Rethinking The Virtual Community: Part One

Less than a decade ago, the Virtual Community was one of the most powerful ideas emanating from the Net, and BBS's and the nascent Internet were already providing glimpses of a better world to come. Proponents are a lot wiser -- and sadder -- now. Can the Virtual Community survive adolescent flamers and the dotcom era? Yes, but it will have to be dramatically reconceived. (First of a series).

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.

Call me a Luddite

But to my mind the thing that I value most about a community is sitting around after a meal with real people and talking. Yes you can chat online but its just not as much fun. It is a wonderful fealing when you see someone who you have not seen in a long time. Online less so.

I personaly think we need to spend more time working on physical communities than virtual ones.

The cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.

better in early days

It was higher quality pre-1994 when the aol/webtv
masses leaped onto the net. That was before commercial
spamming too. When the net was mostly academic
the discussions were better.

Part of the solution

Part of the solution is to make people use their real names. This really helps make the WELL much more personal and intimate.
People usually use their nicks to hide behind - either because they don't want the world to know what a vulnerable, sensitive guy [slashdot.org] they really are or because they need to project a powerful, dynamic image [slashdot.org] to compensate for personal shortcomings [cmdrtaco.net]. That's why some [slashdot.org] of [slashdot.org] the [slashdot.org] best [slashdot.org] posters [slashdot.org] on slashdot use their real [slashdot.org] names [slashdot.org].
Using your real name gives your communications a sense of directness that is essential for understanding. It also reminds people that they are dealing with a real person which helps make them more respectful.
Real names are the essence of community.
--Peter David Johnson

The reality of communities

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.

I think Katz's cyberworld orbits a different sun..

Okay, I'm a mite big confused.

I was on the early BBS's -- I've been online since I was 13.

I didn't find a hostile, all-flames-all-the-time envoriment.

I found intelligent conversations, a lot of stupid jokes, people who were
willing to explain the nicities of the online world to a naive kid, I found
a local group to do RPG with -- I found people who held picnics and actually
made connections with each other in the real world because of their online
connections.

Yes, we had a few flamers -- and our share of soap opera relationships. But
who DOESN'T as a teenager? There's always a jerk, always a couple who breaks
up every 15 minutes only to be found snogging on the couch between breakups.

The BBS's collapsed in my area due to the Sysops getting jobs or going to
college. And due to the ride of -- dum-da-dum -- the Internet.

Now that I'm an adult - and on the 'net -- I've found that its much the
same. I'm in a community of people who share not a local geography, but a
common interest.

We have a multitue of mailing lists, half a dozen message boards, all linked
to a hub page -- we have our own IRC room - -hell, we have half a damn dozen
IRC rooms for various purposes.

And at least once a year we all meet and sit around a pub and talk and drink
and eat. Just because.

We've got several strong relationships -- numerous friendships, and we're
damned tight-knit.

(I myself have a relationship with someone I met from the community. Who is
probably gonna read this and be vaguely amused.)

Perhaps we're abnormal -- but I can't imagine that being the case. Not with
a metric assload of people on the 'net -- not with howevermany gazillions of
interest groups. We CAN'T be the only one.

Communities on the 'net are alive and well -- Katz just isn't invited to
any.


Poor little no puppy toe!

They do (did) exist

Way back when, 3 or 4 years ago, I was a member of a couple of virtual communites that really existed!

I'm going to use the past tense, because the forums on Compuserve are as good as dead

Where were they? Compuserve. Compuserve had some real advantages over everything I've seen on the net so far.

1)A Forum consisted of sections. These sections were usually dedicated to a sub topic of the main forum. Off topic threads could be MOVED, but, if a message was addressed to you in ANY section, you were notified when you entered. There were one or more sysops (admins - sort of), who kept the forum on topic. It was like visting their home - they set the rules. Some forums were anything goes, some were heavly censored. Almost every forum had a "Pub" type section where off topic stuff went

2)Because everyone was logging into the same set of servers, there was no delay in messages, so threading software worked really well

3)Because this was before the internet explosion, the active membership was usually kinda low - like 20-75 people. It was possible to get to know everyone there, particularly in the pub

4)Because there was controlled access (Remember, you were paying Compuserve every month), it was possible to "lock out" or ban people who caused problems. It was rare. In the 15+ years I had a CIS account, I only saw it done 2-3 times. If a person started spamming the system, Compuserve could kick them off, and it was HARD to get back on - Remember, you have to give them a credit card

5)Because this was before the Internet boom, it was really a self selecting group. Everyone was cutting edge with computers. How many people had modems back in 1980? And were willing to send email/do BBS stuff? - and pay a fairly large amount of cash to do it?

