Full Circle Associates

I'll continue my riff on informatics articles. Jeeze, I'm feeling almost academic. :-)

Also in the recent Journal of Community Informations, we have an article on Mapping the Virtual in Social Sciences:On the Category of “Virtual Community” by Serge Proulx and Guillaume Latzko-Toth. The first part IS academic, digging into concepts of discourse, naming, and "three ways to conjugate the virtual." If you want to get theory, start there. If you are a practitioner in online groups, start a bit further down, at "Simulated Communities or Stimulated Communities?"

...First, however, we shall dally on the context in which this notion emerged within public space.

If the origins of the expression “virtual reality” may be situated with relative precision—the term was worked out by computer engineer Jaron Lanier around 1989 (Pimentel & Teixeira, 1993; Woolley, 1992)—the origin of “virtual community” remains as nebulous as its definition. Sandy Stone (1991) attributes the moniker to a group of networking pioneers who created one of the first Bulletin Board Services[4] (BBSs), CommuniTree: “[They] had developed the idea that the BBS was a virtual community, a community that promised radical transformation of existing society and the emergence of new social forms” (p. 88).

We might surmise that the expression “virtual community” appeared as a synthesis between, on the one hand, the growing fascination with the very word virtuality—as much in the popular imagination of engineers as in the imagination of “gurus” like Timothy Leary—and on the other hand, the term online community. The latter was introduced toward the end of the 1960s by two of the “fathers” of computer-mediated communication, J. C. R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor (1968 [1990]), in a visionary text entitled “The Computer as a Communication Device”, and described as follows: “they will consist of geographically separated members (...). They will be communities not of common location, but of common interest” (pp. 37-38).

In all cases, it was through the Sausolito, California-based BBS called the WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link), founded in 1985, that the notion of virtual community gained rapid notoriety (Hafner, 1997), thanks especially to the widely-discussed book written by one of its most famous members, Howard Rheingold (1993). Rheingold defined 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” (p. 5).

The authors then do one of the better jobs I've seen reviewing the emergence of the term and concept of virtual communities. If you are a student of any kind in this area, this paper is worth a read.

Finally, from the summary:

A close examination of current Internet events makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that new collective forms are in the process of being invented. In these new communities, communal resources are framed, not simply by information, but by the very “presence” of others, be this presence abstract, mental, or paradoxically distant, to borrow a title from Jean-Louis Weissberg (1999). The virtual context of these communities might be grasped through the metaphor of a desert watering-hole, or a “passage point”, in Sandy Stone’s term (1991). It is a precarious pole of attraction where individuals of diverse and divergent provenances “meet”, allowing “unfocused interaction” favourable to the development of collective dynamics to take form.

Unlike classical communities, which are constrained to remain bound by a promiscuity without alternatives, the commitment of electronic collectives is (generally) more fluid. The boundaries are blurred, and so, in a certain sense, their reality may be considered virtual. But let us not fool ourselves: virtuality should not be understood as a distortion of the social, but as one of its aspects, an optical effect of its growing complexity, amplified by its own technological artifacts. That, at least, is one of the ideas that we hope to have pried loose in this brief and limited review of the various uses to which the virtual might be put as a category for thinking through contemporary societies.

This line is worth repeating, in bold!

But let us not fool ourselves: virtuality should not be understood as a distortion of the social, but as one of its aspects, an optical effect of its growing complexity, amplified by its own technological artifacts.

Categories: communityinformatics, onlinecommunity, virtualcommunity