               A SLICE OF LIFE IN MY VIRTUAL COMMUNITY
                          (Part Two)
                  by Howard Rheingold  June 1992
                       (hlr@well.sf.ca.us)


[ Continued from EFFector Online 2.11 June 22, 1992. Available via
ftp.eff.org or by email from eff@eff.org]


    Social Contracts, Reciprocity, and Gift Economies in Cyberspace

    The network of communications that constitutes a virtual community
can include the exchange of information as a kind of commodity, and
the economic implications of this phenomenon are significant; the
ultimate social potential of the network, however, lies not solely in
its utility as an information market, but in the individual and group
relationships that can happen over time. When such a group accumulates
a sufficient number of friendships and rivalries, and witnesses the
births, marriages, and deaths that bond any other kind of community,
it takes on a definite and profound sense of place in people's minds.
Virtual communities usually have a geographically local focus, and
often have a connection to a much wider domain. The local focus of my
virtual community, the WELL, is the San Francisco Bay Area; the wider
locus consists of hundreds of thousands of other sites around the
world, and millions of other communitarians, linked via exchanges of
messages into a meta-community known as "the net."

    The existence of computer-linked communities was predicted twenty
years ago by J.C.R. Licklider and Robert Taylor, who as research
directors for the Department of Defense, set in motion the research
that resulted in the creation of the first such community, the
ARPAnet: "What will on-line interactive communities be like?"
Licklider and Taylor wrote, in 1968: "In most fields they will consist
of geographically separated members, sometimes grouped in small
clusters and sometimes working individually. They will be communities
not of common location, but of common interest..."

    My friends and I sometimes believe we are part of the future that
Licklider dreamed about, and we often can attest to the truth of his
prediction that "life will be happier for the on-line individual
because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be
selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents
of proximity." I still believe that, but I also know that life also
has turned out to be unhappy at times, intensely so in some
circumstances, because of words on a screen. Events in cyberspace can
have concrete effects in real life, of both the pleasant and less
pleasant varieties. Participating in a virtual community has not
solved all of life's problems for me, but it has served as an aid, a
comfort and an inspiration at times; at other times, it has been like
an endless, ugly, long-simmering family brawl.

    I visit the WELL both for the sheer pleasure of communicating with
my newfound friends, and for its value as a practical instrument
forgathering information on subjects that are of momentary or enduring
importance, from child care to neuroscience, technical questions on
telecommunications to arguments on philosophical, political, or
spiritual subjects. It's a bit like a neighborhood pub or coffee shop.
It's a little like a salon, where I can participate in a hundred
ongoing conversations with people who don't care what I look like or
sound like, but who do care how I think and communicate. There are
seminars and word fights in different corners. And it's all a little
like a groupmind, where questions are answered, support is given,
inspiration is provided, by people I may have never heard from before,
and whom I may never meet face to face.

    Because we cannot see one another, we are unable to form
prejudices about others before we read what they have to say: Race,
gender, age, national origin and physical appearance are not apparent
unless a person wants to make such characteristics public. People who
are thoughtful but who are not quick to formulate a reply often do
better in CMC than face to face or over the telephone. People whose
physical handicaps make it difficult to form new friendships find that
virtual communities treat them as they always wanted to be treated --
as thinkers and transmitters of ideas and feeling beings, not carnal
vessels with a certain appearance and way of walking and talking (or
not walking and not talking). Don't mistake this filtration of
appearances for dehumanization: Words on a screen are quite capable of
moving one to laughter or tears, of evoking anger or compassion, of
creating a community from a collection of strangers.

    How does anybody find friends? In the traditional community, we
search through our pool of neighbors and professional colleagues, of
acquaintances and acquaintances of acquaintances, in order to find
people who share our values and interests. We then exchange
information about one another, disclose and discuss our mutual
interests, and sometimes we become friends. In a virtual community we
can go directly to the place where our favorite subjects are being
discussed, then get acquainted with those who share our passions, or
who use words in a way we find attractive. In this sense, the topic is
the address: You can't simply pick up a phone and ask to be connected
with someone who wants to talk about Islamic art or California wine,
or someone with a three year old daughter or a 30 year old Hudson; you
can, however, join a computer conference on any of those topics, then
open a public or private correspondence with the previously-unknown
people you find in that conference. You will find that your chances of
making friends are magnified by orders of magnitude over the old
methods of finding a peer group.

