Characteristics of virtual communities
It is now time to review progress in activities
developing beyond the electronic frontier and what
we can do with them. The response will no longer
come from the established powers, but basically
from the growing capacity for promotion and
action where individuals are given
the possibility of organizing their desires, their
aspirations or even their own daily lives within a
virtual and in principle, neutral context which
will acquire a shape similar to that of those
connected to it.
This change has been transformed into a
multiplying force, which builds non repressive
exchanges and which, in addition, does not
necessarily reinforce as in the past a
centralized power, even if logically speaking it does
not exclude such a centralized power. Thus it is the
individuals and organizations which decide on the
functions of VCs that they
have created and manage.
Virtual community do not exist and function alone, since they are
the fruit of the activities by citizens, whether they
be individuals, formal or informal groups,
enterprises, organizations, etc. Thus new artificial
(virtual) spaces have been created with a set of
characteristics that are not always comprehensible
according to “real world” parameters.
1. Information belongs to users , that is to say, the
network is in principle “empty” and it is the users
who decide on the type of information that they
will store, display or exchange. Thus, each user will
decide where he or she will access the network, for
what purpose and with whom.
2. Access to the network is
universal: with a network computer, anyone can
have access to the entire network or “see” the
whole network given that once on the network,
there are sites which require payment prior to
accessing information they contain
simultaneous: we are all on the network at the
same time, since we exist as pieces of information
Zeros and ones. In reality, the network is, since
its creation, the first automatic answer phone. No
one knows whether we are connected or not, but we
all are linked together as if we were, by our digital
presence, by the information we move around, and
by the interactions we trigger;
independent in time and in
space . It is the first permanently open space for
human activities, no matter where we are located.
To have access to everything that is available on
the network, all we need is a network computer.
3. Finally, two other aspects close this compressed
genetic code and stem from the fact that the
network grows in a decentralised and non-
hierarchical way. Keep adding computers (servers)
and the web will spread physically and virtually, yet
no computer can run control and command tasks on
the other computers in the network.
If information on the network is placed there and
published by its users, we are in an eminently
PARTICIPATIVE environment. In fact, the network
is constantly receiving feedback from signals
transmitted by its users. Participation leads
inexorably to INTERACTION, that is to reactions to
what other people are doing (we are not talking
here specifically about the intensity or levels of
that interaction, but we can suggest that
participating means “moving” one’s own information
in relation with that of others and moving other
people’s information in relation to one’s own).
The inevitable result of these two last points is
constant GROWTH in information and knowledge
being circulated through the system. This evolution,
however, is a factor incorporated into the very
structure of the Internet. Growth does not just
mean adding information, it means everything that
goes with it: systems for search, classification,
synthesis, participation and interaction, systematic
and ephemeral groupings, transactions and trade,
organization of information and its visibility, etc.
The rapid emergence and multiple forms of VCs
From this perspective, change has been phenomenal
and very rapid. The first VCs were conceived by
engineers, programmers and hackers, followed by
Usenet and spaces for collaboration in the R&D
sector. Activities in these new virtual spaces were
rapidly extended to include larger thematic areas.
Soon after this, VCs were created, inspired by
BBSs such as those run by Compuserve or AOL,
amongst others, together with the emergence of
broad social organizations. Among these
organizations, we can cite, because of its wide
membership, APC ( Alliance for Progressive
Communications), an umbrella site for many
networks on the five continents grouped together
in clearly defined interest areas. The activities
that have developed under this umbrella site
provide an indication of the complexity of the world
of virtual communities and of an emerging form of
political action with very different characteristics
than those we have seen in the past.
APC played a very important role during the World
Conference for the Environment and Development,
better known as the Earth Summit, which was held
in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. On the World Forum
campus (an alternative conference held alongside
the official conference), rooms were filled with
computers and hundreds of NGO representatives
from all over the world were taught to use the
Internet. In the years that followed, thousands of
people on the five continents, working together in
more or less structured VCs, set up ways for
exchanging information, launching projects,
obtaining funding and organizing events, all using
the network. While the media remained shamefully
silent on the World Bank’s structural adjustment
policies, these VCs were perfectly aware of their
importance and future consequences, of the
complementary role played by the IMF, and of the
impact that these two bodies were having on India
and Latin America. The pressure accumulated, and
finally exploded in Seattle, five years later, with
the official launch of WTO, the offspring of the no
less mysterious GATT and Uruguay Round. Few
people living on the surface of the “real” society
understood where this movement came from or
what it was about, except that it called itself, in
error, “anti-globalization”.
A new form of political live
Were we discovering a new form of political
involvement? Perhaps. But not political involvement
as we had known it until then, with its
characteristics of continuity in action, based on
facts (tradition), nurtured by explicit ideas of
conquest over social or administrative spaces and
of development of action plans after each action.
What we did not understand - and I think we still
do not understand clearly - is that some of the
specific characteristics that define VCs are
introducing a different political scenario:
the possibility of multiple VCs - similarly to
multiple ecosystems, to the extent that they co-
exist in “niches” in the same space, a concept which
is sometimes difficult to understand in a systemic
conception of the world - does not permit a clear
definition of the location of power which is inspired
by adoption by self-managed communities;
The constant, sustained, uncontrolled process of
extension through the connected population, which
continuously moves the frontier between “mature”
VC actors having greater experience and conscious
of what it means to work and interact with others
in contexts that are more or less organized, and
the group of “recent arrivals”. As a result,
activities on the network are being constantly
reinvented, a situation which works against the
installation of less organized forms (more
ephemeral) of relationships on the network, no
matter how important they may be.
