From emv@umich.edu Fri May 21 01:04:15 1999 Date: Tue, 18 May 1999 00:09:05 -0400 (EDT) From: Edward Vielmetti To: vacuum@egroups.com Subject: [vacuum] State of the Virtual Community (from Braddlee) Welcome to Vacuum! Tonight's issue is a guest essay from Braddlee. A little more than a year ago, when I first sent out an issue of Vacuum to about 20 people, I wrote: I'm also aiming at something a bit more mystical, alas - how can people organize in their minds information about a network of people and services that used to seem small enough to grasp (if you spent enough time at it) but now feels like it's too hopelessly large and thinly spread out and uneven that one person can take it in? Think "vacuum" as the relative density of space most of the universe has now compared to the way it was oh around the time of the Big Bang. Here's a perspective I thought worth sharing on how six years worth of network evolution has changed beyond recognition the infrastructures that used to connect people together, and maybe a start for some ideas on how new groups and groupings can put people in contact with each other. Another approach you might find useful (thanks to Jeff Ubois for pointing this out) is Phil Agre's _Networking on the Network_, at http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/network.html which he has written aimed at the graduate student looking to break into the academic professional ranks but which plays pretty well to anyone dealing with virtual communities. I'm interested in hearing your comments on this - send them to me or to Braddlee & I'll publish what comes in if you have any perspectives on the change over the last few years or future prospects for new virtual community efforts. thanks Ed Edward Vielmetti Vacuum: http://egroups.com/list/vacuum http://vacuum.mi.org weblog: http://vacuum.mi.org/weblog.html ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 14 May 1999 20:27:48 -0700 From: Braddlee To: Edward Vielmetti Subject: State of the Virtual Community... Hi - A few thoughts, perhaps Vacuum-like, perhaps just vacuous.... Lately, I've been going back to some old ground, and seemingly finding more scorched earth than fertile soil. When I finished my doctoral dissertation in '93, the net was still pre-NCSA-Mosaic. Gophers ruled the earth, and VERONICA was the cool new tool of choice. As part of my continuing, but as yet unsuccessful, efforts to render myself totally unemployable in academia, in '89 I veered from a pop culture/semiotics dissertation on Pee-Wee's Playhouse to one on virtual communities on the net. Gay virtual communities. Oh, dear. I focussed mostly on Gaynet, a listserve list for gay collegians - from 18 YO fresh*'s to retired faculty. The discussion even then wasn't always profound, but it at least constituted content - enough for me to come up with 500 pages of analysis sufficiently dense to qualify for Ph.D.-hood. Overall, the process of graduate school was pretty traumatic. By the time I defended I had been working full+-time for two years making small piles of numbers out of big piles of numbers, and was so tired of theorizing over the net (and almost everything else) that I couldn't bear the idea of participating on a list, much less sawing journal articles out of a dissertation. Since signing off later the same year as Co-sysop of EFF's Forum on CompuServe, I haven't seen much of the inside of the commercial online services. So, while I've been continually involved in the net, professionally and otherwise for the past 6 years, I really haven't spent much time on interactive mailing lists like Gaynet or its descendants. About 6 months ago, I started looking around again, wanting to explore what signs of life there might be out in the universe since I unplugged. I've spent time on IRC, cruising Usenet, checking out Yahoo, PlanetOut, Badpuppy, and a number of other free and commercial venues. And what I'm finding is - not much. MILLIONS of JPEG's, and nearly as many horny guys looking to connect up with other horny guys (not that there's anything wrong with that). However, Internet personals strike me as being the social equivalent of Ping - useful, but really not much to say about them. So, I'm starting to develop a theory on what I see happening, and what may (or may not be) be wrong with how we're going about all of this. For lack of imagination, let's call it the dispersion theory - when there were only a few games in town, you got people together - they had a chance (for better or worse) to bump up against each other - a bit like the crowded bar on Saturday night. You might end up in a interesting conversation or meet someone new simply because you're forced to share a limited number of oxygen molecules. Today, there are a zillion places to go, but the spark, the critical mass necessary to create life is lacking in nearly all of them. Even where I see threads that show signs of life, they fade away too fast. Perhaps this is a bit like the rest of the universe, where there are 'billions and billions' of stars, but (presumably) a much smaller number of planets capable of supporting intelligent life. What I had hoped for (along with other cyberoptimists, like Howard Rheingold) was that as the net expanded, the opportunity for everyone to find and form social ties related to interests that might not be fulfilled (or simply expanded beyond) local place community would be deepened. Instead, on most days we seem to be heading in a direction that's about a mile wide, and a molecule deep. Now, before this careens into a cry-in-your-beer, "I remember how the net used to be," Postmanesque reminiscence, let me explain that I believe there is an evolutionary purpose to all of this. Despite how fast this is all moving, we're still in the first nanoseconds after the big bang. None of this is worked out yet. In the creation of a plenitude of online venues, evolution is figuring out how some of them are going to survive. Vacuum is one of the possibilities. Sixdegrees is another. A piece of my life these days is about trying to reconnect with what excited me about the net in the first place - the global interconnectedness, the chance to do something new, the opportunity to make a difference (and perhaps even get paid!). To be honest, I'm not sure my life has been much improved by finding out that I'm only three degrees of separation from Carl Steadman. But, eventually, some of this will crawl out of the muck and start to walk upright. It still would be fun to be a piece of the plan. FWIW, B ------------------------------------------------------------------------ @Backup - The #1 Online Backup Service Automatic, Safe, Reliable Backup and Restores. FREE for 30 Days. INSTALL Now and have a chance to win a Palm Pilot V! http://clickhere.egroups.com/click/218 eGroups.com home: http://www.egroups.com/group/vacuum http://www.egroups.com - Simplifying group communications