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     community

This page considers chat and email as mechanisms for online communities and issues such as netiquette and moderation.

It covers -

• introduction
• discontents
• netiquette
• moderation

There is a broader discussion of the shape and strength of online communities in the complementary profile on social spaces and in the digital environment guide.

     introduction

Jonathan Zittrain's prescient 1997 paper The Rise & Fall of Sysopdom commented that

"online community" joins "sysop" in the oversize dustbin of trite or hopelessly esoteric, hence generally meaningless, cyberspace vernacular. Not that "online community" is obscure, like "sysop"; rather, the term’s emptiness results from its abuse. "Online community" is used by Internet companies the way a motivational speaker uses "excellence," an academic uses "new paradigm," or a lawyer uses "justice": it represents something once craved and still invoked (if only as a linguistic placeholder) even as it is believed by all but the most naïve to be laughably beyond reach. Since it's applied to almost anything, it now means vague warm fuzzies and nothing more.

Howard Rheingold, in The Virtual Community: Homesteading the Electronic Frontier, had taken a more positive view -

People in virtual communities use words on screens to 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 if idle talk. People in virtual communities do just about everything people do in real life, but we leave our bodies behind. You can't kiss anybody and nobody can punch you in the nose, but a lot can happen within those boundaries.

with membership of a community apparently involving nothing more than the decision to join a particular forum.

Utopian rhetoric that online communities would inevitably and rightly lead to the emergence of 'netizens' - self-aware, politically active and zealously libertarian (extending a lex americana across all borders and jurisdictions) unsurprisingly hasn't been substantiated. In practice it is unclear whether 'online community' has much meaning outside sociology or cyberstudies departments in provincial universities and fans of the digerati. We have explored the notion of online community in more detail here, highlighting writing and studies of particular significance.

It may be more effective to consider such fora as online social spaces rather than communities - facilities that people visit to view (even exchange) information, be entertained, flirt or otherwise interact but that often do not involve any meaningful sense of obligation to other participants or the owner of the space.

Key features of many chatrooms and newsgroups are

• anonymity, pseudo-anonymity and mutability of identity (is the person with whom you're chatting - or whose post to a newsgroup you are reading who they claim to be? Are several people avatars of a single individual?)
• lack of strong social bonds (eg expectations about reciprocity, responsibility and trust)
• absence of - or merely weak enforcement of - explicit rules and fuzzy implicit norms
• weak participation by many members, with for example most postings on a typical newsgroup coming from under 5% of the subscribers
• behaviour such as flaming and trolling
• operation by corporate entities on a commercial basis, inspiring the same degree of loyalty to the operator and collective bonding with other participants that would be found in visitors to a retail mall

     discontents

Many readers of Rheingold appear to view the construction of online communities as a sort of holy grail. Marketers have also been enthusiastic, evident in books, journal articles and workshops about how to build captive market in the guise of community. We've elsewhere highlighted the significance of the internet for eroding the viability of AOL's "walled garden".

David Johnson's paper The Unscrupulous Diner's Dilemma & Anonymity in Cyberspace argues that 

 to achieve a civilized form of cyberspace, we have to limit the use of anonymous communications. Many early citizens of cyberspace will bitterly oppose any such development, arguing that anonymous and pseudonymous electronic communications are vital to preserve electronic freedoms and allow free expression of human personality. ... we all collectively face the diners' dilemma - we must collaborate in groups to build a rich social fabric, and we know that the ability to act anonymously, sporadically, in large groups brings out the worst in human character.

An ICANNWatch participant more tartly commented that

I wonder if it might be time for ICANNwatch to consider banning anonymous messages. Yeah, free speech is great, but people hiding behind anonymity on this site haven't lately been engaging in insightful discussion on the issues; rather, the "anonymous cowards" (as Slashdot terms them) have unleashed an astounding quantity of utterly delusional "commentary", and seem to have chased off practically all the rational commentators who once made the discussions here interesting and informative. ...

As long as ... things can be posted anonymously, we have no way of knowing whether they're all being written by a single mental-institution escapee, or if there's a groundswell of militant ignorance out there.

Diane Reiner & Keith Blanton in Person to person on the Internet (London: Academic Press 1997) argued that online

contact with an individual of a faraway and unfamiliar land often goes much further to reduce prejudice and close-mindedness than do rhetoric and media exposure to distant cultures

but acknowledged that anonymity permits "immature, insecure people to throw their virtual weight around, harassing people and interfering with their attempts at pleasant online chatting".

That's consistent with cautions in works such as Judith Donath's paper Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community and other papers in Communities in Cyberspace (London: Routledge 1999) edited by Marc Smith & Peter Kollock, Elizabeth Reid's 1996 Communication and Community on Internet Relay Chat: Constructing Communities and The Self and the Internet: Variations on the "Illusion" of One Self in Psychology & the Internet: Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Transpersonal Implications (New York: Academic Press 1998) edited by Jayne Gackenbach.



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