behavior will they find?
Today's bedroom electronic bulletin boards, regional computer conferencing
systems, global computer networks offer clues to what might happen when more
powerful enabling technology comes along. The hardware for amplifying the
computing and communication capacity of every home on the world-grid is in
the pipeline, although the ultimate applications are not yet clear. We'll be
able to transfer the Library of Congress from any point on the globe to any
another point in seconds, upload and download full-motion digital video at
will. But is that really what people are likely to do with all that bandwidth
and computing power? Some of the answers have to come from the behavioral
rather than the technological part of the system. How will people actually
use the desktop supercomputers and multimedia telephones that the engineers
tell us we'll have in the near future.
One possibility is that people are going to do what people always do with
a new communication technology: use it in ways never intended or foreseen by
its inventors, to turn old social codes inside out and make new kinds of
communities possible. CMC will change us, and change our culture, the way
telephones and televisions and cheap video cameras changed us - by altering
the way we perceive and communicate. Virtual communities transformed my life
profoundly, years ago, and continue to do so.
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) Copyright (C) 1992 by Howard Rheingold. All rights reserved.
======================
The most important clues to the shape of the future at this point might
not be found in looking more closely at the properties of silicon, but in
paying attention to the ways people need to, fail to, and try to communicate
with one another. Right now, some people are convinced that spending hours a
day in front of a screen, typing on a keyboard, fulfills in some way our need
for a community of peers. Whether we have discovered something wonderful or
stumbled into something insidiously unwonderful, or both, the fact that
people want to use CMC to meet other people and experiment with identity are
valuable signposts to possible futures. Human behavior in cyberspace, as we
can observe it today on the nets and in the BBSs, gives rise to important
questions about the effects of communication technology on human values. What
kinds of humans are we becoming in an increasingly computer-mediated world,
and do we have any control over that transformation? How have our definitions
of "human" and "community" been under pressure to change to fit the
specifications of a technology-guided civilization?
Fortunately, questions about the nature of virtual communities are not
purely theoretical, for there is a readily accessible example of the
phenomenon at hand to study. Millions of people now inhabit the social spaces
that have grown up on the world's computer networks, and this previously
invisible global subculture has been growing at a monstrous rate recently
(e.g., the Internet growing by 25% per month).
I've lived here myself for seven years; the WELL and the net have been a
regular part of my routine, like gardening on Sunday, for one sixth of my
life thus far. My wife and daughter long ago grew accustomed to the fact that
I sit in front of my computer early in the morning and late at night,
chuckling and cursing, sometimes crying, about something I am reading on the
computer screen. The questions I raise here are not those of a scientist, or
of a polemicist who has found an answer to something, but as a user - a
nearly obsessive user - of CMC and a deep mucker-about in virtual
communities. What kind of people are my friends and I becoming? What does
that portend for others?
If CMC has a potential, it is in the way people in so many parts of the
net fiercely defend the use of the term "community" to describe the
relationships we have built online. But fierceness of belief is not
sufficient evidence that the belief is sound. Is the aura of community an
illusion? The question has not been answered, and is worth asking. I've seen
people hurt by interactions in virtual communities. Is telecommunication
culture capable of becoming something more than what Scott Peck calls a
"pseudo-community," where people lack the genuine personal commitments to one
another that form the bedrock of genuine community? Or is our notion of
"genuine" changing in an age where more people every day live their lives in
increasingly artificial environments? New technologies tend to change old
ways of doing things. Is the human need for community going to be the next
technology commodity?
I can attest that I and thousands of other cybernauts know that what we
are looking for, and finding in some surprising ways, is not just
information, but instant access to ongoing relationships with a large number
of other people. Individuals find friends and groups find shared identities
online, through the aggregated networks of relationships and commitments that
make any community possible. But are relationships and commitments as we know
them even possible in a place where identities are fluid? The physical world,
known variously as "IRL" ("In Real Life"), or "offline," is a place where the
identity and position of the people you communicate with are well known,
fixed, and highly visual. In cyberspace, everybody is in the dark. We can
only exchange words with each other - no glances or shrugs or ironic smiles.
