Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Are There Communities in Cyberspace?

[Originally the assignment essay submitted for the course "Media, Technology and Eveyday Life" in LSE, 28/4/2003. Course convenor: Roger Silverstone]

Are there communities in cyberspace? The internet enthusiasts believe that the computer-mediated communication (CMC) technologies promise a new way of creating communities; the skeptics dismiss the authenticity of ‘virtual communities.’ This question is plagued by the elusive notion of community, which reflects the intellectual struggle between the nostalgic calling for returning to traditional communities and the attempts to acknowledge new forms of social solidarity by re-conceptualizing community. Identifying the inevitable subjective element in every definition of community, I found it a genuine aptitude not to impose any a priori criteria of community in studying the social life in cyberspace, but rather focusing on the CMC user’s subjective interpretation. Based on the empirical evidence available, I found: (a) CMC users can indeed use this medium constructively in maintaining some sort of social life from which they can obtain a ‘sense of community’ (b) However, to claim that such community exist ‘in cyberspace’ is misleading. The cyberspace does not exist as a distinct, separate realm from the real life, but forms a complementary relation with the later, and most social groups formed or maintained with the aid of CMC seem to transgress the boundary between the two. (c) The hope of regenerating communities through the internet is misplaced. The internet, though powerful a tool, has certain restrictions and brings mixed effect on our social life.


Introduction: Debate of the Communities in Cyberspace

“Cyberspace,” a term coined by W. Gibson (1984) in his science fiction Neuromancer and now understood as “where human interaction occurs over computer networks
[1]”, suddenly kick into our daily vocabulary as the computer mediated communication (CMC) swept our lives in the past decade. Its potential impacts on our social life soon captured attention, and triggered the debates on whether there are authentic communities in cyberspace or not, and whether CMC are leading us toward a more accommodating or a more alienating world.

The optimists believe that CMC promise new ways of building human communities. They see the flourishing mailing lists, discussion groups, chat rooms, BBSs as new forms of the “third places” which Oldenburg (1989) claimed to be central to communities’ sociality. Rheingold (1993: 5), for instance, described the online social life with the term “virtual community,” which he defined as the “social aggregations that emerge from the [Internet] when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace.” Schuler (1996: 34) also claimed “computer technology…can play a positive role in rebuilding community.”

Apparently, what is achievable online will not be exactly the same as the traditional geographically- bounded communities, but as Shuler (1996) stated,

The old concept of community is obsolete in many ways and needs to be updated to meet today’s challenges. The old or “traditional” community was often exclusive, inflexible, isolated, unchanging, monolithic, and homogeneous. A new community needs to be fashioned from the remnants of the old (p.9).

Similarly, Roseanne Stone (1991) described that the virtual community, from her perspective, is “incontrovertibly social spaces in which people still meet face-to-face, but under new definitions of both ‘meet’ and ‘face’.” The paragraph written more a decade ago had became more plausible as applications like instant messengers, visual MUD (where one can see the avatars of other players) and video chat emerged in the past few years.

In the other hand, the skepticism of technologies’ capability in improving our life seems never cease since Heiddger’s critique of the “inauthentic existence” under technological and market domination. Some theorists, tried to re-examine the online social life with the criteria they believed essential for a community. For instance, Doheny-Farina (1996) argued,

A community is bound by place, which always includes complex social and environmental necessities. It is not something you can easily join. You can’t subscribe to a community as you subscribe to a discussion group on the net. (p.37)

She carried on to stress that a community must be lived, be intertwined with all the senses, and involve the “continuing, unplanned interactions between the same people for a long period of time (p.37).” Similarly, Calhoun (1998) used the criteria of density, multiplexity and autonomy to examine the relationships forged with the aid of electronic technology. He concluded that, to the most, they are merely manifestations of fostered “categorical identities” based on similar race, occupation or interests, and far from being truly communities.

So, how do we negotiate between the contradictory views? Logically, the question “are there communities in cyberspace” should be answered by examining what is achievable in cyberspace with the criteria of what is a community. I will discuss the later first.


