KonzeptioNerd

Back to the Farm?

In her 2001 book, technology / sociotechnology journalist Katie Hafner tells the story of abut 15 years of The Well - the first online community to turn into a brand, the oldest online community we’re still talking about and the quasi paradisical state all online communities aspire to return to (not). Hafner chose to tell this story for a large part as the story of Well-member and sometime employee Tom Mandel, well knowing “that Mandel’s story was by no means the whole story of the Well”, rationalizing, however, that “it offered a penetrating look into that pioneering world, the first of its kind, that so bewitched him and others.” (184)

But this rather personal look at the Well is also inline with Hafner’s overall view on online communities. The book starts off with a one page excerpt from Robert N. Bellah’s Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, pointing out that “a community offers examples of men and women who have embodied and exemplified the meaning of the community.” Hafner sees online communities as the replacing successor of smalltown and neighborhood communities that seem to be the mainstay of “good old” American life - a life that is changing drastically to no small part due to urbanization and computerization. The very screen that enables and symbolizes individualization and alienation at the same time becomes the new town square of the global village.

Reading The Well makes one wonder how formative The Farm, Stephen Gaskin’s Tennessee project, was for our contemporary understanding of what online communities are or should be.

I wonder how well this transfers to today’s 2nd wave online communities.

After all, the pioneering spirit is somewhat gone. There are no longer those few good women and men who set out to create something special in the gerat wide digital open. Going online has become quite quotidian and an online community a service literally like dozens others. Social networks rather successfully replace quality with quantity. User generated content focused communities don’t so much need the continuous presence of their creative members as their archived creations. Value generation (to use such a mundane concept) within the Well appears to (have) be(en) discursive. The FlickR community will benefit from my uploads long after I personally have defected. Modern online communities need other binding factors than (just) the close-knit ties and intimate conversations of a few dozen core members (who have achieved something of a celebrity status in the online pionering scene, to boot).

“The Well succeeded because it was a community first, and the technology was superimposed on it incidentally.” (162) I think that Hafner is right about downplaying the role of technology. The Well is / was not about the enabling technology, nor about an emergent form of social cohesion. It is about a special group of special people who managed to shape something special for some time - that happened to be online and archiveable. This is probably the reason why it hasn’t been possible to recreate anything quite like the Well again - or why its core memebers have moved on.

But while still not overestimating the value of enabling or underlying technologies, I’d say that modern online communities need to look at the new forms of social cohesion that emerge with the proliferation of digital media. They also need to look at occasions for usage that go beyond verbal exchange.

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