Even the nuances of voice and intonation are stripped away. On top of the
technology-imposed constraints, we who populate cyberspace deliberately
experiment with fracturing traditional notions of identity by living as
multiple simultaneous personae in different virtual neighborhoods.
We reduce and encode our identities as words on a screen, decode and
unpack the identities of others. The way we use these words, the stories
(true and false) we tell about ourselves (or about the identity we want
people to believe us to be) is what determines our identities in cyberspace.
The aggregation of personae, interacting with each other, determines the
nature of the collective culture. Our personae, constructed from our stories
of who we are, use the overt topics of discussion in a BBS or network for a
more fundamental purpose, as means of interacting with each other. And all
this takes place on both public and private levels, in many-to-many open
discussions and one-to-one private electronic mail, front stage role-playing
and backstage behavior.
When I'm online, I cruise through my conferences, reading and replying in
topics that I've been following, starting my own topics when the inspiration
or need strikes me. Every few minutes, I get a notice on my screen that I
have incoming mail. I might decide to wait to read the mail until I'm
finished doing something else, or drop from the conference into the mailer,
to see who it is from. At the same time that I am participating in open
discussion in conferences and private discourse in electronic mail, people I
know well use "sends" - a means of sending one or two quick sentences to my
screen without the intervention of an electronic mail message. This can be
irritating before you get used to it, since you are either reading or writing
something else when it happens, but eventually it becomes a kind of rhythm:
different degrees of thoughtfulness and formality happen simultaneously,
along with the simultaneous multiple personae. Then there are public and
private conferences that have partially overlapping memberships. CMC offers
tools for facilitating all the various ways people have discovered to divide
and communicate, group and subgroup and regroup, include and exclude, select
and elect.
When a group of people remain in communication with one another for
extended periods of time, the question of whether it is a community arises.
Virtual communities might be real communities, they might be
pseudocommunities, 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.
Social norms and shared mental models have not emerged yet, so everyone's
sense of what kind of place cyberspace is can vary widely, which makes it
hard to tell whether the person you are communicating with shares the same
model of the system within which you are communicating. Indeed, the online
acronym YMMV ("Your Mileage May Vary") has become shorthand for this kind of
indeterminacy of shared context. For example, I know people who use vicious
online verbal combat as a way of blowing off steam from the pressures of
their real life - "sport hassling" - and others who use it voyeuristically,
as a text-based form of real-life soap-opera. To some people, it's a game.
And I know people who feel as passionately committed to our virtual community
and the people in it (or at least some of the people in it) as our nation,
occupation, or neighborhood. Whether we like it or not, the communitarians
and the venters, the builders and the vandals, the egalitarians and the
passive-aggressives, are all in this place together. The diversity of the
communicating population is one of the defining characteristics of the new
medium, one of its chief attractions, the source of many of its most vexing
problems.
Is the prospect of moving en-masse into cyberspace in the near future,
when the world's communication network undergoes explosive expansion of
bandwidth, a beneficial thing for entire populations to do? In which ways
might the growth of virtual communities promote alienation? How might virtual
communities facilitate conviviality? Which social structures will dissolve,
which political forces will arise, and which will lose power? These are
questions worth asking now, while there is still time to shape the future of
the medium. In the sense that we are traveling blind into a technology-shaped
future that might be very different from today's culture, direct reports from
life in different corners of the world's online cultures today might furnish
valuable signposts to the territory ahead.
Since the summer of 1985, I've spent an average of two hours a day, seven
days a week, often when I travel, plugged into the WELL (Whole Earth
'Lectronic Link) via a computer and a telephone line, exchanging information
and playing with attention, becoming entangled In Real Life, with a growing
network of similarly wired-in strangers I met in cyberspace. I remember the
first time I walked into a room full of people (IRL) whose faces were
completely unknown to me, but who knew many intimate details of my history,
and whose own stories I knew very well. I had contended with these people,
shot the breeze around the electronic water cooler, shared alliances and
formed bonds, fallen off my chair laughing with them, become livid with anger
at these people, but I had not before seen their faces.
I found this digital watering hole for information-age hunters and
gatherers the same way most people find such places - I was lonely, hungry
for intellectual and emotional companionship, although I didn't know it.
