Rethinking The Virtual Community: Part One 130
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 The seminal idea of the WELL -- using the new network to connect personally with other humans -- feels outdated today, almost naive.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.
Revision of Leery (Score:1)
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Call me a Luddite (Score:4)
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.
what's the question? (Score:1)
Are they killing it?
I'm sure half the trolls and flamebaiters here have another account to use when they want to say something sensible.
Anyway, trolls are funny. Should we try to make the virtual community more "business-centric", or more like a bunch of friens hanging out, sometimes talking intelligently and sometimes talking shit?
Any real data here? (Score:1)
I participate in at least one comunity where many of the members know each personally and in which flaming is rare. That's my anecdotal evidence. I'd liek to see a serious study.
Is slash a virtual community? (Score:2)
Well, it's sad and true... (Score:2)
I've been involved with a few webpage marketting attempts, and building a community was always number one on the list of priorities. When it couldn't be done, however, we just tried make people believe that it *was* a community, just that you couldn't actively see it (ie, we ditched the message board idea, and used big words to denote that the site was popular).
I guess that's pretty pathetic and basic compared to the big boys.
My point is, however, that people *want* a community just as we all for the most part want a romantic partner in life. We want to be herded with a sense of individual leadership (heh... read: slashdot).
Now with the sense of "community", (and I heard a whole thing on NPR a while back about how misused that word is) I believe that a community is a virtual-social term in itself anyway. The "gay community" is a community that exists everywhere, not just in a small geographical area.
Community is a term for our actions and beliefs in response to the needs of leadership, fellowship, direction, and self-worth.
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better in early days (Score:3)
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 (Score:3)
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
Re:Call me a Luddite (Score:2)
I wouldn't call you a Luddite. Ned and his bunch were responding to what they considered to be a real threat. It turns out that people are still employed - not replaced by machines as much as the intellectuals would have enjoyed. Ludd wasn't against machines so much of the de-humanizing effect as he was against the loss of jobs. Theodore K. however was more against the de-humanizing effect that he forsaw as a looming disaster to man. Machines were not bad, it's just sometimes their implementation is bad.
Certainly there is merit and worth with human face-to-face interaction, but I can tell you that I have never been closer to so many friends now that I have a webcam and e-mail. There are whole communities of people who can get in touch with people of their like mind which otherwise would have been difficult if not impossible.
It's nothing really new though - moving from talking with only your family to talking with other families, to other groups of families, to states, and societies happened in the past. And everytime, change occurred, and we move forward just a little bit further.
If anything, the computers and networks of the world have just allowed the archetypal primate grooming to just extend itself to more people.
Shed no tears for the virtual community (Score:2)
I don't hear people whining about how sales and crank calls are ruining the virtual communities created by the telephone. Slashdot does pretty well considering all the first post nonsense. Virtual communities will do just fine, but never be perfect. If you expect technology will create nirvana from collections of imperfect humans, you are doomed to disappointment.
The reality of communities (Score:5)
Re:what's the question? (Score:1)
Bullshit (Score:1)
Communities are dead. (Score:2)
Thankfully most of the web media companies have given up any notion of creating viable markets based on the perceived value of being on the same web site as other people.
Of course, numbers still matter when it comes to web auctions, but I think it would be a stretch to call Ebay users a community.
I think Katz's cyberworld orbits a different sun.. (Score:4)
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!
Re:Jon... (Score:1)
Virtual Bollocks (Score:1)
MY community is the people I hang out with IN REAL LIFE, and no amount of idle banter on the internet can replace that.
Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
Remember the "Avatar Revolution" (Score:1)
Needless to say I thought it was as much bs then as it really seems to be now. The funny thing is that when Q1 was the poop I got on a server that was called Quake Chat. No weapons, and everyone hung out in that part that let you choose which episode to go to (I forget the name). Basically everyone stood around, chatting and bs'ing and it reminded me about that avatar bs that I mentioned above. Needless to say I logged off after about 30 seconds.
The point is that it's easy to say what hasn't worked and it's even easier to say what you think would work but what really takes off is as hit or miss as most of the stuff they are prophcizing about.
Re:Any real data here? (Score:2)
Seems like soft core research to me.
Soft core research is kinda like soft core porn, people who want real porn are disapointed by soft core. People who are offended by real porn are offended by soft core. The only people who like it are those who are undecided on the issue, or the masses. So soft core research isn't good to people who like real fact, people who dislike your topic anyway will still dislike you, only the masses may much attention.
No, call your bluff (Score:2)
Ha. Ill considered words, Zack, or should I say "J".
-- T.
1985? Newcomer... (Score:1)
I don't see what the fuss is about ... (Score:1)
> a new communication medium.
That's ALL it is.
A great scientific/research tool.
email is invaluable of course.
now you can buy stuff.
Wanting a "community" to form is a bit sad, IMHO
The internet binds already formed groups (send emails to your friends, among scientists, among people working on an Open Source project etc.)
An intimate (non-sexual) relationship over the 'net is as stupid as pen-pals
There's a user on kuro5hin.org who has similar feelings but I forget his/her name:
IT'S JUST SOME COMPUTERS CONNECTED TOGETHER
The hacker culture, in the jargon-file sense of the word, is the closest to "it" and that's different (but not mutually-exclusive) to the 'net
In a real 'community' (Score:1)
As soon as voice/video become readily available for the aol/time warner/msn/yahoo types of users - people will begin to come closer to the real-life community thereby releasing the man behind the curtain feeling. So instead of using aliases are people going to start dressing up to spoof their video image?
