Discussion Questions
The readings for this session are following the theme of network as place we
introduced earlier this week. Hafner writes about The Well, probably the first
American electronic community to really take off as a place for general
discussion and interaction for members of the public, rather than computer
people or members of specialized scientific and professional discussion systems.
Rhinegold took his experiences here, and his general love of things computer,
and turned them into a manifesto for general social change. Turkle (who we saw
earlier writing about hackers) takes the most scholarly and least enthusiastic
stance.
- Where was the Well located? What specific cultures was it coming out of,
and what kinds of people used it? Could a system like this be as successful
anywhere?
- What technology did the Well use? How did it differ from commercial
Videotext systems?
- How successful was the Well as a business? What happened when Katz took
over? Could a virtual community ever be a big moneymaker?
- Is a virtual community a real community? Is it a place? How does it differ
from the regular kind? What are its strengths and weaknesses?
- Can your life on-line be better than your real life? How would Turkle and
Rheingold differ about this?
- With the explosion of Internet use, have virtual communities lost their
prominent position on-line? Have you used anything like a virtual community?
Resources
 |
The Well was eventually purchased by
salon.com a few years ago. Its ideas live on
in many modern sites, and in the forums and bulletin boards that form part of
every site from slate to Amazon. The article originally appeared in
Wired, which itself had strong links to
Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth catalog and its early libertarian post-hippy
revolutionary ideal of utopian techno-capitalism.
|
|
Rheingold was involved with one of the earliest internet flops, Electric
Minds. He followed it up with work as a consultant on virtual communities. As we
saw earlier, he had been writing futuristic books about empowerment through
computers since the early 1980s, and spent the late 80s as a fan of virtual
reality technologies. On his site you
can see a bunch of his stuff, including his
entire book Virtual
Communities: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Addison-Wesley, 1993).
|
|
