community, class and generations

This page highlights writing about community in digital environments. 

It covers -

• introduction
• the digital campfire
• communications
• the digital divides
• class
• generation i?

     introduction

What is the shape of 'community' in digital environment, with some commentators claiming that going online will

• reify urban society (particularly at the neighbourhood level)
• link members of digital diasporas
• provide a meeting place for affinity groups
• embody democracy and freedom in the age of 'big media'
• allow people to be valued for themselves rather than for their ethnicity or gender
• potentially reinforce existing cultural divisions and exclusions.

Danah Boyd thus praised the 'blogosphere' as a refuge for and validation of the marginalised -

The Internet has always been a special place for freaks, geeks, queers and other alienated populations. Online, these marginalized members of society created communities that relished their idiosyncrasies. Collectively, they helped one another take pride in their identities and practices - whether the passion be learning how to make synthetic hair, collecting Japanese manga or engaging in sexual practices frowned on by the mainstream.

The result is an infrastructure of support for a new form of social solidarity - a set of collective beliefs, practices and values - that operates outside of the dominant culture. Most important, these communities have been created virtually, across space, a feature that is particularly valuable for nonmobile populations - teens without driver's licenses, for instance.

Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community: Homesteading the Electronic Frontier exulted that -

People in virtual communities use words on screens to exchange pleasantries and argue, engage in intellectual discourse, conduct commerce, exchange knowledge, share emotional support, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, find friends and lose them, play games, flirt, create a little high art and a lot if idle talk. People in virtual communities do just about everything people do in real life, but we leave our bodies behind. You can't kiss anybody and nobody can punch you in the nose, but a lot can happen within those boundaries.

with membership of a community apparently involving nothing more than the decision to join a particular forum.

It is an echo of Reverend Ezra Gannett's 1858 transcendentalist euphoria that the telegraph is necessarily democratic and would shortly generate a "common language of the world" that would lead to the end of war -

It is an institution for the people. Men who talk together daily cannot hate or disown one another.

... The world, it has been said, will be made a great whispering gallery. I would rather say, a great assembly, where every one will see and hear everyone else. The most remarkable effect, if I may judge from my own narrow thought, will be the approach to a practical unity of the human race

Jonathan Zittrain more acutely commented that

"online community" joins "sysop" in the oversize dustbin of trite or hopelessly esoteric, hence generally meaningless, cyberspace vernacular ... it represents something once craved and still invoked (if only as a linguistic placeholder) even as it is believed by all but the most naïve to be laughably beyond reach. Since it's applied to almost anything, it now means vague warm fuzzies and nothing more.

     the digital campfire

Two studies of 'community' are Richard Holeton's Composing Cyberspace: Identity, Community & Knowledge in the Electronic Age (New York: McGraw-Hill 1998) and Communities In Cyberspace (London: Routledge 1999) edited by Marc Smith & Peter Kollock. 

Stacy Horn's Cyberville: Clicks, Culture & the Creation Of An Online Town (New York: Warner 1998) is less substantial. We suggest that you instead consider Erik Brynjolfsson's 1996 paper Electronic Communities: Global Village or Cyberbalkanization? (PDF) and John Naughton's 2001 Contested Space: The Internet & Global Civil Society (PDF).

There are analyses of business characterisations of 'online communities' in Online Communities: Commerce, Community Action & the Virtual University (New York: Hewlett-Packard Professional Books 2001) edited by Chris Werry & Miranda Mowbray - notably Chris Werry's 'Imagined Electronic Community: Representations of Online Community in Business Texts'.

Wendy Grossman's Net.Wars (New York: New York Uni Press 1997) is a perceptive discussion of debates about communities and cliques regarding censorship, cryptography, spam, privacy, copyright and other contentious issues.

Steven Jones edited CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication & Community (London: Sage 1995), a collection of postgrad essays replete with "rhetoric of the electronical sublime" and "taxomony of reproachable conduct on Usenet".

Bruce Jones' study An Ethnography of the Usenet Computer Network and Ronda Hauben's 2001 Culture Clash paper offer insights into newsgroups. In contrast Douglas Schuler's New Community Networks: Wired for Change (New York: ACM Press 1996) offers guidance about building community networks. Nancy Baym's Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom & Online Community (London: Sage 2000) is one of the more rigorous quantitative studies.

The UK Virtual Society Project (VSP) presents original research under the auspices of Oxford University's business school - faddish but thought-provoking - along with pointers to academic resources such as the Cyberspace & Web Sociology Sociosite and Thorsten Lohbeck's major bibliography. Overall we were more impressed by the thoughtful The Future of Community & Personal Identity in the Coming Electronic Culture (Washington: Aspen Institute 1995) by David Bollier & Charles Firestone and by Jonathan Gershuny's 2002 paper Web-use & Net-nerds: A neo-functionalist analysis of the impact of information technology in the home.