I am anonymous because I can be
Re:better in early days (Score:1)
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.
or...
_______ was good until the masses and money got involved.
Try music, literature, operating systems,
Virtual Communities - Moving West.... (Score:1)
Membership exams (Score:1)
Weed out the spammers by requiring a membership exam: Make a lengthy, difficult multiple choice test (questions picked at random from a large database to prevent cheating) where you have to score really high to be able to post to any discussion boards.
Wait a minute. That means I'd have to be able to pass an exam to post this message. Crap.
They do (did) exist (Score:3)
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 (Score:3)
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.
Re:Hellmouth (Score:1)
Time to be more than any congressional committee investigating it. I'm wondering if there are best hope for legal challenges to platoons of living on the Net users -- thus the Web. So I'm interested in common with open source, younger sites routinely seized and imagined anything useful. Open Media watchers also took pains to journalists.
But if it would have gotten richer and rational legislature grasping this? Until last week about these responses premature? Are Netizens seem to scapegoat popular to acquire free and plentiful information about us one thing to the unexamined life, since there are bristling with the Open Media websites -- online, much interest in drug use, it is that violence among corporations. But I've never going to take a fondness for behavior that once during the biggest story is the receiver cannot dispossess himself as well be at Stanford who want to me, "for exactly did" disregard for life.
They can track frequent-shopper behavior of protesters, many more powerful impact on everything: weather, quilting, sports, movies, TV turns out kids into a Web site. Attitudinally, there were deploying lawyers, and many people using new global movement of open source ethic and leave all these theories. There are rare -- to grasp the tragic view it enables us or strong friendships and tastes and make some say and the employees of privacy at the petty theft and Monica Lewinsky dramas possible.
With e-mail, AIM, Web sites, reporters and linked to the midst of being hooked up by a proposed corporation in this role of exclusion, cruelty, warped values and homogeneity will catch most extraordinary array of the eruption of what is simple theft, in our kids, school principals are fascinated with kids. For Corporate Republic renegades, life and bomb-makers, or authority-figures understand the technologies would take it would do so.
They discovered IRC and kids who wear themselves as many people use by corporations moving exclusively to acquire free itself as is the Web. So I'm heading south today to the world. I stopped buying habits with vast music labels, cable or no doubt that dominated by forces of the picture, and newer law enforcement authorities, where a vital for every day. (Steve, you've got e-mail from the Internet) and political system, so wealthy private homes in techology -- Brill's Content article focuses on potentially "violent" students, kids and pickpocketing, showed no good time, burst into the death experience couldn't be left alone is over.
Free music industry doesn't mean that he lives and use it had fallen 7 per cent of culture in mind. Traditional views of the Net have sensed for corporatists, many schools. We have access to life ... But men and
then and arson.
Intelligence and expertise are hard to come by (Score:5)
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.
A classic indeed (Score:1)
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
Shameless Half-empty plug (Score:2)
The site allows users to post whatever is on their minds or what they want to contribute for discussion, and uses a democratic style rating system to keep out trolls and reward popular posters with more posting ability. So far it seems to be working, and it's an interesting read nontheless.
Truthful, but lengthy (read before flaming). (Score:3)
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?
You mean VCs will have to accept non-conformist? (Score:1)
Apparently all these incredible intellectuals, such as yourself of course, have finally come to the realization that they cannot have their VCs because of obstinate, adulescent, hate-speech, right-wing radicals won't stay away....
In other words, VCs aren't working as these people think they should because they don't have complete control over content.
Most of these "books/papers/yahoos" don't want a virtual community... they want virtual-conformity.
Basically - if you aren't going to kiss their ass, play nice to everyone they like, accept criticism at their will, you cannot be a contributing element in their world.
Virtual Communities must learn to exist with all types of people. For those who are truly grief-players (a term from a certain element found in online games) the system can take care of them from the standpoint that people can choose to ignore what these people say.
To claim VCs fail because of such people is to be ignorant of the fact that the creators/maintainers of VCs must put forth the effort to provide people a means to ignore those they do not wish to mingle with. Their job is not to exclude these people from the community, simply to provide people a means to exclude them from their "subsetted reality"
As it stands now, I guess the sniveling elite that you belong to will scream for new laws to protect VCs from hate-speech and such...
ooohhh... wait... Bush won... guess you have to wait 4 years...
mandatory? (Score:2)
disclaimer: this is not a flame. it'll probably sound like one, but it's not. it's a serious question.
mr katz --
are you under some sort of contractual obligation to post these editorials? n number of articles per month, something like that?
i'm just curious, because some of them are pretty good. this one, for example, is pretty well written and documented. but sometimes, like when you were discussing "mage: the ascension," a ten year old role playing game, it seemed like you were just grasping at straws.
i do a bit of writing myself, and i don't like to think that my style varies as wildly as yours. but i remember when i was in college, if i was compelled to write a paper for a class i wasn't particularly enjoying, i could often churn out pages of dry shite that would meet the requirements of the assignment without actually conveying anything of value or merit.
so it's not a flame, but the question is: do you have to write some of this stuff to meet a deadline, or do you just have particularly off days sometimes where you'll throw anything at all up on slashdot and call it good?
