Community (virtual and otherwise)
4.1 The meaning of Community
The word Community has its origins in the same Latin root as the word Communication: Communis (common). This root is derived from one of two combinations of Latin words; ‘cum’ (together) and ‘munis’ (obligation) or ‘cum’ and ‘unus’ (one). [1] These roots explain a little of what it means to belong to a community; the sense of unity and solidarity provided by a collective, along with the obligations and responsibilities that such security incurs. Fernback and Thompson explain that the notion of community has both material and symbolic dimensions:
The concept of community commonly refers to a set of social relationships that operate within specified boundaries or locales, but community has an ideological component as well, in that it refers to a sense of common character, identity or interests. [2]
Anthony Cohen, writing about the symbolic construction of community supports this view. The virtual (on-line) community partially satisfies these criteria, being composed of people who have gathered in cyberspace due to common interests[3] or identity[4], and who communicate via the use of Computer Mediated Communication. [5] Howard Rheingold defines virtual communities as “social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace”.[6]
4.2 A Rose-Tinted Past and a Fake Crocodile
Why do people use computers for communication purposes? And why does this communication get turned into community? One theory (supported by Turkle, Rheingold, Barlow and others) is that Computer Mediated Communication in general, and specifically On-Line (Virtual) Community-Building are both part of an ongoing search for community in a community-less age. Another theory (supported by Papastergiadis and Reid) proposes that such a search for community is the manifestation of an innate search for meaning. Papastergiadis comments that
out of the experience of connectedness … [can come] a step towards making sense of the world. Giving meaning to the otherwise fragmented and disjointed experiences of everyday life is profoundly connected to an understanding of belonging. [7]
This search for meaning could provide the key for unlocking the understanding of the concept of community, virtual and otherwise.
It is interesting to note the proliferation of North American writers who mourn the loss of the organic or traditional community, writing with reference to the Internet as well as in general terms. Ironically, it seems that although the community of the past may well appear idyllic in retrospect, the truth is often that “this idealised image of community conceals the deep divisions that existed then … Traditional life was never as cosy or as static as it is often presented in the present”.[8] Nikos Papastergiadis argues that yearning for the rose-tinted communities of years gone by is a way of expressing our own insecurity and instability about our identities in the present. The need for community, he goes on, is “deep, a universal feature of the human condition. One cannot live in isolation for long”.[9] In his view, community can provide a sense of security and shelter in a fragmented and ever-changing world. If this is the case, it is no great surprise to discover that people will be glad to feel a sense of community wherever it occurs. Indeed, in cyberspace, “relationships become intense very quickly because the participants feel isolated in a remote and unfamiliar world with its own rules. MUDs, like other electronic meeting places, can breed a kind of easy intimacy”.[10] In the context of the Internet, perhaps the virtual communities which are created around social interaction on-line are the result of the natural human search for security and solidarity in a world which seems perhaps stranger and more disjointed than the one in which our physical bodies reside. Such a search for community can be easily identified off the Internet as well as on it, so the most useful questions to ask should really be what forms such communities take, and what effect they have on our sociality.
The anthropologist Ray Oldenburg wrote extensively about the “third place” - neither home nor work, but the “great, good place” where people meet in daily life to interact socially and relax. He and others have mourned the loss of the “third place” from society. Although most of Oldenburg’s examples and references are taken from North American society, he implies that this community-loss is in fact a general post-industrial western phenomenon. Other researchers have since applied Oldenburg’s image of the “third place” to On-Line (computer-mediated) communication, and the communities which grow up around this phenomenon, and have drawn significant parallels.
The irony in this is that whilst Oldenburg is frequently cited in validation of virtual communities, he was not referring to the Internet at all. In fact, when one considers the historical and social context of his argument, it immediately becomes apparent that he was actually mourning the loss of ‘organic’ (or ‘traditional’) community spaces. These social spaces are now considered by some to have been undermined or even destroyed by the increased popularity of virtual communities. Oldenburg’s sentiments have thus been applied to a context that is in fact counter-productive to his original argument; an argument which in part called for a return to organic community.
