A book that was at the forefront of the description of internet social life and it’s consequences was Virtual Culture: Identity & Communication In Cybersociety edited by Steven G. Jones. It was published by SAGE Publications Ltd. in London in 1997. This book explores the structure of community within the context of the internet, and the effects online social life has on it’s participants. The book is outdated in that it was published in 1997 and it deals with the internet, with which countless advancements have been made in the past years. However, in 1997 with the internet being mainly text based and revolving around interaction more than the individual, this book has extreme relevance to the time.
At the time Jones put this book together, he was the Professor and Chair of the Faculty of Communications at the University of Tulsa. Published in 1995, his book Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community earned him critical acclaim. He has made presentations to scholarly and business groups about the Internet and its’ power to bring about social change, and the Internet’s social and commercial uses.
The book begins with a short introduction in which Jones describes how this book is different from his other book CyberSociety. Jones firmly separates the books and states:
Whereas Cybersociety concentrated on the nature of online communities and social formation, Virtual Culture converges on the nature of social and civic life online, and asks (fairly begs) the question: what is it about life offline that makes us so intent on living online? (Jones, viv)
The first chapter is entitled, “The Internet and its Social Landscape”, which was written by Jones himself. Jones looks to prove how the internet is providing a revolution. He also looks to explore how computer-mediated communication (CMC) facilitates “the loss of personality that often accompanies the meditation of communication via computer”, and the time the internet takes to master, which in turn decreases our “face-to-face” interaction with others (Jones, 7).
He frequently references Howard Rheingold, media critic, on a frequent basis as other contributors do, and postulates an idea based on his ideas. Jones believes that there are dual potentialities of the internet. First, he believes the internet can create community “as we had once known it”, which would create the “great good old place” that we had once known. He also contends that the internet can get us together without expending much effort because, “it would overcome space and time for us” (Jones 9).
The overcoming time and space idea, is Jones’ main point. He believes that the internet is free of the constraints of space and time because it allows us to engage with others, but it doesn’t depend on geographic location or time; the community can be constructed from communication and interaction within the group, instead of a set of preconceived values about the places where participants come from (Jones 10). Jones quotes Licklider and Taylor from their 1968 article:
life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity…communication will be more effective and productive, and therefore more enjoyable. (Licklider, 31)
The next chapter is, “The Individual within the Collective: Virtual Ideology and the Realization of Collective Principles” by Jan Fernback a doctoral candidate at the Center for Mass Media Research, School of Journalism, and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado. This chapter looks to explore the individual and the collective in the online world. Fernback believes that since, “social life has become so large in scale that we cannot function as a ‘public’ in any real sense, only in a symbolic, rhetorical sense” (Jones, 37). However she believes that cyberspace has become the new arena for participation in public life. Fernback contends that open-minded space is the breeding ground for mutual respect, political solidarity, and civil discourse.
However, Fernback then goes on question what exactly collectivity is. She questions if it indeed is, “a group of like minded individuals” (Jones 40). Fernback believes that community in cyberspace emphasizes a community based around similar interests which will hopefully lead to social bonding within the community and a “communal” spirit. Yet, Fernback admits that virtual communities are missing the sense of individuality that can operate within the community. This is due to Dewey’s principal that, “the individual’s full potential cannot be realized without the context of the community to guide it” (Jones 42). In other words the individual does not realize how valuable he is until viewed in context with the community itself.
The third chapter is entitled, “Virtual Commonality: Looking for India on the Internet,” written by Ananda Mitra, assistant professor of Communication at Wake Forest University. This chapter deals with a UseNet group on soc.culture.indian aka sci. Yet at the beginning of the chapter Mitra offers insight from a commentator on communities of the web, which really looks to disprove the notion that a community is a group of people with a similar interest.
