Here is a look at the workings of ECHO, a New York-based online community, by founder Stacy Horn, who runs the community and cherishes its eccentricities. ECHO is an example of "Cyberville" and, according to Horn, it is a place where people live much as they do in their own physical towns. Horn's story demonstrates how ECHO evolves and functions. While this is the story of one particular cyberville, members of ECHO experience the same joys, thrills, frustrations, and issues that members of every virtual gathering place--from small bulletin board systems to the giant America Online--face.
Horn highlights all the things you can expect to happen in an online community--thoughtful discussion, irreverent play, unabashed libido--and all the personalities you can expect to find--the clowns, the humorless, and the total jerks. In her personal style, Horn talks about what it is like to be a part of such a community both as a participant and as the person responsible for running it. She chats about how it looks and feels to judge whether a user should be banned or to introduce a celebrity like John F. Kennedy Jr. to the ranks. Horn also fills the book with excerpts from users' posts--many of them an excellent example of the bright banter that takes place when conferencing is going well.
Although Horn expounds on her own views on cybercommunity, she does so without pretense or pomposity. These are clearly personal views born of her experience and, even at her most forceful, Horn maintains a style that discourages readers from taking her discourse as The One Truth. Instead her writing shares the online world she's helped build and loves. Horn's personal tour of one small town in cyberspace has all the drama and humor of real humans interacting.
From Library Journal
Long before America Online and Compuserv became household names, there was Echo, a small, New York City-based online service. Like its San Francisco counterpart, The WELL, Echo was a cyberspace pioneer at a time when no one believed the Internet would amount to anything. This book is not so much a step-by-step account of how Horn, using severance pay, started Echo in 1989 in her one-bedroom Greenwich Village apartment; rather, it's Horn's enthusiastic tribute to the online community that developed over the years. Excerpting bits of online dialog, she tries to re-create for non-Echoids (readers) what life is like in cyberspace: the conversations, the issues (from hate speech to O.J.), the people (from Embraceable Ewe, a preoperative transsexual wanting to join the women-only conference, to Euroman, an obnoxious subscriber eventually banished from Echo). Sometimes Horn tries too hard to prove the significance of these conversations, most of which seem to be conducted at a high-school level. Still, readers curious about this brave new world will enjoy her lively account.?Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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