Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Have you tried any of the current electronic book devices?  How do
they compare to the vision of the Dynabook?
  

    
There are communities all over the world. When I travelled on my book
tours and to speak, people felt compelled to come up to me to testify. As
I made clear in the new chapter, not every online social network is a
place where people party together, eat meals together, pass the hat to
help someone out when they lose a job, form support networks when someone
is ill, babysit for each other's kids -- the kinds of things that we
expect people in communities to do. But from the testimony I've received
from people, it happens everywhere. I had a dinner with dozens of people
at a house Shigaraki, in the hills an hour's train ride outside Kyoto, who
are members of a community network. I had a lunch with a couple dozen
people in Stockholm -- young web designers who were part of a community
that was held together by a list that had sometimes hundreds of messages a
day (I tried to sell them on the idea of message boards). People travel
from all over the world to gather with their friends from IRC channels or
newsgroups, even AOL message boards. I suspect it happens MORE than we
know. The WELL was unique because of the historical time it started, 1985,
because the San Francisco Bay Area is somewhat unique, because of the
Whole Earth Review/Catalog community that seeded it, and because of the
Figtex (and mmc) experience in communal living. But it isn't unique in
terms of it being a home for many communities that extend into the face to
face world.

Brian, I haven't tried any of these devices. As I recall, without looking
it up, the Dynabook was supposed to be about the size of a book, with a
high resolution color screen, wireless broadband network capability,
powerful processor. Looks to me like the best of today's laptops with
wireless connectivity are slightly larger versions. As Alan Kay noted in
the new chapter of Tools for Thought, the Web turned out to be less
symmetrical than he had hoped, in terms of every consumer of information
also being an author.
  

    
Howard, one of the reasons The Virtual Community was such an eye-opener for
me is that you did journey to meet people, and do the extensive follow-up.
It was great hearing snippets about the hack that made the French Minitel
system into an interactive service, and that made it all the more gratifying
to get an in-depth story in the book.

And I know that because of the book you have continued to do this kind of
travel and follow-up...  so my question is, does the afterward chapter add
any good tales and examples?  And are there more you wish you'd had time to
tell?
  

    

Gail is right. You've become *the* most experienced anthropologist for
the virtual community universe. Were you surprised, between editions,
to see how much that universe had expanded? Or, conversely, how little
it had?
  

    
I didn't really get into that in the new chapter, I'm afraid. I could have
written an entirely new book! I wanted to concentrate on some key
questions about the nature of community, about how community-like online
social networks are or are not, what this all has to do with the public
sphere and civil society.

However, after I posted that up above, images immediately flooded into my
head, of the good friends and warm times I had with friends in Adelaide
(which reminded me in a strange way of Austin) and Amsterdam
(http://www.well.com/user/hlr/roadshows/amsterdigital.html) and Tokyo
(http://www.well.com/user/hlr/roadshows/tokyopiga.html) and Austin and New
York and Seattle and Geneva
(http://www.well.com/user/hlr/roadshows/geneva/). I'm sure a dozen more
such instances will occur to me. Truly, there are a lot of very similar
characteristics to these groups, although I don't pretend to be an
ethnographer. People forge strong bonds through some of these groups, and
some of those bonds continue for a long time. I remember how gracious
Flash was to offer his house for a party after I did a booksigning at the
Booksmith on Haight Street in 1988. Almost all the people at the signing
and the party were Well friends.

For some reason that last sentence triggered off a memory that isn't a
happy one, but certainly a poignant one. Who of the people at Dhawk's
memorial could deny that the word "community" could be used legitimately
to describe our connections. I saw so many people I had not seen in
years. There was as much laughter as there were tears, as it should
be. When Reet played that pre-release CD of the Persuasions singing
"Brokedown Palace," chills went up my spine. And all the testimony about
Dhawk. Like everyone, he had his faults. But so many of us had the same
story about how he literally took us by the hand and welcomed us to our
first WELL party, how he patiently spent hours helping us figure out the
complexities of .cfdirs and .cflists and other Picospan technicalities --
long before he was a WELL employee.
  

