Don’t Contradict Yourself: Community and its Paradoxes in Cyberspace
Submitted by Colleen E. Brown on October 15, 2006 to the On-line Interaction and Facilitation Seminar, Fall 2007, Purdue University,
Dr. Sorin A. Matei via the I Think Blog
(http://www.matei.org/ithink)
The growth of computer mediated communication (CMC) has sparked much debate across and within most social scientific disciplines regarding how these technologies affect interpersonal relationships and the nature and possibilities of and for community. Utopians argue that ‘virtual communities’ offer completely new possibilities for community that can replace the declining involvement in traditional public spheres in modern society. Dystopians regard the ‘relationships’ created and maintained through CMC as less meaningful and incomplete compared to traditional community ties. Indeed, many worry this way of interacting may withdraw people from the public realm all together (Hampton, 2004). While the truth of the matter probably lies somewhere in the middle of these two extreme viewpoints, there is no doubt that new ways to communicate have impacted and will continue to impact social interaction and community in both expected and unexpected ways. Specifically, what impact has the emergence of cyberspace had on community formation? Can one experience authentic community online? If so, what does it look and feel like? What factors about the online communicative environment are important to consider?
It is argued in this review that it is possible to experience community online, though the virtual space is fraught with contradictions, some unique to cyberspace and some ubiquitous in modern society. Online communities are emergent in nature—members of these communities define, redefine, and construct social meaning and identity through interaction—thus in order to understand and/or investigate the nature of online communities it is important to take into consideration what salient features of the online environment impact the outcomes of CMC. These sources of influence on CMC include pre-existing external structures, temporal structures, computer infrastructures, the purposes for which the virtual space is used, and the characteristics of the members of the community. Through CMC interaction, the members of the community then appropriate the available resources and communicatively create social meaning. When and if, over time, people develop group-specific norms, new identities and relationships, and specialized lingos through CMC interaction, community can emerge. A crucial first step, then, is to delve into why the authenticity of online communities has been such a contentious issue.
The Community Debate
What constitutes community has been debated in scholarly literature for centuries, characterized by strong ideological and normative connotations. Debates about the whether online communities are “real” communities are fueled by the prevailing and often nostalgic notions and definitions of community. Cohen (1985) suggested that social scientists tend to define community in terms of what we have lost to modernity. Similarly, Jensen (1990) writes that “traditional life was marked by face-to-face, intimate relationships among friends, while modern life is characterized by distant, impersonal contact among strangers” (p. 71).
These normative descriptions have several important assumptions in common: they privilege face-to-face relationships suggesting close geographical proximity is essential for community formation, they romanticize the pre-industrial condition, and they characterize the modern condition as somehow lacking. Indeed, much has been written about the decline of community involvement in the industrial era (see for example Putnam, 1995). Thus, the focus is on recapturing communities of old using the traditional ‘village’-like communities as the ideal prototype against which all other types of communities should be measured and/or denied.
Resistance to the idea of communities online, then, stems from this nostalgic connection to the original conception of community when there were little other choices than for community to be defined by geographic proximity. Just because the village-ideal is comfortable and feels right, this approach doesn’t necessarily reflect the realities of community as we experience it today and may keep us from recognizing the forms of social relationships that are being enacted through CMC (Shumar & Renniger, 2002). If community is understood and defined by these a priori assumptions it is no wonder that the ability to form meaningful and fulfilling communities in cyberspace has been such a controversial issue. It becomes critical to decide whether we want to continue to define community along these terms or if we are ready to accept the fact that society as a whole has moved beyond these assumptions.
Preece and Maloney-Krichmar (2005) point out that the energy and time expended on developing definitions may not be the best way to proceed and they suggest that a more productive approach may be to accept community as a concept with fuzzy boundaries. Consequently, it is argued here that there are simply too many examples of thriving communities that transcend face-to-face contact and geographical proximity to continue the debate. There is abundant literature and research that has also moved beyond this debate as many scholars now consider the strength and nature of relationships between individuals to be a more useful basis for defining community than physical proximity alone (Preece & Malonely-Krichmar, 2005). Communities can now be based on emotional or intellectual proximity, shared interests, need for emotional support, or simply entertainment (Fernback & Thompson, 1995). Wellman (2001) has redefined the notion of community by explicitly acknowledging that loosely- bound, sparsely knit, fragmentary nature of modern communities as a reality. Rather than simply fitting into groups that happen to be close by, a community is defined by “networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging, and social identity” (Wellman, 2001, p. 2). For millions of people around the world, this is a description of what takes place when they interact online.
