The virtual town square

Plato warned, in the allegorical tale of Thoth in Phaedrus, that recording knowledge in books would destroy the oral tradition of knowledge and pedagogy. People would lose the skill of remembering, and education would cease to be a living dialogue, where students and teachers discuss and argue the meaning of knowledge. Education, he said, would become a solitary and lifeless decoding of facts from mute objects. 

Plato was probably right. Human civilization undoubtedly lost something, as well as gained something, when alphabetic writing, books and libraries supplanted bards and peripatetic scholarship. 

Social critic Marshall McLuhan has noted: "Phonetically literate man, from the Greeks to the present, has been consistently aggressive with his environment. His need to translate his environment into phonetic, literate terms turns him into a conqueror and a cultural bulldozer, or leveler... . And when messages can be transported, then come the road, and armies, and empires. The empires of Alexander and the Caesars were essentially built by paper routes." 

Elizabeth Eisenstein, historian of the impact of the printing press, noted that "getting the news" was a community event in pre-Gutenberg Europe. People in towns and villages would gather to hear the latest news from travelers, and often would stand around the town square and discuss it as a group. When printed broadsides became economical, people retreated to an inn or their home to do their reading. 

The beginnings of the newspaper actually helped destroy a certain kind of local community, Eisenstein says. At the same time, people began to identify with other people who were not geographically adjacent. Martin Luther's ideas about reformation of the Church, for example, spread at unprecedented speed. 

The new medium introduced a kind of distance between people in traditional local communities, and spanned a distance that had previously separated people who share religious or other values, but might not even speak the same language. That separation from tradition and the invention of a new, more abstract -- I'm tempted to call it "virtual" -- kind of relationship among people was made possible by the printing press. 

New communities

Today, a change of a similar sort is occurring. At this point, I should disclose that I consider myself a "critical friend" of technology (a term proposed in an excellent new book, Information Ecologies, by Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day). 

Are virtual communities substituting as real lifelines?

Take the Internet, for example: I spend hours of my day online in a dozen different virtual communities. Technology enables me to live in the manner I desire. 

Nevertheless, I have found that over the years I have come to think something is creepy about the realization that more and more people will spend more and more of their time hunched over computers screens, moving only their eyes and their fingertips for hours on end. To be sure, surfing the Net or having a profound experience online look clearly ridiculous to the outside observer. But then again, so does sex. 

I used the term "virtual community" when I first started writing about social activity online in 1988, and later when I wrote a book about the phenomenon, in 1993. At that time, the common wisdom was that only antisocial geeks would use the Internet to communicate. I encountered so many instances of profoundly human communion online that I wanted to show how real people had reached beyond the computer screens that separated them and made important differences in each other's lives. 

I told the stories about the family who endured their son's eight-year battle with leukemia with the support of the parenting conference on the WELL. Over the years, members of that support group raised tens of thousands of dollars for the family. We filled several pews at the memorial service. I have taken my turn sitting by the deathbed of a woman who would have died alone if it were not for the real-life presence of a virtual community. 

Nowadays, hundreds of thousands of people rely on their virtual communities as a real lifeline -- people whose illness or disability prevents normal communication, people who are caregivers or who suffer from any one of hundreds of diseases, people who live in isolated areas, the only gay teenager in a small town, people trying to escape abusive relationships. 

If there is something disturbing about finding community through a computer screen, we should also consider whether it is disturbing for millions of people to drive for hours in their single-passenger, internal-combustion automobiles to cities of inhuman scale, where they spend their days in front of television screens in cubicles within skyscrapers full of people who do not know each other. The rubber tire and the elevator both played their part in the construction of a technology-centric community. 

In search of more information

Arguments about the changing nature of community date back at least a century, to the sociological debate over the traditional gemeinschaft communities and the gesellschaft societies emerging at that time. There is no better time than now to look closely at the ways our tools are influencing our social relationships, from e-mail to chat rooms to cell phones to SUVs. We need to begin to answer the vexing questions posed by technologies' double-edged impacts: Who will benefit? What are the downsides? How will the use of the new technology effect community, health, psychological well-being, the distribution of wealth, the environment? How can new technologies be misused, and what protections or remedies might be available to deal with negative impacts? Where are the points of leverage in influencing the way technologies are designed, deployed, marketed, regulated?

I do not know the answers, but a good beginning toward a more humane and conscious use of technology is for millions of people to become better informed "critical friends of technology." 

Howard Rheingold is the author of The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. His e-mail address is hlr@well.com.

Related Links
Electric Minds, a virtual community originally developed by Rheingold and Randy Haykin, has morphed under new ownership. Rheingold now runs a community called brainstorms. The WELL is the oldest virtual community on the Internet. Salon Magazine recently announced that it plans to purchase the WELL. Emily Green of Forrester Research believes that Electric Minds will be successful but not revolutionary. Digital City New York is a new virtual community with a magazine-like touch. 

Do you agree with Rheingold about the double-edged impact of technology? Which edge is likely to win? is it up toindividuals to ensure that technology is not abused? 

Below are the last ten comments in chronological order. 
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9/10/99 9:43:39 AM maria chambers maria.chambers@beeb.com
Here in London within the New Media community, there is a lot of talk about the challenge/problem of working within an ecommerce world. The BBC's famous charter to inform, educate and entertain (words that can be moved around in anyorder and still make sense) is still the basis on which most of us try to work towards. Shopping is great but there comes a point where as a friend of mine said in a marketing meeting - if my life is about getting Mars bars into schools - am out of here.