The Concept of Community: A Historical Perspective
The term ‘community’ has an elusive meaning. At minimum, community could means “a collection of people who share something in common.
[2]” But it often bears much deeper connotations, such as to “encompass all forms of relationship which are characterized by a high degree of personal intimacy, emotional depth, moral commitment, social cohesion and continuity in time (Nisbet, 1967: 47).” Van Vliet and Burgers (1987) argue that a community contains “social interaction, a shared value system, and a shared symbol system” in its social, economic, political, and cultural realms. Calhoun (1998) proposed “density, multiplexity, and autonomy” as criteria for a community. As Fernback (1997:39) observed, the term community “seems readily definable to the general public but is indefinitely complex and amorphous in academic discourse… It has descriptive, normative, and ideological connotations.”

This “normative and ideological connotations” explain partly the difficulty of defining community. While community is often defined in objective terms of social structure and social interaction, each version of definition inevitably encompass a subjective element of interpreting an ideal state of how we live together. Furthermore, such interpretations are constantly challenged by the social shifts which impact the way in which people relate to each other. Here I will draw a short outline of how community had been conceptualized and discussed, which shows that the elusiveness of its concept reflects a century-long intellectual struggle between the nostalgic calling for returning to traditional communities and the attempts to acknowledge new forms of social solidarity by re-conceptualizing community.

The sociological study of community can be traced back to late nineteenth century, when many sociologists used this concept with the dichotomies between pre-industrial and industrial, or rural and urban societies. In Gemeinshaft und Gesellshaft (1887), for instance, F. Tönnie equates Gesellshaft (community) to the rural, self-contained society that is united by kinship, shared values and a sense of belonging. For many sociologists then, communities were associated with all the assumed good characteristics of the rural, pre-industrial societies, and discussed as a contrastive alternative in their critique of the alienating modern societies
[3]. Hence, the rediscovery of “traditional community” in 19th century can be seen as a reaction out of the anxiety of the social disintegration brought by industrialization and modernization.

The anxiety of the plausible decline and disintegration of traditional values and social orders has never ceased. It is often argued that the urbanization, the penetration of technology and market rationality, the rise of individualism and many other social shifts in modern Western societies has created generations of lonely, atomized citizens, and caused the “loss of community, identity, and morality” (Nisbet, 1953), “the disappearing social capital” (Putnam, 2000), and the “corrosion of individual character” (Sennett 1998). One intuitive response is to call for returning to traditional communities and restoring traditional values, as we can clearly see from Nisbet’s Quest of community in 1953 to Etzioni’s calling for rebuilding the “spirit of community” in 1993. Sampson (1999), in reviewing the community issue, noted “as we approach a new century and reflect on the wrenching social changes that have shaped our recent past, call for a return to community value are everywhere (p.241).
In the other hand, some respond to these challenges by re-conceptualizing community, usually by doing so to include some new forms of social solidarity that were not considered communities previously but are performing certain functions that are similar to the traditional communities. For instance, despite how community had been associated in the rural/urban dichotomies, Robert Park and his colleague at the University of Chicago started to use this term in studying urban life since 1920s.
[4]” Another example was the shift from focusing on the geographical sense of community toward stressing more on its functional and process aspects in 1940s-60s, when social relations were becoming less geographically-confined as the communication and transportation means evolved. This conceptual shift is best reflected by Webber’s ‘community without propinquity’ (1963), with which he illustrate how friendships could be maintained at a distance and how community of a sort could emerge on the basis of professional grouping and complex organization as well as neighborhood.

Furthermore, after 1960s, as television swiftly spread into most western societies, the effect of mass-mediated experience in narrowing the difference between people’s experiences and creating new forms of communities also capture attention. McLuhan (1964) noted that the electronic communications technologies have essentially nullify the space and time distances so that we effectively live in a "global village." Anderson (1991), his “imagined community” thesis, also argued “all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/ genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. (p.7)”

Placed at the end of the historical context outlined above, the current debate about the authenticity of virtual communities is just one last round of the intellectual struggle of how community should be defined. While the optimists’ claims represent a new attempt of re-conceptualizing community to capture the emerging social solidarity online; the skepticism inherit the traditional resistance to technology penetration and the longing for the idyllic notion of the traditional community. From the discussion above, we can see that the word community has acquired a spectrum of meanings, which does not correspond to any specific form of social structure, but reflects various ways, at different levels, of conceptualizing an ideal state of how we live together. In other word, as I pointed out earlier, any form of conceptualization encompass a subjective element, which cannot be logically validated. Since so, I believe the genuine aptitude is not to choose any a priori criteria for community, but to explore how the CMC users actually experience and interpret their online social life, and whether they would call it a community, if so, in what sense. In this changing society, how the sense of community can be provided has been changed many times. Hence, while the nostalgic calling for returning to traditional communities never ceased, it is more realistic to re-conceptualize community as our social life patterns change. After all, the idyllic notion of community implied by the critics, as commented by Castell (2000: 387-388), “probably did not exist in rural society… has certainly disappeared in advanced, industrialized countries.”



