Phil Fox Rose

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December 20, 1990

Virtual Community

Tools to create electronic community are held forward by some as the salvation of our fragmented society, but they may be a fundamental part of the problem instead.

No one is denying that our society is in trouble. Community has broken down, and with it has gone neighborly feelings like trust and responsibility. Eligible voters gripe that the politicians are looking out for themselves rather than their constituents, then they stay home at election time and let them get reelected anyway.

The fragmentation of society may be the inevitable result of our technological age, with its focuses on mass production, specialization and optimization. But some people, rather than thinking in terms of lessening these effects and returning to simpler ways, are looking to technology as the way out of the problems it has created.

These thinkers, with their roots in the likes of Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame, believe that we can create a new kind of community that is free from the ties of physical proximity. With personal computers, interactive televisions and video teleconferencing, they see a future where people can be in the middle of a hostile city or an apathetic suburb and still be a part of a community.

There are serious flaws in this argument, however. For one, it assumes you can remove physical contact without significantly reducing the quality of the exchange. University studies have examined the fact that people interact differently depending on the level of sensual exchange, from full-body, to head and arms only, to head only, to a head on a television screen, to printed words on a computer screen. At each level, as people lose the visual, aural, and olfactory parts of the message, there is less communicating going on even though the same words are being exchanged. Every good presenter knows this: The more interaction with an audience, the more effective the talk. They get out from behind the podium so that people can see all of their body movements.

People have already sacrificed much of the human contact that they once had. Many of us now use electronic tellers even when the banks are open. When we do encounter people behind counters, we often exchange nothing more than money.

But throwing more technology at the problem may be overlooking the fact that not only technology, but electronic community itself is part of the problem. Radio and then television were the first steps down the road to disconnecting human contact from reality. Computers may add interactivity, but they still don't bring back the real thing.

Put simply, you cannot compare a Vermont town meeting or a visit with a neighbor with a bulletin board forum. On the bulletin board, personalities and motivations are hidden. And there may be regular participants, but they are not as familiar as a neighbor's face, no matter how much you have shared bits and bytes.

Perhaps most importantly, in a real local community you are forced to deal with every member of the community. You have to find the common ground or there will be problems for your entire life. The focus (in good communities anyway) is on respect for diversity. In contrast, most of these contrived electronic communities are actually affinity groups: people who have come together at their convenience specifically because they have everything in common. There is nothing wrong with affinity groups but they are not the same thing as community, despite the warm fuzzy feelings the folks at Compuserve and Prodigy try to create with phrases like community bulletin board and electronic cottage.

Electronic community is reminiscent of an idea from the earliest days of computers: computer dating. The idea was simple. Community has fallen apart. People don't meet and talk and get to know each other the way they used to. Computers can solve the problem, and maybe even do it better than before by matching people up scientifically. But people come together because of both similarities and differences. By learning to live together, both partners grow dramatically.

This is the choice before us once again: a safe, synthetic community that we can quickly escape from if it gets unpleasant, where we therefore rarely grow; or a vibrant, diverse and sometimes unpleasant mix of situations that challenges us daily to be better people — in other words, real community.