Intended or designed communities and designated community spaces differ from Oldenburg’s actual ‘third places’. In ‘real’ communities, people congregate as they are (or on their way to or from or currently) performing other tasks - errands, eating, drinking, and so on. A place which exists purely for the enjoyment of the same sort of social activity, yet without the ‘excuse’ seems strangely hollow - like a shopping mall. Turkle expands upon Baudrillard’s discussion of the simulation and re-creation of everyday life[11], offering the example of the modern suburban shopping mall, designed to look and feel like - to re-create - a small town main street in days gone by. However, she points out that there are fundamental changes in critical elements during the re-creation:
Main Street is a public place; the shopping mall is planned to maximise purchasing … Main street had a certain disarray: there was a drunk, a panhandler … In the mall, you are in a relatively controlled space; street theatre is planned and paid for in advance; the appearance of serendipity is part of the simulation. [12]
This is a classic case of the fake seeming more compelling than the real - the ‘artificial crocodile’[13] effect. This is true of TV (e.g. time-lapse photography), film (engaging ways of storytelling), artefacts and furnishings (e.g. reproduction dishwasher-safe Victorian tableware) and recreational activities (e.g. ‘Cheers’ bars, or traditional dance shows performed for tourists in hotels).
There is no doubt that the invention and increase in use of the new communication technologies leads to a ’shrinking’ of the world, which can indeed come at the expense of the local. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase ‘Global Village’, to express the way in which information and resources are increasingly shared through the emergence of new technologies, and the way that “the development of electronic communication technologies … essentially abrogated space and time”.[14] However, this phrase seems to be something of an oxymoron. The fact is that the globalisation of commodities, resources, information and so on may have very little to do with the preservation of the ‘village’ in its traditional form. Although his phrase is supposed to conjure up cosy sentiments of shared life (like a village) with convenience (on the global stage), it actually contradicts itself. In this example, some believe, you simply cannot have it both ways.
4.3 Virtual Community or Real Community - a choice?
Langdon Winner is a vehement critic of what he calls the “banal fantasies that pass as ‘vision’ among many of those who speculate about cyberspace and politics in our time”.[15] His arguments follow on from Oldenburg’s view on the demise of the local and familiar in favour of the faceless and multinational. Winner uses the example of Net commerce (specifically, book-selling[16]) to illustrate what he sees as one of the potentially destructive aspects of cyberspace. He points out that before we start “shifting our purchases to Internet vendors, we need to recognize a hidden price we may end up paying: the demise of traditional shops”.[17] He goes on to argue that
the benefit bookstores and other local shops offer individuals is matched by the way they serve as anchors for the civic culture of our towns and cities. One sign that a community is flourishing is the presence of well-maintained, well-stocked shops … downtown. These are not only places where commodities are bought and sold but also social gathering places. [18]
Although Winner’s point is made clearly, he fails to acknowledge that virtual communities may provide participants with an experience which, although not intended to replace real life (face-to-face) interaction, can actively complement it. This failure seems to occur all too frequently in the theorising and opinion that surround the subject of virtual communities.
Often, the reader is presented with arguments indicating that a choice needs to be made between the virtual and the real. Discounting, for the moment, the problems inherent in the discourse of virtuality, this type of black-and-white argument is both misleading and simplistic. It would seem to be obvious that “[t]he most common of the commonalities in both rl and vl[19] communities are they are peopled by people…”. [20] The researcher of communities on the Internet must accept that despite the name, virtual communities are constructed of and by and for real people. This is most important to consider in the discussion on social interaction and the Internet.
4.4 Virtual Community and Real Community - a reciprocal relationship?
Cyberculture (sociality, virtual community) and real-world culture (society, community) must be integrated in order for the former (and, to some extent, the latter) to succeed. It should not be forgotten that cyberculture and virtual communities cannot exist without RL participation in a society, community and culture. Participants in social environments in cyberspace bring their experience of being human, of living in society, and of living a culture to their social interaction on-line.
