Tute Presentation - "The Virtual Community"

Hey guys,

So, I thought that I had posted this on Monday but turns out it actually didn't work... Sorry that its so late, but these are my thoughts on the Howard Rheingold reading "The Virtual Community".

Following on from Caitlin’s discussion of virtual communities, I thought I would open up a discussion about how we, as a part of this generation in which technology is such a dominant force, feel about virtual communities and the idea of life within a computer.

Firstly, I thought we would look at how our feelings towards virtual communities have changed since we have become more involved in them. Rheingold says that “the idea of a community accessible only via my computer screen sounded cold to me at first, but I learned quickly that people can feel passionately about e-mail and computer conferences.” For many of us, this unit is the first time we have blogged or been a part of an online community, and although it is different because we also have the face-to-face contact in tutorials, we are still engaging in virtual relationships online.
How have our perceptions of virtual community changed since becoming part of one?

Leading on from this, it is important to discuss how our perception of ourselves can be altered by involvement in online communities. In the article, Rheingold talks about the ability to be so many different people at once in a virtual environment. He says “I was an audience, performer and scriptwriter, along with my companions, in an ongoing improvisation”. We have discussed before the way in which people tend to only present a version of themselves in an online environment, in order to present the best possible idea of who they are. It is clear that people might also take the opportunity to engage with different versions of themselves that they feel are marginalised in real life.
Do we feel that people can reinvent themselves and present different versions of their personalities in virtual communities?

One of the most important points I noticed that Rheingold was trying to make in the article, relates to the leverage that virtual communities, and internet technology as a whole, give to ordinary people. We must note that this article was written in 1993, when the internet was just being developed and people, even those like Rheingold, who were heavily involved in it, only had a slight idea of how it would develop. He talks alot about how people need to be educated about the internet in order to use its technical power intelligently to maximise its potential. His reading is highly developed when it notes that “this new sphere of vital human discourse remains open to the citizens of the planet before the political and economic big boys seize it, censor it, meter it, and sell it back to us.”
Given that this article was written 17 years ago, how do we feel about this statement? Do we think that his prediction was right, or is the internet as free to citizens as Rheingold would have hoped?

Finally, I would lie to discuss a very interesting observation made by Rheingold in reference to the way the internet was propagating and evolving at the time of the article. He said to “think of cyberspace as a social petri dish, and virtual communities as the colonies of microorganisms that grow in petri dishes”. He says the net is a “social experiment that nobody planned but that is happening nevertheless”.
Although it may have started out as a social experiment, what do we think of the internet now? Does it still seem experimental or is the internet just second nature to us now?