Virtual Worlds Resources

Virtual Communities

New Finds

Meta Sources

Articles, Papers, FAQs

Places and Communities

Virtual Reality Info

Critiques of Cyberculture and Technology

New Finds

February 4, 1996:

Is Howard Rheingold a utopian cult leader, closely allied with both the publishers of Wired and right-wing militias? New to the Critiques section of this list, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron make such a case in The California Ideology.

The best news I've had since the Communications Decency Act passed Congress, that pack of scurrilous know-nothings, was the reminder by Marc Demarest is that this has all happened before, with the ultimately doomed effort to control and suppress the effects of the printing press. Highly recommended. Email this URL to your friends.

A list of more than 100 peer-reviewed journals in science, technology, and medicine and scenarios regarding the future of online journals. As long as the scientists don't say naughty words or discuss abortion.

"Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet" by Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben centers on the biggest virtual community in the world.

Community-building in meatspace: The Public Involvement Network furnishes practical information about public involvement.

Cyberwar, God And Television is an interview with Paul Virilio by Louise Wilson for CTHEORY.

December 1, 1995:

Two theses by the ever-knowledgeable Elizabeth Reid (Electropolis: Communication and Community on Internet Relay Chat, and Cultural Formations in Text-Based Virtual Realities) and several essays.

A Masters thesis on a societal model of Usenet

From Florida Atlanta University, a "comprehsive list of communication, anthropology, and cyberculture resources on the Web"

November 28, 1995:

Webconferencing finally works. With Motet, the Web finally becomes a sociable medium. The software is available at Utne Reader's Utne Cafe and any day now at the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle's The Gate.

Another attempt at creating a community of interest is Salon, a new commercial webzine started by a group of former editors at the San Francisco Examiner who are trying to create a high-culture community of discussion. Disclaimer: I write a column for Salon, called Mr. Rheingold's Neighborhood.

Brainstorms reader Markus Schlegel of Oslo, writes: "I have compiled a moderate list of Virtual Communities online sources that lists some non-classical (i.e. European) sites."

On the political implications of many-to-many media, check out Thomas Jefferson and the Electronic commons

Meta Sources

• EINet Galaxy has a rich collection of resources on networking and communication, including a long list of links to community networks.
• The WELLgopher archives several excellent resources in its Community directory.
• Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine is worth checking out monthly.
• The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication is more academic, also worth checking out regularly
• The Communications Archive @ Sunsite has a great collection of papers about computer mediated communications.
• Donna L. Hoffman and Thomas P. Novak, web-surfing marketing theorists at Vanderbilt University, have written a number of informative papers that show why marketing on the Web is not your father's BBD&O.
• CMC Study Center Resources list has other goodies.
• Glocom, the Tokyo-based Center for Global Communications, is always good for an international perspective on networks, international affairs, and virtual communities.
• Here is an excellent collection of resources regarding ethics and law on the electronic frontier
• A jumping off point for MUD Resources
• Check out the Center for the Study of Online Community, where sociologist Marc Smith has some key papers and syllabi.
• This University of Pennsylvania course in Social Implications of Information Technology has lots of pointers to social psychology, media criticism, political implications.
• This site has many resources relating to MOOs and Stuff including direct connections to various MOOs.
• David Wooley maintains a collection of Web-based conferencing systems
• The Victoria B.C. Freenet maintains a Gateway to Freenets and Community Networks via World-wide Web.