Social Life in Cyberspace
A comprehensive assessment of how social life is lived online is destined to be overwhelmed by the fast progress and the enormous diversity of CMC applications. For instance, while we are still talking about text-based MUD, the visual-based MUD (such as Leaneage, which was launched in July, 2000 and now has 1.6 million members
[5]) is already on its way. Moreover, internet does not provide one environment, but various environments. Table 1. presents some typical online environments involving social interaction, classified by its temporal aspect (synchronous/ asynchronous) and the number of users involved (interpersonal/multi-user). More aspects can be further added to differentiate internet environments, such as the norm and administration of one online group, its traffic flow and demographic composition, and the use of certain media formats (image, voice, video). Each combination of all the factors above has its own strength and limitation in terms of social interaction, and cannot be discussed in a general voice.

Nonetheless, the exiting literature already show sufficient evidence that some CMC users can indeed use this medium constructively in maintaining some sort of social life, from which they can obtain ‘a sense of community.’ Rheingold (1993:3) is among the earliest writers who captured the richness of online social life. After participating in the WELL (a bulletin board system based on bay area, San Francisco) for seven years, He wrote, in cyberspace, people “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 of idle talk.” They “do just about everything people do in real life.”

Such richness of online social life is confirmed by Baym (2000:62), who, after studying the newsgroup rec,arts,tv,soap (r.a.t.s) for two years, wrote that “the thousands of people who have participated in r.a.t.s have created a dynamic and rich community filled with social nuance and emotion.” She also noted the emergence of group-specific identities, norms, relations and expressions with group-specific meanings:

“…participants in CMC develop forms of expression that enable them to communicate social information and to create and codify group-specific meanings, socially negotiate group-specific identities, form relationships that span from the playfully antagonistic to the deeply romantic… and create norms that serve to organise interaction and to maintain desirable social climates.”

Moreover, some participants do feel a sense of community and were willing to share personal experience in certain online group. In a survey of the participants on the mailing list WMST-L, Koreman and Wyatt (1996) found, while asked what is satisfying and useful about the group, aside from “information,” many participants also mentioned a “sense of community” and the “discussion of personal experience.” Turkle (1995) also demonstrated that MUD players could form a sense of community as well.

However, to claim that such communities exist ‘in cyberspace’ is misleading. Because the cyberspace does not exist as a distinct, separate realm from the real life, but forms a complementary relation with the later, and most social groups formed or maintained with the aid of CMC seem to transgress the boundary between the two. In one way, internet is often used as a supplementary tool to enhance the already existing social relations or network in real life, such as the email among family members, friends, colleagues and schoolmates. As Calhoun (1998) argued, “CMC can supplement face-to-face contact … provide a powerful new channel for connections among people already linked by residence or engagement in a common organizational framework” (381)

In the other way, a considerable portion of the relations initiated online will be extended in to real life. For instance, “virtual community” advocate Rheingold also admit, WELL “felt like an authentic community… because it was grounded in my everyday physical world.” In a survey investigating the relations newsgroup subscribers build on the newsgroup, Parks and Floyd (1996) found that a high percentage of their respondent had contacted their online mates using means other than internet, such as telephone (35.3%), the postal service (28.4%), or face-to-face communication (33.3%). Baym (2000: 63) also observe that the “on-line groups are often woven into the fabric of off-line life rather than set in opposition to it. The evidence includes the pervasiveness of off-line contexts in on-line interaction and the movement of on-line relationships off-line.”