I have friends who I talk to all the time (just got off the phone with one) that I gained from Compuserve. I miss it. The closest thing I've seen on the net are some of the SMALL mailing lists, and believe it or not....

Slashdot, particularly back when it was somewhat smaller. I just wish there was a way to find out if there were messages to YOU (Not just replies)

Wafting antoher airball with Jon Salerie Katz

Hordes of like minded folks have gathered and talked and some acutaly have done something. The magic label "community" is left for those on the outside, for the tourist, the fashion geek and the twice a week logon.

Can you even remeber FIDO and SEA? Did your 7 min research reveal the plethora of children groups spawned by Ward Christiansens work? From early interboard posting drops to todays Egroups it would truly take a reported as blind and deaf tot he vibrant history of the online world, sucj as Jon Katz, to first try and foist the Community label on it and then to dig away at it for not fitting thier definition of the term Community.

Jon Katz once again shows us why he is the out of touch out of time out of ideas patron saint of the lobotomized know nothings, the chich yet shallow fashion geeks. He is the lord god of the mediocracy.

Jon Katz, please go do some history research that dates back before your first AOL account in 1995.
The online community has been flourishing in ways you will never ever know about since the late 70's.

Intelligence and expertise are hard to come by

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.

Truthful, but lengthy (read before flaming).

In all honesty it seems that Mr. Katz has taken a very, very long time to say something that would appear to be obvious. If you make it easy for people to gather, especially in a place where they cannot be held accountable, the few bad apples which are loudest, rowdiest, or just nastiest will ruin the experience for everyone (look around you, the trolls and spammers are just this bunch).

The thing that Jon doesn't even touch on, and that I rarely see mentioned anywhere, is that this is simply evolution working in a technological media. Seriously, the entire idea of "Internet Community" is very, very new when compared with the human race and its societal development. When the first humans lived together in a cave or on the plains, does anyone think that they were completely civil and organized? We are watching the Internet community develop in much the same way that the "meat world" community developed. We will go through a generation or two of uncivil, adolescent like behaviour and slowly watch our community develop into a stronger, healthier (mentally) and much more cohesive society.

The only negative thing is that the institutions that are in the meat world have seen this happening quickly (relatively) and realized that they needed to exert their influence into the online world before people got used to the idea of a "free" community, where the expression of ideas, thoughts and "digital media" like musical compositions and movies were freely and quickly transfered to anyone that was interested. The powers that be do not want that sort of freedom. It removes monetary incentives from people's minds, and removes the power that groups like the RIAA, the MPAA and even the government can use, develop, and exert.

Whether these large and powerful groups are going to be able to completely and fully tame the Internet community spirit remains to be seen. But I truly feel that there will always be some places on the Internet that are "free". Even though slashdot is not the most free of places, it is one of the freeist in existance at the moment. And there will always be something that is the equivalent of usenet and such.

But our "community" in the online world is just now starting to define itself, and just now finding its own character. It will take much more time (even by Internet time standards) before we see what "online community" will really mean. Hopefully it will be something better and still more free than the meat world allows us. And with worldwide use increasing, there is still a large amount of promise. I still have hope. How about you?

Selfabsorption check

You are mad if you think "The WELL was unique". I hate to be overly dismissive, but what an incredibly self-absorbed, uninsightful Boomer perspective! Do please smarten up. Quick.

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 [besonic.com] 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.

You can't be anonymous and still say something

Sometimes a nick becomes the name that you are known by everywhere. It identifies you online and in meatspace. Mine is like that. It was given to me by a friend in 1984 as a joke and it has stuck ever since. I first started using it online in the late 80's.

