Virtual%20Communities

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Virtual Communities
3011 Geographies of Cyberspace

• Martin Dodge
• (m.dodge_at_ucl.ac.uk)
• Lecture 9, Monday 6th December 2004
• http//www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/cyberspace

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Communications Community?

• many would argue that the true power of
  cyberspace is that it provides new media which
  fosters new social interaction between groups of
  people
• to these commentators, one of the most basic
  human needs is to communicate and interact with
  others,
• and cyberspace - through email, newsgroups,
  mailing-lists, bulletin-boards, chat rooms, MUDS,
  networked games, avatar virtual worlds, blogs,
  p2p - is providing new media through which this
  communication can occur and in many cases
  flourish
• do these new means of sociability give rise to
  new types of community? and what are the
  implications for other forms of social
  interaction based on place?
• A key debate in social science analysis of the
  Internet

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No real change, CMC just part of existing social
networks
CMC is damaging, gt isolation and sense of
alienation
Community, is it changing?
No real change, CMC is a parallel world with
little impact on the rest of peoples lives
CMC is positive means to enhance community and
renewal of place
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What is community?

• do you live in a community?
• do you know your neighbours by sight? do you say
  hello? would you ask them a favour? Would you
  invite them round for tea?
• how many people do you know? how many do you
  speak to face-to-face?
• are you involved in lots of overlapping
  communities? Or are they really individual
  networks of family, friends, contacts?
• how much time do you send in social activities as
  opposed to individual /solitary things?
• do you give time to groups voluntarily,without
  the expectation of reward?
• are you involved in civic activities because you
  think they make a difference to your community?

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Defining community

• like many social terms community is hard to
  define
• my desk dictionary, Group of people etc living
  in the same locality or having same religion,
  race, profession, interests, etc
• shared ideas and interests give rise to common
  norms, feelings and goals
• share space gives rise to communal sense of place
• social theorists have long argued about nature of
  community and how it is changing

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Defining community

• Tonnies (1887) conception of community into 2
  distinct ideals
• gemeinschaft - natural, organic groups of people
  bounded by long established family ties, shared
  customs, language. Civic minded as right thing to
  do
• gesellschaft - rationally conceived groups that
  centred around networks of individual interests.
  Bonds forged through exchanges and contracts.
  Civic engagement as beneficial to the individual
• shift to modernity in European with rapid
  urbanisation and industralisation was shifting
  community

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Defining community

• CMC is seen as impacting on gemeinschaft type
  of natural placed-based community in a negative
  fashion, more towards non-local,
  technologically- mediated gesellschaft community
• argued that gemeinschaft view of community is
  nostalgic longing for a past that (may) never
  existed
• Castells notes (p. 124), for urban sociologists
  this is a very old discussion, which reproduces
  previous debates between those seeing the process
  of urbanization as the disappearance of
  meaningful forms of community life, to be
  replaced by selective, weaker ties between
  households scattered in the anonymous metropolis,
  and those identifying the city with liberation of
  people from traditional social control.

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Life in a Virtual World

• 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
  of idle talk.
• People in virtual communities do just about
  everything that people do in real life but we
  leave our bodies behind. You cant kiss anybody
  and nobody can punch you on the nose, but a lot
  can happen within those boundaries. To the
  millions who have been drawn into it, the
  richness and vitality of computer-linked cultures
  is attractive, even addictive. (Rheingold, 1993,
  p. 3)

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Communities in cyberspace

• cyberspace allows the formation of communities
  that are free of the constraints of place
• communities in cyberspace are sustained and
  grounded by communicative practice, not
  geographic propinquity
• a sense of community is based upon new modes of
  interaction and is centred on common interests
  and affinity
• within cyberspace individual participants can
• circumvent the geographical constraints of the
  material world
• take a more pro-active role in shaping their own
  virtual community and their position within it

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Communities in cyberspace

• analysts agree that virtual communities exist
• all communities are imagined, and as long members
  share a common imaginative structure, a community
  can be said to exist.
• many online communities are self-sustaining and
  rich in diversity
• people would not invest so much time and effort
  if they did not gain some sense of social
  cohesion or community from their virtual actions
• Watson (1997, quoted in Fernback, p.213), notes
  The term virtual means something akin to
  unreal My experience has been that people in
  the offline world tend to see online communities
  as virtual, but that participants in the online
  communities see them as quite real.