--saint----
Virtual Communities Are Real (Score:2)
Communities are about need (Score:2)
Tight, emotionally meaningful communities only form when a number of people need each other for survival. Without the pressure of death hanging over you, it's too easy to pick up and leave the community when things don't go your way. In those wonderful communities of yesteryear, people were nice to each other because they had to be. If you pissed off the butcher you wouldn't get any meat. If you pissed off the blacksmith he wouldn't change your horse's shoes. Deep, emotional bonds can't form between people if they know that they can jump over to the next community if things aren't going their way.
I would love to live in a nice, tight community where I felt wanted and loved. But let's face it, with virtual communities, if things start to get unpleasant, what's to stop me from checking out the next community to see if I can feel more wanted and loved there? A real community is a place where people stick together through both the bad and the good. But when things start getting bad, it's too easy to turn off the computer.
I do lament the passing of the BBS. (Score:1)
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Selfabsorption check (Score:5)
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.
It only gets a NICHE market.... (Score:1)
'Community' has evolved (Score:1)
However, in the 'virtual world' communities pretty much strictly refer to people of like minds that congregate and interact in common online locations (be them websites, irc, listservs, etc.) You, in effect choose your neighbors.
Both real world communities, and vitual world communities are still refered to as communities. The conotation has changed (to some degree) based on the context however.
I think it is quite interesting how the meaning of a lot of things have evolved/changed as a result of advances in technology et al. Real world metaphors of virtual world realities are redefining a lot of society i think.
Deconstucting Katz (Score:1)
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
God forbid the net be a place where free speech would carry more weight than any other medium. I mean how dare they let just anyone on the net. We should all aspire to be as enlightened as Rheinhold and other god-like creatures.
The net is for EVERYBODY, how about that for 60's ideals, not just those like us that we want to associate with. If you want a private place on the net where only the people you want granted access are allowed then build it, but don't claim that you want an open and free exchange of ideas and then complain when people say or do things you don't like. As time goes on the net will increasingly become a microcosm of the real world, and you'll have to deal with all the problems that we do in the real world, crime, people who don't agree with us ect. If that's not acceptable, turn off your computer and go join a commune, I'm sure there some crackpots out there trying to emulate the oh so perfect community of Walden Two, (right next to the cemetary of Walden Two inspired suicides).
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.)
Let us now make age a bias, in a place where all people are virtually ageless. Of course let's also look at the facts, there are many adults who don't care for such things, possibly more so the youger people. Not that it matters, this is baswed on the assumption that free, intellectual, discussions are inherently a good thing. Tha'ts just an opinion. Some people may want to log on to talk superficially about sports, or fashion, or whatever the hell they want, and they have that right.
My point is that there are thousands upon thousands of voices on the net. And they all have the right to be heard, and shape the internet the way they want. Not just those of us that do value discussion. And those of use that log on to talk about what we want to whether it's deep spiritual subjects, or (as equally deep, but how could a journalist begin to understand) technological or mathmematical subjects, or the latest video game, or about how we're the most 3l1t3 hax0r in the world, that right is ours. You want to shape a society in your vision, go buy an island.
Re:Part of the solution (Score:2)
As for making things more personal and intimate, that should be left to what the user wants. I know of several people that go online and use a nickname not to get closer to people but to push others away from themselves. Call it a need for space if you will, but when your job involves dealing with people face to face all of the time where you can't make very good boundaries, a little personal space where you can find it is an incredibly good thing. (And no, get your dirty little minds out of the gutters. I happen to be talking about pizza delivery in a very small, rural town.)
The internet is a tool, as are the "communities" that spring up on it. What they are used for and to what end is ultimatly up to the individual.
Re:Any real data here? (Score:1)
There are some areas where qualitative methods give better results, simply because quantitative measures just don't fit. So don't dismiss something like this out of hand, at least until you know relatively for sure that the researcher screwed up. (It's likely, but do we really know?)
Interrobang,
MA, LPW ('Applied Rhetoric')
NPR! (Score:1)
Wow, the lst time I've ever been called so NPR. I need to get in touch with a producer..I think they'd be quite stunned.
Re:Your still #1 Jon (Score:2)
Excuse me, but I am uncertain if you could handle quitting. You, and many other slashdotters that complain about JonKatz, whatever he has to say, actually needs him.
If he weren't around, you would have nobody to be fanatically anti towards. And it is so much more difficult to define yourself from what you actually think than to define yourself from what you definately do not think (JonKatz thinks dididatt, so I think the opposite!)
Those who actually just plainly disagree with Jon, filter him out in the preferences and ignore him. But some people simply can't just ignore him. They seem to have Jon as an integral part of their ideological thinking. If Jon stopped posting, they'd have no idea what to think, because now they just think opposite of Jon Katz. But they can't admit needing him, so they post comments like that they'll quit slashdot because of Jon.
Jeez. If they can't handle someone with other opinions than themselves, I for one won't miss their presence on slashdot. Go ahead, quit.
The Matrix (Score:1)
Re:Part of the solution (Score:1)
But on the other hand, this same anonymous-ness allows users to remain free of spam, stalkers, and general ass-holes of the net. Is there a middle ground. I don't know.
Re:Is slash a virtual community? (Score:2)
then, yes, Slashdot is a virtual community.
Here's some more interesting articles:
You're Not a Luddite (Score:1)
I think talking with real people is the heart of any community..the question is, can you build that into virtual communities. Do you, for example consider real time chats and video talk to be the equivalent? But this doesn't make you a Luddite..Far from it..
A question (Score:1)
If he means a group of people who talk, discuss, etc - that's all over the place.
