Biology and the Electric Community: Part One

Electric Communities are used by almost everyone online, but they're little studied or understood. Scientists like Mark Stefik of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center are finding that e-communities have their own social and biological traits: that e-dwellers show many of the same traits as animal species. Some are hunters, others gatherers, watchers and defenders. Part One looks at the biology of e-communities. Part Two looks at the evolution of new kinds of communities -- weblogs, in particular -- and lists some species traits.

Part One: Biology and the Electric Community.

E-mail is an amazingly flexible, almost organic medium. It's adaptable for one-on-one conversations, newsletters, mailing lists.

Whenever it's used for group conversations, the network becomes a community, one that sometimes takes on the characteristics of place - office, home, village, watering hole. Together, these hundreds of thousands, perhaps by now millions, of smaller communities make up the Digital World.

The e-community is still new and rapidly evolving, is something widely experienced but little understood. Its citizens are often much too close to evaluate their own electric worlds, the people outside too bewildered or ill-informed.

But e-communities have their own near- biological and social characteristics.

In "Internet Dreams, Archetypes, Myths and Metaphors" (MIT Press), Mark Stefik, a scientist at Xerox's legendary Palo Alto Research Center, christens many of the people using computer technology information foragers.

Foraging behavior is a biological notion, used to describe the ways hunters and grazers pursue their food. Different species use different foraging strategies in different settings. Wolves chase their food; spiders sit patiently waiting for it.

Electronic communities have existed on the Net for decades, but computer users are constantly in pursuit of the perfect one. Thousands of mailing lists, BBSs, computer conferencing systems, lists, groups and websites have come and gone; almost everyone who's been online for any length of time has sampled one or many, then moved on.

These ghost sites hover in the ether, a reminder that the electronic e-community - elusive and complicated - continues to fascinate, evolve and attract.

People foraging on the Net are generally after one of two things - food (i.e., information), or other people.

The instincts - nourishment and contact - are connected and powerful, and they're also subject to difficulty and risk.

The idea of e-communities as organisms people by distinct biological species is compelling, especially on a site like this one, where many such species are almost instantly recognizable.

Slashdot is essentially a classic foraging site, where geeks hunt information. It has a focus: technology and techno-culture in the broadest sense, Linux and Open Source, plus links to information about programming and computing, science, the Net and the Web.

It also offers users a wide variety of preferences, choices and options, and the opportunity to share and trade information.

To protect a distinct, useful and relevant identity, it also provides some eclectic original content, from essays and columns to movie and book reviews.

"On the network," writes Stefik, "people use different foraging behaviors in different situations. When a topic is hot and new, information is scarce. The behavior of information foragers in this setting is like the behavior of foragers in the desert, where it makes sense to share things'Over time, as a topic becomes more crowded, things change. People, seeing less value in getting every bit of news, create smaller subgroups, and become more specialized and territorial."

On sites like this, the wolves - the people running the site - are constantly out hunting for new information to post and link to. The Spiders - I'd call them lurkers - are the biggest single component of most public, information-based e-communities, waiting patiently and usually silently for their information, then going off somewhere to digest it. They pick what they need, ignoring the rest, and have little time or desire to do the hunting. Stefik also describes what he calls the fishermen.

A newsgroup spider, he writes, waits for useful information to arrive. But joining a newsgroup - or poking through a website like this - is more like fishing, he says - deciding where to cast the nets to catch the information you want or need. On the other hand, he says, a person following links and references in a digital library is better described as a hunter. By his defintion, there's a big difference between people who seek information and those who wait to receive it, both dominant groupings on most large electric communities.

Probably the single worst problem plaguing electric communities is the relentless hostility. Many posters have no real idea how to disagree without being assaultive or insulting. Maybe this has its roots in biology as well.

Nobody really knows why hostility and electronic messaging are so intertwined, but the venom online is epidemic, shocking to newcomers and outsiders, as many of the Threads topics here and on other large and public electric communities demonstrate.

While flaming is a hallmark of the freedom on the Net and the Web, it's also in many ways it's worst nightmare. This has become a huge problem for digital communities, as well as a free speech issue -- many people are intimidated into silence or driven out of communities entirely by personal attacks.

People don't simply block, filter, or disagree; they seem viscerally threatened by ideas that are strange or different. This, too, is a familiar behavior among other species. Stefik's notions may help. Nobody really know why there's so much hostility in online communities, any more than they know why some high school kids attack their peers. Some believe the hostility comes largely from young males responding to their particular hormonal issues. Others suggest that the distance and relative anonymity of cyber-communities makes it easy to see other people as non-human, deserving of attack.

Some psychologists have suggested that hours in front of screens cause fatigue and irritability. Still others say that e-mail and messaging is so instant (as opposed to letter writing, or even dialing a telephone) that the usual inhibitions don't apply - an angry message is off before the sender can really consider it. Since the target is distant and unknown, there are rarely consequences.

Stefik suggest the hostility might come from the instinctive need of veterans to protect and defend their site, like birds that buzz intruders who come too close to their nests. Or like the human body, where white cells rush to attack foreign objects. Or some species whose young males preen, head-butt or mark territory. When strangers or outsiders appear, there is an impulse among some species to drive them off, to protect the integrity and safety of the community.

Tomorrow: Part Two: Growing pains of e-communities; is the weblog another step in the evolutionary chain?; and a list of the species types and traits of e-communities.