While many commuters dream of working at home, telecommuting, I happen to
know what it's like to work that way. I never could stand to commute or even
get out of my pajamas if I didn't want to, so I've always worked at home. It
has its advantages and its disadvantages. Others like myself also have been
drawn into the online world because they shared with me the occupational
hazard of the self-employed, home-based symbolic analyst of the 1990s -
isolation. The kind of people that Robert Reich, call "symbolic analysts" are
natural matches for online communities: programmers, writers, freelance
artists and designers, independent radio and television producers, editors,
researchers, librarians. People who know what to do with symbols,
abstractions, and representations, but who sometimes find themselves spending
more time with keyboards and screens than human companions.
I've learned that virtual communities are very much like other communities
in some ways, deceptively so to those who assume that people who communicate
via words on a screen are in some way aberrant in their communication skills
and human needs. And I've learned that virtual communities are very much not
like communities in some other ways, deceptively so to those who assume that
people who communicate via words on a screen necessarily share the same level
of commitment to each other in real life as more traditional communities.
Communities can emerge from and exist within computer-linked groups, but that
technical linkage of electronic personae is not sufficient to create a
community.
===============================================================
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've changed my mind about a lot of aspects of the WELL over the years,
but the "sense of place" is still as strong as ever. As Ray Oldenburg
revealed in "The Great Good Place," there are three essential places in every
person's life: the place they live, the place they work, and the place they
gather for conviviality. Although the casual conversation that takes place in
cafes, beauty shops, pubs, town squares is universally considered to be
trivial, "idle talk," Oldenburg makes the case that such places are where
communities can arise and hold together. When the automobile-centric,
suburban, high-rise, fast food, shopping mall way of life eliminated many of
these "third places," the social fabric of existing communities shredded. It
might not be the same kind of place that Oldenburg had in mind, but so many
of his descriptions of "third places" could also describe the WELL.
The feeling of logging into the WELL for just a minute or two, dozens of
times a day is very similar to the feeling of peeking into the cafe, the pub,
the common room, to see who's there, and whether you want to stay around for
a chat. Indeed, in all the hundreds of thousands of computer systems around
the world that use the UNIX operating system, as does the WELL, the most
widely used command is the one that shows you who is online. Another widely
used command is the one that shows you a particular user's biography.
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.
From my informal research into virtual communities around the world, I
have found that enthusiastic members of virtual communities in Japan,
England, and the US agree that "increasing the diversity of their circle of
friends" was one of the most important advantages of computer conferencing.
CMC is a way to meet people, whether or not you feel the need to affiliate
with them on a community level, but the way you meet them has an interesting
twist: In traditional kinds of communities, we are accustomed to meeting
people, then getting to know them; in virtual communities, you can get to
know people and then choose to meet them. In some cases, you can get to know
people who you might never meet on the physical plane.
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.
I think one key difference between straightforward workaday reciprocity is
that in the virtual community I know best, one valuable currency is
knowledge, elegantly presented. Wit and use of language are rewarded in this
medium, which is biased toward those who learn how to manipulate attention
and emotion with the written word. Sometimes, you give one person more
information than you would give another person in response to the same query,
simply because you recognize one of them to be more generous or funny or
to-the-point or agreeable to your political convictions than the other one.
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.
When the WELL was young and growing more slowly than it is now, such
knowledge-potlatching had a kind of naively enthusiastic energy. When you
extend the conversation - several dozen different characters, well-known to
one another from four or five years of virtual hanging-out, several hours a
day - it gets richer, but not necessarily "happier."
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.
================
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.
===========================
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.