For technolibertarians (or merely 'cyberselfish') Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community (Minerva: London 1994) remains a benchmark, though deeply flawed and well past its use-by date as commercialisation of the Web rolls over the brave little bands of cyber anarchists. Michael Heim's 1995 CMC article on The Nerd in the Noosphere explores some theorising about community, cyberspace and metaphysics, more convincingly than Eric Raymond's Homesteading the Noosphere (HTN).

Katie Hafner's The Well: A Story of Love, Death & Real Life in the Seminal Online Community (New York: Carroll & Graf 2001) - like her May 1997 WIRED article on The World's Most Influential Online Community (And It's Not AOL): The Epic Saga of the WELL - is characteristically upbeat. In contrast, the gloomy Republic.com (Albany: State Uni of NY Press 2001) by Cass Sunstein and Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2007) by Markus Prior extend Turow's arguments about the web as the enemy of civic culture.

George Gilder's Telecosm: How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionise Our World (New York: Free Press 2000) is replete with nonsense about the death of distance = death of advertising. Bigger pipes arguably offer more scope for more pervasive invisible persuasion. 

If you are a Gilderoid you'll buy his vision of a new digital community. We don't. Dan Schiller's paper Ambush on the I-Way: Commoditization on the Electronic Frontier, his provocative Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System (Cambridge: MIT Press 1999) and Deep Impact: The Web & the Changing Media Economy (Info, Feb 1999) are both more convincing and more entertaining. 

     communications

Russell Neuman and Joseph Turow exemplify key features of the debate about 'new media' as an agent and adversary of community. 

Neuman's The Future of the Mass Audience (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1996) offers an incisive analysis of 'demassification' and narrowcasting, arguing that new technologies will not lead to the death of the mass media and fragment communities. 

Turow's Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World (Chicago: Chicago Uni Press 1997), like Cass Sunstein's Republic.com (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2001), is overstated but worth a look, particularly when complemented by studies from Benjamin Compaine.

There is a far more extreme rendition in William Donnelly's dystopian The Confetti Generation: How the New Communications Technology Is Fragmenting America (New York: Holt 1986) -

New technology in all of its forms will simply aggravate the confusion. Information will rain on us like confetti and become just as meaningless. The information we receive, isolated with our television sets, will be increasingly incomprehensible.

Not so, say the authors in Community Informatics: Enabling Communities with Information and Communications Technologies (Hershey: Idea Group 2000) edited by Michael Gurstein and in Community Informatics: Shaping Computer-Mediated Social Networks (London: Routledge 2001) edited by Brian Loader & Leigh Keeble. Community informatics buffs may enjoy this list.

Capitalism & the Information Age: the Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press 1998) is a lament from the left, edited by Robert McChesney, Ellen Wood & John Foster. It complements the bleak The Global Political Economy of Communication: Hegemony, Telecommunications & the Information Economy (New York: St Martin's 1994) edited by Edward Comer. 

This site includes a detailed profile on web logs (blogs) and blogging, acclaimed (implausibly, in our view) as

the "pirate radio stations" of the Web ... a new, personal, and determinedly non-hostile evolution of the electric community.

     the digital divide

We have explored the digital divide throughout the guides on this site, in particular the multi-part profile on regional divides and a broader discussion of 'broadband gap' rhetoric. 

A useful starting point in print is Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency & Policy in the Information Society (London: Routledge 1998) edited by Brian Loader. 

There is more detailed analysis in William Wresch's Disconnected: Haves & Have-Nots in the Information Age (New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni Press 1998), Jim Davis's Cutting Edge: Technology, Information Capitalism & Social Revolution (London: Verso 1998) and Donald Schon's High Technology & Low-Income Communities: Prospects For The Positive Use of Advanced Information Technology (Cambridge: MIT Press 1999).

A useful one-volume introduction to some of the challenges of regulating cyberspace is provided by Brian Loader's The Governance of Cyberspace: Politics, Technology & Global Restructuring (London: Routledge 1997). A US perspective is provided by W Russell Neuman, Lee McKnight & Richard Solomon in The Gordian Knot - Political Gridlock on the Information Highway (Cambridge: MIT Press 1997). 

Mitch Kapor's 1993 essay Where is the Digital Highway Really Heading? retains its value. The Social Shaping of Information Superhighways: European & American Roads to the Information Society (New York: St Martins 1997) is a collection of papers, edited by Herbert Kubicek, about national information equity initiatives.

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