 9/11/99 10:07:01 AM Giorgio Viali viali@mail.com
A human being is a human being. Is it not true? And it possesses something that is always in its mind. Joy, fear, ...normal or electric mind should be it. He usually discovers something. The alphabet, the books, the Net. New instruments. New tools.Virtual communities? They are like the normal communities. We have to learn living in. That's the matter! Living togheter sometimes is not simple.It's difficult. Find new rules for the virtual communities could be ours task. But why instead learning living in a virtual community we at first do not learn living in a virtual family? Father?

 9/12/99 2:51:23 AM Dave Todd dvxsoftware@att.net
We harbor reservations about it, but there seems to be an inescapable inevitability about technology. Recent studies have abstracted the view that the Internet is growing in ways similar to a living organism, and I find that compelling food for thought. Humans have an affinity for technology as you noted. It makes you uneasy in some ways, but it allows you to live as you want. I don't think there's much use in trying to develop a perspective on what it all means or where it's heading, and whether or not it's a "good" thing. I think all we can do is hang on and go for the ride, be as much a part of it as we can, and try to make a positive contribution to it all. I think that's true whether you're an end-user software application designer like me, or if you're Bill Gates.I think there's reason to hope that technology is going to give us the tools to solve our fundemental social and survival problems and that we will use them to do so before we use them to destroy ourselves.

 9/24/99 5:02:31 PM David Marynik davidmarynik@msn.com
I agree with Mr. Rheingold "double-edged" is accurate in that if one side of a knife is used more than another it will be kept in better shape thru constant sharpening while the other side will be neglected. It is up to individuals to look at both sides of a question or an answer. We see a lot of so-called win-win situations proposed and wonder if there really is such a thing.

 9/26/99 10:45:28 PM Jared Andrus jareddon@jps.net
I enjoy the experiences that the net has brought me thus far. I also enjoy a great many social outdoor type activities. The internet in my experience as a user and observer is addictive. I am always cautious to limit my time online, regardless of why I am on. What happens when the lights go out? I wonder how some people will cope. I have three small sons and they will no doubt do so much more online than I do. They play outside, they look forward to joining the Boy Scouts. I have seen so much good come out of the net, and so much bad as well. I have not come to a final conclusion. The older I become, the less important privacy is, and the more I understand why thy old people around the corner spend hours on eachothers porches.

 10/28/99 7:36:15 PM Ana Lucia Merege merege@pronet.com.br
You are absolutely right about new technologies: they do have two faces. They surely can enrich our lives as Christopher said, but they can also serve the powerful as their tool. On my part I firmly believe - and not only because I am a librarian :-) - that before and during their experience with computers people need to be educated in a more, say, traditional way; they have to improve their literacy and reading power,to be able to analize and criticize the world they're living in. Then technologies can help them to communicate, to act.Technology is a good servant, when it has a good master; but when it BECOMES the master, there's certainly something wrong!

 11/24/99 5:27:19 AM Glenn N 
I believe human beings, as animals, are self-presevational. We always find ways of balancing our fundamental needs. Two important ones of which are communication and human contact. Access to virtual communities creates very exciting opportunities to communicate with people and cultures inaccessible by huge distances . On the other hand, there is a real need to experience human social interaction in the real physical sense which goes beyond the exchanging of ideas and thoughts. I certainly don't feel threatened by this technology, actually, I embrace it, but my questions are hypothetical: If the virtual community is to be the future of humankind, what of the community of underclasses around the world that cannot afford the hardware and education to use it? If we are succeeding in bringing together like-minded communities around the world, is it at the expense of distancing unlike communities on our own doorsteps?

 2/2/00 2:37:55 PM James Embrey jsest8+@pitt.edu
Lots of people talk about movies saying things like they represent a person's impression of a story. That story often comes out in book form originally and we've all heard the remark, "I liked the movie but the book was better.", or "The movie didn't do the book justice." I feel the internet is a way of getting 'the movie', if you will to many people and from there, discussions can result from peoples' interpretations of what they've seen on the internet. In other words, it's information and knowledge, and people will ultimately decide what to do with that knowledge. I think the last line is important because a virtual community can include anyone willing to take the time and effort to be involved. It's a way of sharing and communicating, just on a more technologically advanced level.

 3/5/00 2:02:45 AM Linda Davyouk@cs.com
I think it is up to the individuals to see that technology is not misused. After all, technology starts with an ida and then ends with the individual.We should be careful how we use it. We should use it to better our work enviorenment, not as a way to increase the work load. If we do this, we wouldn't have so much stress and speend more time with our family and freinds.Technology can be our friend instead of our foe. If used responsivly.

 3/20/00 5:54:40 PM Amandeep KAtaria am_123@hotmail.com
I've read much of Mr Rheingolds work and enjoy it throughly however i cannot seem to find much information on the interactionists perspective and the internet, since this is a key area of interest for me, i was hoping you could point me in the right direction. I'm an A- Level student @ Brentide High School Sixth Form, Currently working On a piece of coursework about the Interectionists perspectives ability to assess internet relationships. I would be very gratefull if somebody could help me by providing any relavant information. Thankyou :)

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