    You can be fooled about people in cyberspace, behind the cloak of
words. But that can be said about telephones or face to face
communications, as well; computer-mediated communications provide new
ways to fool people, and the most obvious identity-swindles will die
out only when enough people learn to use the medium critically. Sara
Kiesler noted that the word "phony" is an artifact of the early years
of the telephone, when media-naive people were conned by slick talkers
in ways that wouldn't deceive an eight-year old with a cellular phone
today.

    There is both an intellectual and an emotional component to CMC.
Since so many members of virtual communities are the kind of
knowledge-based professionals whose professional standing can be
enhanced by what they know, virtual communities can be practical,
cold-blooded instruments. Virtual communities can help their members
cope with information overload. The problem with the information age,
especially for students and knowledge workers who spend their time
immersed in the info-flow, is that there is too much information
available and no effective filters for sifting the key data that are
useful and interesting to us as individuals. Programmers are trying to
design better and better "software agents" that can seek and sift,
filter and find, and save us from the awful feeling one gets when it
turns out that the specific knowledge one needs is buried in 15,000
pages of related information.

    The first software agents are now becoming available (e.g., WAIS,
Rosebud), but we already have far more sophisticated, if informal,
social contracts among groups of people that allow us to act as
software agents for one another. If, in my wanderings through
information space, I come across items that don't interest me but
which I know one of my worldwide loose-knit affinity group of online
friends would appreciate, I send the appropriate friend a pointer, or
simply forward the entire text (one of the new powers of CMC is the
ability to publish and converse with the same medium). In some cases,
I can put the information in exactly the right place for 10,000 people
I don't know, but who are intensely interested in that specific topic,
to find it when they need it. And sometimes, 10,000 people I don't
know do the same thing for me.

    This unwritten, unspoken social contract, a blend of strong-tie
and weak-tie relationships among people who have a mixture of motives,
requires one to give something, and enables one to receive something.
I have to keep my friends in mind and send them pointers instead of
throwing my informational discards into the virtual scrap-heap. It
doesn't take a great deal of energy to do that, since I have to sift

that information anyway in order to find the knowledge I seek for my
own purposes; it takes two keystrokes to delete the information, three
keystrokes to forward it to someone else. And with scores of other
people who have an eye out for my interests while they explore sectors
of the information space that I normally wouldn't frequent, I find
that the help I receive far outweighs the energy I expend helping
others: A marriage of altruism and self-interest.

    The first time I learned about that particular cyberspace power
was early in the history of the WELL, when I was invited to join a
panel of experts who advise the U.S. Congress Office of Technology
Assessment (OTA). The subject of the assessment was "Communication
Systems for an Information Age." I'm not an expert in
telecommunication technology or policy, but I do know where to find a
group of such experts, and how to get them to tell me what they know.
Before I went to Washington for my first panel meeting, I opened a
conference in the WELL and invited assorted information-freaks,
technophiles, and communication experts to help me come up with
something to say. An amazing collection of minds flocked to that
topic, and some of them created whole new communities when they
collided.

    By the time I sat down with the captains of industry, government
advisers, and academic experts at the panel table, I had over 200
pages of expert advice from my own panel. I wouldn't have been able to
integrate that much knowledge of my subject in an entire academic or
industrial career, and it only took me (and my virtual community) a
few minutes a day for six weeks. I have found the WELL to be an
outright magical resource, professionally. An editor or producer or
client can call and ask me if I know much about the Constitution, or
fiber optics, or intellectual property. "Let me get back to you in
twenty minutes," I say, reaching for the modem. In terms of the way I
learned to use the WELL to get the right piece of information at the
right time, I'd say that the hours I've spent putting information into
the WELL turned out to be the most lucrative professional investments
I've ever made.

