Customer Reviews

The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier

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Rheingold provides a comprehensive, broad sweeping portrayal of the virtual communities landscape, particularly as it was in the early 1990s. In particular, the book provides a fascinating history of the development of virtual communities from back in the 1960s. The many stories of the development of virtual communities and of life in virtual communities provide a rich account.

The books' style is more journalistic that academic. It reads something like an extended newspaper article, with some fine writing. The book concentrates mostly on a kind of anecdotal and human accounting with a smattering of theory and stuff thrown in. Howard Rheingold eloquently lays out many of the salient issues and does an excellent job of arguing for the importance of recognizing the growth of online social groups. Also, he provides an intriguing treatment of cultural issues. The depth and breadth of his experience with the medium is clearly evident.

Generally, book is more historical than theoretical or practical. Howard admits to wanting to popularize the notion of virtual communities, which he does effectively. But, there is little that would help you set up a virtual community or really understand why they work that way. His basis is more in his experience than in theory or rigorous research.

The original book has been widely commented on, so perhaps just two comments on the 2000 version are in order. First, the book seems a little dated. The new material for this new version seems mostly added in the last two chapters, leaving the preceding 10 tinged with the state of affairs in 1992, which was pre-web and pre- a large bit of corporate development of e-business and virtual communities on the web. Of course, most of the issues are still relevant, but one has to keep the age of the material in mind. Second, the new material, although comprehensive and certainly based on Howard's considerable experience, seems a little rushed. Howard qualifies this by saying it would need another book, but this leaves the book feeling like an older book with a lengthy afterward tacked on later.

The virtual community is, in reality, at best a bunch of people disagreeing and regularly indulging in shark-like small group attacks. The WELL, of which Howard speaks so much, hounded one of its early members - Blair - to his death by suicide, a matter described, but not really examined with much thoroughness. Yes, he touches on flaming, but does not examine a deeper pattern of common harrasment, particularly of outliers. How Howard himself participated in this type of online gang harassment activity, not understanding the man, Blair, and discounting his claims out of hand is a quite interesting story. He touches on this, and gives an account, which would be acceptable in a personal autobiography. But to leave it where he does in a book purporting to be a seminal piece on virtual community is truly remarkably remiss. Since the record is all there, or was, it could have been given serious consideration.

The conflicting interests, and the commonly irresponsible behavior of people online - viciousness, gratuitous, undeserved nastiness, intellectual dishonesty - looking for targets to vent on is not explored as it should be. This is quite common outside of the world of flaming.

This book is a gloss piece, advertising for something that doesn't really exist as he claims. Howard, while a pleasant guy personally, does not show himself a deep thinker, and may not be much of an observer either. Nor is the author ready, willing or able to take on anything that is likely to upset the herd of which he has become something of a starring member. The story of virtual community is not such a very nice one in many ways.

The underside of the story of virtual community is a story of psychological denial, denial about a great deal. It is a story of in-groups and out-groups, and a good deal more, something which requires an anhtropologists eye, and someone with more nerve.

Go ahead and read this book. But understand that the book itself is evidence of the degree of denial which pervades the "virtual community".

Everyone seems to miss what I think is the most important the point of Howard's book. First published in 1993 and now in the expanded edition, the bottom line on this book is that the Internet has finally made it possible for individuals to own the fruits of their own labor--the power has shifted from the industrial age aggregators of labor, capital, and hard resources to the individual knowledge workers. The virtual community is the social manifestation of this new access to one another, but the real revolution is manifested in the freedom that cyberspace makes possible--as John Perry Barlow has said, the Internet interprets censorship (including corporate attempts to "own" employee knowledge) as an outage, and *routes around it*. Not only are communities possible, but so also are short-term aggregations of interest, remote bartering, on the fly hiring of world-class experts at a fraction of their "physical presence price". If Howard's first big book, Tools for Thought, was the window on what is possible at the desktop, this book is the window on what is possible in cyberspace, transcending physical, legal, cultural, and financial barriers. This is not quite the watershed that The Communist Manifesto was, but in many ways this book foreshadowed all of the netgain, infinite wealth, and other electronic frontier books coming out of the fevered brains around Boston--a guy in Mill Valley wearing hand-painted cowboy boots was there long before those carpetbaggers (smile).

This is a classic work on the development of online communities immediately before the advent of the World Wide Web. A new expanded edition with a terrific follow up chapter and expanded bibliography is due this fall from The MIT Press. A must read!

The ironic thing about Rheingold's "Virtual Community" is that in the communities forming online aren't so virtual at all -- they are real in every sense of the word. From homesteads to the storefronts (like Amazon!), virtual communities are thriving. Rheingold weaves a fascinating tale of the development of several of these communitites, vividly describes the research carried out at places like PARC/Xerox (years ahead of its time), and emotionally involves the reader as he takes you on his journeys of new (virtual) worlds.

This is a classic work on the development of online communities immediately before the advent of the World Wide Web. A new expanded edition with a terrific follow up chapter and expanded bibliography is due this fall from The MIT Press. A must read!

This is a classic work on the development of online communities immediately before the advent of the World Wide Web. A new expanded edition with a terrific follow up chapter and expanded bibliography is due this fall from The MIT Press. A must read!

Howard Rheingold hits the nail squarely on the head in his assesment of the social and political issues surrounding the world "on line." As fellow Netizens, it is our responsibly to understand and ACTIVELY participate in the development and direction of this communications media. I think every ISP and online service should require their customers to read this before allowing them online (much like the FCC requires a license before you can broadcast).

Though published only four years ago, Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community already feels like a classic. Perhaps this isn't too surprising given that its subject matter - the social implications of computer networking - is based on a technology that measures things in nanoseconds. A long-time member of a California based BBS called the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (or WELL), Rheingold describes, with sober affection, what that sort of connectedness has meant to him and can mean for the rest of us, particularly when it grows into an online community. Although he clearly champions computer networking, however, his book doesn't degenerate into one long Internet infomercial. On the contrary, Rheingold makes his readers acutely aware of the dangers to liberty and democracy that computer-aided surveillance and the commercialization of networking can pose. Despite this, the book remains hopeful, providing a kind of blueprint for the distributed, grassroots, on-going conversation that computer networking, at its best, can make possible. Like all true classics, the book's real value lies not in letting us remember how it was (back when the Internet was simple), but in helping us imagine what it can become again.

Rheingold's work is informed by the Chicago school of communication theory, libertarianism and romantic notions of the wild west.

These thoughts are not new - they've surfaced with each new technology this century.

It's an important book, and entertaingly written. He makes crucial points and the book is a must read for anyone interested in the Internet as a medium.