    

I know that when I was working as a freelance writer I certainly felt the
isolation that you talked about earlier, and logging on to the WELL was a
way to feel that I was connected, not just to the outside world but also
to other writers.  That feeling was reinforced at a g writer's party at
your house one year, Howard, which felt to me like I had gone to the
office Christmas party and actually met my co-workers, some for the first
time.  That's just one of the ways that the WELL was a community in my
experience.  As I started going to more and more conferences and meeting
more and more people, that feeling of community expanded and was further
reinforced.  In a way, it was more real than many of the other connections
I have with people in face-to-face life.
  

    
That was a special party for me, too. We had an altar. Certainly the
Writer's conference is one of the places on the WELL where a strong sense
of mutual support has always been encouraged. The hosts have always gone
out of their way in that regard, and so have the participants.

Clearly, those of us who are somewhat familiar with the WELL understand
that it's misleading to call it "a community." Is the News conference a
"community?" Or "war?" It's very much like the small town that
grows. Sure, there was a time in 1985 or 1986 when it was possible to have
a .cflist that included every conference, if not every topic on the
WELL. And most people recognized most other people's names. And the people
at WOPs represented a significant if nowhere near a majority portion of
the population. But the kind of feeling you can get with an online
population of 500 changes when that population grows to 1000 and 5000. I
think the "community" feeling is somewhat granular -- smaller groups of
50-200, like the writer's conference, are communities. Some people belong 
to multiple communities. People have portfolios of social ties
online. Some of those ties are strong ties. Some of them are weak
ties. Some conferences discourage flamefests. Others are hotbeds. 

At one point, I had to severely curtail my excessive WELL participation
-- I didn't have the time or energy during the Electric Minds
period. Writers was one of the conferences I trimmed from my list. Not
because it failed to meet my needs, but because I didn't have time in my
life. Now that I have more time and and doing more writing, I guess I
need to return. It's kinda hard to return to a place like that simply
because of all the water under the bridge. Thank Gopod for fixseen!

[Only a hardcore WELL geek would write something like "Thank Gopod for
fixseen!, doncha think?]
y
  

    

For a while you had a (weekly?) column that you were also posting on The
WeLL, and you've also written for magazines and the like; could you comment
a bit on these various types of writing that you've done?  Do you approach
the task differently when you're writing for a periodical instead of
writing a book?  Do the books influence the articles, or vice-versa?
  

    
Hi Alan. The WELL part was definitely the most fun part about writing that
column. I was originally hired by David Talbot to write for the
Examiner. He was also interested in talking about starting an Internet
publication, but that's another story...

In retrospect, a lot of those columns were way ahead. It was called
"Tomorrow," but sometimes I think it should have been called "what my
friends on the WELL are talking about today but nobody else will
understand for five years. ;-)"

I would get an idea, post a draft, and let the people who know more than I
about the topic have at it. It's a scary thing for a writer to do, but by
that time I felt I had a strong enough sense of my own voice, and had
played editor long enough, that I could let people question, hammer,
nitpick, and not get goofy about it. It was like multiplying my own
expertise a hundredfold. 

But writing a weekly column is like skiing down Everest -- there's always
this avalanche behind you. You're never finished. If you want to go away
for two weeks, you need to get four columns ahead. I don't know how Jon
Carroll does daily columns. It takes a very special form of
genius/insanity to do that. I got tired of doing it. I felt like I had
learned all I could learn from trying to jam a big idea into 700 words.

A bunch of old columns are stashed at
http://www.well.com/user/hlr/tomorrow/

Sometimes, books grow out of magazine articles. I wrote "Virtual
Communities" for Whole Earth Review in 1988. Kevin Kelly prodded me into
it -- he's really a great editor for getting big ideas out of writers, and
also a master at helping you rework material. It took years to convince a
trade book publisher that this Internet stuff was for people other than
electrical engineers.

