First Draft, Short Review

Virtual Utopias and Online Interaction
Thomas More first coined the word “Utopia” for his didactic novel of the same name in 1515. The word’s translation means, literally, “No Place,” since More’s imagined edenic community did not actually exist. Today, our best chance at a perfect no-place seems to be in the non-space of cyberspace. In late 2007, it seems almost ridiculous to talk about whether online communities exist; the evidence of such communities on the internet is overwhelming. The question, however, was easily warranted in the early days of what would become “the internet.” Just twenty years ago, scholars were asking “Can communities exist online?” and “If so, how are they better (or worse) than ‘real’ communities?” What seems to unite these questions, and the driving force behind much of online-interaction research is a Utopianist rhetoric: A progress narrative that searches for the perfect community. This essay will examine both the early questions of the existence of community online, as well as the later, more explicit arguments for online community as Utopia.


Imagined Communities and Online Groups
Although the focus in past years has moved from one of ontology to one of axiology, even in the earliest conceptions of online communities, a definite Utopianist thread can be found fairly easily. I present these chronologically primarily to emphasize the conversation between writers and scholars, but also because technology’s tendency to grow exponentially means that the nature of “online” changes with each passing day—let alone month or year. I begin with descriptions of one of the first online communities—or at least the first to be written about extensively—the WELL. Many scholars begin here, possibly because of the WELL’s extensive archives and utopian reputation.

Howard Rheingold, in The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (1993), was the first to write extensively about his experiences at the WELL. Early in his introduction, Rheingold glorifies the internet as an egalitarian venture, he and continues to espouse that point of view throughout this first book: “The technology that makes virtual communities possible has the potential to bring enormous leverage to ordinary citizens at relatively little cost—intellectual leverage, social leverage, commercial leverage, and, most important, political leverage” (1993, p. xix). After an introduction that lays out Rheingold’s excitement for the potential of the internet, the remainder of the book blends theoretical considerations of what Benedict Anderson calls “imagined communities” with the a history of the WELL, and Rhengold’s own participation in it. For Rheingold, the WELL—and we might extrapolate to all online communities here—was “a full-scale subculture” (1993, p. xvi) and a “new kind of culture” where “Norms were established, challenged, changed, reestablished, rechallenged, in a kind of speeded up social evolution” (1993, p.xvi). Few argue with Rheingold that the WELL is, in fact, community; his evidence of interaction both online and in the Real World is extensive, from excerpts from discussions to narratives about his first experiences and later involvement. As an integral part of the WELL community, Rheingold offers a particular participant-observer perspective (“do-it-yourself anthropology,” he says in the introduction), but is also clearly biased.

The history of the WELL might be able to account for its Utopian echoes. As Rheingold, Seabrook, and Matei explain, the WELL was born as a project for the Whole Earth Catalog. Seabrook (1997)succinctly states “The basic idea was that by providing citizens with the technology to do more things for themselves…you could free people from their dependence on mass consumer products and corporate marketing” (p. 147). Utopian notions are built into the WELL, but whether or not the WELL is/was actually Utopia, however, is up for debate. John Seabrook, writing first for The New Yorker, then expanding to Deeper: My Two Year Odyssey in Cyberspace,” began his time at the WELL as a “lurker”—someone who watched the conversations in the postings, but did not participate. Not surprisingly, Seabrook begins his descriptions as an outsider, and thus has a very different viewpoint from the insider Rheingold; his outsider status makes him vulnerable to initiations and “flames” from the long-time users, and Seabrook includes these not-so-flattering comments in his text. Seabrook also does not hesitate to point out the disagreements and arguments that run rampant through the group: “Most of the time the WELL was peaceful and bucolic….But every now and then a thread would erupt into what was known on the WELL as a ‘thrash’” (152). In moving from “lurker” to “poster,” Seabrook experienced his own thrashings, emotional debates between angered community members, the text of which he reproduces and comments upon. However, Seabrook concludes that this insider/outsider divide, while not exactly Utopian, helps create a sense of community; internal disagreements and initiation rites are inherently part of any community, and they tend to help a community form its identity. It’s not surprising that Seabrook begins to echo Rheingold as his description of the WELL moves from insider to outsider status; he eventually states that “the WELL was the closest thing to a functional utopia of free speech of any place I encountered in my two years before the [computer] screen” (p. 185).

