Building community in cyberspace

By MASSAWE ARKADI

It is in this context that we must consider the building of virtual communities. The internet is a relatively new communications medium, yet already there are numerous ways in which people have set out to build community in cyberspace.

The internet has been considered an ideal medium for the building and maintaining of community and as uniquely able to separate community and place entirely. Despite its very recent incursion into the fabric of daily life for many in the west, social networks of people who might otherwise have never conversed and shared ideas and opinions have already been formed over the internet. How important these networks are to their members, or will become to them, is yet to be fully and adequately researched as the emergence of these 'virtual communities' is so novel that their potential cannot yet have been realised. Nevertheless, since the possibilities afforded by the internet first began to enter into public consciousness great claims have been made in popular writing, academic and policy discourses as to just this potential.

As early as 1995 Nicholas Negroponte predicted that in the near future 'We will socialise in digital neighbourhoods' (1995:7) while in the same year Christina Odone, suggested that:
The Net has already [my emphasis] managed to promise a reordered world where the individual can sample a community life that has long been eroded by the rush for individual gains, the rending of the fabric of family life, the polarisation of an economic system that makes for haves and have nots (1995:10).

Powerful though the technology is, It is not only the technical innovations which the internet has provided which seem to hold out the possibility of building an expanded and improved community life in cyberspace. The internet has also been described as an inherently open, accessible and democratic medium within which community-building is not only possible but can flourish and take hitherto unknown forms.

The development of different internet-based communication tools:
…has encouraged a wide range of debates to emerge surrounding the potential of digital computer networks (or "telematics") for supporting new types of public, social and cultural exchange.' (Graham and Aurigi 1997:20).

Surf the internet and before long the chatrooms, MUDs [1] , newsgroups, bulletin boards and networks can be discovered which offer the potential spaces for community-building in cyberspace.
Some have speculated that building community in cyberspace will result in novel forms of interaction which are totally 'virtual' in that they will have no geographical referent and will be truly global in scope (Rheingold 1994) and others have suggested that community building on the internet will be utilised to extend and enhance existing relationships which are based in physical spaces (Benedict 1991, Schuler 1996).

Most writing on virtual communities, however, implies that what will be built in cyberspace will improve on traditional forms of community. Traditional communities, it is suggested, are either disappearing as people become generally less socially motivated and follow more individualistic and self-interested courses of action or are becoming subject to intolerable strains as problems such as poverty and crime tear them apart. It has also been noted that place-based communities are liable to fracture along religious, racial or ideological lines and have been sites of exclusion as well as inclusion (Crow and Allen 1994). It has been suggested too that those who have been marginalized and excluded for whatever reason within their face-to-face, physically bounded environments may find their spaces to communicate and interrelate in a different realm which is unrelated to the physical - within the 'virtual community'.