It seems that a participant in an on-line social environment (or community) must continue to participate in their own real-life or physical[21] society and culture in order to be able to contribute effectively to the on-line community. Withdrawing from the physical world in favour of the virtual one - a process which may encompass social interaction, entertainment and even, to some extent, transportation - means that a member of an on-line social group will inevitably have less to contribute to their virtual community, not to mention their off-line sociality.
4.5 Virtuality and Reality
The word virtual is used to signify a number of different things in the Modern English Language. ‘Virtual’ as defined by the dictionary means: “Being in essence or effect not in name or fact”[22], in other words “something which is not quite true but appears to be true”.[23] The word virtual originates from the Latin vertus: truth. But virtual usually means ‘truth-like’ and implies that what is being discussed is nearly, or almost, but not quite; “He virtually said yes”; “We had virtually completed the journey”; “It is virtually impossible to define culture”. Just as something cannot be ‘nearly true’, so the application of the term in question to phrases such as ‘virtual community’ implies ‘untrue’ or ‘fake’. However, since it has already been shown that cultural and community characteristics exist in abundance on the Internet, there is no doubt that what is in fact being discussed is a liminal category. Simulated situations in a simulated world are not culture itself, but expressions of culture.
Cyber-Anthropologist Steve Mizrach points out that “culture grows out of adaptations to real-world environments … [but] culture is also about the transaction of meaning … the investment of human energy into symbolic interactions”.[24] On-line symbolic interactions, including CMC, are certainly no less ‘real’ than parallel interactions off-line. Computer Mediated Communication, in the same way as ‘real’ human processes of communication (speaking, etc.), is effected at its technological root, through the use of electrical signals and pulses. It is generally agreed that community is an imagined state of being, and this is equally true on- and off-line. Anthony Cohen engages in a lengthy discourse of community boundaries and structure in his 1985 book, The Symbolic Construction of Community, finding that the “consciousness of community is … encapsulated in perception of its boundaries, … which are themselves largely constituted by people in interaction”.[25] Just as the basis for human experience is the human imagination, social interaction on-line can sometimes affect its users as profoundly as in the ‘real’ world.
Dramatically increased usage of the Internet and the accompanying withdrawal from social relations in the physical world can have significant effects. The “Homenet” study, conducted in August 1998 by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, reported startling effects of Internet use on ‘normal’ social interaction with family and friends. From a sample group of 169 Internet users, “the researchers found that one hour a week on the Internet led to an average increase of 1% on the depression scale, a loss of 2.7 members of the subject’s social circle and an increase of 0.4% on the so-called loneliness scale”.[26] Of course, figures such as these lead to the interpretation that the Internet is bad for your social life - and that is certainly the conclusion that the Homenet study (among many others) has drawn.
Another way to interpret these results might involve considering the timing of the depressions reported by the participants. Did they occur when during use of the Internet or when they were not using it? Could it be the case that in fact such reported depression was caused at least in part by their realisation that their social relationships off-line were not so frequent, fun and perhaps even fulfilling as those that they experienced on-line? Could it be that perhaps they felt a greater sense of ‘connectedness’ within their on-line social groups, and this made their isolation in the real world all the more obvious and painful? Statistics can be misleading, and the general trend in the popular media seems to be to discredit the medium, deride those who use it and discourage the use of the Internet for the purpose of social interaction.
It should be pointed out that withdrawal from the physical world cannot happen entirely, due to the basic physical requirements that our bodies impose on us, living in the physical world; our embodied culture. Thus it seems that, in a wry parody of the old adage, when traditional logic seems to dictate a sterile choice between real communities and virtual ones, the reality is that you have to have it both ways, if you want to have any experience of the latter at all.
There is much discussion in cyberspace about the way that people use the Internet in ‘real life’, meaning how the Internet has practical application for the way that they are living. However, such a discussion overlooks the realisation that in fact the Internet is real life, albeit played out in a virtual space. The Internet is a different social space, but is definitely human. Indeed, it could hardly fail to be so. It is constructed from and by real people, with real physical bodies and real emotions and sensations, all of whom exist and live in real societies and communities and have real cultures. As they interact socially in cyberspace, all participants sit in real rooms, in front of physical machinery, innately responding to the biological and embodied demands of their physical bodies.