    The same strategy of nurturing and making use of loose
information-sharing affiliations across the net can be applied to an
infinite domain of problem areas, from literary criticism to software
evaluation. It's a neat way for a sufficiently large, sufficiently
diverse group of people to multiply their individual degree of
expertise, and I think it could be done even if the people aren't
involved in a community other than their company or their research
specialty. I think it works better when the community's conceptual
model of itself is more like barn-raising than horse-trading, though.
Reciprocity is a key element of any market-based culture, but the
arrangement I'm describing feels to me more like a kind of gift
economy where people do things for one another out of a spirit of
building something between them, rather than a spreadsheet-calculated
quid pro quo. When that spirit exists, everybody gets a little extra
something, a little sparkle, from their more practical transactions;
different kinds of things become possible when this mindset pervades.
Conversely, people who have valuable things to add to the mix tend to
keep their heads down and their ideas to themselves when a mercenary
or hostile zeitgeist dominates an online community.

    If you give useful information freely, without demanding tightly-
coupled reciprocity, your requests for information are met more
swiftly, in greater detail, than they would have been otherwise. The
person  you help might never be in a position to help you, but someone
else might be. That's why it is hard to distinguish idle talk from
serious context-setting. In a virtual community, idle talk is context-
setting. Idle talk is where people learn what kind of person you are,
why you should be trusted or mistrusted, what interests you. An agora
is more than the site of transactions; it is also a place where people
meet and size up one another.

    A market depends on the quality of knowledge held by the
participants, the buyers and sellers, about price and availability and
a thousand other things that influence business; a market that has a
forum for informal and back-channel communications is a better-
informed market. The London Stock Exchange grew out of the informal
transactions in a coffee-house; when it became the London
International Stock Exchange a few years ago, and abolished the
trading-room floor, the enterprise lost something vital in the
transition from an old room where all the old boys met and cut their
deals to the screens of thousands of workstations scattered around the
world.

    The context of the informal community of knowledge sharers grew to
include years of both professional and personal relationships. It is
not news that the right network of people can serve as an inquiry
research system: You throw out the question, and somebody on the net
knows the answer. You can make a game out of it, where you gain
symbolic prestige among your virtual peers by knowing the answer. And
you can make a game out of it among a group of people who have dropped
out of their orthodox professional lives, where some of them sell
these information services for exorbitant rates, in order to
participate voluntarily in the virtual community game.

    Virtual communities have several drawbacks in comparison to face-
to-face communication, disadvantages that must be kept in mind if you
are to make use of the power of these computer-mediated discussion
groups. The filtration factor that prevents one from knowing the race
or age of another participant also prevents people from communicating
the facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice that
constitute the inaudible but vital component of most face to face
communications. Irony, sarcasm, compassion, and other subtle but all-
important nuances that aren't conveyed in words alone are lost when
all you can see of a person are words on a screen.

    It's amazing how the ambiguity of words in the absence of body
language inevitably leads to online misunderstandings. And since the
physical absence of other people also seems to loosen some of the
social bonds that prevent people from insulting one another in person,
misunderstandings can grow into truly nasty stuff before anybody has a
chance to untangle the original miscommunication. Heated diatribes and
interpersonal incivility that wouldn't crop up often in face to face
or even telephone discourse seem to appear with relative frequency in
computer conferences. The only presently available antidote to this
flaw of CMC as a human communication medium is widespread knowledge of
this flaw -- aka "Netiquette."

    Online civility and how to deal with breaches of it is a topic
unto itself, and has been much-argued on the WELL. Degrees of outright
incivility constitute entire universes such as alt.flame, the Usenet
newsgroup where people go specifically to spend their days hurling
vile imprecations at one another. I am beginning to suspect that the
most powerful and effective defense an online community has in the
face of those who are bent on disruption might be norms and agreements
about withdrawing attention from those who can't abide by even loose
rules of verbal behavior. "If you continue doing that," I remember
someone saying to a particularly persistent would-be disrupter, "we
will stop paying attention to you." This is technically easy to do on
Usenet, where putting the name of a person or topic header in a "kill
file" (aka "bozo filter") means you will never see future
contributions from that person or about that topic. You can simply
choose to not see any postings from Rich Rosen, or that feature the
word "abortion" in the title. A society in which people can remove one
another, or even entire topics of discussion, from visibility. The
WELL does not have a bozo filter, although the need for one is a topic
of frequent discussion.