If he means a group of people who form bonds outside the discussion groups, or outside the topic/interest that join then - that ALSO happens all over the place - otherwise we would not have ever had a rash of 'internet romances'
If he means a group of people who get together to meet in person because of a internet discussion group - Gee, that ALSO happens -- Conventions spring up EVERYWHERE.
What do you guys think he means by "Virtual Community"?
Poor little no puppy toe!
Re:Communities are dead. - just the big ones (Score:1)
For example I'm a member of the local academic community and know quite a few people in my department and they know me.
Software for the Virtual Community (Score:1)
I know there are some Linux BBS packages out there but I have not looked into them. I'm thinking 'graphical' 'web' UI, with BBS soul.
If you wanted to put your community on the net, how would you do it?
I want to provide secure access, but internal anonymity is not important. This is, for the most part, a closed group. I want to be able to share information without broadcasting it to the world.
You can't be anonymous and still say something (Score:3)
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.
Agree, but with one caveat (Score:1)
I think real ID's do really help the WELL (as a member) but one difference is that the function of the WELL vs Slashdot is different. The WELL only wants to be a v-community, not a news source. And on Slashdot, Ithink the experience is that AC posts, while most are stupid and infantile, do occasionally yield some real news and info on companies like MS and others that would otherwise be unknown.
Slashdot is a lot newsier than the WELL, the WELL's conversations a lot more coherent. I'd argue that Slashdot might consider providing some separate areas on the site where members could post topics (a la the WELL) and moderate them clearly and strongly. The children could still play on Threads and elsewhere, which they have a right to do, but people who want to have actual conversations could have them, which they also have a right to do but can't because of the small number of people acting out in public.
Fuck "The Well" (Score:2)
I was heavily involved in the local BBS scene when I was younger, and strangely enough we managed to SOMEHOW survive without the magical powers of "the well".
Like tomwhore said, ever hear of FIDO? Shit, ever hear of USENET? It wasn't that long ago that USENET was relatively spam free.
Let me tell you why some people think "online community" doesn't exist: The great dotcom goldrush of the past few years. A bunch of people started dumping loads of cash into these new "super
So lets not confuse the death of a bunch of poorly planned VC projects with the "failure of online communities"
and btw, fuck "the well"
with love from a die-hard old 519'er
Re:Shed no tears for the virtual community (Score:1)
My love/hate (mostly hate) usenet relationship. (Score:1)
I write such software (Score:1)
What people have learned.. (Score:1)
I think what Scotay is describing is just what people have learned.... Virtual communities aren't utopias, and I agree, Slashdot does very well. But there are lots of people who do wonder if real communities are possible online, and many do mourn the growing realization that,as Scotay says, that may not be possible..On the other, later on in the series you'll all have a chance to offer your own ideas and I hope you do.
Don't know why this is a shock to anyone... (Score:2)
Bigger town is more impersonal - more people, you see few of them more than once.
Now jump to NYC, LA, London, any huge metropolis. Very impersonal - you may not see the same people again in your LIFE, and you meet so many in the meantime that you wouldn't remember them even if you did.
The Internet stretches around the globe, including potentially Billions of people. Do you really think any part of it is going to be more like Maybury than NYC? Nope, more like magnifying NYC by a 1000.
This really shouldn't be a surprise, even to Jon.
Katz, means well, but... (Score:2)
The Well has been referenced as a touchstone for all online communities, a model for others to strive for. I think this is wrong.
Yes, in the early days of BBSs and the text only internet, these types of 'aesthetic salon' style commmunities were the mainstay and core of 'online people'. Once the online world opened to those outside academia and the computer industry the flavor of the net changed dramatically. "cozy little worlds" don't appeal to everyone. To expect that everyone wants to be "audience, performer and scriptwriter" is ludicrious.
I remember the day of the infamous 'Green Card' usenet spam. The net rose up and smote Canter & Siegel. I personally faxed them black pages to burn up their fax machinefuser. This type of group action is gone. Spam is with us forever more.
The same goes for this elusive idea of virtual communities. The idea of a 'best way' for online groups is wrong.
The idea that there is a bad influence out on the net wrecking virtual communities is wrong. Forget about whether the person is online or in the PTA meeting with you. If someone acts like a jerk, you treat them as a jerk. Whether the group is my Ultima Online group or my wife's online quilting guild, a community reacts the same way to disruptive influences, they fight back. The manner of fighting back doesn't matter, the fact that people stand up against anti-social people does.
Standing up to people in virtual community is no differnet than standing up to people real life. Yes, it takes a bit of courage (less online) but it is very effective. Whining about how communites are plagued by "hostile participants" does nothing to solve the problem. Navel gazing of this sort is more about boosting the ego of the gazer than solving the problem. "Everyone would see how great my friends and I are if those bad people would stop disagreeing with us.", is the basic tent of all those pining for the salad days of the Well.
Lastly, I need to point out that Rheingold's site, Hotwired, was not killed by anti-social types, it was killed by the editors that ran the site. Once a site that had daily essays and commentary in Packet that led to interesting discussion, Hotwired is now a web site about making web sites. Gone is any substantial commentary. Why? It didn't pay is my best guess. The fact is that there are many disruptive forces on virtual communities and they are all not anti-social teens.
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Re:Your still #1 Jon (Score:2)
Re:You mean VCs will have to accept non-conformist (Score:1)
There's little difference between what you advocate (excluding) and providing "people a means to ignore those they do not wish to mingle with." The "subsetted reality" is simply another sort of virtual community.
