“Daily Life in Cyberspace” by Howard Rheingold
Post your comments on the second assigned reading for Week 5: Daily Life in Cyberspace: How the Computerized Counterculture Built a New Kind of Place. Excerpted from The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Post your comments by noon, Monday, February 11.
February 10th, 2008 at 12:24 am
I was fascinated by the WELL conference system, although I didn’t really understand how it worked until the end of the article (and I’m sure I’m still missing something). Still, it sounds like it avoids some of the pitfalls of sites such as Wikipedia because it requires everyone to identify themselves by their real name and prides itself on being a source for experts (not just anyone who has a computer).
It was interesting to see how this type of new media still relies on and interacts with old media - namely radio, in the case of the Deadhead who was inspired to syndicate his show.
I wonder how WELL would work if it was created by people who had never met each other. Would it lose some of the commune vibe, or would they be able to overcome that?
February 10th, 2008 at 11:44 am
I don’t know why, but this article kind of depressed me. I just can’t see myself spending hours a day talking to people who I don’t know online– even if it was about a subject that I was interested in.
I thought it was interesting that the creators of Well were so involved in the counterculture. There was Brand, who was on the bus with the rest of the Merry Pranksters, etc. I see Well as a movement away from the ideals that the Pranksters stood for. They were all about movement and experience it seems– driving across the country, meeting new people, experiencing new things and of course doing a whole lotta acid. Now, this same man ensconces himself in front of his computer, high on megapixels? What happened to talking to “real” people?
When I first got the Internet I remember sitting in front of it for hours, talking to weirdos in chat rooms and reading message boards. I always emerged from the technological haze just a little more lonely than I was before. Go figure.
February 10th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
For some reason, his discussion and actual history of the WELL project were less interesting than the terms he used to approach and think about the project. I was especially intrigued by his initial reaction to the WELL system–”Writing as performing art.” Computer art has become normative in the art market these days–something that I am sure no one would have expected before. The iconography created by 80s computers have so effectively slipped into our collective day dreams that they are now available to be bought in galleries.
Have you all ever heard of the artist Cory Archangel? He was made famous a few years back by putting a piece of programming that he called art in the Whitney Biennial. For the piece he had programed a Super Mario cartridge so that only the clouds were endlessly flying by and then projected it. But he also did a really neat performance piece a few years back that connects to our other reading on social networking. Do you remember when there was no Myspace and if you were going to be a hip young thing you needed to be connected to Friendster? Well if yes. Did you know it used to be impossible to close a Friendster account. I mean you could delete all your photos and your interests and comments but if someone googled you, your friendster page (as empty as can be) would still pop up. Well Cory was giving a lecture during this time and he said that he was going to do a performance. He then proceeded to commit “social suicide” by deleting his Friendster account on which at the time he had over 300 friends. Hipsters across the room gasped.
In order to delete his account, he first had to hack into the mainframe of Friendster which he did projecting it on to a giant screen. And then after a few moments of typing code, he was gone. He had deleted himself from Friendster (with the even more extreme promise of never returning again). Rumor has it one girl in the room even cried.
February 11th, 2008 at 10:35 am
I thought Rheingold’s piece was interesting because it presented a side of the Internet that many of us missed out on.
I remember first hearing about the Web when I was in 5th grade (this would have been in 1995), when our teacher showed us how to send a strange message called an email. We all gathered around a beat-up Mac and, three hundred simple keystrokes later, sent an email to the school office.
Maybe it was because I was only 13 at the time, but I remember the Internet as a confusing jumble of raw text with nothing resembling a user-friendly interface. As Rheingold describes the WELL and the band of dirty hippies that created it, I can only imagine the sheer clunkiness of the layout.
But I’m sure it was all worth it for the community aspect, especially to those Deadheads who had no other avenues to express their insightful readings of Jerry Garcia’s lyrical genius. I thought it was especially interesting that the WELL community had set up a list of “design goals” resembling a governing charter.
It’s also funny to imagine the tiny online community trying to enforce the now outdated concept of “Netiquette” – a set of conventions defining politeness and social interaction in the online world. Now that the Web is home to billions of OMGlolRoflL33t-speakers, such common courtesy has gone out the window, but it has been replaced with an endless amount of information (only some of it can be considered “expert”), leaving intact Rheingold’s concept of a gift culture based on reciprocation.
