Customer Reviews

Cyberville: Clicks, Culture, and the Creation of an Online Town

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Anyone questioning the relevance of Cyberville as a useful primer on internet culture should be pleased to learn that the book is being used as a core text in a course about cultures and communities in cyberspace at the University of Western Ontario. Don't let the use of Cyberville in an academic setting dissuade you, though. This book is far from your average textbook. Cyberville is an entertaining, highly readable account of author Stacy Horn's experiences with the creation of the online community ECHO. Horn uses a casual approach in detailing many of the issues relevant to online communities, including gender issues, cybersex, and online stalkers. The result is insightful and humourous. Cyberville is reccommended reading for anyone wanting to learn more about online communities. A word of warning, however -- Horn uses many postings from ECHO to illustrate her discussions. These egocentric ramblings from a bunch of self-loathing New Yorkers (especially the frequent examples from a conference entitled "I Hate Myself") are enough to inspire depression in even the cheeriest of individuals.

There is a real dearth of good books on internet culture. Cyberville and My Tiny Life are really the only two worth reading. Horn has an amazing ability to step back far enough from the community she is part of in order to do a sociological analysis of it. It's incredibly readable, very human, but a still-relevant look at the way we form communities and relationships online.

In the technoculture of superficiality, 'community' has becomejust another buzz word, undistinguished in the mad rush to Make MoneyFast on the Internet. Cyberville manages to ignore the commercial mainstream and focus instead on the humans who turn out to be not all that different online than off. That this should be a surprise is remarkable but somehow, the other writers in the cybergenre were too busy looking at the wires to notice.

Horn manages to convey the life and spirit of an online community by allowing the members, including herself, to be themselves -- the selves they are online, at any rate. If you don't have any idea how an online bbs could be lively, challenging, upsetting, intimate, anger- or love-creating, CYBERVILLE will demonstrate it to you.

If all you've ever done on the Internet is surf the Web and send Email, you've barely scratched the surface. In Cyberville: Clicks, Culture, and the Creation of an Online Town, Stacy Horn describes the founding, growth and day-to-day life of Echo, her New York-based online community.

This is a story about people, not machines. There is more here about eunuchs than about Unix. Horn started Echo in 1990, her only financing her severance package from Mobil Oil. Cyberville tells about the early settlers of this electronic homestead and how they grew it into a town with heroes, villains, wackos, love, hate, sex (all kinds), death, birth, laughter and tears.

The people of Echo don't stay glued to their computers. They bowl and drink and play softball and go to the movies together. Horn follows these face-to-face activities and relates them to the online life these people share.

Written in a light and breezy conversational style, Cyberville comes across as a fascinating tale of interesting people settling an uncharted land together.

The nice thing about Stacy Horn's book is that she's able tocapture the variety of online life. Her voice dominates, of course,but the reader gets to hear much of the Echo community living out its online life, in nice big chunks of text. It's a welcome change from your typical dry-as-dust tome about cyber culture.

Stacy Horn does a good job of capturing the essense of Echo -- at least in the sense that I really felt like a part of Echo by the time I finished the book, not that I have any experience with Echo. I read this book because I manage virtual communities so I wanted to see how somebody else did it. I think other virtual community managers will enjoy this book, aside from the fact that it's just plain entertaining, because so many of the personality types will be so familiar. We are not alone. We all have our Phils and our Euromans.

i couldn't put it down. brings home the experience in dense, funny, entertaining style.

Stacy Horn's Cyberville gives a slice of life from the late '80s and early 1990s at the birth of the Internet age.

What i like about this book is it gives real world examples of what online communities are like. She has a great philosophy for dealing with troublemakers and funny lists at the end of each chapter that mimic content from EchoNYC.

Still quite relevent (and cheap) for any web community development.

Jim

Cyberville is a unique book in that it is non-fiction and discusses real people and events. More importantly, interesting people with real views. Horn doesn't shy away from difficult topics and isn't afraid to reveal that she doesn't have all the answers.