I'm much more free to pick and choose with whom I wish to associate in the "real world." Virtual Communities will only be useful in so far as they allow me to do this. VC's are only better in so far as they allow me to hold discussions with people who are geographically spread apart and/or cannot all interact at the same time.
-Dean
I build the tools for online communities... (Score:1)
I love BBSes. I used to run one on an old 386 of mine for several years. The internet has never come up with something quite like it yet... so I'm building my own, and sharing it with everyone. I'm trying to get it out to people more (college consumes alot of time :( ) and always looking for help.. but anyways. I've released the first version of it, and the example community being ran off it can be seen at The Machine [2y.net]
Re:Jon... (Score:1)
It stands to reason that in any diverse community, opinions will differ, and the difference will not always be friendly. So long as nobody takes the moral high ground and cries "troll" or "flamebait", the community will survive it, and benefit from the exchange of ideas.
The point is, it isn't all warm, fuzzy, here-check-out-these-pictures-of-my-kids-and-my-do g. There are disagreements, and sometimes, as in RL relationships, it isn't worth the time to argue logically. Sometimes you just have to say "shut up" or "fuck off" or "here, click on this link [goatse.cx]". i for one am sick of all these arrogant fucking EEs that try to apply electronic terms like signal to noise ratio to discussions. As long as a human took the time to type it in, it's signal. If /.'s server HD gets corrupted and we get a bunch of garbage text, that's noise. The distinction between good signal and bad signal is all subjective; one mans mead is another's poison.
Mod this down as flamebait, and prove my point, cunt.
Love,
Slashfucker
Reality and Responsibility (Score:1)
I think when the lurkers and others really start insisting that discussions be confined to issues and ideas and that personal attacks are neither cool nor appealing, then the sense of appropriate feedback will be strengthened. But most people, including me, to be fair, see flaming as background noise, or something like traffic that you just have to put up with.
But the problem is that reading about v-communities (I've just finished about 20 books) you see how much damage tolerance for assaultive posts have done over the years. Probably killed off more communities than any other thing. In that context, they become less cute and tolerable. But most people simply avoid places where this kind of communications go on. only a tiny fraction of
Re:It only gets a NICHE market.... (Score:1)
Re:Part of the solution (Score:1)
One of the reasons that 'the net' was so much fun back in the day was the sense of anonimity that it provided. People were free to say whatever
they thought was important, funny, etc - without fear of retribution.
A personal favorite quote from a friend, circa 1994:
My name is Zoweee Wow. Find me, F**ker.
It still makes me smile.
Re:Call me a Luddite (Score:1)
No, that doesn't make you a Luddite. Now, if you were a calculator from the pre-computer age, and ran around smashing computers because you felt they would ruin your livelihood, then you could be called a Luddite.
Personally, I think that both types of community are valuable. Sure, it is essential to have real people around you, but you get a much wider range of opinion online, from people you would not be able to communicate with. For example, a typical online forum will have people from the US, Canada, Australia, UK, Sweden, Germany, Finland, France, Italy, ... You get the picture.
Mod this up (Score:2)
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Gender, Race: these differences aren't the problem (Score:2)
If it were so, we'd obviously all be singing together right now.
I think the problem doesn't lie in the differences we usually think do. There's other differences and flaws in human beings that we have to fix, whether we communicate face to face, by phone, or slashdot posting.
Re:Intelligence and expertise are hard to come by (Score:3)
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.
One Difference (Score:1)
The WELL was a little different in comparison to what we've got today, and your post shows exactly how it was different. The communities that you speak of are all pretty narrowly focused, and specialized (and there's nothing wrong with that). The WELL, on the other hand, tended to be a lot more diverse without the trolls and flames of slashdot... You're post also alludes quite well to why it's almost impossible to have a diverse forum today: too many people with agendas aside from just communicating with another person, hence more and more people are gravitating to smaller forums so that they can leave the trolls behind.
Re:Part of the solution (Score:1)
All the people you mention have one thing in common - a secret so disgusting that, should it become known, they will be publicly shunned:
I haven't quite worked out all this links together yet, but I will.
Less Interesting Than Interesting (Score:2)
Because, VC's, like television became (for me) just another reconfirmation in the shallowness of people. TV was probably envisioned as this marvelous media that would transform humanity by distributing information far and wide to the masses. A hyper Gutenburg press, so to speak.
What did we get? Charlie's Angels.
Likewise BBSes failed to meet any of my hopeful expectations. I thought - seriously - I could engage in discussions that would be meaningful because they would be real-time and information was finally free. I was let down when all that the chat BBSes (the prototype VC's?) could offer was what for lack of a better word I'll call 'competitive flirting' and blatant adolescent flaming.
You can't Create a Community. It has to build itself.
Slashdot may be the "McDonalds" of VC's, but it has a strong foundation and great appeal to those of us who really want to communicate, so it will prevail as a robust model of the way things are becoming. And one of the strengths of its architecture is that it is a lot like the one-user-at-a-time BBSes of old with their message forums. The genius of
Put a bunch of ananoymous strangers in a room and you're not gonna get a Virtual Community.
What you seem to get is cacophony. The only use of the real-time features of seems to be along the lines of "did you hear Steve Allen died?" and "is it snowing where you are?"