    Who Is The WELL?

    One way to know what the WELL is like is to know something about the
kind of people who use it. It has roots in the San Francisco Bay Area,
and in two separate cultural revolutions that took place there in past
decades. The Whole Earth Catalog originally emerged from the
counterculture as Stewart Brand's way of providing access to tools and
ideas to all the communes who were exploring alternate ways of life in
the forests of Mendocino or the high deserts outside Santa Fe. The Whole
Earth Catalogs and the magazines they spawned, Co-Evolution Quarterly
and Whole Earth Review, have outlived the counterculture itself, since
they are still alive and raising hell after nearly 25 years. For many
years, the people who have been exploring alternatives and are open to
ideas that you don't find in the mass media have found themselves in
cities instead of rural communes, where their need for new tools and
ideas didn't go away.

    The Whole Earth Catalog crew received a large advance in the mid-
1980s to produce an updated version, a project involving many
geographically-separated authors and editors, many of whom were using
computers. They bought a minicomputer and the license to Picospan, a
computer conferencing program, leased an office next to the magazine's
office, leased incoming telephone lines, set up modems, and the WELL was
born in 1985. The idea from the beginning was that the founders weren't
sure what the WELL would become, but they would provide tools for people
to build it into something useful. It was consciously a cultural
experiment, and the business was designed to succeed or fail on the
basis of the results of the experiment. The person Stewart Brand chose
to be the WELL's first director -- technician, manager, innkeeper, and
bouncer -- was Matthew McClure, not-coincidentally a computer-savvy
veteran of The Farm, one of the most successful of the communes that
started in the sixties. Brand and McClure started a low- rules,
high-tone discussion, where savvy networkers, futurists, misfits who had
learned how to make our outsiderness work for us, could take the
technology of CMC to its cultural limits.

    The Whole Earth network -- the granola-eating utopians, the solar-
power enthusiasts, serious ecologists and the space-station crowd,
immortalists, Biospherians, environmentalists, social activists -- was
part of the core population from the beginning. But there were a couple
of other key elements. One was the subculture that happened ten years
after the counterculture era -- the personal computer revolution.
Personal computers and the PC industry were created by young iconoclasts
who wanted to have whizzy tools and change the world. Whole Earth had
honored them, including the outlaws among them, with the early Hacker's
Conferences. The young computer wizards, and the grizzled old hands who
were still messing with mainframes, showed up early at the WELL because
the guts of the system itself -- the UNIX operating system and "C"
language programming code -- were available for tinkering by responsible
craftsmen.

    A third cultural element that made up the initial mix of the WELL,
which has drifted from its counterculture origins in many ways, were the
deadheads. Books and theses have been written about the subculture that
have grown up around the band, the Grateful Dead. The deadheads have a
strong feeling of community, but they can only manifest it en masse when
the band has concerts. They were a community looking for a place to
happen when several technology-savvy deadheads started a "Grateful Dead
Conference" on the WELL. GD was so phenomenally successful that for the
first several years, deadheads were by far the single largest source of
income for the enterprise.

    Along with the other elements came the first marathon swimmers in
the new currents of the information streams, the futurists and writers
and journalists. The New York Times, Business Week, the San Francisco
Chronicle, Time, Rolling Stone, Byte, the Wall Street Journal all have
journalists that I know personally who drop into the WELL as a listening
post. People in Silicon Valley lurk to hear loose talk among the pros.
Journalists tend to attract other journalists, and the purpose of
journalists is to attract everybody else: most people have to use an old
medium to hear news about the arrival of a new medium.

    Things changed, both rapidly and slowly, in the WELL. There were
about 600 members of the WELL when I joined, in the summer of 1985. It
seemed that then, as now, the usual ten percent of the members did 80%
of the talking. Now there are about 6000 people, with a net gain of
about a hundred a month. There do seem to be more women than other parts
of cyberspace. Most of the people I meet seem to be white or Asian;
African-Americans aren't missing, but they aren't conspicuous or even
visible. If you can fake it, gender and age are invisible, too. I'd
guess the WELL consists of about 80% men, 20% women. I don't know
whether formal demographics would be the kind of thing that most WELL
users would want to contribute to. It's certainly something we'd
discuss, argue, debate, joke about.