Mutual respect for the objectives and
methodologies on which members are in agreement.
This is the new ethic or the network ethic. In
practice, there is no comparable space in the
physical world, where the occupants have the
possibility of checking what happens, of examining
the nature of exchanges and of analyzing whether
they respect collectively approved standards. This
process of feedback from the activity itself implies
a strong ethical responsibility, because respect
cannot be shared solely on the basis of a mere
declaration of intentions, but on that of the form
that the rules take within the VC’s common
archives, for members and non-members alike.
The existence of archives in which the VC’s
activities are stored. This is a crucial factor but
does not always receive enough attention. When we
speak of the forms of political relationship, or of a
new ethic for these relationships, etc., we are not
just referring to a static photograph of a VC which
can share a part of its existence. The archives
represent an essential pedagogical factor for those
who join the VC, one by one, for which there is no
equivalent in the real world. Thus this factor is a
constituent part of the organization, its history, its
transparency, its degree of comprehension and its
capacity to disseminate its content to other VCs or
to other pockets of connected populations (or not).
From this point of view, the technological element
of archive management is just as important as is,
for example, the organization of our personal
library so that a neighbour can understand its
structure, not only from the point of view of the
formal organization of books, but also of what the
books express of our personal interests.
The creation of a virtual space for an informal
apprenticeship, an environment which we cannot
find in the real world. This is not a question of a
speculative or intellectual apprenticeship. What is
important is collective action, through which
information, knowledge, and experience are shared
in a more or less formal, more or less consensual
manner. The sharing of ¬questions and the
methods for working in a common virtual space
bring out elements of dispersed knowledge, which
come together, are exchanged, are combined in
order to generate operational knowledge. Mature
or complex VCs are also called Intelligent Networks,
for the following reasons:
Their content is linked to concrete objectives
(project intelligence);
Their content does not rely only on the
knowledge of certain members, but in the
generation and collective management of knowledge
which interests the VC (collaborative intelligence);
Their content depends on the network being open
to other networks, for the exchange of information
and knowledge, whether these networks are or are
not in the same organization (intelligence of
networked interactions).
The objective difficulty in building a VC religion
in the strict sense of the term, that is to say
“relaying” the activity carried out in the virtual
space (taking into account the full diversity of
actions, organizations, methodologies, objectives,
organization of trajectories, relations between VCs,
etc.) with what is happening in the real world,
including even those times when social movements
organized in networks emerge into the real world.
The last point is crucial since it is linked to the
transfer of activities developed by individuals in a
VC from different characteristics and propositions
to an off-network activity which introduce a form
of social organization based on the principles of
self-management and self-organization.
Sometimes, in wanting to apply the same scale of
values to one and the other activity, to the virtual
and the real, we lose sight of how far what we
could call the “VC philosophy” from the
organizational perspective (self-organization, self-
management, transparency of behaviour, historic
register open to consultation and distribution of its
content, etc.) actually allows unending
relationships, at all levels in the real world:
individual, professional, entrepreneurial,
governmental or non-governmental (NGOs),
institutional, communal, etc. This does not mean, of
course, that there is necessarily an automatic
transfer of the VCs’ typical forms of organization
to the real world in the same way that the real
world’s forms of organization immediately create
tension and conflict when one tries to impose them
on the virtual world as a way of meeting targets
through interaction and collective work.
There are no limits to the types of VCs, due to the
simplicity of their construction and development:
an explicit objective, a group of people who agree
to develop this objective by exchanging ideas, a
working method (which includes the possibility of
moderation), an organized virtual space (which can
be just a simple mailing list or a highly organized
virtual environment, with help lines for the
community: consultants, additional materials
obtained from the web, bibliographical references,
links to other networks or VCs, researchers of
materials generated by the VCs, etc.), transparent
files with different levels of organization.
In addition, there are no limits to the territory
which can be colonized by a VC: from spontaneous
groups, with varying levels of organization, within
open frameworks to groups organized within
companies or institutions; relationships between
citizens or between citizens and public
administrations; professional or leisure activities;
groups with social, economic, cultural or scientific
objectives; all of which maintain an immense
diversity of criteria about the provenance or the
characteristics of their members. In reality, as we
said earlier, we are talking about a basic
production cell of information and knowledge in the
Knowledge Society, and this is why we insist on the
political features of this type of production as it
occurs in VCs.
To the unlimited range of the VC formats, we must
add another factor: their government. Based on
the rules emanating from the first BBSs
containing VCs dedicated to discuss specific themes
- in the early days, they were basically interested
in the technology and computer programmes which
allowed VCs to be created and operated in the
network’s virtual space, from the operation of the
VC itself, no matter how elementary they might be
- evolved VCs of greater complexity with regard to
their internal organization which prefigure
advanced forms of self-government, of democratic
consensus and of a new approach to politics through
an implicit deliberative context which emerged
forcefully during critical moments of the operation
of a VC.
The moderator has played a historic and essential
role in the government of the VC, becoming
progressively a new figure in models of
asynchronous cooperation and of self-organization
in what might otherwise have resulted in chaos by
accumulation. The moderator, if he or she has the
benefit of clear working methods, is one of the
rare people in a VC who can influence the quality,
operational rhythm and tonality of exchanges.
In conclusion, the Knowledge Society is built on the
capacity to create, to handle and to transmit
information and knowledge. This capacity implies a
new perception - or combination - of words such as
productivity, efficiency, and profitability of
knowledge. The VC tends to optimize the creation,
management, and distribution of collective
knowledge, considered as the result of members’
activities, which supposes an increase in the
freedom of action for each of them.
BY MWORIA ANGEL
BAPRM 42642
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