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Communities in cyberspace

• Where there is significant divergence of opinion
  is over the extent to which
• (1) these online communities provide an
  alternative to geographic (offline) communities
• (2) they are placeless

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Online communities as alternatives

• communities in geographic space are fragmenting
  and losing cohesion due to cultural and economic
  globalisation
• society is suffering increasingly from a
  condition of placelessness
• communities little more than geographically
  defined and administered land units which consist
  of atomised individuals who share little common
  historical consciousness or beliefs
• online communities offer an alternative and
  antidote to social alienation and placelessness
  experienced in geographic communities
• new forms of communities based upon our interests
  and affinity, rather than coincidence of location

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Online communities as alternatives

• just like real-world communities there are
  behavioural norms, differing personalities,
  shared significance and allegiances
• the Internet fosters the growth of distinct
  cultures grounded in communicative practice
• commonly agreed protocols and laws
• advent of distinctive referent language
  (abbreviations, jargon, symbols)
• the formation of strong social networks

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Online communities as alternatives

• Kevin Robins (1995) argues that online
  communities are at the very best self-selecting,
  psuedo-communities.
• he feels it is a serious misnomer to directly
  equate communication with communion and community
• he questions the quality of relationships forged
  and sustained through cyberspace
• dialogue is specific to few and yet read by a
  larger unknown set of participants who may or may
  not be considered community members
• conversations are less inhibited, nonconforming
  and relatively free of personal consequences
• correspondence is predominantly between virtual
  strangers - when the machine is turned off the
  only things known are those given, those written

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• We are who we are because of the places in
  which we grow up, the accents and friends we
  acquire by chance, the burdens we have not chosen
  but somehow learn to cope with. Real communities
  are always local - places in which people have to
  put down some roots and are willing to put up
  with the burdens of living together. The fantasy
  of virtual communities is that we can enjoy the
  benefits of community without its burdens,
  without the daily effort to keep delicate human
  connections intact. Real communities can bear
  those burdens because they are embedded in
  particular places and evoke enduring loyalties.
  In cyberspace, however, there is nowhere that a
  sense of place can grow, and no way in which the
  solidarities that sustain human beings through
  difficult times can be forged.

• Kevin Robins (1995) counters
• Rheingolds vision of cyberspace as an escape
  hatch

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Online communities are not separate

• Wellman and Gulia (1999) note that online and
  geographic communities are in fact remarkably
  similar in some respects.
• It has long been the case that a persons
  community does not necessarily live within
  walking distance.
• geographic communities have been replaced by
  social networks that are spread out over a wide
  terrain, and which are sustained by a variety of
  media.
• they contend that the division between geographic
  and virtual is not helpful -- one is simply an
  extension of the other

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Online communities are not separate

• It is the relationship between people that is
  important, not the medium of communication
• Social networks maintained exclusively in
  cyberspace are thus not pale imitations of real
  networks, or substitutions for these networks,
  they are just another form of network, a subset
  of an individuals total network
• Castells (p. 129) argues that The new pattern
  of sociability in our societies is characterized
  by networked individualism
• people are adapting Internet media to fit their
  networked life, holding strands of connections
  and making/breaking new ones as needed

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Web portals to encourage civic engagement

• cyberspace is often used to try and reconnect
  members of a community and foster a sense of
  place.
• many cities now have websites devoted to
  community relations and development
• Many communities are using cyberspace to develop
  cross-community and cross-issue alliances to help
  fight particular concerns
• Instead of replacement, geographic communities
  are being augmented by online interactions
• see Closer to the state article from The
  Guardian

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Cyberspace communities as placeless communities

• cyberspace is commonly conceived as being
  aspatial
• There is no there there
• thus has no spatiality and thus no sense of place
  
• however, online interactions are often structured
  through a variety of geographic metaphors
• for example, cyberspace is replete with the
  vocabulary of place - nouns, such as rooms,
  lobbies, highway, frontier, cafes and verbs,
  such as surf, inhabit, build, enter.

