own editor. I much, much prefer to read a specialized magazine or newsletter than wade through web discussions.
The fact is, such communities are constantly being born and dying. I've been a part of a major one easily as big and 'personal' as the WELL was, and am right now involved with another one that hasn't died off yet, that came from still another one that's currently a wasteland.
How is this possible? It's very simple: virtual online communities are formed by collections of people who share interests that are not necessarily interests you'll find a community for in your _physical_ neighborhood. The first example I gave was alt.lifestyle.furry, perhaps a weird group but one dedicated to 'spiritual therianthropy'- quick precis is, I personally have always been a 'cat person' in a pretty deep sense, and turns out there are loads of people all over the world who similarly identify that closely with some form of nonhuman creature. A community sprang up and thrived for quite a while until increasing popularity effectively dissolved it. The second example is a music bulletin board, "MusikaBoard" that's a haven for a bunch of electronic musicians. In this one I'm more of an outsider (sure I do music but my latest album has lots of loud guitars on it which makes me an outsider to the electronic crowd in a sense) but it's plain to see the community there, and so far it hasn't succumbed to disinterest, overpopularity or some other condition that would break up the community. It originally came from a community at mp3.com that was disrupted by a social behavior- at mp3.com people were paid by the download (in theory) so all social behavior became conditioned by this and all social interaction became the outright demand to be downloaded, and trust based schemes for exchanging downloads. This killed the community by lowering signal-to-noise ratio so dramatically that nobody who was left were behaving socially- "give me" is not inherently a community behavior.
There are some interesting lessons in this- assuming you can give up the notion that "The WELL was a unique situation in human history!". Really now- get a grip, it was not special. That situation happens all the time, and it would be good to consider ways to preserve it when it happens, because it's both valuable and fragile.