It is important at this point to recognize that online communities need not be viewed in technologically deterministic ways; that is, just because it is possible to form communities online does not mean it is inevitable. Community formation does not happen to all of the people all of the time, only to some of the people some of the time. Some people don’t expect or want to find community when engaging in interactions over the Internet. Many people use the Internet in a purely utilitarian sense, for example, to find manage their checking accounts or to find out what movies are playing at the local cinema. Surely these activities do not constitute community in any sense of the word. However, since it is accepted here that a community can exist online, what does it look and feel like? What is the nature of community life as it is played out in cyberspace?
While communities can exist online, it does not follow that the virtual space has accomplished a utopian ideal. Indeed, the second argument presented in this review is that the very nature of cyberspace is in many senses paradoxical. Contradictions—such as virtual but real, fleeting yet permanent, producer and consumer, individual agency versus the communal, egalitarian but cliquish—permeate cyberspace. The dichotomous nature of cyberspace is a major contributor to the complexity of the issues surrounding when and how people experience community online. In order to ferret out some of these contradictions, it is useful to take a closer look at the inner workings of an established online community.
The WELL: An experiment in community
Howard Rheingold, one of the most prominent authors on the subject of communities in cyberspace, coined the term “virtual community” to describe what was happening online in his influential and controversial book The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (1993). In this treatment of virtual community, Rheingold claimed that online communities were actually superior to off-line communities: what had been lost in modernity could be realized through interacting in cyberspace because virtual communities were always available, offered better and more complete support, the emotional ties created in the space were more intense and authentic because the medium offered an egalitarian community that was more tolerant than the offline world. Rheingold’s position on whether what happens online can be considered ‘real’ community or not becomes quite clear as he describes his experience:
“In cyberspace, we chat and argue, engage in intellectual discourse, perform acts of commerce, exchange knowledge, share emotional support, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, find friends and lose them, play games and metagames, flirt…We do everything people do when people get together, but we do it with words on computer screens, leaving our bodies behind…our identities commingle and interact electronically, independent of local time and location” (1994, p. 58).
The ability to network, gain knowledge, or find communion within cyberspace is, according to Rheingold (1994), the social glue that binds individuals into a community. Rheingold’s views of virtual community stemmed from his involvement in one of the earliest and most well-known online communities—the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link). The WELL was an early bulletin board and conferencing system that “…was created as an electronic commune by countercultural activists and was run and managed by former hippies, mainly for the countercultural population of [the] San Francisco Bay Area” (Matei, 2001, p. 15). The countercultural underpinnings of the WELL are especially important to acknowledge because the features of and purposes for the community grew out of countercultural ideals. The feel of the 60’s, the commune ideal, and core values such as free expression and individual agency seeped the landscape of the WELL and Rheingold’s representation of the community to the mainstream public (Preece, 2000). For many members of the WELL the realization of these ideals played out a little differently and several important contradictions in cyberspace emerged.
In response to the fragmented nature of modernity, members of the WELL sought to forge “a new sense of community, where individuality is not repressed, but cultivated” (Matei, 2001, p. 9). The tension between self-realization on one hand and community constraints on the other is one of the main conflicts that characterized the WELL and the nature of community life both on and offline still today. For members of the WELL, the answer to this paradox resided in the concepts of self-expression and open communication. As a result, rather than the WELL becoming a place where community was stronger than ever before, many involved found that the space actually caused a form of hyper self-interest, a place where individualistic values crushed communitarian values in such a way that the WELL actually fell way short of its countercultural ideals. Instead of the rosy, commune-like place of closely-knit and supportive people where no one participant was valued more or less than any other, it ended up being a place of intense conflict and judgment. Matei (2001) summed this contradiction succinctly when he noted that “the demand for self-expression engulfs the declared ideal of harmony, the community spirit was drowned by [the] self-absorbed competition for attention” (p. 22). It was also found that a small percentage of the population of the WELL did most of the communicating, negating on at least some level the ideal of egalitarianism and participation. This tendency toward a few voices obscuring the many is still found in online spaces today.