February 11th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
I tried several times to download this article but couldn’t for some reason. So I can’t say anything meaningful in response to the article (crazy NU library site!) but I’ll try to respond a bit in general.
One of the things I find strange and depressing about my own “daily life in cyberspace” is that, no matter how long I spend on Facebook one day, and no matter how little I enjoyed doing it, I’m more likely than not to spend an equal amount of time in it the next day. Why is that? If I go to a restaurant in the real world and don’t think it’s that great, I probably won’t be going back. But it’s different online. Why? Is it the randomly-dispersed positive reinforcement? The sporadic photo-tag notifications? The wall post every few days? The rare but intriguing message from an old flame?
I’d actually really like to know, because man I could sure use my time more efficiently if I could get off the damn Facebook.
February 11th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
I like what Rob just said: “I’m sure it was all worth it for the community aspect, especially to those Deadheads who had no other avenues to express their insightful readings of Jerry Garcia’s lyrical genius.” But wait, is it really “community” when your main motivation is to get your opinion out there?
I, like Brenna, was a little depressed by this article. I too was thinking back to the afternoons of typing away with strangers in chat rooms - half the time I made up my age and location. Maybe this online community was exactly what these Deadheads needed, but wouldn’t they have been better off finding ways to congregate and communicate in person? Everyone needs to feel connected, but I can’t see how online communication can be an all-out replacement for socializing.
February 11th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
I wonder if the WELL network was such a revolutionary concept then what happened to it. Today’s Wikipedia is probably the closest construct, but yet cannot be fully trusted because it is unclear who writes it and what (if any) actual knowledge they have to contribute. If Wikipedia were to require posts from identified scholars I imagine more people would think of it as a credible source.
If WELL started out as a credible source (or at least more credible than Wikipedia) why was this model not followed? Why not have people identify themselves by name on Wikipedia? Why not require people to prove themselves as intelligent on the topic? I guess if that was the case then Wikipedia wouldn’t be what it is today – a massive source of information.
I just wonder if anyone did follow the WELL model, and if so where are those sites? What are they doing? Is it working? What would the original hippie founders say about WELL now?
February 11th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Utopian hippies in cyberspace? Who doesn’t love that?
For me this article said more about the idealistic dreams of aging members of the counterculture than it did about the states of virtual communities.
Online interaction will always feel partially hollow, as Brenna has already mentioned, so Anna and I will have to work on paring back our use of Facebook to feel better about our lives. My guess is that the allure of sites like Facebook will fade once the limits of its usefulness become clearer. There is always intense fervor with the introduction of new forms of interaction, but in the end practicality rules the day. Those utopean dreams are really just dreams after all.
February 11th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
I have a confession to make. I watch LonelyGirl15. On the website, in addition to the webisodes, you can sign up and post comments on each of the videos. There are hundreds of people all over the world who post like it is their job every time a new video is posted. Not only do they comment on the plot line of the lame story, but they talk with each other.
.
They are all strangers, but over time I have read the comments that became so personal I would have thought these people were old friends if I hadn’t known it was a woman from New Zealand offering to mail holiday cookies to some guy in Missouri. As lonely and weird as it is for me to even contemplate spending hours talking to strangers, maybe this fulfills something for these LonelyGirl15 fans, just like the Deadheads.
Even in j-school I’m sure most of us found ourselves developing intense bonds with each other (once strangers) based on a common interest. Is it any less real than if we all met in a chat room and formed a bond by chatting about our shared experience at Medill? So I won’t begrudge the LonelyGirl15 crew. After all, none of you are sending me Christmas cookies
February 11th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Does anyone else think it’s a bit humorous that WELL was founded and run by hippies and commune alumni? Rheingold seems to say that these folks created such a successful online community becayse of their real-life community-building experience.
I was a bit confused by the idea of the WELL community not being anonymous. Rheingold says the WELL users created pseudonyms. How is that not anonymous? Were other users able to view their real names somehow? I wonder if WELL was like the modern-day Web, where everything seems anonymous, but nothing really is.