Finally, while CMC has certain strength and can be used constructively in our social life, it has certain restrictions, and the hope of regenerating communities solely by CMC is misplaced. One of the major reason for skepticism to rise was some "overheated language,” as Turkle (1996) noted, that "falls within a long tradition of American technological optimism” and “ tend to represent urban decay and class polarization as out-of-date formulations of a problem that could be solved with the right technology.’” Such hyper-optimists provided promising prophecies of CMC’s capability in promoting equality, democracy, civil society and so on. Yet these hopes are now challenged by the findings that CMC in effect strengthen the “hegemonic culture” (Fernback & Thompson, 1999), create a “new class” of the information- elite (Luke, 1993), caused the “compartmentalization of community” (Calhoun, 1998: 389) and “polarization” (Spears et al, 1990). Fernback and Thompson (1999), in contrasting the hopes placed on CMC with the reality, concluded: “virtual community is more indicative of an assemblage of people being "virtually" a community than being a real community in the nostalgic sense that advocates of CMC would seem to be endorsing.”


Conclusion
The debate of whether there exist community in the cyberspace is the latest round of a century-long intellectual struggle between the nostalgic calling for returning to traditional communities, and the attempts to acknowledge new forms of social solidarity by re-concept- ualising community. Recognizing the inevitable subjective element in every definition of community, I found it a genuine aptitude to focus on the CMC user’s interpretation instead of imposing any a priori criteria of community, but in studying the social life in cyberspace. Examining the empirical evidence from existing literature, I found: (a) CMC users can indeed use this medium constructively in maintaining some sort of social life from which they can obtain a ‘sense of community’ (b) However, claiming such community as existing ‘in cyberspace’ is misleading, because the cyberspace does not exist as a distinct, separate realm from the real life, but forms a complementary relation with the later, and most social groups formed or maintained with the aid of CMC seem to transgress the boundary between the two. (c) The hope of regenerating communities through the internet is misplaced. The internet, though powerful a tool, has certain restrictions and brings mixed effect on our social life.

Reference
Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised Edition ed. London and New York: Verso.
Baym, N. K. (2000) ‘The Emergence of Community in Computer-mediated Communication.’ In S. G. Jones (ed.) Cybersociety 2.0: Revisiting Computer-mediated Communication and Community. London: Sage, 35-68.
Calhoun, C. (1998) ‘Community without Propinquity Revisited: Communications Technology and the Transformation of the Urban Public Sphere.’ Sociological Inquiry, 68 (3) 373-397.
Doheny-Farina, S. (1996) The Wired Neighbourhood, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Etzioni, A. (1993) The Spirit of Community. New York : Crown Publishers.Technology and the Transformation of the Urban Public Sphere.’ Sociological Inquiry, 68 (3) 373-391.
Fernback, J. & Thompson, B. (1999) ‘Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?’
http://www.well.com/user/hlr/texts/VCcivil.html (April 2002)
Fowler, R. B. (1991) The Dance with Community: The Contemporary Debate in American Political Thought. Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press.
Hillery, G. A. (1955) ‘Definitions of Community: Areas of Agreement.’ Rural Sociology, 20 (2), 118.
Luke, T. (1993) ‘Community and ecology.’ In S. Walker (Ed.), Changing Community: The Graywolf Annual Ten (pp. 207-221). St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press.
Nisbet, R. (1953) The Quest for Community Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nisbet, R. (1967) The Sociological Tradition. London : Heinemann.
Oldenburg, R. (1989) The Great Good Place, Paragon House.
Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Rheingold, H. (1993) The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Seligment, E. R. A. (ed.) (1930-35) Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: The Macmillan.
Spears, M., Russell, L., and Lee, S. (1990) ‘De-individuation and Group Polarization in Computer Mediated Communication.’ British Journal of Social Psychology, 29, 121-134
Turkle, S. (1996) ‘Virtuality and Its Discontents.’ The American Prospect vol. 7 no. 24.
Webber, M. M. (1963) ‘Order in Diversity: Community without Propinquity,’ in L. Wirigo (ed.) Cities and Space. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.


Endnotes
[1] Federal Communications Commission (1998) A Glossary of Telecommunications.
[2] Johnson, A (2000)The Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology, 2nd ed. Blackwell: London, p. 53
[3] Abercrombie, N et al. (2000) The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology, 4th ed. Penguin:London, p. 64
[4] Borrowing from bilogical ecology, Park defined community as “a population [of people, animal or plant], territorially organized, more or less completely rooted in the soil it occupies, its individual units living in a relationship of mutual interdependence that is symbiotic.” (Quoted by Coser, 1977:363. http://www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/DSS/Park/PARKW6.HTML accessed 17/04/2003 )
[5] Gamania Site http://www.gamania.com/introduction/english/history.html

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