Some point out here that the WELL may be a special case; the community was active not just online, but it centered around a relatively small geographical area as well. Even Rheingold himself reminds us that “The WELL felt like an authentic community to me from the start because it was grounded in my every day physical world” (1993, p. xvi) For Rheingold, it was grounded in his physical world, but for others, online communities may be entirely ephemeral—users may never meet, may never even be in the same time zone. The lack of interaction outside the bulletin board, blog, or other online platform can easily lead to stresses that the early WELL easily resolved. In the revised edition of The Virtual Community, Rheingold addresses his critics in an additional chapter, titled “Rethinking Virtual Communities,” by helpfully outlining, and then answering a series of questions that emerged from his first book: “Is the use of the phrase virtual community a perversion of the notion of community? What do we mean by community, anyway? What should we know about the history of technological transformations of community?....Are virtual communities simulacra for authentic community, in an age where everything is commodified?....Most important, are hopes for a revitalization of the democratic public sphere dangerously naïve?” (p. 325). These questions continue to frame discussions of online community today, and Rheingold offers his own story of moving from naïve enthusiasm to knowledgeable critique as an example of how quickly the conversation about these issues can change. While this older Rheingold is far less naive, however, he is still equally enthusiastic, and he offers a thought experiment of ways to use internet-generated funds responsibly, “not…an unattainably ideal society expected to emerge magically from technology” (p. 391). The question of the quality of “community” in “virtual community,” he reminds us, is still up for debate among researchers.

By the late 1990s, however, scholars seem to agree that online communities are, in fact, communities; the term “community” itself undergoes some redefinition with the emergence of online groups, and online groups begin to see themselves as real, working communities. As the internet became more accessible to more people (with the evolution of the World Wide Web and America Online), scholars began to question not the existence of these groups, but their qualities, and their inherent potential to cause social change in the Real World. As Rheingold says “More than ever, we need to ask the right questions today about what kind of people, what kind of societies might emerge from social cyberspaces tomorrow” (p. 323). And for Rheingold and others, the potential for something approaching Utopia online seems vividly apparent.

Utopia, Communitas, and Agency

Rheingold first addresses the utopian tendencies of discussions of online communities in the introduction to the first edition of Virtual Communities. In the revised edition, however, Rheingold is far more explicit: He acknowledges that in his first book, he might have put a “rosier tint” on the WELL in order to emphasize the “realness” of it—to argue against the view that only “socially crippled adolescents would use the Internet to communicate with other people” (p. 324). He adds that “Perhaps prospects for online life were brighter then, seven years before the dotcom era” (p. 324). In Rheingold’s books and in the articles that follow below, a “bright” vision of the internet, what I am calling “Utopian,” is primarily egalitarian, “democratic,” and free from corporate intervention. The utopian online community mirrors, not surprisingly, the utopian commune experiments of the 1960s and 1970s.

Sorin Matei makes this connection explicit in his article “From Counter Culture to Cyberculture.” Matei gives a brief history of the WELL’s connection to the Whole Earth Catalog, analyzing WELL posts for their inherent counterculture assumptions and value, as well as for evidence of “community.” Matei concludes that the WELL, in imaging itself as a new type of commune experiment, superimposes a counterculture rhetoric over the already utopian language of technological progress.

New technologies have furthered the idea of cyberspace as utopia. Blogging and wiki functions have expanded the egalitarian language outside of just communities to other forms of online interaction; now, even encyclopedia writing is framed as a purely democratic and collaborative, if not utopian experience. What makes these shift from mere democratic language to utopian can be seen in Wikipedia’s own “neutral point of view” policy:

The policy requires that where multiple or conflicting perspectives exist within a topic each should be presented fairly. None of the views should be given undue weight or asserted as being judged as "the truth", in order that the various significant published viewpoints are made accessible to the reader, not just the most popular one. It should also not be asserted that the most popular view, or some sort of intermediate view among the different views, is the correct one to the extent that other views are mentioned only pejoratively. Readers should be allowed to form their own opinions. (“Neutral Point of View”)

The above policy posits an imagined space where bias can, in fact, be removed enough to allow each individual to make up his or her own mind. Neither popularity nor expertise will guide the user toward one reading or another—Wikipedia imagines intellectual freedom without gatekeepers.