It is funny to me to see how online interactions have changed. With WELL, people were mostly communicating with strangers. And as Brenna and Andrea said, when we first became exposed to the Web through AOL and other services, the norm was to interact with strangers online. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think most Web users have moved away from that now, using the Web mostly to communicate with people they know or to gather information.
February 11th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
I think all of the above post are great. Maude, I love the story about deleting yourself from friendster. I am just coming to terms with how difficult it is to separate the internet as a useful tool versus something that is much more meaningful and personal to many people.
Now that I can find myself on google, it makes me much more aware of why and how other people use the internet, and I do feel more personally involved for some reason. Perhaps that is what the author is talking about when he writes that “communities are imagined in the sense that a given nation exists by virtue of common acceptance in the minds of the population that it exists.”
I also thought Felecia’s post about lonelygirl and her comparison of it to our new relationships at Medill was an interesting point.
February 11th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Sorry again for the tardiness! Darn computer. Ok, now time to get down to business. Truthfully, the article confused me a little. I did understand the WELL projects until I read it through a few times. I have to agree with Brenna and Andrea that I found the article a little depressing. I would have no interest in just talking to people I didn’t know on the Internet. The idea even bores me. If I wanted to have a discussion, I’d rather do it in person. That is not to say that once upon a time I didn’t sit in chat rooms talking to people, because when the internet first came out (or at least I first discover it) I would go to those kid chat rooms and talk. But it was all so impersonal. It drove me nuts. So I stopped and saved the IInternet for research and connecting with friends I knew from school.
As for the WELL, I do like how it strives to be a creditable source with real names and such. I think that is a great model to follow. So many people hide behind the anonymity of the web and spout ideas as facts. It is a bit sad. Hopefully, in the future, others will follow this example and make the Internet more reliable for those gathering information. Unfortunately, that is all I really got from the article. Sorry I can’t give more!
February 11th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
It’s funny that we all think the idea of using online communities solely to connect with other strangers as creepy/boring, yet we all used to do it. In the early days of the Internet, that was part of its fascination. First of all, the idea that you cold connect with someone on the other side of the country, let alone world, was exciting. Now in the age of globilization when many of our friends live in different countries, it’s not quite that thrilling.
And yes, some people do get online primarily to meet strangers (as evidenced by the success of online dating sites), but you don’t maintain your anonymity.
Basically I think the initial reaction to chat rooms, anonymous encounters, etc is one of excitement at the unknown. But now that we all know what to expect, we crave the personal connections, and then realized the Internet could provide that as well as more further explained in the other reading.
February 12th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
While I, too, found Rheingold’s piece to be a little depressing, it threw me back to the time when the Internet was new. It reminded me of what it was like to sit and stare in awe at WebCrawler or Dogpile. Except, for me it was a little different because I sat in front of my TV – I actually had WebTV. That was pretty odd, now that I think back to it. For me, the Internet became linked with television, because whenever someone was online, the other members of the family couldn’t watch TV.
Like a few people discussed on this thread, I remember going into chatrooms and forums and talking to strangers, much like WELL members did back in the hippie days. Now, while I am somewhat creeped out by the thought of talking to strangers online, I think my limited experiences with online strangers back in the day were fairly useful. I belonged to an online debate forum throughout high school (that’s when we got WebTV). I know, I know, I’m a nerd, but the example illustrates my point. I would pose questions and reply to threads under a pseudonym. Not only did I learn a lot from debaters all over the country, but I made a few friends online. Some of us would chat in the forum’s chatrooms and we met in person at debate tournaments. While this may be a rarity, I actually forged real-life friendships with the debaters I met online. So, talking to strangers online actually became talking to friends in person. Go figure.
February 13th, 2008 at 2:03 am
Something that stuck out for me in this article was the idea of “selling the customers to each other.” What has made any social networking site work is the fact that likeable people have showed up to the party. I really had no interest in MySpace or Facebook until friends of mine started signing up.
As everyone has mentioned, it didn’t exactly used to be that way. When you went into one of those old-timey chatrooms (cue old-timey piano music), you had no idea what kind of people would be there. The site had to work harder to sell you on a theme.
WELL seems to be somewhere in between. They got journalists to sign up so they could spread the word. But they were also selling the idea that a certain kind of person would show up to a WELL discussion. The person you talked to might be a stranger, but you’d recognize their type.