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Cyberspace communities as placeless communities

• Couclelis (1998) details that the use of these
  geographic metaphors - the spatialisation of
  cyberspace - is an attempt to translate media
  into domains familiar and comfortable to users.
• cyberspace is built out of the ideas and language
  of place
• employment of these metaphors to create sites of
  interaction engenders an online spatiality.

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Cyberspace communities as placeless communities

• Taylor (1997, p. 190) -- to be within a virtual
  world is to have an intrinsically geographic
  experience, as virtual worlds are experienced
  fundamentally as places.
• new places, and new spatialities, are being
  formed online
• Batty (1997 339) the many components that
  comprise cyberspace each have their own sense of
  place and space, their own geography.

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Corrells study of a bar

• study of an online lesbian café
• describes how patrons constructed an elaborate
  café setting using textual descriptions and
  contextualised all their interactions within this
  setting
• construction (spatialisation) of this shared
  setting created a common sense of reality which
  grounded communication
• the locale needed for community in geographic
  space was simulated online
• spatialisation was the secret to the community
  being a success

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30 Days in Alphaworld

• Sought to chart empirically the process of
  virtual place-making
• created a new virtual world that any person could
  inhabit and build within.
• monitored in detail the building of urban
  structures and social interaction
• users built a diverse range of structures and a
  strong core community, who met and interacted
  regularly, developed.
• AlphaWorld consists of hybrid places - lacking
  the materiality of geographic space but yet
  having a powerful mimetic quality
• contains enough geographical referents and
  structure to make them tangible

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30 Days in Alphaworld

• sense of place is centred around the activities
  of claiming land, designing and building
  homesteads
• space is transformed into meaningful places, and
  by social interaction between the inhabitants.
• leads to specific forms of socio-spatial
  practice the playing with identity, the creation
  of community, land disputes, virtual vandalism,
  policing.
• space, place and socio-spatial processes are
  central to online interactions within the
  Alphaworld

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Embodied Spaces

• reason that so many analysts have misunderstood
  cyberspace as placeless, spaceless media is
  because they have conceived cyberspace as a
  separate realm divorced from geographic space
• this conception falls into the trap of treating
  cyberspace as locations of the sublime (as
  powerful, dislocated, deterministic paraspaces)
• cyberspace rather than being a separate realm to
  geographic space is merely an extension of it -
  it is embodied

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Conclusion

• Cyberspace does have implications for the idea of
  community
• But its impact is neither utopian or dystopic
  it does not provide an alternative or counter
  community in real space
• Rather cyberspace is another medium through which
  social networks can be formed and sustained

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Reading for this lecture

• Key article
• Fernback J (1999) "There is a There There Notes
  Towards a Definition of Cybercommunity"
• Castells, Internet Galaxy - Virtual Communities
  or Network Society, Chapter 4, pages 117-136

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Reading for this lecture

• Supplemental readings

• Rheingold H., (1993), Virtual Community
  Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier,
  Addison-Wesley, New York
• Wellman B. and Gulia M. (1999) "Net Surfers
  Don't Ride Alone Virtual Community as Community
  http//www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/cyberspace/wellman_gulia
  _netsurfers.pdf
• Robins, K. (1995) Cyberspace and the world we
  live in. In Featherstone, M. and Burrows, R. (Ed)
  Cyberspace, Cyberbodies and Cyberpunk Cultures
  of technological embodiment. Sage, London, pp.
  135-156
• Taylor, J. (1997) The emerging geographies of
  virtual worlds. The Geographical Review 87
  172-192. Available thru JSTOR
• Correll, S. (1995) The ethnography of an
  electronic bar The lesbian cafe. Journal of
  Contemporary Ethnography 24 270-298

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Next steps

• Friday DCA presentations
• 10 minutes per group
• demo website, explain mapping strategy
• all material needs to be online
• remember website and presentation are worth 40
  of the coursework mark