Communities in Cyberspace

Peter Kollock, Marc Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415191401
• eBook ISBN: 9781134654116
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This wide-ranging introductory text looks at the virtual community of cyberspace and analyses its relationship to real communities lived out in today's societies. Issues such as race, gender, power, economics and ethics in cyberspace are grouped under four main sections and discussed by leading experts:

* identity
* social order and control
* community structure and dynamics
* collective action.

This topical new book displays how the idea of community is being challenged and rewritten by the increasing power and range of cyberspace. As new societies and relationships are formed in this virtual landscape, we now have to consider the potential consequences this may have on our own community and societies.

Clearly and concisely written with a wide range of international examples, this edited volume is an essential introduction to the sociology of the internet. It will appeal to students and professionals, and to those concerned about the changing relationships between information technology and a society which is fast becoming divided between those on-line and those not.

Part one
Introduction

Chapter 1
Communities in cyberspace

Peter Kollock and Marc A. Smith

The sociologists are going to love the next 100 years.

John C. Dvorak (1996)

Since 1993, computer networks have grabbed enormous public attention. The major news and entertainment media have been filled with stories about the “information superhighway” and of the financial and political fortunes to be made on it. Computer sales continue to rise and more and more people are getting connected to “the Net.”¹ Computer networks, once an obscure and arcane set of technologies used by a small elite, are now widely used and the subject of political debate, public interest, and popular culture. The “information superhighway” competes with a collection of metaphors that attempt to label and define these technologies. Others, like “cyberspace,” “the Net,” “online,” and “the Web,” highlight different aspects of network technology and its meaning, role, and impact. Whichever term is used, it is clear that computer networks allow people to create a range of new social spaces in which to meet and interact with one another.

Instead of people talking to machines, computer networks are being used to connect people to people (Wellman et al. 1996).² In cyberspace the economies of interaction, communication, and coordination are different than when people meet face-to-face. These shifts make the creation of thousands of spaces to house conversations and exchanges between far-flung groups of people practical and convenient. Using network interaction media like email, chat, and conferencing systems like the Usenet, people have formed thousands of groups to discuss a range of topics, play games, entertain one another, and even work on a range of complex collective projects. These are not only communication media–they are group media, sustaining and supporting many-to-many interactions (Licklider et al. 1978; Harasim 1993).

What kinds of social spaces do people create with networks? Two opposing visions are popular. One highlights the positive effects of networks and their benefits for democracy and prosperity. A prominent proponent is Al Gore (1993), who captures this vision by saying, “Our new ways of communicating will entertain as well as inform. More importantly, they will educate, promote democracy, and save lives. And in the process they will also create a lot of new jobs. In fact, they’re already doing it .” The promise is that networks will create new places of assembly that will generate opportunities for employment, political participation, social contact, and entertainment. At their best, networks are said to renew community by strengthening the bonds that connect us to the wider social world while simultaneously increasing our power in that world.

An alternative view notes that this glowing vision is in part driven by significant investments in public relations, advertising, and political rhetoric.³ Critics see a darker outcome in which individuals are trapped and ensnared in a “net” that predominantly offers new opportunities for surveillance and social control. For Theodore Roszak (1986: xii), “information technology has the obvious capacity to concentrate political power, to create new forms of social obfuscation and domination.” While these critics do not rule out the idea that computers and networks increase the power of individuals, they believe that networks will disproportionately increase the strength of existing concentrations of power.

The chapters in this volume share a common understanding that the kinds of interactions and institutions that are emerging in cyberspace are more complicated than can be captured in one-sided utopian or dystopian terms. These chapters do not ask whether online interaction is “good” or “bad.” Our focus is on describing and analyzing patterns of online social interaction and organization as they exist.

The Internet is a strategic research site in which to study fundamental social processes. It provides a level of access to the details of social life and a durability of the traces of social interaction that is unprecedented.⁴ We use this research site to investigate how social action and organization change as they are refracted through online interaction. How do the economies (taking that term very broadly) of social life shift? What becomes easier to do? What becomes more difficult? And what are the aggregate consequences of these changes? The outcomes are not uniformly positive or negative. The new opportunities and constraints online interaction creates are doubled-edged, leading to results that can amplify both beneficial and noxious social processes.

Technology has its most profound effect when it alters the ways in which people come together and communicate. In this volume, we focus on computer network systems that directly support the interaction of people with other people. Before we turn to a discussion of the chapters in this volume, we review the types of systems discussed here and offer some technical background.

The landscape of cyberspace

Each online communication system structures interaction in a particular way, in some cases with dramatic effect on the types of social organizations that emerge from peopleusing them. We examine in turn email and discussion lists, Usenet and BBSs, text chat, MUDs, World Wide Web (WWW) sites, and graphical worlds.