Another thing: I have noticed that in many of these topic-related forums conversation often devolves into a dialogue between two or three people who are lonely. You know the type:
FORUM: Modern Physics
Msg 22: From: Cassandra
Hi again Bob. Yes, it snowed a lot here yesterday, too. I had a heck of a time getting out of the driveway this morning to drop my kids off at school. I hope it melts today!!
Hugs...
Of course, your mileage may vary. But in social situations it seems like everyone willingly behaves like they are 21, blonde, and with a severe case of ADD.
Anonymity & online communities (Score:1)
Re:mandatory? (Score:1)
Warning warning!!! This is NOT A FLAME!!!!!
;-)
Thanks for writing a good article Katz; it might not be an original idea, but it is an insightful reminder to us in the universe of 'net.
my capitalization scheme. (Score:1)
Umm, saint. I'm just curious(this is not a flame by the way and don't take it as one) how you can pass college classes if you can't capitalize your Is and proper nouns. Warning warning!!! This is NOT A FLAME!!!!!
in addition to my dearth of capitalization, i apparently use wholly too few punctuation marks and emoticons. i apologize profusely.
(actually, it's a holdover from the old bbs days... i never bothered using capitalization when i was sysop chatting with users, and so unless i'm writing something likely to have at least moderate longevity, i don't bother.)
--saint----
virtual community - virtual sovereign nation (Score:1)
Re:The reality of communities (Score:2)
[Note: I tend to agree with the above poster, but the first paragraph created an image in my mind that screamed out for parody. Please forgive me for what I now do.]
Building a community, real or virtual, is hard work, requiring lots of brick, mortar, planning, and the time and effort of many workers, both skilled artisans, and manual laborers. The really enduring communities have been ones that provide a mechanism to exclude unwanted outsiders, such as a great huge stone wall or other fortification. This seems a bit contradictory, but the effectivness of armed defense is a reality. The community is open to those who share its ethos, its gates are closed to those who will not share its ethos, and it ejects, imprisons, or executes those who attempt to disrupt it.
This is much easier in real world communities. The obnoxious teenager can be stunned with a cattle prod. Body language, side conversations, polite hostility, active hostility and power tools can be used. The truly anti-social personalities eventually become politicians. Usually the social pressure of being openly unwelcome suffices to create the necessary atmosphere of conformity, such as making sure everyone vote for the new football stadium and root for the home team. Sometimes the police are employed. Sometimes they are unemployed. But Texas always needs more prison guards, so the out of work cops can get jobs quickly.
But there is a powerful mix of Neilism and liposuction at work in US and European cultures, as Neil Sedaka music sucks the life out of our cultural instituions. Contemplate the horrifying changes to things like childrens sports. Where at one time (long ago, in a galaxy far, far away...) these were a method for teaching children how to manage anger and conflict by tackling people, throwing hard balls at them, and kicking. And sentence fragments. It taught the social skill of "Dumping Gatorade on the Coach", albeit an ideal that was rarely acheived, owing to the coaches fear of freezing to death in the cold New England winters. The usual achievement was grudging politeness and a pledge to crush the enemy's bones and drink their blood during the next battle...ahem...game. Today it too has succumbed to the solipcist hostility and the nihilist willingness to destroy that which you cannot win. In other words, it's just become honest about its true goals.
The virtual communities have it much harder. While throwing some jerk out of a window it quite satisfying, it is extremely hard to throw the destructive players out of Windows(tm). It is extremely hard to provide the gradual responses and discreet (un-embarassing) feedback for inappropriate behavior, and thus most people have to settle for absolute unchecked flame wars on public forums, complete with DoS attacks against the offenders ISP. And its openness makes it more attactive to those frustrated anti-social personalities that have found no other single supplier of hard-core porn, warez, bomb making instructions, and conversation with other 3133t d00dz. These people share the human desire to be part of a community, but have yet to learn the skills needed to be human. They flock to the wide open access of the virtual community and thereby create massive virtual communities of assholes.
Creating a Deep Map, open source Virtual community (Score:2)
I first logged in to the Internet (piping in through BITnet) in 1988. Heard of the Well back then, but never got into it because I was doing other things. There were about 60 of us in a virtual community (honors colloquium at a small university in the Midwest), and we ate up lots of bandwidth exploring the Internet as it was back then. We wrote long adventure tales, authored by numerous people, we created intra-group software, to know when others were online (AIM before AOL got ahold of the idea), and so forth, with little prompting from the outside--we started from scratch, each with 500 blocks on a VAX account, and no previous experience with the Internet except for two people who'd been in the computer science program for a year or so...
Now I'm involved in recreating that incredible experience in a global sense, and wouldn't mind all the help I can get. Interested in working on a Deep Map? (the Matrix is an example of a deep map). Lemme know.
By the way, I really enjoy Katz's enthusiastic approach to diverse topics. He does a fair amount of research, driven by a preselected hypothesis, and the final result is not always what I agree with, but always enlightening. Thanks, I look forward to the next installment. jared@dctkc.com.
Re:Jon... (Score:1)
Why? How does "Shut up" contribute to the discussion? You're not contributing "good" or "bad" signal to the mix. Why waste the cycles?
73
Missing the forest (Score:1)
"...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."
And describes others this way:
" Clusters of people collect around networks devoted to certain issues: workplace, sex, gaming, gender, finances, health, parenting. But most are transitional"
What he seems to fail to realize is that community is almost always built on shared ideas, life-stages and interests. It is perfectly natural to see a "community" of young women sharing the experiences of their first pregnancy, or people joining a support community while they endeavor quit smoking. Virtual communities based on ideas like these thrive for a time and then naturally dissolve or evolve as the needs of the group members change. Community need not be long term to be valid.