In addition, Rheingold sang the virtues of the virtual community because it was a place where people were able to shed offline constraints such as gender, class, and race, freely express their authentic selves, and explore different identities (Matei, 2001). Hence, another important result of the virtual space and the open communication ideal should be the absence of prejudice. However, many participants found that new forms of prejudice simply supplanted old ones, representing another significant contradiction in cyberspace. In the WELL, people were now divided along the lines of insiders versus outsiders, the “newbie” versus the veteran. Seabrook (1997) wrote in detail about his experience on the WELL as a participant observer in his classic book Deeper. Instead of the WELL realizing its hopes of an egalitarian community characterized by social equality, what resulted were old-fashioned, exclusive and elitist cliques. The WELL was a collection of single-issue conferences each “requiring from its members continuous effort to prove their originality and ‘authenticity’ of [their] feelings and ideas” (Matei, 2001, p.22). Indeed, online communities are criticized for their tendency toward homogeneity, that is, most interaction is organized by interests. Thus people form connections based on similarity with little or no obligation to deal with diversity (Baym, 1998).
Similarly, hazing was an important feature of the WELL making acceptance into the community difficult and emotional for many members. Undeniably, the in-group vs. out-group mentality found on the WELL (and in many online communities today) was a major reason why most people simply observed (lurked) instead of participating. Seabrook (1997) experienced these hazing rituals first hand as members of the WELL mercilessly criticized an article he wrote for The New Yorker. Seabrook took the insults of his work and by extension to his character very personally. After ten days, as the ‘thrashing’ wore down and Seabrook had his say, Rheingold himself responded by saying, “It’s an initiation ritual…stick around and help us dump on the next guy;-)” (p. 177). Yet another member congratulated Seabrook’s survival of the hazing by noting that “I have watched seabrook [sic] go from freshly irritated novice to a hardened [veteran]…He may be a newbie, but he has a clue firmly clenched in his wet little fist. Nice work, dude.” (p. 182). In a place where the countercultural idea of freedom from oppressive hierarchies was valued, new forms of social hierarchies certainly seemed alive and well.
Given the strife, conflicts, and contradictions that seemed to permeate the WELL, one may be inclined to conclude that online community has obviously failed. Specifically because of the emergence of group norms and the fact that intense emotions were experienced by WELL members, this social experiment can and should be called a community—what materialized may not have been the panacea hoped for or described by some of its members, it was still undeniably a community. It is argued here that the only thing that failed was the notion that online communities were going to offer something totally new and different, something superior to what is experienced in ‘real life’ face to face, geographically bound communities. An important conclusion is that online communities in many ways mirror what happens in offline life, adding credence to the fact that what some people experience in computer mediated communication is in fact community. It is, however, obviously not exactly the same. What happened inside the WELL was just as much of a function of the individuals that comprised it as it was a function of the context in which it took place. The fact that people must build communities around textual interaction instead of verbal, within the confines of their private worlds instead of the public realm, across wires and through computers instead of face to face must have important implications for community. Thus, it is important to place the differences between off and online community in the appropriate context in order to fully appreciate the impact CMC has on how community emerges and how it is experienced by its members.
Emergent Community
Baym (1998) argues that when trying to understand the formation of online communities several pre-existing structures must be taken into consideration because these structures influence the outcomes of CMC. These structures are not necessarily mutually exclusive and each structure may prove to be more or less important for different groups at different times. The first of these structures is the external contexts that participants are nested in before they enter into CMC including, but not limited to, their offline culture and the external environment through which people access their online groups (for example work, school, or home). In the case of the WELL, the countercultural context of the San Francisco Bay area, where most of the participants worked and lived, undoubtedly shaped the community in significant ways. Second, the temporal structures of the community have important influences on CMC including whether the interaction is synchronous or asynchronous, whether the group meets once, for a limited amount of time, or over an extended period of time. Much research into the affect of temporal structures has been undertaken as this influence affects the availability of immediate feedback, the ability for participants to edit or rewrite messages before sending them, the availability of the history of the group’s interaction, and the number of people that can participate at any given time. The asynchronous temporal structure of the WELL, for instance, had an enormous impact because participants could trace back the history of relationships and of conflict and could respond to discussions at their leisure. System infrastructure, such as system configuration, system adaptability, and level of user friendliness, is another important influence on the outcomes of CMC. In order to participate on the WELL, members had to have both the desire and the intellectual capability to essentially learn a new language in order to navigate the space. Group purpose, or the reason why the group has gathered, is another important factor to consider. In the case of the WELL, its purpose was simply to communicate and to form social bonds. While this seems vague, one can imagine that if the purpose was to organize an event or accomplish a specific goal, the outcomes of the interaction would have been completely different. Finally, the characteristics of the participants play an important role in the outcomes of CMC and community formation. Variables such as attitudes towards technology and the degree of training in the medium, perception of the medium as able to support social bonds, and inherent characteristics such as sociability and demographic attributes are all important influences on the outcome of CMC.
