Howard Rheingold

Społeczność wirtualna

Howard Rheingold - The Virtual Community_ Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)

Since the summer of 1985, for an average of two hours a day, seven days a week, I've been plugging my personal computer into my telephone and making contact with the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link)--a computer conferencing system that enables people around the world to carry on public conversations and exchange private electronic mail (e-mail).

The idea of a community accessible only via my computer screen sounded cold to me at first, but I learned quickly that people can feel passionately about e-mail and computer conferences.

Millions of people on every continent also participate in the computer-mediated social groups known as virtual communities,

The virtual village of a few hundred people I stumbled upon in 1985 grew to eight thousand by 1993.

. It became clear to me during the first months of that history that I was participating in the self-design of a new kind of culture. I watched the community's social contracts stretch and change as the people who discovered and started building the WELL in its first year or two were joined by so many others. Norms were established, challenged, changed, reestablished, rechallenged, in a kind of speeded-up social evolution.

he WELL felt like an authentic community to me from the start because it was grounded in my everyday physical world. WELLites who don't live within driving distance of the San Francisco Bay area are constrained in their ability to participate in the local networks of face-to-face acquaintances. By now, I've attended real-life WELL marriages, WELL births, and even a WELL funeral.

Three months after I joined, I went to my first WELL party at the home of one of the WELL's online moderators. I looked around at the room full of strangers when I walked in. It was one of the oddest sensations of my life. I had contended with these people, shot the invisible breeze around the electronic watercooler, shared alliances and formed bonds, fallen off my chair laughing with them, become livid with anger at some of them. But there wasn't a recognizable face in the house. I had never seen them before.

It might have looked to my daughter as if I were alone at my desk the night she caught me chortling online, but from my point of view I was in living contact with old and new friends, strangers and colleagues: I was in the Parenting conference on the WELL, participating in an informational and emotional support group for a friend who just learned his son was diagnosed with leukemia. I was in MicroMUSE, a role-playing fantasy game of the twenty-fourth century (and science education medium in disguise), interacting with students and professors who know me only as "Pollenator." I was in TWICS, a bicultural community in Tokyo; CIX, a community in London; CalvaCom, a community in Paris; and Usenet, a collection of hundreds of different discussions that travel around the world via electronic mail to millions of participants in dozens of countries.

I was following an eyewitness report from Moscow during the coup attempt, or China during the Tiananmen Square incident, or Israel and Kuwait during the Gulf War, passed directly from citizen to citizen through an ad hoc network patched together from cheap computers and ordinary telephone lines, cutting across normal geographic and political boundaries by piggybacking on the global communications infrastructure. I was monitoring a rambling real-time dialogue among people whose bodies were scattered across three continents, a global bull session that seems to blend wit and sophomore locker-room talk via Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a medium that combines the features of conversation and writing. IRC has accumulated an obsessive subculture of its own among undergraduates by the thousands from Adelaide to Arabia.

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 if 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.

You can use virtual communities to find a date, sell a lawnmower, publish a novel, conduct a meeting.

Others, such as the most addicted players of Minitel in France or Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) on the international networks, spend eighty hours a week or more pretending they are someone else, living a life that does not exist outside a computer. Because MUDs not only are susceptible to pathologically obsessive use by some people but also create a strain on computer and MUDding has been banned at universities such as Amherst and on the entire continent of Australia

Literatura

1. Howard Rheingold, Talking Tech: A conversational Guide to Science and Technology, with Howard Levine (1982)
2. Howard Rheingold, Higher Creativity: Liberating the Unconscious for Breakthrough Insight, with Willis Harman (1984)
3. Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology (free in HTML form) (1985)
   1. Rheingold H., Narzędzia ułatwiające myślenie. Historia i przyszłość metod poszerzania możliwości umysłu, przeł. J. Szporko, Warszawa 2003.
4. Howard Rheingold, Out of the Inner Circle, with Bill Landreth (1985)#
5. Howard Rheingold, They Have a Word for It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words & Phrases (1988)
6. Howard Rheingold, The Cognitive Connection: Thought and Language in Man and Machine, with Howard Levine (1987)
7. Howard Rheingold, Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind (1988)
8. Howard Rheingold, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, with Stephen LaBerge (1990)
9. Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality, Summit Books: Nowy Jork 1991.
10. Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, (free in HTML form) (1993) ISBN 0-201-60870-7
11. Howard Rheingold, Millennium Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools and Ideas for the Twenty-First Century (1995)
12. Howard Rheingold, The Heart of the WELL (1998)
13. Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (2000 reprint with some new material) ISBN 0-262-68121-8
14. Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (2002)
15. Howard Rheingold, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online (2012) ISBN 0-262-01745-8
16. Howard Rheingold, Mind Amplifier: Can Our Digital Tools Make Us Smarter? (2012)