    One important social rule was built into Picospan, the software that
the WELL lives inside: Nobody is anonymous. Everybody is required to
attach their real "userid" to their postings. It is possible to use
pseudonyms to create alternate identities, or to carry metamessages, but
the pseudonyms are always linked in every posting to the real userid. So
individual personae -- whether or not they correspond closely to the
real person who owns the account -- are responsible for the words they
post. In fact, the first several years, the screen that you saw when you
reached the WELL said "You own your own words."  Stewart Brand, the
WELL's co-founder likes epigrams: "Whole Earth," "Information wants to
be free." "You own your own words." Like the best epigrams, "You own
your own words" is open to multiple interpretations. The matter of
responsibility and ownership of words is one of the topics WELLbeings
argue about endlessly, so much that the phrase has been abbreviated to
"YOYOW," As in, "Oh no, another YOYOW debate."

    Who are the WELL members, and what do they talk about? I can tell
you about the individuals I have come to know over six years, but the
WELL has long since been something larger than the sum of everybody's
friends. The characteristics of the pool of people who tune into this
electronic listening post, whether or not they every post a word in
public, is a strong determinant of the flavor of the "place." There's a
cross-sectional feeling of "who are we?" that transcends the
intersecting and non-intersecting rings of friends and acquaintances
each individual develops.

    My Neighborhood On The WELL

    Every CMC system gives users tools for creating their own sense of
place, by customizing the way they navigate through the database of
conferences, topics, and responses. A conference or newsgroup is like a
place you go. If you go to several different places in a fixed order, it
seems to reinforce the feeling of place by creating a customized
neighborhood that is also shared by others. You see some of the same
users in different parts of the same neighborhood. Some faces, you see
only in one context -- the parents conference, the Grateful Dead tours
conference, the politics or sex conference.

    My home neighborhood on the WELL is reflected in my ".cflist," the
file that records my preferences about the order of conferences I visit.
It is always possible to go to any conference with a command, but with a
.cflist you structure your online time by going from conference to
specified conference at regular intervals, reading and perhaps
responding in several ongoing threads in several different places.
That's the part of the art of discourse where I have found that the
computer adds value to the intellectual activity of discussing formally
distinct subjects asynchronously, from different parts of the world,
over extending periods, by enabling groups to structure conversations by
topic, over time.

    My .cflist starts, for sentimental reasons, with the Mind
conference, the first one I hosted on the WELL, since 1985. I've changed
my .cflist hundreds of times over the years, to add or delete
conferences from my regular neighborhood, but I've always kept Mind in
the lede. The entry banner screen for the Mind conference used to
display to each user the exact phase of the moon in numbers and ASCII
graphics every time they logged in to the conference. But the volunteer
programmer who had created the "phoon" program had decided to withdraw
it, years later, in a dispute with WELL management. There is often a
technological fix to a social problem within this particular universe.
Because the WELL seems to be an intersection of many different cultures,
there have been many experiments with software tools to ameliorate
problems that seemed to crop up between people, whether because of the
nature of the medium or the nature of the people. A frighteningly
expensive pool of talent was donated by volunteer programmers to create
tools and even weapons for WELL users to deal with each other. People
keep giving things to the WELL, and taking them away. Offline readers
and online tools by volunteer programmers gave others increased power to
communicate.

    The News conference is what's next. This is the commons, the place
where the most people visit the most often, where the most outrageous
off-topic proliferation is least pernicious, where the important
announcements about the system or social events or major disputes or new
conferences are announced. When an earthquake or fire happens, News is

where you want to go. Immediately after the 1989 earthquake and during
the Oakland fire of 1991, the WELL was a place to check the damage to
the local geographic community, lend help to those who need it, and get
first-hand reports. During Tienamen square, the Gulf War, the Soviet
Coup, the WELL was a media-funnel, with snippets of email from Tel-Aviv
and entire newsgroups fed by fax machines in China, erupting in News
conference topics that grew into fast-moving conferences of their own.
During any major crisis in the real world, the routine at our house is
to turn on CNN and log into the WELL.

