your net:// Virtual communities can teach more than we want to know about neighbours

Are you lonely? On the internet someone may hear you scream. They may also hear more than they need to know about your mission in life, your peculiar interests, even your innermost thoughts.

Enter the world of virtual communities and find life's rich tapestry is just a mouse-click away. Here you can run the gamut of online optimism and pessimism - the earnest, the mundane, the nutters and the very, very sad.

The phenomenon is all over the web. But you will find the biggest congregations at sites such as AOL Hometown and Yahoo GeoCities.

There, vast collections of web pages are gathered together under categories such as cultures and beliefs, sports and recreation, family and home, and food, travel and the arts. They also make it easy for new members by offering free homepages using easy-to-follow templates.

Some are really just online extensions of existing organisations. For fringe groups such as the New Zealand Men for Equal Rights Association, the web gives a place to air views that might otherwise not be heard.

Reading some of them, you can see why. "Feminism: The State Ideology whereby women have rights, men have responsibilities, and children have their lives ruined."

While the web helps a group to get its message across, the ease with which it can be done also brings into question the sanctity of freedom of speech versus the harm done by organisations which incite racial hatred or neo-Nazi philosophy. Some argue such groups should be banned from the web. Others say it's better for such views to be expressed openly rather than to have them exist underground.

Some communities, such as extropy.org, are made for the web, because of their futurist beliefs. They're a group of "transhumanists" - people who want to live for ever. "We advocate using science to accelerate our move from human to a transhuman or posthuman condition."

Other sites start with a meaningless idea that blossoms into a kind of art form. In 1992, Clarke Robinson started riding buses around the San Francisco Bay area, interviewing and photographing people he met.

It started as a way to overcome his fear of talking to strangers, but along the way he found he "learned quite a bit."

Religion in its various guises features large in these virtual communities. For sheer dedication to faith against the odds, Glen Harry Enterprises is hard to beat. "At 15 years of age I was shown the work God wanted me to organise in the last years of this world's history ... Money will be necessary to finance these projects which God will provide as it is needed." Glen then outlines his seven enterprises - a dairy farm, recreational gardens, vegetable gardens, a restaurant in the city, health clinic in the country, sheep farm and radio station. Sounds like heaven.

But nothing really compares with the bizarre world of online journal-writers. Here people keep personal diaries about their everyday lives for all the world to see. A sample from Joanna: "So we watched Dawson's and talked about first kisses. She said she wanted Pacey as her bit on the side, and I said I wanted him as my bit on the side too. She pointed out that I didn't need a bit on the side, I just need a bit, but I was like, 'No no, I only want a side serving right now thanks'."

Why do they do it? Perhaps because they can. And maybe because others do - which really isn't a bad definition for what community is about.

But it does raise some questions about the psychology of virtual communities.

Prevailing wisdom says healthy individuals will still interact with real people, but may expand their social horizons in cyberspace. More radical is the view that as the web grows at an exponential rate, the virtual will take on more and more of the missing dimensions of social interaction.

For the moment, however, the web provides only some of the foundation blocks to build a community.

Mostly it gives a vehicle for publishing community philosophy and information. What's largely missing is interactivity - something the more successful web-based communities such as Slashdot have long recognised. E-mail lists, message boards, chatrooms, one-to-one live messaging and web rings which link like-minded groups all point the way forward for how virtual communities can provide direct contact with their members.

With greater use of interactive technologies, we may soon find it difficult to distinguish between what is a real and what is a virtual community. But you can't help thinking that many of the people in these online worlds should get out more often.

Links

AOL Hometown

Yahoo GeoCities

NZ Men for Equal Rights Ass'n

extropy.org

In transit with Clarke Robinson

Glen Harry Enterprises

Online journals at about.com

Online journals at journal.org.nz

Slashdot - News for nerds

WebRing

More links to virtual communities


Black Planet

ICQ

The Globe

Tripod

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