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community This page highlights some recent writing about community in the digital environment.       the digital campfire Two studies of 'community' are Richard Holeton's Composing Cyberspace: Identity, Community & Knowledge in the Electronic Age (New York, McGraw-Hill 98) and Communities In Cyberspace (London, Routledge 99) edited by Marc Smith & Peter Kollock.  Stacy Horn's Cyberville: Clicks, Culture & the Creation Of An Online Town (New York, Warner 98) is less substantial. We suggest that you instead consider Erik Brynjolfsson's 1996 paper Electronic Communities: Global Village or Cyberbalkanization? (PDF). Wendy Grossman's Net.Wars (New York, New York Uni Press 97) 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 95), 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 96) offers guidance about building community networks. Nancy Baym's Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom & Online Community (London, Sage 00) 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. Overall we were more impressed by the thoughtful The Future of Community & Personal Identity in the Coming Electronic Culture (Washington, Aspen Institute 95) by David Bollier & Charles Firestone. 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. Katie Hafner's The Well: A Story of Love, Death & Real Life in the Seminal Online Community (New York, Carroll & Graf 01) - like her May 97 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, Cass Sunstein's gloomy Republic.com (Albany, State Uni of NY Press 01) extends 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 00) 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're 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 99) and Deep Impact: The Web & the Changing Media Economy (Info, Feb 99) 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 96) 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 97), like Cass Sunstein's Republic.com (Princeton, Princeton Uni Press 01), is overstated but worth a look.  There's a far more extreme rendition in William Donnelly's dystopian The Confetti Generation: How the New Communications Technology Is Fragmenting America (New York, Holt 86): "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."  Capitalism & the Information Age: the Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution (New York, Monthly Review Press 98) 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 94) edited by Edward Comer.       the digital divide We've explored the digital divide throughout the guides on this site, in particular the divide page.  A useful starting point in print is Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency & Policy in the Information Society (Routledge 98) edited by Brian Loader.  There's more detailed analysis in William Wresch's Disconnected: Haves & Have-Nots in the Information Age (New Brunswick, Rutgers Uni Press 98), Jim Davis's Cutting Edge: Technology, Information Capitalism & Social Revolution (London, Verso 98) and Donald Schon's High Technology & Low-Income Communities: Prospects For The Positive Use of Advanced Information Technology (Cambridge, MIT Press 99). 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 (Routledge, London 1997). A US perspective is provided by W Russell Neuman, Lee McKnight & Richard Solomon in The Gordian Knot - Political Gridlock on the Information Highway (MIT Press, Cambridge 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 97) is a collection of papers, edited by Herbert Kubicek, about national information equity initiatives.     next page (culture)