The book industry has changed so much. When I wrote the first edition of
The VC, for example, Doubleday, Dell, Ballantine, Random House, and Knopf
were all different companies. Now, they are all part of Bertelsmann. There
used to be thousands of sales reps who loved books and thousands of
independent book sellers who met with them and discussed lists. They had a
huge convention every year. Now, there is Borders, Barnes & Noble, and
Amazon. 
  

    
So whom (in terms of a reading audience) would you say this edition of
VC is aimed at?
  

    
I'm especially interested in the new generations of researchers --
students and graduate students and post-docs in sociology, social
psychology, political science. I'm interested in those who feel there is
some potential in social cyberspaces for enriching social capital in the
face to face world and in using online discourse as part of a strategy for
revitalizing the public sphere. There's so much anecdotal (pretty
good) theory, anecdotal (total bullshit) theory, preliminary research,
shoddy research, fragmentary research, research that ought to be
interdisciplinary but isn't -- and journalism and public policy discussion
based on this very mixed bag. I'd love to see the field of
interdisciplinary cyberspace studies grow. I don't think human social
behavior is every going to be quantifiable in the way Skinner and others
sought, but I do think good methodology and good samples and the right
kinds of questions can lend some substance to debates that seem to me to
be based mostly on rhetoric.

Students. People who thought the first edition was terrific and are ready
for mor depth. People who thought the first edition fell short and might
be surprised that I listened to them.

It's not a how-to. There are already books by Cliff Figallo and Amy Jo Kim
and Jenny Preece, and there will be others.

I wanted to try to encompass the phenomena of online socializing, from
chat rooms to Usenet to the WELL to the Web, humanize it to show what I've
found in terms of real community, try to map out the territory for an
interdisciplinary investigation of whether or not these activities are
good for (all or some of) us or not, whether they have potential for civic
renewal or are (as Fernback & Thompson and others claim) a kind of
technological utopianism that is doomed to fail.

I'd like to help people get beyond the simplistic questions and start
looking at the big picture.
  

    
In your look backward/forward, Howard, I'm very curious on your
thoughts about "early adopters" and "the rest of the world" (I know, it
ain't that simplistic, but...)

If we are to harness the _potential_ for the social good supported by
what we call "community" -- how do we make it _doable_? I think about
people who aren't that curious to poke at half built/buggy conferencing
tools, with slow modems, who don't have the luxury of time to
integrate themselves into places like the Well, who aren't great
writers. What might virtual community mean for this larger, less self
selected group of people? In terms of literacy, but much much
more...???
  

    
Thomas Brinson e-mails:

Howard,  yesterday you spoke of "online communication literacy" in post #23
as follows:

             "I'd say the biggest wild card in trying to see the shape of
social
             cyberspaces in the future, and their importance in people's
lives and the
             public sphere, is how far, quickly, and deeply online
communication
             literacy spreads."

For some time based upon my experience in online community and working with
virtual teams I have felt that CMC has made significant progress on two of
its three requisite legs, the hardware and the software. The third leg,
however, has been lagging; it deals, I believe, with the spreading of
"online communication literacy". An associate, Casey Hughes, has called it
the SOS --> the Social Operating System. I term it the "soulware", the
protocols, practices, dynamics of creating, implementing and managing online
communication.

What do you see will enhance the spreading of "online communication
literacy"? 

thomas brinson
  

    
Hi Nancy!

This kind of communication isn't for everybody and won't ever be for
everybody. I think you'll agree that communities of practice and virtual
teams and support groups and other groups of people who need to have
organized, recorded conversations across barriers of time and space will
end up using CMC. So there will, I believe, be a larger number of people
in the future using message boards and chat and IMs and listservs. I don't
know that there are ever going to be that many people who do it for fun
the way we do. So one answer is to look for groups who have a real need,
and show them how they can do some things better than before and how they
can do some things that weren't possible for them before. 