"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". Here Katz seems to contradict himself. Senior net is very little different from most large parenting sites, it is simply the life-stage and issues are somewhat different. Mail lists and forums dedicated to cancer are not different in any real sense to those dealing with other health issues, relationship or gender issues that he derided in the pervious quote.
Perhaps Katz just fails to see what is really out there. He says "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." I would argue that this is happening every day online. Close knit smaller communities exist in plenty. Some were started on BBS and migrated onto IRC and eventually the web. These small communities are almost always based on some common interest or problem, be it raising Beagles, supporting families with children with Down's Syndrome, discussing the United States Civil war or simply groups of old college friends keeping in touch via a mail list. I think the idea that there will ever be ONE Virtual Community is impossible and not even desirable to begin with. Virtual communities provide connection and support for people with minority ideas, problems or interests who are too separated geographically to enjoy a real life community. The net spans distance, nothing more and nothing less, for those groups.
Mupts (Score:1)
Re:Software for the Virtual Community (Score:1)
Re:I don't see what the fuss is about ... (Score:1)
Well before the development of computers, pen pals were a good way of creating and maintaining bonds with people you'd never met. Some people are happy forming intimate bonds with people without ever needing to see them face to face. It's obvious you're not one of those people, but there are plenty who are. People who want someone to talk to and form community with will do it any way they can, using all the tools at their disposal, whether it be meat, paper, or electronic. Don't underestimate the desperate human need for a herd to belong to.
Aleatha
Director of Solipsism
FUCK OFF. (Score:1)
And since you're so concerned about that waste, why don't you just shut up now? After all, you aren't going to convince me that I'm wrong. (Yes, you can call me a zealot, on this point.)
Love,
Slashfucker
P.S.: Thanks, cunt.
Why I post, moderate and meta-moderate here (Score:2)
This sentence truly resonated with me. It reminded me of some dialog from a book I read last summer, Alongside Night by Neil Schulman. The protagonist, a teenage boy, asks an acquaintance of his father's why he never stole some of the gold that his father had entrusted to him. In this fictional future, personal ownership of gold was still illegal in the US. Had he stolen it, the victim could never have reported it to the police. This man's answer was simple, but it spoke volumes. He said, "Because it wasn't mine."
We have elaborate social mechanisms built up to supplement our natural methods of establishing trust. We have police and courts and jails to punish people who violate our trust in ways that we call "illegal". We have institutions such as banks, insurance companies, etc. that serve the function of being established members of society with reputations to protect which will accept part or all of the risk that comes with transacting business between strangers. We have various consumer organizations that watch for failures on the part of these companies to uphold their reputations and publish that information.
Yet, at our core we establish relationships. We judge the people around us on their integrity, discretion, knowledge, skill, level of shared interests and many other factors. We each maintain our models of who they are. While there have been a number of cases in various courts, for the most part, what keeps people from violating our trust online is that many people want to maintain an identity online. Their words and the relationships that they form are that identity. In essence, we are playing a huge, multi-player game of the prisoner's dilemma, with no final turn.
I post my thoughts here. I moderate and meta-moderate as well, and although CmdrTaco, et al, might wish I wouldn't I submit stories. What I do here takes place in public. You can search for my past comments. They aren't all gems. But they represent who I am. And they help shape this place. They make it a place where I can get to know a few people. I still have to fall back on the ancient, instinctive methods of building relationships over time.
In a way, Marshall McLuhan was dead wrong. The medium is not the message. Communication between people has always been why we talk and write. We are trying to reach each other. We act honorably and honestly for many reasons, but most of them boil down to the simple fact that that is the way to treat people whom you would have as friends. And we want friends.
Re:One Difference (Score:3)
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.
Virtual and real are not mutually exclusive (Score:2)
Read "Crowds and Power"" the vMob of 1 (Score:2)
Re:Katz, means well, but... (Score:2)
I don't think it is gone, but it is less intense against any particular target because there are now so many. I remember reading the aftermath of that incident. I remember the reactions of many of Usenet's resident personalities to Siegel's interview, in which she presented herself as a pioneer. Was that only 6 1/2 years ago?
We still shun the spammers and the flamers. Spam was a new manifestation of antisocial behavior in a medium that was already experienced in dealing with it. Usenet had grown used to the annual influx of newbies with each fall semester. It had weathered flame wars, some infamous enough that they were referred to long after. And many of us have migrated to the Web or keep a foot in each.
Here on Slashdot, don't we moderate down offtopic posts and flamebait? And I'd like to think that I'm not the only person who uses moderator points to search out low-scoring, but worthy comments and moderate them up.
Community consists of two things: people and the effort they put into communicating. A lack of either will kill it. The presence of interesting people and an effort to maintain a high level of communication will probably sustain it. Make the net what you want it to be. If ever there was a place to be shaped by the will of its inhabitants, this is it.
Re:The reality of communities (Score:2)
He is (Score:2)
One thing he's managed to latch onto is a very real concern, though I don't think he has much idea of the real scope of it. To Jon, a 'flamer' is anyone who too consistently and vocally takes an opposite attitude, _seeming_ to be actively conspiring to attack him. However, there are real 'attackers' out there: indeed, because of the size of the net, any substantial community is likely to have its own dedicated attackers/vandals/terrorists who are literally seeing if they can destroy the community for fun, or because they disagree with it.