    After News is Hosts, where the hottest stuff usually happens. The
hosts community is a story in itself. The success of the WELL in its
first five years, all would agree, rested heavily on the efforts of the
conference hosts -- online characters who had created the character of
the first neighborhoods and kept the juice flowing between one another
all over the WELL, but most pointedly in the Hosts conference. Some
spicy reading in the Archives conference originated from old hosts'
disputes - and substantial arguments about the implications of CMC for
civil rights, intellectual property, censorship, by a lot of people who
know what they are talking about, mixed liberally with a lot of other
people who don't know what they are talking about, but love to talk
anyway, via keyboard and screen, for years on end.

    In this virtual place, the pillars of the community and the worst
offenders of public sensibilities are in the same group -- the hosts.
At their best and their worst, this ten percent of the online population
put out the words that the other ninety percent keep paying to read.
Like good hosts at any social gathering, they make newcomers welcome,
keep the conversation flowing, mediate disputes, clean up messes, and
throw out miscreants, if need be. A WELL host is part salon keeper, part
saloon keeper, part talk-show host, part publisher.  The only power to
censor or to ban a user is the hosts' power. Policy varies from host to
host, and that's the only policy. The only justice for those who misuse
that power is the forced participation in weeks of debilitating and
vituperative post-mortem.

    The hosts community is part long-running soap opera, part town
meeting, bar-room brawl, anarchic debating society, creative groupmind,
bloody arena, union hall, playpen, encounter group. The Hosts conference
is extremely general, from technical questions to personal attacks. The
Policy conference is supposed to be restricted to matters of what WELL
policy is, or ought to be. The part-delusion, part-accurate perception
that the hosts and other users have strong influence over WELL policy is
part of what feeds debate here, and a strong element in the libertarian
reputation of the stereotypical WELLite. After fighting my way through a
day's or hour's worth of the Hot New Dispute in News, Hosts, and Policy,
I check on the conferences I host -- Info, Virtual Communities, Virtual
Reality. After that my .cflist directs me, at the press of the return
key, to the first new topic or response in the Parenting, Writers',
Grateful Dead tours, Telecommunication, Macintosh, Weird, Electronic
Frontier Foundation, Whole Earth, Books, Media, Men on the WELL,
Miscellaneous, and Unclear conferences.

    Grabbing attention in the Commons is a powerful act. Some people
seem drawn to performing there; others burst out there in acts of
desperation, after one history of frustration or another. Dealing with
people who are so consistently off-topic or apparently deeply grooved
into incoherence, long-windedness, scatology, is one of the events that
challenges a community to decide what its values really are, or ought to
be.

    Something is happening here. I'm not sure anybody understands it
yet. I know that the WELL and the net is an important part of my life
and I have to decide for myself whether this is a new way to make
genuine commitments to other human beings, or a silicon-induced illusion
of community. I urge others to help pursue that question in a variety of
ways, while we have the time. The political dimensions of CMC might lead
to situations that would pre-empt questions of other social effects;
responses to the need for understanding the power- relationships
inherent in CMC are well represented by the Electronic Frontier
Foundation and others. We need to learn a lot more, very quickly, about
what kind of place our minds are homesteading.

    The future of virtual communities is connected to the future of
everything else, starting with the most precious thing people have to
gain or lose -- political freedom. The part played by communication
technologies in the disintegration of communism, the way broadcast
television pre-empted the American electoral process, the power of fax
and CMC networks during times of political repression like Tienamen
Square and the Soviet Coup attempt, the power of citizen electronic
journalism, the power-maneuvering of law enforcement and intelligence
agencies to restrict rights of citizen access and expression in
cyberspace, all point to the future of CMC as a close correlate of
future political scenarios. More important than civilizing cyberspace is
ensuring its freedom as a citizen-to-citizen communication and
publication medium; laws that infringe equity of access to and freedom
of expression in cyberspace could transform today's populist empowerment
into yet another instrument of manipulation. Will "electronic democracy"
be an accurate description of political empowerment that grows out of
the screen of a computer? Or will it become a brilliant piece of
disinfotainment, another means of manipulating emotions and
manufacturing public opinion in the service of power.