Baym (1998) points out that it is impossible to predict in advance of the interaction how these factors will combine to affect the outcome of CMC. Instead, the impact is emergent. Users appropriate these pre-existing structures to communicatively create meaning through their interactions. Participants utilize the system’s features to:
“…play with new forms of expressive communication, to explore possible public identities, to create otherwise unlikely relationships, and to create behavioral norms. When and if these emergent features develop into stable, group-specific understandings, the group gains the potential to be imagined as a community” (p. 43).
Thus over time new forms of communication emerge, such as the use of emoticons to express feelings or specialized lingo known only to the group, which serves to delineate in and out group boundaries—a factor essential to the definition of a community. Participants in CMC are able to some degree, both negatively or positively, create and experiment with untried versions of one’s self, which for some people is part of the magic and for others part of the danger surrounding online interaction. As the group matures into a community, behavioral norms, such as taboos against flaming, emerge and users come up with ways to reinforce norms by creating structural and social sanctions against violating them. In many online spaces, norms are both initially given and emerge through continued interaction. Stable patterns of interactions are created and are recreated again and again through a group’s ongoing discourse, leading to the creation of community for the participants in that particular space at that particular time. Given all of these factors, it is not surprising that cyberspace is so full of contradictions and that the formation of communities is so unpredictable and variable.
Conclusions
It has been argued here that it is necessary to move past nostalgic definitions of community and embrace the idea that communication technologies offer a new way to connect with people. And if the intention, the timing, and the mix of participants are right, community can emerge. Online communities don’t necessarily live up to utopian ideals or do they transform community building into something completely new and different that is unrecognizable or incomparable to what happens in many offline communities—the WELL provided an excellent case study to illustrate this point. While cyberspace is in many ways burdened with contradictions, it is perhaps the interplay of these contractions and our attempts and desire to reconcile them that makes virtual communities so interesting to participate in and/or to investigate. In order to understand community formation and participation, it is necessary to consider what pre-existing structures and features impact CMC, how these features are appropriated by members of an online group, and how the participants of these groups communicatively create stable social meanings that evolve into a feeling of community. Eluded to, but not specifically covered in this review, is the importance of offline relationships for online communities. Many online community members also know or meet each other in real life. This is also an important variable when considering the shape and connectivity of online communities.
For practical purposes, the realization that contradictions found in cyberspace can lead to unintended consequences within an online community is crucial. This knowledge can be used to guide designer’s decisions in several interesting ways. Conflict is inevitable (in both on and offline communities) as people struggle with individual needs versus community needs and a designer must decide to what extent s/he wants or is able to control this. Imposed versus emergent hierarchies is certainly a central issue in any virtual space. The WELL illustrates that a community requires trust, reciprocity, and for better or for worse, emotional effervescence to sustain interest and membership. To what extent a designer can build these notions in the space versus to what extent they must emerge on their own is an interesting area for future research. Baym’s (1998) approach could also be useful in informing a designer how decisions regarding, for example, user-friendliness and temporal structures affect the outcomes of CMC. Her framework can be a useful tool in identifying why some online groups have been successful in creating community and why some have not, or how and why a particular community thrived yet ultimately failed. Studying community lingo and norms can help researchers understand the inner workings of a community. Overall, this review reveals that the formation of virtual communities is a complex endeavor, yet for those who have benefited from them, a worthwhile one. As long as this continues to be the case, virtual communities will also be a rich area of academic inquiry.
References
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