A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community: A Cybernaut’s-Eye View
Communities can emerge from and exist within computer-linked groups, but that technical linkage of electronic personae is not sufficient to create a community.
Archives: Expert Predictions
A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community: A Cybernaut’s-Eye View
New technologies tend to change old ways of doing things. Is the human need for community going to be the next technology commodity?
A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community
We need to think as teams here, across boundaries of academic discipline, industrial affiliation, nation, to understand, and thus perhaps regain control of, the way human communities are being transformed by communication technologies.
A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community
The playing field in the global telecommunications industry will never be level, but the degree of individual freedom available through telecommunication technologies in the future may depend upon whether the market for goods and services in cyberspace remains open for new companies to create new uses for CMC.
A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community
Who controls what kinds of information is communicated in the international networks where virtual communities live? Who censors, and what is censored? Who safeguards the privacy of individuals in the face of technologies that make it possible to amass and retrieve detailed personal information about every member of a large population? The answers to these political questions might make moot any more abstract questions about cultures in cyberspace.
A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community: A Cybernaut’s-Eye View
People are going to do what people always do with a new communication technology: use it in ways never intended or foreseen by its inventors, to turn old social codes inside out and make new kinds of communities possible. CMC will change us, and change our culture, the way telephones and televisions and cheap video cameras changed us – by altering the way we perceive and communicate.
A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community: A Cybernaut’s-Eye View
The age of the online pioneers will end soon, and the cyberspace settlers will come en-masse. Telecommuters who might have thought they were just working from home and avoiding one day of gridlock on the freeway will find themselves drawn into a whole new society.
Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?
CMC does not, at this point, hold the promise of enhancing democracy because it promotes communities of interest that are just as narrowly defined as current public factions defined by identity (whether it be racial, sexual, or religious). Public discourse ends when identities become the last, unyielding basis for argumentation that strives ideally to achieve consensus based on a common good.
Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?
The likely result of the development of virtual communities through CMC will be that a hegemonic culture will maintain its dominance. Certainly, it cannot be assumed that the current political and technical elites would willingly cede their position of dominance or knowingly sow the seeds of their own destruction. Indeed, it seems most likely that the virtual public sphere brought about by CMC will serve a cathartic role, allowing the public to feel involved rather than to advance actual participation. Communities seem more likely to be formed or reinforced when action is needed, as when a country goes to war, rather than through discourse alone.
Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?
As CMC grows in popularity, there will be less need for face-to-face interaction. It is one of the supreme ironies of the utopian view of CMC that it is likely to reduce that felt sense of community that it so nostalgically seems to uphold as virtuous. In its place will be a community of interest in which members will be able to drift in and out. One of the key aspects of community is having to deal with and resolve conflicts. It is either the height of arrogance or defeat when one chooses or is forced to leave his or her community over an unresolved conflict. Typically, leaving a community is emotionally traumatic. Leaving a virtual community might be as easy as changing the channel on a television set.