    Who controls what kinds of information is communicated in the
international networks where virtual communities live? Who censors, and
what is censored? Who safeguards the privacy of individuals in the face
of technologies that make it possible to amass and retrieve detailed
personal information about every member of a large population? The
answers to these political questions might make moot any more abstract
questions about cultures in cyberspace. Democracy itself depends on the
relatively free flow of communications. The following words by James
Madison are carved in marble at the United States Library of Congress:
"A popular government without popular information, or the means of
acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps
both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to
be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which
knowledge gives." It is time for people to arm themselves with power
about the future of CMC technology.

    Who controls the market for relationships? Will the world's
increasingly interlinked, increasingly powerful, decreasingly costly
communications infrastructure be controlled by a small number of very
large companies? Will cyberspace be privatized and parceled out to those
who can afford to buy into the auction? If political forces do not seize
the high ground and end today's freewheeling exchange of ideas, it is
still possible for a more benevolent form of economic control to stunt
the evolution of virtual communities, if a small number of companies
gain the power to put up toll-roads in the information networks, and
smaller companies are not able to compete with them.

    Or will there be an open market, in which newcomers like Apple or
Microsoft can become industry leaders? The playing field in the global
telecommunications industry will never be level, but the degree of
individual freedom available through telecommunication technologies in
the future may depend upon whether the market for goods and services in
cyberspace remains open for new companies to create new uses for CMC.

    I present these observations as a set of questions, not as answers.
I believe that we need to try to understand the nature of CMC,
cyberspace, and virtual communities in every important context --
politically, economically, socially , culturally, cognitively. Each
different perspective reveals something that the other perspectives do
not reveal. Each different discipline fails to see something that
another discipline sees very well. We need to think as teams here,
across boundaries of academic discipline, industrial affiliation,
nation, to understand, and thus perhaps regain control of, the way human
communities are being transformed by communication technologies.  We
can't do this solely as dispassionate observers, although there is
certainly a huge need for the detached assessment of social science.
But community is a matter of the heart and the gut as well as the head.
Some of the most important learning will always have to be done by
jumping into one corner or another of cyberspace, living there, and
getting up to your elbows in the problems that virtual communities face.

    References:

    Sara Kiesler, "The Hidden Messages in Computer Networks," Harvard
Business Review, January-February 1986.

    J.C.R. Licklider, Robert Taylor, and E. Herbert, "The Computer as a
Communication Device," International Science and Technology, April 1978.

    Ray Oldenburg, "The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community
Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They
Get You Through The Day," New York: Paragon House, 1991.

    M. Scott Peck, M.D., "The Different Drum: Community Making and
Peace," New York: Touchstone, 1987.

    Howard Rheingold, "Tools for Thought," Simon & Schuster 1986.

Note: In 1988, _Whole Earth Review_ published my article, "Virtual
Communities." Four years later, I reread it and realized that I had
learned a few things, and that the world I was observing had changed.
So I rewrote it. The original version is available on the WELL as
/uh/72/hlr/virtual_communities88.

Portions of this will appear in "Globalizing Networks: Computers and
International Communication," edited by Linda Harasim and Jan Walls for
MIT press. Portions of this will appear in "Virtual Communities," by
Howard Rheingold, Addison-Wesley. Portions of this may find their way
into Whole Earth Review.

This is a world-readable file, and I think these are important issues;
encourage distribution, but I do ask for fair use: Don't remove my name
from my words when you quote or reproduce them, don't change them, and
don't impair my ability to make a living with them.

                                            Howard Rheingold
                                            Editor, Whole Earth Review
                                            27 Gate Five Road
                                            Sausalito, CA 94965
                                            Tel: 415 332 1716
                                            Fax: 415 332 3110
                                            Internet: hlr@well.sf.ca.us