The social dynamics of the WELL spawn new conferences in response to
different kinds of pressures. Whenever a hot interpersonal or doctrinal issue
breaks out, for example, people want to stage the brawl or make a dramatic
farewell speech or shocking disclosure or serious accusation in the most
heavily-visited area of the WELL, which is usually the place that others want
to be a Commons - a place where people from different sub-communities can
come to find out what is going on around the WELL, outside the WELL, where
they can pose questions to the committee of the whole. When too many
discussions of what the WELL's official policy ought to be, about censorship
Today's bedroom electronic bulletin boards, regional computer conferencing
systems, global computer networks offer clues to what might happen when more
powerful enabling technology comes along. The hardware for amplifying the
computing and communication capacity of every home on the world-grid is in
the pipeline, although the ultimate applications are not yet clear. We'll be
able to transfer the Library of Congress from any point on the globe to any
another point in seconds, upload and download full-motion digital video at
will. But is that really what people are likely to do with all that bandwidth
and computing power? Some of the answers have to come from the behavioral
rather than the technological part of the system. How will people actually
use the desktop supercomputers and multimedia telephones that the engineers
tell us we'll have in the near future.
One possibility is that people are going to do what people always do with
a new communication technology: use it in ways never intended or foreseen by
its inventors, to turn old social codes inside out and make new kinds of
communities possible. CMC will change us, and change our culture, the way
telephones and televisions and cheap video cameras changed us - by altering
the way we perceive and communicate. Virtual communities transformed my life
profoundly, years ago, and continue to do so.
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) Copyright (C) 1992 by Howard Rheingold. All rights reserved.
======================
The most important clues to the shape of the future at this point might
not be found in looking more closely at the properties of silicon, but in
paying attention to the ways people need to, fail to, and try to communicate
with one another. Right now, some people are convinced that spending hours a
day in front of a screen, typing on a keyboard, fulfills in some way our need
for a community of peers. Whether we have discovered something wonderful or
stumbled into something insidiously unwonderful, or both, the fact that
people want to use CMC to meet other people and experiment with identity are
valuable signposts to possible futures. Human behavior in cyberspace, as we
can observe it today on the nets and in the BBSs, gives rise to important
questions about the effects of communication technology on human values. What
kinds of humans are we becoming in an increasingly computer-mediated world,
and do we have any control over that transformation? How have our definitions
of "human" and "community" been under pressure to change to fit the
specifications of a technology-guided civilization?
Fortunately, questions about the nature of virtual communities are not
purely theoretical, for there is a readily accessible example of the
phenomenon at hand to study. Millions of people now inhabit the social spaces
that have grown up on the world's computer networks, and this previously
invisible global subculture has been growing at a monstrous rate recently
(e.g., the Internet growing by 25% per month).
I've lived here myself for seven years; the WELL and the net have been a
regular part of my routine, like gardening on Sunday, for one sixth of my
life thus far. My wife and daughter long ago grew accustomed to the fact that
I sit in front of my computer early in the morning and late at night,
chuckling and cursing, sometimes crying, about something I am reading on the
computer screen. The questions I raise here are not those of a scientist, or
of a polemicist who has found an answer to something, but as a user - a
nearly obsessive user - of CMC and a deep mucker-about in virtual
communities. What kind of people are my friends and I becoming? What does
that portend for others?
If CMC has a potential, it is in the way people in so many parts of the
net fiercely defend the use of the term "community" to describe the
relationships we have built online. But fierceness of belief is not
sufficient evidence that the belief is sound. Is the aura of community an
illusion? The question has not been answered, and is worth asking. I've seen
people hurt by interactions in virtual communities. Is telecommunication
culture capable of becoming something more than what Scott Peck calls a
"pseudo-community," where people lack the genuine personal commitments to one
another that form the bedrock of genuine community? Or is our notion of
"genuine" changing in an age where more people every day live their lives in
increasingly artificial environments? New technologies tend to change old
ways of doing things. Is the human need for community going to be the next
technology commodity?
I can attest that I and thousands of other cybernauts know that what we
are looking for, and finding in some surprising ways, is not just
information, but instant access to ongoing relationships with a large number
of other people. Individuals find friends and groups find shared identities
online, through the aggregated networks of relationships and commitments that
make any community possible. But are relationships and commitments as we know
them even possible in a place where identities are fluid? The physical world,
known variously as "IRL" ("In Real Life"), or "offline," is a place where the
identity and position of the people you communicate with are well known,
fixed, and highly visual. In cyberspace, everybody is in the dark. We can
only exchange words with each other - no glances or shrugs or ironic smiles.
