Community Considered
L. Jean Camp
What is a community? What purposes have communities served and failed to
serve? How can electronic communities server or fail to serve these needs?
I am not scholar of communities. However, it appears that the evaluation I have
read implies several functions of communities: companionship, logistical support,
trust evaluations, and prevention of ideological isolation. I argue that only in
logistical support do Internet communities fail to match or exceed geographical
communities.
First a point: there are different types of communities on the Internet. There are
chat areas, often with Web based interfaces. There are dlists, private and open.
There are Usenet forums, moderated and free for all. These all have different
characteristics.
Companionship
In terms of emotional support the Internet can match the real world community.
The emotional support offered by a community has always required conforming
to a norm. In the ideal community of Portugal, would a poor refugee from Africa
be accepted? It is not only the difficulty of exit but the difficulty of entry that
defines traditional communities. Consider those who have deviated from the
sometime arbitrary community norm, either by choice or by inherent
characteristic. That person must pay the high price of exit for one geographical
community, leave home completely, and find another community at some risk of
never achieving unity. The feminist of the twenties, the gay man of the fifties, the
person with AIDS today all may find themselves isolated in their physical home of
choice. So the offer of supportive companionship is conditional in a traditional
community.
Electronic communities can also exclude. Sub-groups of Usenet subscribers form
private (closed) lists. People get unsubscribed from even open d-lists. Specific
domains (most notably cmu.edu or mit.edu) get excluded from Internet chat.
Individuals get excluded from Usenet groups from the sheer force of group
loathing, or by every regular contributor putting the person in his or her kill file. (A
kill file filters in-coming mail so that mail with certain attributes, e.g. a name in the
from field, is transferred automatically and unseen to trash. On LotusNotes this
would be an ‘agent.’) Yet on the Internet one can always find a community that
will accept you as part of the norm, regardless of who you are.
Here is a critical difference -- when excluded from an electronic community there
is no increase in entry costs to the next community. In stable geographical
communities there can be very high entry costs. In very stable communities
people are often judged by their families. Thus changing communities can have a
very high price. The cost of exit in an on-line community is equal to the lose of
that community. That is, your only loss is what you got from it. In the Internet a
community is worth what you put into it. This is because only contributions can
make standing.
Logistical Support
In this one area the Internet fails most grievously. However, advances in the
service industry have made some level of distance logistical support possible.
Let me take one example, my own long term Internet community. It is admittedly
a fairly wired group of people, all with above median resources. This group
provides much companionship. We share information about jobs, dates,
marriages, divorces, pregnancy and of course child care. We share family fights.
One friend spent first stage labor on line.
We have provided for each other during difficulties. In Boston and the Bay Area
there are sub-groups which also have geographical community. These formed
from the electronic community. However there are many lone Midwestern and
western subscribers. These people have found real support not only in the form
of 1-800-flowers and phone calls. It is possible to fix dinner for a person across
the country with the aid of a phone and a credit card. New York Cheesecakes
can be shipped anywhere in America, even Phoenix at 101oF.
Certainly there is more to logistical support than dropping by with dinner or
sharing your opinion of that awful or awesome purchase. I can share recipes and
shopping, but I have never held the children of my distant co-subscribers, nor
can I get glass of water in Kansas at 5am. One thing Moore’s Law will never
change -- you cannot hug a virtual body. On this one dimension electronic
communities can fail, but not entirely.
Trust
One of the other issues considered is that communities enabled trust. Yet I would
argue that trust has traditionally been ill-served by community. Trust itself is now
being transformed from a community-based social evaluation to an explicit
evaluation. This is not a loss. In an informal evaluation people take cues which
are meaningless in themselves, and discriminatory in the whole. People evaluate
each other based on how similar they are to themselves: racial, regional, physical
attractiveness, charisma, and other completely meaningless information is
entered into each person’s trust evaluation.
Trust will become more formal as communities become more electronic. Even if
public key cryptography does not becomes ubiquitous, the mechanisms for
determining trust now being developed will require explicit decision making.
Person A must be approved by entity B for action Z before being trusted. And
extending trust for action Z does not imply trust for action Y.
Fraud works not because of the Internet but because we as humans extend trust
for simply silly reasons. "Of course I trusted the neighbor with my child. I had
borrowed his mower. He lives next door." This was true far before the Internet
was a gleam in the DOD’s electronic eye. On the Internet, trust can be based on
an evaluation of formal other’s claims. What do you know, are your credentials in
order, and what exactly are you trusted to do?
This has happened before. In an agrarian society economic trust is embodied as
credit at the local store. Credit might be denied on the basis of race and gender,
as these are community norms. Denial of credit in a community makes economic
survival difficult. Now credit is provided through formal and quantitative risk
evaluations. This makes credit easier to regulate, although I would by no means
suggest that the biases of the people involved no longer play a role.
Tolerance
The Internet has often been identified as a threat to diversity, in that it will create
Balkanized groups who cannot function together as a citizenry. There is some
threat of such separateness emerging but I argue that this threat will be
undermined by the availability of those with whom you disagree.
Recall the isolated individual in the geographic community. The Internet offers
that person the ability to find intellectual and spiritual community without leaving
a geographical community which has strong family or economic ties. Such a
lessening of isolation may mitigate the need to flee for a more supportive place,
and thereby provide to geographical communities a diversity they would
otherwise need not tolerate.
There is also the annoying tendency of adolescents to investigate anything
prohibited. (In this statement I have the greatest confidence of any in this
document.) Thus for the first time any thirteen year old is certain to be able to find
those groups and ideas abhorred by community and parental standards. Young
people can evaluate outcast groups as they represent themselves and as they
are represented by those who loathe them. To object to this reality is to assume
that the standards are right; that there is nothing to learn from open evaluation of
the coming generations. It is also to undervalue that cherished market place of
ideas.
Finally, Usenet forums do predispose individuals to flame wars yet they also
allow those who would never interact to meet as previously discussed. A meeting
between Act Up! and the Christian Coalition would be as fiery in real life as online, except that it would not happen. And when people talk some will, over time,
acknowledge the humanity of the other. It is less difficult to advocate the
extermination of a creature who is unknown than one with whom you have
corresponded. Of course this hope for world peace was extended at the dawn of
the radio age, and proved ill-founded.
I know that the Internet can make a difference in small ways. My dear friend from
tribal, Christian, eastern Indian would have met and a Brahman gentleman in
India. They met on a Usenet group about India, and months later flew across the
United States to wed. Both communities would have worked to prevent such
happiness from befalling this particular couple.
Summary
The normalization of trust and the formation of voluntary communities will drive
interesting social changes. Those changes won’t be all bad. And as for the high
percentage of Americans who would prefer to live in America in the fifties, I
disagree. North Carolina was segregated, sexist and un-air conditioned in the
fifties. I look forward to changes in public morality and human comfort on the
same order in the next four decades.