Cyberspace and Virtual Communities

Virtual Communities: Fact or Fiction?

What constitutes a community? In the United States until WWII, it was believed that community was determined by geographic location; who you lived by and what town you were in constituted your community. This type of community can still be found in small towns today - everyone knows everyone else's business and has an emotional stock in the goings-on of everyday life. After WWII, however, people began to leave small towns for the cities, and leave the cities for the suburbs. The commonality of phones, radios, and televisions expanded our idea of the extent of community to remote locations (radio stations from other cities, phone conversations across the nations) and the members of community to strangers and even fictional characters (soap opera characters). There was a shift in the focus from the public to the private, which led to a drive toward communities composed of like-minded individuals, a concept that is closer to our hearts and minds.

As the communications technologies improve and we are provided with computer-mediated communication (CMC) in increasingly accessible forms, we see the emergence of virtual communities. The virtual community has evolved from the use of locally connected bulletin boards and e-mail through globally accessed newsgroups and chat rooms to highly interactive MUDs, MOOs, cybercafes, and the like.
Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community, defines virtual communities as "social aggregations that emerge from the [Internet] when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace. ... Virtual communities might be real communities, they might be pseudo-communities, or they might be something entirely new in the realm of social contracts, but I believe they are in part a response to the hunger for community that has followed the disintegration of traditional communities around the world."

Rheingold believes that the creation of virtual communities (VCs) was inevitable, given the fact that the advanced communications technology enabled them to develop in the first place. Discovering that computers could be networked and common places could be established (eg. bulletin boards) made new modes of communication possible, and communities emerged almost immediately. He likens the development of VCs to that of colonies of bacteria growing in a petri dish; as long as the agar in the dish (or the Internet) can provide sustenance, the colonies will grow.

"I suspect that one of the explanations for [the emergence of virtual communities] is the hunger for community that grows in the breasts of people around the world as more and more informal public spaces disappear." (Rheingold, Introduction to The Virtual Community)
The public spaces Rheingold refers to are the local diner, the front porch, and the town theater. In the post-WWII era, people left the cities to live in the suburbs, but kept their jobs in the city, and spent most of their time commuting and thus avoiding contact with their new suburban neighbors, who were busy commuting to their own city jobs. Increasingly, people who live in suburbs don't interact with, and in some cases, don't even know the names of their neighbors. There are too many other options open to us to join communities of like-minded people. Malls and cinema complexes make sure that neighbors won't even have the shared experience of seeing the same movie or eating at the same restaurant. In short, the old notion of community as a group defined by common boundaries has been outmoded by the CMC technologies. Or as Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure? puts it, "...the development of electronic communication technologies has essentially abrogated space and time so that we effectively live in a boundless 'global village'."

Visit our secondary site for an interesting editorial, written by Shalini Jain, on the illusion of virtual "communities."

The "global village" suffers from a few problems, given the limits of the medium, but has already solved several of these problems. One of the initial problems with linking different networks together was the issue of standardization. This has been dealt with in much the same way that problems of standardization in printing were solved in the 15th century. To illustrate, when printing first became a big business, each printer had a different way of spelling, punctuating, and organizing the material to be printed. Printing shops eventually came up with a standardized set of symbols and forms, thanks to the help of mendicant scholars. Similarly, today there are mendicant sysops (systems operators) who trade their services, transcribing between different editors, for free internet access. Another problem is that of authorship. In the past, printers could print anything without strict author permission or credit to the author. This problem was solved in the print world by copyright laws, but who regulates the on-line world to make sure that authors are credited accurately and consistently for their work?

The idea of control on the web is a tricky one. Should our government have the right to install the Clipper Chip or screen for pornography? The MUDs are maintained by a set of people who monitor the action, but a lot of the regulation is by the members or participants themselves. For example, while participating in a MOO, we witnessed the "booting" of a guest who was allegedly harrassing another participant. "Booting", as we soon found out, is permanent and irrevocable once carried out, but the bootee does have one chance to challenge the boot if he/she/they felt it was unwarranted. The most interesting aspect about booting is that it can be done by any member of a MOO to any other member, though it is assumed that it is done for good reason, and in fact the booter is requested to provide the reason for booting to all present members. Another aspect that has arisen on the newsgroups is the use of netiquette. Netiquette makes two demands on the part of the user: first, that individualism is honored and fostered, and second, that the network is good and must be protected. People who violate these rules, by attacking or insulting another's point of view or the interests of the group in general, can be communally ostracized via the "Kill" button or simply posting that the individual to be exiled, as it were, is to be avoided and listing his/her transgressions. So until a regulating force can be agreed upon, the "citizens" of the Internet have taken it upon themselves to maintain the Internet.

Another interesting problem with the medium of CMC is that all communication is necessarily visual. Both (normally) verbal and nonverbal communication is set down in text. Verbal communication translates well to the textual format, as long as the author and audience speak the same language. Nonverbal communication, however, is a bit more problematic. We have developed shortcuts that, once accepted, represent a wide range of emotions and attitudes. Writing in ALL CAPS is interpreted as shouting, emoticons replace having to write out "I'm smiling" or "I'm being sarcastic," and actions can be performed by placing the action word between asterisks, parentheses, and the like (eg. >hug<, *smile*, (hee hee), #gasp!#). Communication, therefore, can be at most as rich as a face to face interaction, and at least as adequate as a written letter.

One aspect of communication on the Internet, especially in newsgroups, chatrooms, and MOOs, is that, due to the nature of the medium, emotions seem rawer, behavior less controlled, and opinions taken at face value. When someone flames another's posting, it is seen as (and often written as) an attack on that person in general. It is a lot easier to assign negative attributes to strangers that we never have to see, especially when we ourselves are protected from that person's wrath or explanations. Newsgroup posters (and MOOers, for that matter) who might ordinarily never challenge an opposing opinion or act in a boisterous manner find themselves freed from their reticence by the nature of pseudo-anonymity found in a userid.
It has also been written that the MUDs and MOOs attract pathologically obsessive users, people who are drawn by the highly emotional contact with others and who can become very addicted to the virtual world. The MUDs and MOOs also have proven to be a huge drain on electronic and computer resources and because of this, they have been banned by several universities as well as the entire continent of Australia.

It is interesting to note that in all of the articles available about the development of virtual communities, very few make mention of existing communities, countries or nations. They are not forgotten, but the focus is not on the individual's nationality but on the individual himself/herself. However, as the following quote illustrates, the majority of Internet users are in the United States, and the ideals behind the Internet stem from philosophies that could only have been developed in this country.

"Ideologically, community within cyberspace appears to emphasize a shared belief in the principles of free speech, individualism, equality, and open access [to] the same symbolic interests that define the character of American democracy. Experientially, community within cyberspace emphasizes a community of interests ... that can lead to a communal spirit and apparent social bonding."
(quoted in Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?)

This is not to say that other countries don't have their share of 'net users. There are a wide range of languages as well as nationalities represented in newsgroups and freenets and many Web sites, while written in English for the most part, originate from points all around the globe. We are seeing the Internet bring us together faster and with greater bandwidth than the telephone, radio, and television combined.

If you already live in a Virtual Community, these sites may be of interest...
Citizen's Guide to Internet Resources
Electronic News for CyberCitizens

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by Lisa Thomas