Articles, Papers, FAQs

• Elizabeth Reid's Electropolis: Communication and Community on Internet Relay Chat> is a must-read for any student of virtual communities.
• Amy Bruckman is another must-read scholar of virtual communities. Here is a stash of Amy Bruckman's writing on virtual communities. Don't miss her paper on Identity Workshops
• Tony Rutkowski (Director of the Internet Society) made a keynote speech about the present and future of the Net that's also a must-read.
• Ann Beamis' Master's thesis (City Planning, MIT, February 1995) is the first scholarly investigation of Communities On-line: Community-Based Computer Networks
• Paper on VC, MUDs, IRC etc. from the Communications Archive @ Sunsite
• Howard Rheingold's Virtual Communities text from 1992, via WELLgopher.
• A proposed national strategy regarding Civic Networking.
• The Benton Foundation looks at telecommunications policy from a public interest perspective in What's going on with the National Information Infrastructure
• Computer networks are only the tool. Community is the task. Can we use these communication tools to help revitalize our real-life communities? The Rockefeller-funded Millennium Project has published its report, Communications as Engagement: a Communications Strategy for Revitalization including a list of 235 projects that have established themselves as effective community-building initiatives.
• Vannevar Bush wrote his prescient A s We May Think way back in 1945. Still worth a reading.
• Gender Issues in Computer Networking, by Leslie Regan Shade
• Elizabeth Lane Lawley has written a paper about The Sociology of Culture in Computer-Mediated Communication from the point of view of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.
• This piece by Brenda Danet of the Hebrew University, on Smoking Dope at A Virtual Party: Writing, Play, and Performance on Internet Relay Chat will be published in Network and Netplay: Virtual Groups on the Internet, MIT Press, in press.
• A paper about Collaborative Hypermedia Servers and Webbed MOO (WOO) Transaction Protocol (WTP)
• The Sci.Virtual- Worlds Meta-FAQ is the place to start if you just got interested in VR and want to know a whole lot more.

Places and Communities

• The WELL, Rheingoldian home turf, hotbed of gnarly individualism
• The River, a virtual community owned and governed by the users.
• FreeNets Home Page leads to lots of resources for community networkers
• Blacksburg Electronic Village, a state-of-the-art community network.
• TWICS, a virtual community in Tokyo
• COARA, a virtual community in Oita, Japan -- far from Tokyo; less bicultural than TWICS; I've visited them four times IRL. COARA members are starting to put up lots of cool web pages.
• OTIS - an online caldron of creativity
• Cobra Lounge is one of the weirdest, wackiest, art-troupes in cyberspace, part of The San Francisco Telecircus [Scroll down a ways and you'll come across Mamie "Minispoon" Rheingold]
• Click your way into a whole nuther world, ChibaMOO
• Vincent's Hollow, a "text-based virtual reality" (MUD-like place).
• CTD MOO is a virtual community for the Center for Talent Development.
• Ubique is a commercial outfit that creates tools to add human presence to the Web.
• Mix your real reality and your virtual community: A global guide to Cyber Cafes.
• TurnPike Metropolis will publish, at no charge, up to one megabyte of your non-commercial Web pages
• The Spring is a young virtual community flesh-based in Austin, Texas.
• Station Rose, my zany Austrian artist friends, are online from Frankfurt, via the WELL in California.

Virtual Reality Info

• Virtual Reality Archive Home-page
• A succinct but juicy list of VR-related resources.
• The Human Interface Technology Lab is the home of Tom Furness' crusade to scan images directly on the retina, and a dozen other VR projects in medicine, architecture, education.
• Presence is MIT's distinguished VR journal, available via ftp.
• The VR page by Chris Hand is a great jumping-off place for VR websurfers.
• NASA's Virtual Environment Generator
• Carl Loeffler's Distributed Virtual Reality
• Triangle VR Group from North Carolina's Research Triangle Region.
• Georgia Institute of Technology's Graphic s Visualization and Usability Center has worlds o' stuff related to virtual environments, VR applications from surgical simulation to the phobia project, human factors in VR research.
• The University of Washington's virtual worlds ftp site is another goldmine if you are looking for VR papers, postings, books, faqs, discussions.

Critiques of Cyberculture and Technology

• If you ever let the words "electronic democracy" leave your lips, you owe it to yourself to read Utopian Promises - Net Realities.
• Are virtual communities helping destroy real community? Don't make up your mind until you read Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?
• Howard Rheingold, Utopian Cult Leader? The California Ideology hits some good targets, and makes some wildly inaccurate analyses. Worth reading. Salt according to taste.
• Does the decentralized, ubiquitous nature of many-to-many communications make the Internet a perfect medium for disinformation? Luciano Floridi e-mailed me his examination of this question, and granted permission to post it here. Worth reading. It will leave you wondering where it's leading, which is a good thing to wonder these days.

Send corrections, updates, candidates to

Howard Rheingold hlr@well.com

Brainstorms Tomorrow Virtual