Internet Culture

David Porter, David Porter

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135209032
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Art
• Thema: Popular Culture in Art

The internet has recently grown from a fringe cultural phenomenon to a significant site of cultural production and transformation. Internet Culture maps this new domain of language, politics and identity, locating it within the histories of communication and the public sphere. Internet Culture offers a critical interrogation of the sustaining myths of the virtual world and of the implications of the current mass migration onto the electronic frontier. Among the topics discussed in Internet Culture are the virtual spaces and places created by the citizens of the Net and their claims to the hotly contested notion of "virtual community"; the virtual bodies that occupy such spaces; and the desires that animate these bodies. The contributors also examine the communication medium behind theworlds of the Net, analyzing the rhetorical conventions governing online discussion, literary antecedents, and potential pedagogical applications.

ONE

VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES

AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF CYBERSPACES

VIRTUALITY, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY

Shawn P. Wilbur

Internet Culture? Virtual Community?

“Virtual community” is certainly among the most used, and perhaps abused, phrases in the literature on computer-mediated communication (CMC). This should come as no surprise. An increasing number of people are finding their lives touched by collectivities which have nothing to do with physical proximity. A space has opened up for something like community on computer networks, at a time when so many forms of “real life” community seem under attack, perhaps even by the same techno-cultural forces that make Internet culture possible. We need to be particularly critical as we approach the tools we use to explore Internet culture, even the words we choose to employ. Consider the notion of “virtual community.” It reveals something about our presuppositions about both (unmodified, presumably “real”) community and (primarily computer) technology that this phrase even makes sense. It is more revealing that we might think of “virtual community” as a new arrival on the cultural scene.

What follows is an attempt to come to grips with at least some of the questions raised by the notion of “virtual community,” and particularly by its apparent acceptance as a phrase of choice among Internet users, CMC researchers and journalists alike. It is an “archeological” study in two rather different ways. The first section, which is an exploration—or perhaps excavation—of some of the possible cultural and etymological roots of the phrase “virtual community,” aims at unearthing a range of interpretive possibilities and spreading them out so we can begin the speculative (re)construction of concepts that we can use for rigorous research in CMC. The second section involves the exploration of slightly more literal ruins, as I examine what remains of two “virtual communities” that have already come and gone—a section of a text-base virtual reality system housed at MIT's Media Lab, and a voice-based “virtual village” created by Harlequin Romance in conjunction with one of its book series. Throughout, the work is driven by my sense that Internet users and CMC researchers have been hasty in their adoption of tools and terminology, but also by a feeling that the choices we have made in haste may prove to be surprisingly powerful, assuming we learn to use them with eyes wide open.

It is probably worth noting that my investments in these subjects are complex and multiple. Researchers on the Internet seem to show a high tendency toward “going native,” and I fear I am no exception. Although I have attempted to write what follows in the voice of a CMC researcher and academic, I wear numerous other hats on the Internet—nonprofessional user, electronic publisher, MOO “wizard,” and owner of several electronic mailing lists, among others. I suspect some of those other voices will have their say before we are through. Of course, reference to the personal—and the resulting scholarly discomfort—seems to be characteristic of much of the emerging literature on Internet culture. This may simply be a logical result of the strangely solitary work that many CMC researchers are engaged in, sitting alone at their computers, but surrounded by a global multitude.

The Right Tools for the Job

We use words as tools, as individuals and as scholars. On the Internet we use little else. Whatever else Internet culture might be, it is still largely a text-based affair. Words are not simply tools which we can use in any way we see fit. They come to us framed by specific histories of use and meaning, and are products of particular ideological struggles. Richard Dawkins’ notion of the “meme” may help us here. The meme is the cultural equivalent of a gene, a basic “unit of imitation.” As genes act as replicators for biological structures, memes replicate cultures¹. If we think of terms like virtual community or computer-mediated communication as the result of memetic (re)combinations, then perhaps we are more likely to be concerned about their particular inheritances, but we are also encouraged to consider the hardiness of our concepts. We ought to be on the lookout for recessive memes, and for the circumstances where elements of our memetic heritage might recombine in ways which do not enhance our possibilities for cultural survival.

The current benchmark for any study of virtual community is Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Rheingold's earlier Virtual Reality established him as both a sharp-eyed observer and talented popularizer of “new edge” technologies². According to Rheingold,

Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace.³

“Sufficient human feeling” is a rather imprecise measure, full of assumptions about the “human” and about what emotions will count as “feeling.” And we are left to wonder about the ends to which this “human feeling” will be “sufficient.” We are left very much in the dark about the process of community development—perhaps “generation” or “genesis” would be as appropriate—but we know that the key ingredients are communication and feeling. To his credit, Rheingold is not inclined to claim any great definitional rigor, although he provides plenty of indications about his own feelings. Judging from the examples which he uses, Rheingold is most prepared to see “community” in those groups that move from CMC to face-to-face interaction, as well as in those who share specific, or useful, details of “real life” (RL).⁴ It seems that for Rheingold, despite his immersion in certain virtual communities and his guarded enthusiasm for the uses of CMC, the best virtual community is an extension of “real community”—though not, I think, in Marshall McLuhan's sense of transformative extension and amputation.

