Virtual Communities Essay Research Paper Virtual CommunitiesWhat

Virtual Communities Essay, Research Paper

Virtual Communities

What does this mean?

Rheingold (1993) defines virtual communities as “social aggregations that emerge from the [Internet] when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace” (p. 5).

According to Rheingold and others, the notion of virtual community is not to be dismissed as a technological, cyberpunk fantasy in which people increasingly live in what Mills (1959) terms “second-hand worlds”; chained to their computer terminals, experiencing life through dehumanizing technology rather than through human contact and intimacy.

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 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. To the millions who have been drawn into it, the richness and vitality of computer- linked cultures is attractive, even addictive. (p. 3)

Example of Virtual environment: IRC

One of these rich and vital computer-linked cultures is the Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a multi-user synchronous “chat” line that was designed for social rather than business use. The IRC is comprised of various channels that indicate the subject matter being discussed within (such as the homosexual sex channel) in order to manage the traffic flow resulting when hundreds of people use the IRC simultaneously. Users type words on their screens which instantaneously reach other users; but without the benefit of nonverbal cues that express subtlety of meaning, IRC users must use a series of symbols in order to communicate efficiently with one another and develop a unique sense of community based on the unconventional boundaries of the medium. For example, IRC users compensate for the lack of nonverbal cues by typing what are essentially stage directions to one another that serve to indicate a range of emotions: typing *heeheehee* might indicate playful laughter, *falls down laughing* indicates hilarity, and other words such as *squeeze* or *smooch* indicate a user’s actions toward another user. These phrases or words are recognized symbolic conventions within the IRC community, and, as Reid (1991) indicates in her work on community on the IRC, “the textual cues utilised on IRC provide the symbols of interpretation and discourse that the users of IRC have devised to meet specific problems posed by situations they face in common. Without these textual cues to substitute for non-verbal language, the users of IRC would fail to constitute a community” (p. 18). Successful computer mediated communications, particularly within the IRC environment, depends on the use of these symbolic conventions. Despite the playful nature of these conventions, the expressions of emotion that they convey are, according to Reid, “not in any way thought to be shallow or ephemeral” (p. 13).

Ethical issues/ rules and codes

The CMC community also contains sanctions against those who violate its norms by ignoring Internet etiquette, sometimes called “netiquette,” essentially the ethics code of cyberspace. The two primary ethical principles governing the use of CMC are 1) individualism is honored and fostered, and 2) the network is good and must be protected (Krol, 1992, p. 35). Abuses such as hateful or antisocial postings on bulletin boards and using other people’s names or identities on IRC are discouraged and can be punished by means of ostracization from the community or through system operator-enforced severing of an individual’s link to the IRC (known as the “kill” function). Thus, the construction of the boundaries of community within cyberspace is not a completely arbitrary matter, and CMC may not be as egalitarian as its advocates suggest.

Disadvantage

? Computer bulletin boards serve to “add the final mechanism needed to insure that we never talk to people beyond our immediate friends and family on a personal level about anything. The global community, linked by terminals, replaces community where we are” (Schwartz, 1994).

? R]ather than providing a replacement for the crumbling public realm, virtual communities are actually contributing to its decline. They’re another thing keeping people indoors and off the streets. Just as TV produces couch potatoes, so on-line culture creates mouse potatoes, people who hide from real life and spend their whole life goofing off in cyberspace. (p 10)

? Access to CMC both economic access in terms of the ability to afford a computer and an Internet subscription as well as intellectual access in terms of the ability to read and comprehend the lexicon of virtual communities is critical to the notion that virtual community is a pre-selected community in which, despite the Internet’s egalitarian rhetoric, a true sense of equality will not be tested until the technology becomes widespread. Thus, we must recognize that contemporary virtual communities are essentially a class phen