Email and discussion lists

Email and discussion lists are the oldest and most popular form of interaction on the Internet.⁵ Email allows an individual to send a message directly to another person. However, email is often used to go beyond a one-to-one interaction. In an email discussion list a message sent to a group address is then copied and sent to all the email addresses on a list. When people direct a series of messages and responses to the list, a group discussion can develop. As of 1998, there are tens of millions of email users and thousands of public mailing lists as well as hundreds of thousands of less formal discussion lists in existence.⁶ These lists are maintained for the discussion and distribution of information on thousands of topics. This may be the most common form of group interaction on the Internet, and a number of lists contain thousands or tens of thousands of members.

Email discussion lists have some important qualities that distinguish them from other Internet communication tools. Email lists are typically owned by a single individual or small group. Since all messages sent to the list must pass through a single point, email lists offer their owners significant control over who can contribute to their group. List owners can personally review all requests to be added to a list, can forbid anyone from contributing to the list if they are not on the list themselves, and even censor specific messages that they do not want broadcast to the list as a whole. Because active review requires significant time and effort, most email lists are run as open spaces, allowing anyone to join the list and anyone to contribute to it. Still, even open lists can be selectively closed or controlled by their owners when faced with disruption. Most email lists operate as benign dictatorships sustained by the monopoly power that the list owner wields over the boundaries and content of their group. As a result, email lists are often distinguished by their relatively more ordered and focused activity.

Usenet and BBSs

Email discussion lists are asynchronous media. Interaction is structured into turns, but a reply may occur minutes or months after the prior turn. There are a number of benefits to asynchronous interaction. A group can interact without everyone gathering at a particular time. As a result people on very different schedules or in distant time zones can still exchange messages and sustain discussions.

Bulletin board systems (BBSs–also known as conferencing systems) are another form of asynchronous communication that refine email discussion lists in a number of ways. Most BBSs allow participants to create topical groups in which a series of messages, similar to email messages, can be strung together one after another. There are a number of conferencing systems. Well-known ones include the Usenet, the WELL (picospan),ECHO (caucus), and the bulletin board discussion groups run on the commercial online services such as America Online and the Microsoft Network. Each sustains a wide collection of topics of discussion and an ongoing give-and-take between participants. BBSs differ from email discussion lists in another way. Email is a “push” media–messages are sent to people without them necessarily doing anything. In contrast, conferencing systems are “pull” media–people must select groups and messages they want to read and actively request them.

The Usenet is the largest conferencing system and has a unique form of social organization. The Usenet is composed of a distributed database of messages that is passed through an informal global network of systems that agree to a standard message format. As of 1998, tens of thousands of “newsgroups” are carried over the Usenet, each containing from a few dozen to tens of thousands of messages. On an average day tens of thousands of different people contribute hundreds of thousands of messages to the Usenet. A new site “joins” the Usenet simply by finding any existing site that is willing to pass along a copy of the daily “feed” (the collection of messages it receives). As a result, the Usenet has no central authority, no single source of power that can enforce boundaries and police behavior. No one owns most Usenet newsgroups; most newsgroups are anarchic in the technical sense of the term–they have no central authority though they do have an order and structure. Almost anyone can read the contents of a Usenet newsgroup, create entirely new newsgroups, or contribute to one.⁷ This makes the Usenet a more interesting and challenging social space than systems that are ruled by central authorities. Whatever order exists in the Usenet is the product of a delicate balance between individual freedom and collective good. Many newsgroups are wild, unordered places, but what is startling is how many are well organized and productive.

Text chat

Text chat differs from email lists and BBSs in that it supports synchronous communication– a number of people can chat in real time by sending lines of text to one another. Chat is one of the most popular forms of interaction on the Internet, and accounts for a sizeable proportion of the revenue of the commercial online providers such as America Online. Text chat is often organized around the idea of channels on a text-based “Citizens’ Band (CB) radio” system. Most chat systems support a great number of “channels” dedicated to a vast array of subjects and interests.

Text chat also uses a centralized server that grants the server owner a great deal of power over access to the system and to individual channels. In the commercial chat services, chat channels frequently are policed by the provider’s staff or by appointed volunteers. In the largest non-commercial system–Internet Relay Chat (IRC)–each channel has an owner who can eject people from the channel, control who enters the channel, and decide how many people can enter.

MUDs

Email discussion lists and conferencing systems are based on the models of postal mail and bulletin boards. Text chat is based on the model of CB radio. In contrast, Multi-User Domains or Dungeons (MUDs) attempt to model physical places as well as face-to-face interaction.⁸ MUDs are text-based virtual realities that maintain a sense of space by linking different “rooms” together. MUDs grew out of interest in adventure-style games that presented a textual description of different rooms and the objects in them and allowed the player to move from room to room, take and drop objects, and do things such as fight dragons and solve puzzles. With the growing availability of networked computers on university campuses in the late 1970s, MUDs were developed to allow people to play Adventure games with other people instead of against computers.