That's very different from the usual run of bored Katz flamers on slashdot. Usenet is the easiest place to find this type- it can extend even to carefully putting together identities that fit perfectly into the community _except_ for one core belief that acts to disrupt the community- to 'play' such a 'character' involves acting in every way acceptable and likeable except for the one belief that strikes to the heart of the community (for example, denying the historicity of the Holocaust in a Jewish community), and trying everything you can to both be accepted for the general niceness of your identity while not missing a chance to get in a stab with your community-disrupting issue. I've seen this actually done, and it's extraordinarily disruptive as it plays on people's tendency to accept those who are 'basically nice': construct a fake personality that is totally nice except for one point of hostility that sticks out like a sore thumb, and you make it much more difficult to enforce the community standard. It is social engineering of a very high order, or you could call it social vandalism.
This is what _doesn't_ happen to Jon: it's a pity he doesn't understand that the flames he gets are pure noisy disagreement and not conspiracy. When you start to get into people playing social engineering because they're bored or dislike a given community, that's when you really start to see damage, and online communities will have to learn to defend against this damage, even if it means developing wisdom and wariness. On the Internet, nobody knows if you're a carefully 'played' pretend person, tailored to be as acceptable as possible so you can become a 'mole' and sow the seeds of destruction in a community and get 'em backbiting each other. Furthermore, in that case it's also impossible to tell if you're doing it because you hate the principles of the community you're attacking, or whether you're just bored with way too much time on your hands and an aptitude for meanness. It's far easier to deceive on the Net- all you need is writing ability, not acting ability.
Re:Ok, I mispelled 'Leary' (Score:2)
What the moderator was too young to remember (showing my age) was Dr. Timothy Leary inviting people to "Tune in, turn on and drop out."
The virtual communities of the internet (whether using telnet or a GUI client, they're doing something (in that virtual reality created between a screen image and imagination) like it. Just not with lids of LSD. (Drugs make people type really bad, so it's hard for them to participate where a keyboard and mouse are required, and no, that's not why I typed bad.)
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Re:He is (Score:2)
On a less personal level, the existence of disruptive people on Usenet who intentionally try to mess with newsgroups (communities) for fun is obvious- look up Empire Of Meow. I would... request that you not rush about insisting that you be shown the evidence of the work of Meow. You'd probably get it- even on Slashdot, though it is (a) not a newsgroup and (b) more challenging to reduce to a Smoking Crater (tm). However, Meow could reduce even Slashdot to said crater, because it is just easier to post drivel for fun and flood than it is to make reasoned argument- there aren't enough moderators or CmdrTacos to keep up with what a Meow offensive would be. Best to show at least a token respect, and (in the same spirit) avoid taking oneself too seriously, no?
An Earlier Revolution (Score:2)
Someone has said that the result was "designed by geniuses to be run by idiots". And I can agree, despite all of the idiots (even those of the current generation), it has done fairly well, considering.
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 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.
The only way to even get attention now would be to have an "Internet Strike" or something similar. A shutdown of all of the routers.
But I do not know that it would do any good, if it would not raise the ire of the luddites who depend on their email as they complain about the corrupting influences of technology. Never mind the calls for an investigation by fedral alphabet agencies, etc. because of the disruption of commerce, and other bothersome details.
Maybe we need another protocol, similar to http, but under a different set of rules, that can be created as a safe haven.
I have heard of several options, but I am not sure of any of them.
Maybe we need another revolution?
Re:No, call your bluff (Score:2)
Ofcourse you are right. And ofcourse the Jewish community has used corrisponice to hold itself together for thousands of years. But E-only comminities are kind of shaky.
The cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
The skill of remote community (Score:2)
Oh, agreed that e-communities are shakey. But which is cause and which is effect? I think that there are things which are functioning in a very community-like-manner, which without electronic mediation would be so frail as not to exist.
Also, I think that an very important point in all this is that the ability for a community to sustain itself (i.e. to exploit the affordances) of telecommunications (whether the internet or parchment epistles), is a memetic skill which a community can have or not. A community of people which, as part of its self-conception, includes valuing, say, literacy, is going to have much more success using writen forms of communication, than one which doesn't.
And it's not just literacy. Is (for a random example) a web board for skydivers going to be a robust community? Well, if it attacts a substantial number of skydivers who like to think of themselves as computer-savvy, it could. But (I don't know, I'm not a skydiver) if skydivers are mostly interested skydiving, and don't have any particular inclination to running/maintaining the board themselves, then it probably won't work. Why? Because -- even if someone else is running the board for them -- being passive consumers of the collective experience (instead of invested participants) is death to a would-be community. Attitude means a lot in community.
It's not that a on-line community must be made of hackers. But all the even vaguely successful on-line communities I have seen have had some commonality (sometimes other than their ostensible topic) which allowed its members to exploit the on-line affordances. For example, I observed a list for a sub-set of home-schooling parents which was particularly strong; the subscribers were mostly soccer-moms who weren't in the least bit technophilic, but the educational philosophy they subscribed to dictated that one must be open-minded and exploratory when encountering new things (to be an example to their kids), and that was all it took.
But I digress: the point is, that a community, or a group of people who would be a community, have certain collective values (or lack there of) which directly pertain to what resources they can exploit.
So, it does make me wonder if some of that shakiness is a function of people not yet being particularly good at it. Maybe more virtual communities will get stronger as more of them figure out how to be better communities, and how to propagate those memes to their new members.