SECOND INTERNATIONAL HARVARD CONFERENCE ON INTERNET & SOCIETY  may 26-29, 1998

Virtual Communities, Phony Communities? by Howard Rheingold Howard Rheingold is the author of numerous books about technology and culture, and a longtime participant in—and advocate for—online communities. Howard was one of the original members of the Well, and he chronicled many of his experiences there in his celebrated book, "The Virtual Community." Howard also founded one of the most ambitious attempts in Web-based community building, Electric Minds. For this essay series, I asked him whether he was still as enthusiastic about virtual communities after all these years, and how he thought the Web had changed things since the first days of the Well. His response has much to say not only about social life in cyberspace, but also our attitudes toward technology in general. -- Steven Johnson .         .         .         .         .         .         .         Ever since I wrote a book about "virtual communities"—groups of people who communicate with each other via computer networks—I have been asked many times about whether such groups are "really" communities. My answer is: "No, virtual communities are not "really" communities, but it is important to extend the question." The same can be said of most apartment buildings, many neighborhoods, and all large cities. The question of what to do about increasing human alienation within the increasingly larger-and-faster-than-human environment is a serious one. People who communicate via computer networks definitely should be instructed about the danger of mistaking messages on computer screens for fully authentic human relationships. And we definitely need to be skeptical of claims that online discourse can effectively substitute for or revitalize the traditional public sphere, the one that is now enclosed and fragmented by the billboards and pseudo-events of mass-media advertising and PR. But two important qualifications must be considered before critiquing the phenomenon of virtual communities: First, for some people, online communication is a lifeline, a way of improving their quality of life, and one should think hard and along before appointing oneself the arbiter of whether spending time online is healthy for an Alzheimer's caregiver, an AIDS patient, a quadriplegic, or a bright student in a remote location. If one's critique does not take these people into account, there is the danger of doing real damage to the lives of people who might otherwise have no social life at all. The second thing to keep in mind when critiquing virtual communities is that alienation is real and important, but it did not begin with computers, and nor should our critique. I would be the first to stipulate that in many cases, the availability of online social interaction can exacerbate the isolation and dehumanization of people who live in the modern world. If we are going to look unblinkingly at whether it is humane to support a world where more and more people spend more of our time driving single-passenger, petroleum-fueled vehicles through concrete landscapes to our cubicles inside towering, ugly buildings, where we spend our time staring at computer screens, manipulating symbols, and exercising our fingers—we need to look closely at the room, the building, the urban landscape, the entire civilization that computer screen is situated within, as well as questioning whether life in front of a screen is healthy. The most important critiques of virtual communities are those which attack the validity of claims that many-to-many communication media have the potential for being a democratizing tool. Now that every desktop is potentially a printing press, a broadcasting station, a place of assembly, has important decentralization of the power to inform, witness, influence, and persuade taken place? Certainly, for the Serbian opposition who put their radio station B92 on the Net when the government shut down their broadcasts, and for the Zapatistas who effectively disseminated news and influenced world opinion via the Net, this claim is not wholly false. But whether computer bulletin boards, mailing lists, and email can effectively counter the power of the global disinfotainment complex is a pragmatic question to ask. I believe it is too early for a definitive answer. The most intelligent critiques of this concept are Fernbach and Thompson's "Abort, Retry, Failure?" and Langdon Winner's essay, "Mythinformation," reprinted in his book, "The Whale and the Reactor." The fact is that when I offer my opinion about the psychological, social, political impact of virtual communities, I am speculating, and so are all other critics. We have almost no data to argue about. Serious systematic social research by sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, and political scientists is in its infancy. Considering how important these questions might be, I think it's worth gathering far more data than we have at present to inform our arguments. We should not close the books on the debate about the mental or social health of virtual communities. And neither should we stop at a shallow level of analysis. It's time to look at today's questions about digital life as instances of the same questions Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford asked about technological civilization half a century ago, and which Marx, Weber, and Veblen dealt with even earlier. -- Howard Rheingold Further Reading: http://www.well.com/ The Well, one of the first virtual communities http://wellengaged.com/engaged/votelink.cgi?c=InFOCUS Votelink/WELL Engaged's Discussion Forum for current events http://epn.org/prospect/24/24putn.html Robert Putnam's "The Strange Disappearance of Civic America" www.rheingold.com/texts/techpolitix/civil.html Rheingold's own essay, "Virtual Communities, Phony Civil Society?" http://www.e-democracy.org/ Minnesota's Electronic Democracy Project http://207.10.94.56/opennet/b92inet.html/ B92 Radio Homepage http://epn.org/ The Electronic Policy Network