Another aspect of Rheingold's study that we ought to note, at least in passing, is his invocation of the “electronic frontier” metaphor, particularly in his use of the term “homesteading” to describe “pioneers” in virtual community-building. Because of organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which have played an important role in addressing new issues of civil liberty and privacy relating to CMC, the notion of an electronic frontier has gained considerable currency online, even among computer users who might otherwise have reservations about a metaphor so steeped in traditions of imperialism, rough justice and the sometimes violent opposition of any number of others.⁵ In the complex social and legal spaces of Internet culture, groups like EFF seem to be wearing the white hats, but we may want to consider the memetic heritage they carry with them. In any event, we should take note of the connection made between community and the near-primitive conditions of a frontier.

Community

From here, we must proceed carefully. A little bit of etymological spadework only serves to show how complicated the issues are.⁶ Community seems to refer primarily to relations of commonality between persons and objects, and only rather imprecisely to the site of such community. What is important is a holding-in-common of qualities, properties, identities or ideas. The roots of community are sunk deep into rather abstract terrain. For example, community has achieved a remarkable flexibility in its career as a political term. It can be used to mean a quite literal holding-in-common of goods, as in a communist society, or it can refer much more broadly to the state and its citizens. In common usage, it can also refer to the location within which a community is gathered. Under the influence of bureaucracy and cartographic standards, this more common usage reduces the holding-in-common of the community to a matter of proximity. Community becomes shorthand for community-of-location, although we hardly presume anything like joint ownership.

A personal example will clarify what is at stake here. My earliest recollections of the word “community” are of seeing it on road maps, back-seat driving as my father steered the family car through the rather desolate expanses of the southern San Joaquin Valley. I would track our route from town to town— except that most of the towns in that part of the world were little more than crossroads with perhaps a gas station and a few trailers nearby. The maps designated these tiny towns, with a population under some magic number which I have long since forgotten, as communities. As a child, then, I imagined that a community was an empty, or nearly nonexistent, town.

This lowest common denominator for community is certainly far from Rheingold's “sufficient human feeling.” Yet these tiny rural sites resonate with a discourse of homesteading and frontiers, if only to draw a clear line between those communities that grew to become larger dots on the map, merging into one another as they spread, and those that remain isolated. Here is one place to begin to ask questions about the ends of the homesteading process—about issues of ownership and enterprise, the division of labor and the establishment of law and order. For the most part, Rheingold leaves these questions open. Are his “homesteaders” the relatively well-to-do patrons of high-priced services like the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link)?⁷ If so, then what role are the less “civilized” or less affluent denizens of the Internet destined to play? For the moment, the white hats at EFF and elsewhere seem inclined to defend outlaws and “savages,” but it may be that their role is somewhat obscured by the relative absence of real law on the Internet thus far.

The Virtual

In everyday speech, the “virtual” seems most often to refer to that which appears to be (but is not) real, authentic or proper—although it may have the same effects. Even in this colloquial form it attests to the possibility that seeming and being might be confused, and that the confusion might not matter in the end. But this sense of the virtual arises from a complex history of relations between reality, appearance and goodness. The roots of “virtuality” are in “virtue”, and therefore in both power and morality. In an archaic form, the virtual and the virtuous were synonymous. Another sense of the virtual— which we might think is unconnected—refers to optics, where the virtual image is, for example, that which appears in the mirror. But it may be that all of these etymological threads finally wind together.

The deepest roots of virtuality seem to reach back into a religious world view where power and moral goodness are united in virtue. And the characteristic of the virtual is that it is able to produce effects, or to produce itself as an effect even in the absence of the “real effect.” The air of the miraculous that clings to virtue helps to obscure the distinction between real effects of power and/or goodness and effects that are as good as real. The two uses of the term seem to have been concurrent. Perhaps this is an almost necessary effect of the highly metaphorical world of a Christian church that can conjure the (virtual) body of Christ anyplace “where two or three are gathered together in [Jesus’] name” (Matthew 18:20), or that at one time invested authority for an entire religion in an elite council or “virtual church.”

A more secular understanding of virtue begins by assigning it to more physical powers, so that virtue is equated with health, strength and sexual purity. These are, of course, still closely tied to notions of morality. Between this physical virtue and the virtuality of appearances there may in fact be some sort of discontinuity. We can draw on what we know of the history of Protestantism to suggest at least one possible bridge between the two. Think of “visible saints,” caught between an unknown but predestined fate and the demands of a culture that demanded “proofs” of salvation.⁸ You can perhaps see how a good (apparently moral) appearance can come to be as good as a good heart. Following Max Weber, you can see how the preoccupation with the former came to largely replace concern for the latter.

The optical definition of the virtual undoubtedly shares some elements of the miraculous, but refers specifically to the realm of appearances. Optical technologies deceive us in potentially useful ways, by bringing that which can't be seen into view—via reflection, refraction, magnification, remote viewing or simulation. We need only turn on the television to see how powerful these technologies can be. It is no wonder that the promise of immersive virtual reality has caused so much controversy. And perhaps it should be no surprise that this extreme form of optical virtuality has given rise to a fresh outburst of moral concern, such as the media's titillated fascination with “cybersex” and “teledildonics.” Behind the rather tiresome, but by no means novel, interest in “dirty tech” there is a more intense and interesting concern about the blurring...