Cyberspace is not a place. It is many places. The character of these many places is not identical. They instead differ in ways that are fundamental. These differences come in part from differences in the people who populate these places. But demographics alone won’t explain the variance. Something more is going on.

Here is a test. Read the following passage, and ask yourself whether the description rings true for you:

I believe virtual communities promise to restore to Americans at the end of the twentieth century what many of us feel was lost in the decades at the beginning of the century—a stable sense of community, of place. Ask those who’ve been members of such a virtual community, and they’ll tell you that what happens there is more than an exchange of electronic impulses in the wires. It’s not just virtual barn raising. . . . It’s also the comfort from others that a man like Phil Catalfo of the WELL can experience when he’s up late at night caring for a child suffering from leukemia, and he logs on to the WELL and pours out his anguish and fears. People really do care for each other and fall in love over the Net, just as they do in geographic communities. And that “virtual” connectedness is a real sign of hope in a nation that’s increasingly anxious about the fragmentation of public life and the polarization of interest groups and the alienation of urban existence.¹

There are two sorts of reactions to talk like this. To those who have been in this place for some time, such talk is extremely familiar. These people have been on nets from the start. They moved to the Internet from more isolated communities—from a local BBS (bulletin board service), or as Mike Godwin (the author of the passage) likes to put it, from a “tony” address like “The WELL.” For them the Net is a space for conversation, connections, and exchange, a wildly promising location for making life in real space different.

But if you are a recent immigrant to this “space” (the old-timers call you “newbies”), you are likely to be impatient with talk like this. When people talk about “community,” about special ways to connect, or about the amazing power of this space to alter lives, you are likely to ask, “What is this idea of cyberspace as a place?” For newbies, those who have simply e-mailed or surfed the World Wide Web, the “community” of the Net is an odd sort of mysticism. How can anyone think of these pages full of advertisements and spinning Mickey Mouse icons as a community, or even as a space? To the sober newbie, this just sounds like hype high on java.²

Newbies are the silent majority of today’s Net.³ However much we romanticize the old days when the Net was a place for conversation and exchange, this is not its function for most of its users now. Certainly, the world is into “chat,” but even ignoring the large portion of that space devoted to sex, chat is not the stuff the WELL was made of. Most people do not understand what chat or a MOO really is—maybe they have heard talk about them, but they do not understand what they are about. They do not understand what life in the community of the WELL, or a MOO, is really like.

In its feel, cyberspace has changed.⁴ How it looks, what you can do there, how you are connected there—all this has changed. Why it has changed is a complicated question—a complete answer to which I can’t provide. Cyberspace has changed in part because the people—who they are, what their interests are—have changed, and in part because the capabilities provided by the space have changed.

But part of the change has to do with the space itself. Communities, exchange, and conversation all flourish in a certain type of space; they are extinguished in a different type of space.⁵ My hope is to illuminate the differences between these two environments.

The next sections describe different cyber-places. The aim is an intuition about how to think through the differences that we observe. This intuition, in turn, will help us see something about where cyberspace is moving.

Footnotes

¹ Mike Godwin, Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age (New York: Times Books, 1998), 15. See also Esther Dyson, Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age (New York: Broadway Books, 1997), who asserts: “Used right, the Internet can be a powerful enabling technology fostering the development of communities because it supports the very thing that creates a community—human interaction” (32); see also Stephen Doheny-Farina, The Wired Neighborhood (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 121–37. For a recent and important collection examining community in cyberspace, see Marc A. Smith and Peter Kollock, Communities in Cyberspace (New York: Routledge, 1999). The collection ranges across the social issues of community, including “social order and control,” “collective action,” “community structure and dynamics,” and “identity.” The same relationship between architecture and norms assumed in this chapter guides much of the analysis in Smith and Kollock’s collection. Edit Delete

² The newest “communitarian” on the Net might be business. A number of influential works have argued that the key to success with online businesses is the development of “virtual communities”; see, for example, Larry Downes and Chunka Mui, Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998), 101–9; John Hagel and Arthur G. Armstrong, Net Gain: Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997). Edit Delete

³ For a detailed study of Internet demographics, see Matrix Information and Directory Services, “Internet Demographics: The Third MIDS Internet Demographic Survey” (MIDS ids3, October 1995), available at http://web.archive.org/web/19961111042911/http://www.mids.org/ids3/index.html. Edit Delete

⁴ For a great sense of how it was, see the articles by Rheingold, Barlow, Bruckman, and Ramo in part 4 of Richard Holeton, Composing Cyberspace: Identity, Community, and Knowledge in the Electronic Age (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998). Howard Rheingold’s book (the first chapter of which is excerpted in Holeton’s book) is also an early classic; see The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993). Stacy Horn’s book is a brilliant text taken more directly from the interchange (and more) online; see Cyberville: Clicks, Culture, and the Creation of an Online Town (New York: Warner Books, 1998). Edit Delete

⁵ For an excellent description, see Jonathan Zittrain, “The Rise and Fall of Sysopdom,” Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 10 (1997): 495. Edit Delete