Since the early 1980s MUDs have become increasingly sophisticated and complex. Modern social MUDs allow users to build new spaces, create objects, and to use powerful programming languages to automate their behavior. While many MUDs continue to focus on combat role-playing, many “social” MUDs have become a means for widely dispersed groups to maintain personal contact. MUDs incorporate a range of other modes of communication like email and discussion groups to link users with other users. But like text chat, their key quality is that they support synchronous communication–people interact with each other in real time. MUDs allow a number of people in the same “room” to meet and talk by sending lines of text to one another. MUDs often support simulations of the multi-channel quality and nuances of face-to-face interaction by framing the lines of text users send to one another as “say,” “think,” or “emote” messages. This allows users to provide meta-commentary on their turns of talk and to create “gestures” or make parenthetical comments.

Like email lists, MUDs are typically owned by the individual or group that provides the hardware and software and the technical skill needed to maintain the system. Because these skills and resources have until very recently been rare, owners of MUD servers have had nearly complete control over the system. MUD owners are often referred to as “Gods.” Gods can delegate their power in whole or in part to selected participants, who commonly take on the status of “Wizards.” Other users can be granted more access to the computer’s memory and network capacity, allowing them to build larger and more elaborate virtual spaces and objects. Users can be granted or denied the right to enter the MUD, be given the power to build new objects or enter specific rooms, and can have limited abilities to communicate with other users. MUDs can contain sophisticated forms of social stratification and elaborate hierarchies.

World Wide Web sites

While the World Wide Web has been hugely popular for some time, it is only more recently that it has become a site for interaction. In its original incarnation, the Web served as a powerful way of accessing and linking documents. Web sites can now support both asynchronous and synchronous communication. Through the use of varioussoftware tools, Web sites can host asynchronous discussion groups as well as real-time text chat.

Because of its graphical user interface and the ability to integrate images and sounds, Web sites can create a more intuitive and richer context for text chat. As navigating through a Web site is a familiar experience for most online users, entering into a discussion can be easier than learning a propriety system on a BBS. In addition, Web sites can increase the channels of communication, setting the mood or style of the interaction through layout design, images, and sounds.

Web sites can also serve as a separate supplement to text-based communities. For example, a number of MUDs have elaborate Web sites that are used to collect images and documents related to the MUD, as well as links to the personal Web pages of its members. While text communication can be a very powerful form of interaction, the fact that MUDs establish Web sites suggests that the Web’s interface and graphical design provide important benefits.

Graphical worlds

As computing power and network bandwidth increase, the kind of media that people can use to interact with one another expands to include images, sound, and two- or three-dimensional models of spaces. Real-time video and audio interaction tools have developed, as have online interaction systems that integrate text chat with a visual representation of each participant (often called “avatars”) and some representation of a place. Some of these graphical worlds allow people to engage in a real-time audio conversation, a high-tech return to the low-tech telephone party line.

As these systems become more sophisticated they have taken on some of the characteristics of other older media. For example, WorldsAway (www.worldsaway.com)– a descendant of the earliest graphical interaction system, Habitat–has developed a social structure similar to that found in MUDs. In WorldsAway, some users become “acolytes” who serve as helpers in the community and have a higher status than regular members. For other users a token economy adds another form of social stratification, creating virtual millionaires as well as beggars.

While these new graphical spaces present interesting research possibilities, the case studies in this volume all concentrate on text-based social systems. This was done because text-based systems have been in existence much longer than graphical systems. Hence, social interaction and groups in text-based systems have a longer history, are often more developed and elaborated, and there is a greater variety of textual online social spaces to compare and contrast. Most of the lessons drawn in these case studies of text-based interaction are also applicable to the emerging graphical worlds.

Each of the parts in this volume explores the implications of online interaction in terms of a key concept, and each part builds on the previous one. The chapters are organized into four major groups. We treat in turn issues of identity, social order and control, community structure and dynamics, and collective action.

Identity

We begin with a consideration of identity, the basic building block of social interaction. All of our interactions, even those with strangers, are shaped by our sense of with whom we are interacting. In face-to-face and telephone interactions there are a wealth of cues of varying reliability to indicate our identity and our intentions. Our clothes, voices, bodies, and gestures signal messages about status, power, and group membership. We rely on our ability to recognize fellow group members in order to know who we can turn to and what we can expect. Our ability to identify others also allows us to hold individuals accountable for their actions.

Online interaction strips away many of the cues and signs that are part of face-to-face interaction. This poverty of signals is both a limitation and a resource, making certain kinds of interaction more difficult but also providing room to play with one’s identity. The resulting ambiguity over identity has been a source of inspiration to many who believe that because people’s physical appearance is not manifest online (yet), individuals will be judged by the merit of their ideas, rather than by their gender, race, class, or age. But others (including authors in this volume) argue that traditional status hierarchies and inequalities are reproduced in online interaction and perhaps are even magnified. In Part 2 we examine how identity is established online as well as the durability of the institutions of race and gender in online interaction.

Honesty and deception

How is identity–true or counterfeit–established in online communities? This question is at the heart of Judith Donath’s chapter on “Identity and deception in the virtual community.” Deception can bring great benefits, but deception is...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures and Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Part One Introduction
• Part Two Identity
• Part Three Social Order and Control
• Part Four Community Structure and Dynamics
• Part Five Collective Action