I think that speaks a little to Thomas' question, too. Literacy with the
written and spoken word isn't universal, either. The proportion of the
population who gives a rats ass about effective communication or
meaningful discourse is not likely to ever be that large. However, I do
think norms of behavior emerge eventually with every communication
medium. Online media are more complex than telephones, and there are more
ways for larger numbers of people to misunderstand each other, so I think
it will take longer for norms to diffuse.

One thing I wonder about is whether there is a minimum amount of civility
and coherence required for social cyberspaces to appeal strongly enough to
people for them to contribute their attention and energy. There's the myth
of "the September that never ended," before the Web even, about how so
many new people started using email and usenet that the older means of
diffusing norms of netiquette and cooperation were swamped long ago. But I
think we're living in different time scales. Social evolution online was
rather slow between 1970 and 1980, accelerated when Usenet started,
accelerated even more when the Net started to be a big deal, went into
overdrive with the Web. It's hard to figure where things will be a few
years from now.

It doesn't hurt, though, to try to show more people stuff that works --
like putting your long list of addresses in the BCC field. ;-)
  

    
Good morning, Howard!

You and I experienced some ecstatic highs and some gut wrenching lows
during our months together at Electric Minds. How did the total
Electric Minds experience change your thinking? And, is your experience
detailed in the revised "Virtual Community"?
  

    
I do talk about Electric Minds in the new chapter, in terms of lessons
learned.

I'll try to be brief. Your questions is rather large, Fatty. ;-)

First, the business part: Why I got into it, what the business model was,
why it failed. 

From the first time I saw the Web, I wanted to experiment with combining
publishing and discourse. When Kevin Kelly and Jonathan Steuer invited me
to talk Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe into starting an online zine, I
jumped at it. In retrospect, if Louis and I had taken even twenty minutes
to talk to each other one on one, it would have been clear that the
relatiosohip was doomed. Let's just say that he was interested in
extending the broadcast model of the magazine, and I was interested in
something more participatory and community-like. Of course, if either of
us had jumped on an idea that came up in a 1994 meeting -- offer free web
pages to subscribers -- the enterprise might have worked out
differently. After leaving HotWired soon after launch, I had a fun year
working on my Well-based website. I did everything myself and it was great
fun being writer, editor, publisher, and art director. The amateurism of
the web -- in the best sense of the word -- was intoxicating. I'm amazed
at how swiftly most of the world has forgotten that the Web was a labor of
love, with absolutely no commercial aspect, before it was a financial
arena.

I started inviting my friends around the world to contribute. I started
wanting to add a message board. Web-based conferencing was still in its
infancy. There was Motet and Engaged and, I think Web Crossing started up
soon after. But I wasn't enough of a geek to run a server. I started
calculating what it would cost to pay my contributors and to run a server
and integrate some conferencing software, and it was beyond my means. I
had this goofy idea of technically integrating editorial content and
conversation, so there was a window from the editorial pages into the
conversation about those pages, and vice-versa. There were very few off
the shelf application servers available then, so that made the entire
enterprise more expensive.

I was introduced to a guy who knew how to make my scribblings into a
business plan and raise money. He was the wrong choice for a partner, and
my first and biggest mistake was not firing him early in the game. But he
knew someone who was willing to put a million dollars into the
enterprise. The investor was Softbank, which had a worldwide publishing
operation before it started investing in Yahoo and Ziff Davis. What I told
the Softbank guy was that they should look at Electric Minds not as a big
investment but as really inexpensive research and development. I was
totally open that we weren't sure what the business model was -- not many
enterprises had solid business models in 1996 -- but we would try to get
along on advertising. But the payoff to our investors would be in what we
could learn about integrating publishing and community. The small
investment in Electric Minds might leverage their larger investments. 

I made more than one bad hire. Of the many mistakes I made, hiring
incompetents was by far the worst. Our ad sales guy never sold one
ad. That sunk us in Softbank's eyes before we had our first big success in
the R&D angle -- the community we created for IBM around the chess match
between Gary Kasparov and Deep Blue II (a story that Cliff Figallo tells
in his book).