4.6 Blurring the Boundaries
Clifford Geertz’s concept of ‘Blurred Genres’ can be applied to the context of cyberspace. “The boundaries in [cyberspace] are fuzzier”.[27] The routine of participation in social interaction in cyberspace becomes part of players’ lives. Sherry Turkle offers an example of the way that social interaction in cyberspace can blur the boundaries between real and simulation, as well as providing an arena for experimentation of the self. She describes one case study of a MUD user:
Stewart is logged onto one MUD or another for at least forty hours a week. It seems misleading to call what he does there playing. He spends his time constructing a life that is more expansive than the one he lives in physical reality. [28]
As recently as five years ago, the main use of the Internet was for Newsgroups, e-mail and MUDs. Nowadays, there has been a massive increase in the use of the World Wide Web. More and more individuals, companies and institutions have a ‘web-presence’, which usually takes the form of a web page or site. Perhaps there is some similarity between the ways that participants represent and construct identities in MUDs and virtual communities and the ways in which home-pages are constructed. They become a fundamental representation of ‘home’, of an individual, to the rest of the cyber-community. In an earlier example, although the actual individual was not present or locatable, my Canadian friend’s homepage became a representation of him in cyberspace.
John Seabrook explains that the contents of a person’s homepage tend to reflect their personality, friends, experiences, interests and affiliations[29] (or at least those which they wish to broadcast to the public) and that “building a homepage [is] also an act of joining the community of the Web, by sharing … useful information with others in the group”.[30] The World Wide Web works through the use of ‘hypertext’ links. [31] Navigating via this method means that readers can jump from page to page (or site to site) with ease. It also means that (since such links are generally reciprocal) the links that can be accessed from and to an individual’s page can help to define that person, at least in cyberspace, by being a symbolic and actual representation of the individual.
4.7 Participating in the Consensual Hallucination
The idea of an On-Line community leads to questions of participation and authenticity. Who joins a community, virtual or otherwise? Are you a member whether you choose to be or not? What do people gain from belonging to any kind of community? How does participation in a virtual community affect an individual’s participation in a real community?
All of these questions must inevitably lead to a re-examination of meanings of community - in both On-Line and RL (real life) circumstances. This reinterpretation of experience in turn contributes to an emerging (re)definition of community as a whole. By accepting On-Line social congregations and interactions as valid communities or products of such, we are forced to expand our conceptual category of ‘community’ in Real Life to encompass these phenomena and products. This consideration is especially relevant, as they become increasingly important to a growing number of people in everyday life. But it is also important to acknowledge that discourse on the role of virtual communities in real life is somewhat misleading. As previously proposed, virtual communities are real life, albeit played out in a ‘virtual’ (i.e. electronic) context, a medium which transcends both time and space. Although this ‘virtuality’ inevitably leads to a different experience of sociality, it is the role of this sociality in which we are predominantly interested.
There are clearly a number of psychological factors affecting the ways that people use Computer Mediated Communication. The American writer John Seabrook, during a two-year exploration of cyberspace, developed the idea of the ‘groupmind’ with reference to communities On-Line. According to his experience (mostly on the WELL), the groupmind acts like a social conscience - or social consciousness - which regulates the behaviour of the participants. In this way, his experience reflects a Durkheimian view of culture, in which society exists at a super-organic level, as a ‘thing’ which acts on the individual. This perspective should be familiar to anthropologists as characteristic of structural functionalism.