A community is more than a bunch of people distributed in all 24 time zones, sitting in their dens and pounding away on keyboards about the latest news in alt.music.indigo-girls. That’s not a community; it’s a fan club. Newsgroups, mailings lists, chat rooms-call them what you will- the Internet’s virtual communities are not communities in almost any sense of the word. A community is people who have greater things in common than a fascination with a narrowly defined topic. (Snyder, 1996)
Mitra then turns to observing the UseNet group previously mentioned. The posts generally suggest that while many of the members are not from India, the posts are from a nationalist standpoint as if the posters were in India. Mitra then shifts to crossposting in that people from various communities are crossposting between boards, in which generally hateful remarks result.
Chapter four entitled, “Structural Relations, Electronic Media, and social Change: The Public Electronic Network and the Homeless” deals with the PEN or the Public Electronic Network. The chapter was written by Joseph Schmitz, a professor of Communications at the University of Tulsa, and a forerunner of PEN. PEN had six main objectives: “to provide electronic access to public information; to aid delivery of city services; to enhance communication among residents; to enhance Santa Monica’s sense of community through electronic conferences among residents; to diffuse knowledge of, and access to, the new communication technology; to facilitate an equitable distribution of communication resources to have the ‘have nots’” (Jones, 81). While Schmitz was at the forefront of this network, he points out that there was a separation between the conversations within the text.
Note how the PEN text features elites conversing directly with the homeless about issues important to both. While these entries are atypical because they do not include much of the mundane “chat” common to many PEN entries of this time, they do reflect the tone and content of the early Homeless conference. (Jones 90)
The next chapter by Nessim Watson, “Why We Argue About Virtual Community: A Case Study of the Phish.Net Fan Community”, deals with the interactions on the Phish.Net community. Watson is an adjunct professor in the Communications Department at Westfield State College. Early in the chapter Watson defines exactly what community is from the Random House Dictionary of the English Language.
- a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage…3…group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists.
Watson disagrees with the common notion that a community is firmly based on frequency of visitation. Instead he believes in community more in the sense of dedication and belief in the community. (Jones 105)
Chapter six by David F. Shaw, a doctoral candidate at the Center for Mass Media Research, School of Journalism, and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado deals with the gay community online. The chapter entitled “Gay Men and Computer Communication: A Discourse of Sex and Identity in Cyberspace”, deals a lot with Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Shaw used this to interview many gay men on the web. He believes by doing this he established their trust because he was part of the community in a sense because he was actively participating in it (Jones 134). However IRC is void of all physicality. There is no body language, no figure to view while you chat, no change in tone of voice, and no facial expression. However, through IRC users exchanges pictures of each other over the web. Shaw then goes on to relate a “gaysex” channel part of the IRC, in which he relates it to finding a gay bar. In this channel gay men can come and send images to one another, gossip, give stories of sexual bravado etc. Heterosexual men sometimes even lurk on the channel then “gaybash” the members, which makes it even more real for the gay members (Jones, 137).
The next chapter is by three authors, Margaret L. McLaughlin, Professor of Communication at the University of Southern California, and her two students, Kerry K. Osborne, and Nicole B. Ellison. The chapter is entitled “Virtual Community in a Telepresence Environment”, and it deals mainly with the different social interactions and relationships between members on a website. The team discovers that, “there seems to be a prevailing sentiment that new technologies require us to invent novel strategies for organizing social relations” (Jones, 147). According to the team, new strategies include new expressive forms of communication like emoticons, graphic accents, etc. The team describes that in online communities there is a need for a set of rules and boundaries, as well as a system for behavior monitoring. They explore the Tele-Garden in which you can maintain a garden through the use of a robot. According to the team, it was created to provide a test for a new generation of low-cost “point and click” devices for control of a robotic apparatus over wide area networks (Jones, 149).
Dawn Dietrich is the author of the next chapter, and is an assistant professor of English at Western Washington University. The chapter, “(Re)-Fashioning the Techno-Erotic Woman: Gender and Textuality in the Cybercultural Matrix”. The chapter mainly focuses on the vague point of gender differences within various postmodern technologies. She uses an exaggerated metaphor from Allucquere Rosanne Stone (1991) who offered a feminist interpretation of gendered technologies “by deconstructing the act of penetrating the screen, an act which she attributes to the heterosexual male user who empowers himself by incorporating the surfaces of cyberspace into himself” (Jones, 170).