Blogging, like wiki, is seen as a bottom-up movement; networks of writers report the news in non-legitimated forms, without the oversight of editors or corprorations. Communities form around some blogs, and users work together to create new knowledges. The grassroots language used to describe the blogosphere echoes the WELL’s vision of a non-hierarchical information exchange . David Weinberger’s(2002) Small Pieces Loosely Joined is equally optimistic about the potential of the World Wide Web: “The Web is about groups—people who, in one way or another, can look into one another’s eyes. Groups are the heart of the Web” (p. 105). These groups then go on to produce shared knowledge

Of course, these utopian visions of a perfect democracy fail to account for several factors. Wikipedia depends upon a somewhat naïve notion of collaboration; the belief that “Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy” (McHenry, 2007). And it is quite clear that Wikipedia’s knowledge-building strategies depend upon not only experts and hierarchies, but traditional higher education forms as well—citations are required, an encyclopedic language is recommended, and even the collaborative “talk” pages require a rhetorical savvy that more closely mirrors academic review than a conversation on the street.

Conclusions: Community and Desire

What these theories fail to account for is how online communities transmit, manage, and contain desire, and the division that comes with it. As these new technologies continue to emerge, scholars have turned to the more complex questions about online communities: What is the draw? How do these communities hang together? How can we predict success or failure? How might a utopia actually emerge? The concept of “Communitas” has been proposed as a working hypothesis of community maintenance and progress. According to the The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Religious Rites, Rituals and Festivals, “Communitas… is a relational quality of full, unmediated communication, even communion, between people of definite and determinate identity, which arises spontaneously in all kinds of groups, situations, and circumstances” (p. 97). Communitas is essentially utopian, it “strains toward universalism and openness; it is richly charged with feeling, mainly pleasurable” (p. 98). The very idea of “Communitas” depends on the assumption that all communities are continually striving toward perfection, toward a harmonious balance between individuality and community.

However, “Communitas” itself is dependent upon an understanding of rite, ritual and myth. An addition of Rene Girard’s concept of “scapegoating” as community maintenance to the already important sociological concept of “communitas” seems prudent at this stage of theory-building. The remainder of this essay will give an overview of Girard’s theory and how it might contribute to the already well-developed ideas presented above.

In Girard’s Things Hidden, which is the culmination and condensation of several of his earlier works, Girard theorizes that desire and difference are dual (and inseparable) causes of the disintegration of communities. To counter and manage mimetic desire—which leads to the destruction of structured societies—a ritual (with an accompanying myth) is required, specifically, a ritual of sacrifice and victimage: “The death of the victim transforms relations within the community. The change from discord to harmony is not attributed to its actual cause, the unifying mimesis of collective violence, but to the victim itself” (p. 48). According to Girard, community maintenance depends upon this scapegoating of a pre-selected victim—a victim who is the Other, who represents difference within the community; a myth and narrative arises naturally from repeated scapegoating. Thus, myth becomes “the transfigured account of real violence” (p. 109), and the initial murder moves to the symbolic—the scapegoat is murdered “symbolically” through language.

Seabrook’s reproduction of some of the arguments on the WELL show a definite scapegoating mechanism at work in that community—one member even goes so far as to sarcastically note that s/he is the “System Scapegoat” whose “shortcomings…are the source of all problems on the WELL” (Stewart Brand, qtd in Seabrook, 1997, p. 158). It is unlikely that other scapegoats and scapegoaters are aware of their role—this would, in fact, deconstruct the scapegoat process and make the community vulnerable again. Finding scapegoats and the myths and rituals that surround them in online communities might be one way to approach theories of community maintenance. It also points us away from the naïve utopian rhetoric that seems to dominate much of our discussions of online communities: finding scapegoat mechanisms reminds us that online communities are just as vulnerable to difference and desire as physical communities, and that it a disembodied, non-corporeal topoi is not likely to resolve the basic problems of human interaction.

Works Cited
Girard, R (1978). Things hidden since the foundation of the world. Trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer. Stanford, CA: Standord U Press.
Rheingold, H. (1993). The Virtual Community: homesteading on the electronic frontier (Revised ed.). New York, NY: HarperPerennial.
Seabrook, J. (1997). Deeper. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Rites of Communitas (2004). The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Religious Rites, Rituals and Festivals. Ed. Frank A. Salamone. New York: Routledge, 97-101.
McHenry, R. The faith-based encyclopedia. Retrieved 15 Oct 2007 from http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html.
Weinberger, D. (2002). Small pieces loosely joined. Perseus.