Even the nuances of voice and intonation are stripped away. On top of the
technology-imposed constraints, we who populate cyberspace deliberately
experiment with fracturing traditional notions of identity by living as
multiple simultaneous personae in different virtual neighborhoods.
We reduce and encode our identities as words on a screen, decode and
unpack the identities of others. The way we use these words, the stories
(true and false) we tell about ourselves (or about the identity we want
people to believe us to be) is what determines our identities in cyberspace.
The aggregation of personae, interacting with each other, determines the
nature of the collective culture. Our personae, constructed from our stories
of who we are, use the overt topics of discussion in a BBS or network for a
more fundamental purpose, as means of interacting with each other. And all
this takes place on both public and private levels, in many-to-many open
discussions and one-to-one private electronic mail, front stage role-playing
and backstage behavior.
When I'm online, I cruise through my conferences, reading and replying in
topics that I've been following, starting my own topics when the inspiration
or need strikes me. Every few minutes, I get a notice on my screen that I
have incoming mail. I might decide to wait to read the mail until I'm
finished doing something else, or drop from the conference into the mailer,
to see who it is from. At the same time that I am participating in open
discussion in conferences and private discourse in electronic mail, people I
know well use "sends" - a means of sending one or two quick sentences to my
screen without the intervention of an electronic mail message. This can be
irritating before you get used to it, since you are either reading or writing
something else when it happens, but eventually it becomes a kind of rhythm:
different degrees of thoughtfulness and formality happen simultaneously,
along with the simultaneous multiple personae. Then there are public and
private conferences that have partially overlapping memberships. CMC offers
tools for facilitating all the various ways people have discovered to divide
and communicate, group and subgroup and regroup, include and exclude, select
and elect.
When a group of people remain in communication with one another for
extended periods of time, the question of whether it is a community arises.
Virtual communities might be real communities, they might be
pseudocommunities, 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.
Social norms and shared mental models have not emerged yet, so everyone's
sense of what kind of place cyberspace is can vary widely, which makes it
hard to tell whether the person you are communicating with shares the same
model of the system within which you are communicating. Indeed, the online
acronym YMMV ("Your Mileage May Vary") has become shorthand for this kind of
indeterminacy of shared context. For example, I know people who use vicious
online verbal combat as a way of blowing off steam from the pressures of
their real life - "sport hassling" - and others who use it voyeuristically,
as a text-based form of real-life soap-opera. To some people, it's a game.
And I know people who feel as passionately committed to our virtual community
and the people in it (or at least some of the people in it) as our nation,
occupation, or neighborhood. Whether we like it or not, the communitarians
and the venters, the builders and the vandals, the egalitarians and the
passive-aggressives, are all in this place together. The diversity of the
communicating population is one of the defining characteristics of the new
medium, one of its chief attractions, the source of many of its most vexing
problems.
Is the prospect of moving en-masse into cyberspace in the near future,
when the world's communication network undergoes explosive expansion of
bandwidth, a beneficial thing for entire populations to do? In which ways
might the growth of virtual communities promote alienation? How might virtual
communities facilitate conviviality? Which social structures will dissolve,
which political forces will arise, and which will lose power? These are
questions worth asking now, while there is still time to shape the future of
the medium. In the sense that we are traveling blind into a technology-shaped
future that might be very different from today's culture, direct reports from
life in different corners of the world's online cultures today might furnish
valuable signposts to the territory ahead.
Since the summer of 1985, I've spent an average of two hours a day, seven
days a week, often when I travel, plugged into the WELL (Whole Earth
'Lectronic Link) via a computer and a telephone line, exchanging information
and playing with attention, becoming entangled In Real Life, with a growing
network of similarly wired-in strangers I met in cyberspace. I remember the
first time I walked into a room full of people (IRL) whose faces were
completely unknown to me, but who knew many intimate details of my history,
and whose own stories I knew very well. I had contended with these people,
shot the breeze around the electronic water cooler, shared alliances and
formed bonds, fallen off my chair laughing with them, become livid with anger
at these people, but I had not before seen their faces.
I found this digital watering hole for information-age hunters and
gatherers the same way most people find such places - I was lonely, hungry
for intellectual and emotional companionship, although I didn't know it.