In terms of what I learned about community management in a public
community that is also a commercial enterprise, I learned that it's more
important to throw out obnoxious assholes (the Nazi who hung around for
months comes to mind, but there were more than a few ) than to fetishize
"free speech." Free speech means "Congress shall make no law..." not
"Thou shalt suffer the abuse of bigots and assholes in public
discussions." I learned that it's important to have a good hosts contract
and to make sure hosts go through training. 

Then the business of Electric Minds went under, but the community
continued. I give a brief description of that in the new chapter. Lessons
learned: I should have been more aware of "founder's syndrome" and dropped
out of the community discussions. One of the great services Stewart Brand
did for the WELL was to more or less disappear for a year, not long after
founding it. The other lesson, which I discuss at greater length in the
new chapter, is that democracy is a great idea and a messy process and
asynchronous online discussions among people who never meet face to face
is not the best way to try to put together a constitution or by-laws. Many
people want to talk about subject matter, from technology to parenting,
not to talk, talk, talk about how to talk about subject matter. Too much
meta-process drives off all but the most rabid process freaks.

It's become clear that advertising isn't going to support a large number
of sites that combine high quality editorial content and online
discussion. Salon does a great job of putting quality content online
daily, and they are struggling to survive. But nobody knew that in
1996. It's a shame.

All in all, although it was a painful experience in many ways, and
definitely something I didn't really enjoy doing, I'm glad I tried. We did
achieve some cultural excellence, I think. It was a great lesson in
capitalism for me. I realized that like a great many intellectuals who had
never tried to meet a payroll, I had an unexamined contempt for
business. I now understand how much credit people deserve for running an
honest business, paying employees, and managing them. 

I've known for a long time that I'm a terrible employee. Electric Minds
taught me that I'm a bad employer (and that management truly is an
art). I'm much happier as a freelancer and a contractor who hires
subcontractors.

It isn't that great a loss to the world that online community doesn't have
much of a business model (if you aren't AOL, that is). Fortunately, the
cost of setting up a webconferencing or listserv or chat or MOO community
has dropped to the point where many amateurs can do it.
  

    

You know, I was going to type a sentence marveling about the shift from
being immersed in a virtual community to managing one with business
concerns in mind, and i do marvel, what a different experience that is!

But what I experienced in typing a post is something more interesting to
ask about.  I was going "a computer mediated.. [delete] an asyncronous...
[delete] a text-centric..."  

I don't know how to honestly extrapolate from WELL experiences to online
communites in general, though some which are relatively free in spirit and
in technology are often very similar.

When I want to speak abstractly about the kinds of interrelations and 
the way perspectives are changes I question whether I can say
"in a virtual community,"  or whether there are more specific causes of 
the powerful patterns we see. 

So is the distance most important?  The computers?  The text?  The
reader-provided tone? What is it that makes the "virtual" phenomenon and 
how much is dependent on the medium?
  

    
Can you take another run at that question, Gail?

I do find it useful to avoid generalizations whenever possible, and to
examine the degree to which the generalizations I make really hold true
for other people's experience. To say "The WELL" is to generalize, of
course, since we each have different histories here, different .cflists,
different "forgotten" topics, different interpretations.
  

    
<12-13>
  

    
Eh?
  

    
Trying to generate a URL for direct reference to responses 12-13 that I
could post in <point.vue.>.  Didn't work.
  

    
The URL for the Association for Community Networking is
<http://bcn.boulder.co.us/afcn/>, without the leading "www".
  

    
Howard, would you characterize ISSUE <http://www.issue.spirit.nl/> as a
worthy experiment?
  

    
Sounds interesting, John. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

"Support of the relationship between citizens and politicans in daily
life between elections. It is all about forming the agenda of politicans,
and not so much about decesion making." Sounds like the public
sphere. Where public opinion is formed and is made known to politicians.

What do you know about this initiative? 
  

    
<choco> posted an email about it she received in <vc.18.455>.
I've sent her email asking for permission to crosspost here.