I remember early experiences with various online communities where what appeared to be real names weren't. One of the most common jokes was for guys to assume women's names to play with people's heads. Through those experiences I learned what a name truly is. It is continuity. It is identity. It is reputation.

Consistent use of any memorable, unique name is a way to establish who you are for all to see. John Doe, logging in for the first time next week is as much of a stranger to me as someone with a nick. Either of them can then build the identity that I will come to know.

For all of the psychological power that the idea carries, the thought that we can connect a name to a person hides some assumptions that just aren't true. Names aren't unique. People lie. And people change. My best friends from high school weren't the people I remembered when I went back for my 10th reunion.

NPR's Morning Edition ran a story this morning entitled Author Unknown [npr.org] about tracking the identity of anonymous authors. It underscored the fact that your words identify you. Each of us has a style, a voice. If you can hear the voices, even friends without real names can still be friends.

Re:Intelligence and expertise are hard to come by

I have to agree; the quote hits one of the biggest problems dead on. It is often cited as the reason for the demise of Usenet. And yet, when I stop by several newsgroups today, I find that they are very much the same as they were in the early 90's even though the volume has increased. In fact, I see many of the same personalities there. I still go there to find some of my friends.

Usenet survived being the original target of spam. I suspect in a way it was ready to deal with it because it had had flamers for years. But it is worth looking at why Usenet persists to discover how virtual communities survive. It is a place, no less real for having no physical location, in which people can meet others of like interests. So long as there is a community that values and protects an online space as a community, it can survive. I doubt that that is fully sufficient for it's survival, but it is clearly necessary.

Re:One Difference

I honestly don't think "affluent, white, liberal Calfornia hippie" really, truly equates to "general". This is a misperception produced by the fact that, although the WELL was catalysed by the Deadhead community, it ended up very much general in _topic_, if not in constituency. This generality of topic is something that I have seen in _every_ _single_ _virtual_ _community_ I've ever encountered, and passes for diversity quite easily. However, the bottom line is that the core community _is_ invariably specialised, and the WELL is far from being an exception. In fact, the Deadhead group that catalysed it is somewhat more homogenous than either of the communities I mentioned.

The WELL was a perfect example of virtual community in every respect, and was certainly one of the first ones out there. It was no different than any other because the underlying social rules and principles that produce this 'specialised general gathering' are emergent from human behavior. The only reason it's hyped as being different is Boomer ego- by comparison, the furry lifestyler community I mentioned tends to respond to the dissolution of its community by distress and a sense that the lost community was a lucky break and the product of hard work that nobody's putting in anymore- nostalgia and self-worship are alien to that particular community, so it's a point of distress that the group lost focus, with essentially no backpatting that it had existed in the first place. The WELL is very subject to the Boomer self-celebratory characteristic, and so in retrospect it is spun as an absolutely unique thing that cannot be recaptured, much as the 60s 'cannot be recaptured': if it could be recaptured, that would make the Boomers less wonderful by contrast, wouldn't it? If just _anybody_ could be spiritual, committed, and activist?

Which of course reads like an indictment, for which I apologize: it is difficult to explain what causes Boomers to insist the WELL was unique, without accepting that Boomers as a class have a great deal invested in the concept that they were a peak of society, and that no succeeding generation have been anything but a disappointment by comparison. Yes, that is an insulting belief, but it is less a tenet of individual faith and more a cultural expectation 'spun' through pop analysis like 'The Greening Of America' (contrast with 'The Closing Of The American Mind'), and is as all-encompassing as Pokemon- and no more inherently honest or plausible.

That is why the WELL takes a special place in virtual communities: not because it is in fact any different, but because the people responsible for it are significantly more likely to place value on it being special, on it being a peak of human achievement that nobody these days is remotely spiritual, enlightened and hip enough to recapture. As a result, this is the spin it's given, and by default everything else is defined as a weak imitation. The WELL was certainly no _less_ than other forms of online community, but it was also no _more_: it's a simple social process that will continue to recur over and over and fall prey to the influences of disruption, uncontrolled growth, and shift in the constituency of the group.