In his 1997 book Virtual Culture, Steven Jones calls upon the phenomenon of “aimless connectedness”, and argues that any sense of community on the Internet is in fact “incidental to activity that takes place therein”.[32] This means that the social group, and any notional idea of community that accompanies it, is actually formed through participation in the group. However, it is important to realise that this does not mean that communities constructed in this manner are any ‘better’ or ‘worse’[33] than communities off-line, although the differences between virtual and face-to-face interaction are fairly obvious. [34] Cohen notes that throughout the Chicago tradition there is a view that “urban society is, by definition, more complicated than that of the rural community”[35], using the example of the rural community to signify ‘face-to-face’ society as opposed to the anonymity of the urban context. He goes on to debunk this myth as a gross simplification, concluding that “the reality of community lies in its members’ perception of the vitality of its culture”[36] and not in its structure or boundaries. Steven Jones, more recently, cites Benedict Anderson, the author of Imagined Communities, who noted that “Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined”.[37]
4.8 Imagination and Construction
The idea of imagining communities pioneered by Anderson is certainly an interesting one. Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian social theorist famously wrote that ‘the medium is the message’. In the context of communities on the Internet, this would seem to imply that what constructs or creates the community is, in fact, the technology used to make it work. In the physical world, this could be likened to proposing that it is the housing estate or neighbourhood (the structure) which creates the community. I would argue, concurring with Anthony Cohen’s thoughts on structure and community, that although such structure may indeed help to define the community, the experience of community is actually more than that. During this research process, I have often encountered articles and opinions on virtual communities in which they are defined as or by the electronic media - the tools - used to create them. Other researchers tend to focus intently on the minutiae of Computer-Mediated Communication - its syntax, meaning and usage, as well as the electronic processes such communication undergoes. In my opinion, the focus should be on the human aspect of communities - both on and off the Internet - because what is a community if the people are excluded from the equation? Is virtual community constructed in as well as aided by the technology? Perhaps not. This realisation inevitably leads to a questioning of McLuhan’s premise, that the medium is always the most important consideration.
One common view is that the reason that virtual communities can be considered to be discrete cultures, and thereby have a community identity, is because in most cases there exists a documented history, a record of social transactions over time. Seabrook and others have written about this history positively, believing that it helps to define the community. Others have been more dubious of this claim, recognising the limitations of such a history. One of the participants in the conference topic I started in Electric Minds made an incisive comment about the problems he had encountered in a community which relied on a text-based memory. He pointed out that speech
allows us to tell stories and create myths and exaggerations and elaborations of tales. Is this possible in a text-based community where it is hard to generate hearsay and slippage [?] We have a collective memory in text form which we can always refer back to [and] refer others to. [38]
In many ways this observation is reminiscent of Jack Goody’s thoughts on orality, literacy and history. The very fact that I was able to locate and accurately quote this particular comment neatly proves MR_D’s point. The text-based memory of a virtual community, as he pointed out, leaves no room for the natural human tendency to exaggerate, confuse, improve or forget stories about the community, or about events which have occurred within the community.
An example of this technological limitation was encountered early on in the research process, while participating in a discussion on how virtual communities deal with disruptive elements. One participant described a situation which had occurred the previous year in which a member of the community openly and rudely criticised the leaders of a particular conference. The member, who was using this event to illustrate a point about diversity in virtual communities, was able to refer his readers to the original postings in which the disruption had occurred. [39]
However, text-based memories, such as those found in many forms of virtual community, do not last forever. Mostly due to lack of space (which, with no little irony, is usually defined in technical terms as ‘memory’), the archives which hold old conferences, threads and topics are regularly purged by the system administrators of the particular community. This means that the ’snapshot’ profile of the community will change, depending on what is in the archive. [40] This phenomenon is evidenced in Appendix Three (a) which shows a list of currently active topics in one of the Electric Minds conferences, and Three (b) which shows a list of currently archived topics in the same conference, both as of September 1 1998. [41]
The limited history of the text-based memory demonstrates that virtual communities are in a constant state of construction. However, community is not constructed only (if at all) in the networks - technological or social - which help define it. Community, according to Benedict Anderson, is ‘imagined’ (constructed) by the members themselves around shared cultural practices. [42] Anthony Cohen argues that “[p]eople construct community symbolically, making it a resource and repository of meaning, and a referent of their identity”.[43] More recent writers have developed the idea of an imagined community - a consensual hallucination in its own way - to include the contexts of the Internet and virtual communities. Ananda Mitra, in a study on commonalities and distance on the Net, shapes Anderson’s original conceptualisation into an argument which notes that “a community, albeit electronic, can textually produce itself, thus imagine itself”.[44] Mitra is referring here to the textual expression (record) of identity and memory.
<< Under Construction: Chapter Three | Main | Under Construction: Chapter Five >>