The next chapter is by Susan Zickmund, an assistant professor of Speech Communications at Augustana College. Zickmund claims that while there are sites designed around right radicalism, there are those who populate the site just to provide hatred toward its cause. She also goes on to discuss hate websites such as alt.skinhead, sometimes come from outside the culture. She believes with this, that an “Ideological Dialectic” is established.
“Punishing the Persona: Correctional Strategies for the Virtual Offender”, by Richard C. MacKinnon, doctoral student at the ACTLAB at the University of Texas, MacKinnon looks for the consequences for your actions while on the internet. MacKinnon views actions and their consequences in this way,
- Evaluating suspect actions in their local context.
- Preserving the local context by the proper direction of punishment
- Establishing a rage of punishments appropriate to the local context and reflective of the relative seriousness of the crime. (Jones, 208)
MacKinnon goes on to describe the various acts of crimes committed by Kevin Mitnick, Mr Bungle, and Jake Baker, on the internet.
The last chapter by Harris Breslow, a Professor in the Mass Communications Programme at York University, is entitled “Civil Society, Political Economy, and the Internet”. He believes that the internet can be corporately commercialized just like television can influence what you eat. Breslow states, “In this respect the Internet is a disputed site it is contested by, on the one hand, commercial and political forces that wish to define the Net in much the same way as television was construed…” Each aspect of our lives can influence the internet, just as the internet can in turn influence us (Jones, 237).
While this book is extremely outdated in the context of the internet, it provided us with some theoretical principles that in some ways governed the way people use the internet. Its arguments about the legitimacy of a “virtual” community, are battles still being fought today. In reference to our class, it seems that a general idea of the book was that these online communities serve to in some ways worship a totem, which in this case is the community itself. Another aspect that relates to our class is the consistent idea of interacting on an online community as a sort of human interaction with the virtual world, and in some ways a ritual. The ritual with online communities is the act of laying one’s hands on a keyboard and typing on the message board or email (Jones 28). The idea of the group being more important than the individual is also another worldly idea, however I want to make the case for religion. Jones contends:
No longer do we, as members of the group belong to the community, rather the community belongs to us. Our sense of identity is not only derived from our identification with the group, it is derived from our understanding of the group identity. (Jones 16)
This is the same principle as religion. While someone’s religion belongs to them, without the individual that is part of that religion, the religion would have less gravity. Building on this quote, with religion it is the general understanding that one cannot truly understand themselves, without understanding the religion as a whole.
Virtual culture has drastically changed over the years and has held to some of the predictions that were made in the past about it. Yet, I somehow don’t believe that back in 1997, predictions were made that the internet would be as vast as it is today. During that time, users were amazed at the fact of being able to send each other .gifs of .jpgs at extremely slow speeds. Now users of the internet can stream movies while participating in an online community while doing work, among the millions of other possibilities. This book while outdated provided great insight into the way that the internet was thought of and studied in 1997. It also served as a blueprint in a way for what was to come. However, due to it being outdated, it was boring at times, due to the fact that I knew exactly what they were talking about. Another note about the author is that, Jones seemed to reference himself many times in the book. In his own essay he referenced back to his previous books, and in almost every other essay in the book. While this didn’t detract from the meaning of the book, it was as if Jones wanted to be center of attention even though he only edited the book.
Works Cited
Jones, Steven G. Virtual Culture: Identity & Communication In Cybersociety. 1st ed. London: SAGE Ltd., 1997. Print.
Licklider, J.C.R., & Taylor, R.W. (1968, April). “The computer as a communication device”. Science & Technology, 21-31.
Snyder, J. (1996). “Get real”. Internet World, 7(2), 92-94.