While many commuters dream of working at home, telecommuting, I happen to
know what it's like to work that way. I never could stand to commute or even
get out of my pajamas if I didn't want to, so I've always worked at home. It
has its advantages and its disadvantages. Others like myself also have been
drawn into the online world because they shared with me the occupational
hazard of the self-employed, home-based symbolic analyst of the 1990s -
isolation. The kind of people that Robert Reich, call "symbolic analysts" are
natural matches for online communities: programmers, writers, freelance
artists and designers, independent radio and television producers, editors,
researchers, librarians. People who know what to do with symbols,
abstractions, and representations, but who sometimes find themselves spending
more time with keyboards and screens than human companions.
I've learned that virtual communities are very much like other communities
in some ways, deceptively so to those who assume that people who communicate
via words on a screen are in some way aberrant in their communication skills
and human needs. And I've learned that virtual communities are very much not
like communities in some other ways, deceptively so to those who assume that
people who communicate via words on a screen necessarily share the same level
of commitment to each other in real life as more traditional communities.
Communities can emerge from and exist within computer-linked groups, but that
technical linkage of electronic personae is not sufficient to create a
community.
===============================================================
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've changed my mind about a lot of aspects of the WELL over the years,
but the "sense of place" is still as strong as ever. As Ray Oldenburg
revealed in "The Great Good Place," there are three essential places in every
person's life: the place they live, the place they work, and the place they
gather for conviviality. Although the casual conversation that takes place in
cafes, beauty shops, pubs, town squares is universally considered to be
trivial, "idle talk," Oldenburg makes the case that such places are where
communities can arise and hold together. When the automobile-centric,
suburban, high-rise, fast food, shopping mall way of life eliminated many of
these "third places," the social fabric of existing communities shredded. It
might not be the same kind of place that Oldenburg had in mind, but so many
of his descriptions of "third places" could also describe the WELL.
The feeling of logging into the WELL for just a minute or two, dozens of
times a day is very similar to the feeling of peeking into the cafe, the pub,
the common room, to see who's there, and whether you want to stay around for
a chat. Indeed, in all the hundreds of thousands of computer systems around
the world that use the UNIX operating system, as does the WELL, the most
widely used command is the one that shows you who is online. Another widely
used command is the one that shows you a particular user's biography.
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.
From my informal research into virtual communities around the world, I
have found that enthusiastic members of virtual communities in Japan,
England, and the US agree that "increasing the diversity of their circle of
friends" was one of the most important advantages of computer conferencing.
CMC is a way to meet people, whether or not you feel the need to affiliate
with them on a community level, but the way you meet them has an interesting
twist: In traditional kinds of communities, we are accustomed to meeting
people, then getting to know them; in virtual communities, you can get to
know people and then choose to meet them. In some cases, you can get to know
people who you might never meet on the physical plane.
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.
I think one key difference between straightforward workaday reciprocity is
that in the virtual community I know best, one valuable currency is
knowledge, elegantly presented. Wit and use of language are rewarded in this
medium, which is biased toward those who learn how to manipulate attention
and emotion with the written word. Sometimes, you give one person more
information than you would give another person in response to the same query,
simply because you recognize one of them to be more generous or funny or
to-the-point or agreeable to your political convictions than the other one.
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.
When the WELL was young and growing more slowly than it is now, such
knowledge-potlatching had a kind of naively enthusiastic energy. When you
extend the conversation - several dozen different characters, well-known to
one another from four or five years of virtual hanging-out, several hours a
day - it gets richer, but not necessarily "happier."
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.
================
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.
===========================
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.
The social dynamics of the WELL spawn new conferences in response to
different kinds of pressures. Whenever a hot interpersonal or doctrinal issue
breaks out, for example, people want to stage the brawl or make a dramatic
farewell speech or shocking disclosure or serious accusation in the most
heavily-visited area of the WELL, which is usually the place that others want
to be a Commons - a place where people from different sub-communities can
come to find out what is going on around the WELL, outside the WELL, where
they can pose questions to the committee of the whole. When too many
discussions of what the WELL's official policy ought to be, about censorship