ON VIRTUAL COMMUNITY by Eric S. Theise Many of you know that I gave a pair of Internet workshops over the weekend. It was heartening to see such a large turnout in this small community; 35 people came out for these introductory sessions, and that's the number I often draw when running workshops in San Francisco, the very heart of cyberculture! We spent the first day talking about basic hookups and connecting to people through electronic mail, conferencing systems, and real time chat. We spent the second day talking about connecting to information through a variety of search and retrieval tools. A comment that came up a few times in the evaluations was that we spent too much time 'schmoozing'. I'd like to take the 'schmooze' as a departure point for some thoughts about people on the networks and the phenomena of virtual communities. Let's focus on people. They're the ones who put all that glorious information in place. On an expensive information service like Dialog, that process is highly automated and seamless. The personalities of the information workers is largely invisible. But on the Internet, where you rarely pay any surcharge, the information is put in place by volunteers doing it strictly for passion, curiosity, maybe ego gratification. You can't help noticing that The Internet is a participative medium, and it helps to acknowledge the people that are putting information out now, if for no other reason than it may be you doing the deed in six months. A story: I help Stephen Hill get information out about his syndicated public radio program, Music from the Hearts of Space. Most of the e-mail I receive as a result is fan mail for Stephen, questions about the availability of the music, requests for help on using our system. But one morning I logged on to find a message of thanks from an Arizona man describing how his child had been born at home during Hearts of Space program number #139, and how he'd always meant to send away for a playlist of music from that program. Our service helped him put closure on one of life's unfinished businesses. I mentioned help with systems. Internet systems can be confusing to use, and while they *are* getting better, you're not going to find the kind of online help you're used to on your desktop. Who's going to help you? A book, maybe, but chances are the best help will come from a stranger you cross paths with online. Might be a man or woman, young or old, living anywhere. Might be a wizard who works for the system you're trying to access, but more likely it'll be some friendly person who's a user like you, only slightly more experienced. On the net, today's newbie is tomorrow's elder. It's likely you'll never come across this person again, but a provocative exchange of e-mail could turn this person into a friend, a client, a lover, a mentor, an employer. Another story: I was online one Sunday morning and noticed that Susie Bright, an SF-based writer on matters sexual, was online. I'd e-mailed her some information about connectivity in France a few weeks earlier, but hadn't heard anything back from her. I did a 'send' to her, and we got to talking about ways to make The WELL more convenient for her to use. After 15 minutes or so, she said that she was feeling bad about how information was only flowing in one direction. I asked her to describe where she was logging in from. For the next 15 minutes I got a stream of consciousness portrait of a castle in the south of France, built in the middle ages but converted to dwellings, of herself, wrapped in blankets trying to beat pneumonia, and of her daughter playing in fields of flowers every day, picking up the language from her new friends. Not a bad adventure for a Sunday morning over coffee. This is the sort of exchange we used to get from our community. My neighborhood, Liberty Hill, is a quiet section of San Francisco. Once a year, there's a block party and dozens of people turn out on the street. But usually I only see my landlord and my Buddhist neighbors across the street. The German woman who does all the gardening doesn't talk to me, perhaps because at two years residence I am still too much of a newcomer. The man two houses down has never once deigned to acknowledge my greetings, although he lavishes a great deal of attention on his Volvo station wagon. My virtual community, The WELL, has about 8000 residents. Many of them live in the Bay Area, but many don't. I have made friends in Austin, where I go this weekend, New York City, Seattle, Boston, Chicago, Belgium, Japan, and Australia. These people have, sight unseen, fed me, let me stay in their homes, given me work, and provided me with emotional support. The best advice I got when my girlfriend and I broke up showed up as simple text on a computer screen, sent from an 'aging cyberpunk weirdo' in Texas. Ditto for when my parents died. On The WELL I know dozens of people well enough to know what makes them laugh, who I can trust, who I can collaborate on projects with, who's in a relationship, and who has diametrically opposed views to mine on gun control, abortion, the latest popular film or song, or the eternal Mac versus DOS and what about the Amiga, anyway?, question. I'll tell you two Mike Godwin stories. Godwin is a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and has mused on civil liberties in cyberspace more than anyone I know. But he is a lawyer, and he likes to come out ahead in a debate. He systematically takes apart people who disagree with him, and it's possible he's made as many enemies as friends. When EFF moved from Cambridge to DC, all of Mike's possessions were destroyed in a fluke moving van fire. He posted about this in the news conference on The WELL, and within minutes people were pledging to send him furniture, a new telephone, their best wishes. And books. Godwin *loves* books, and within days had much of his collection rebuilt, this time with hardcover editions signed by the authors, many of whom have accounts on The WELL. And this was not our first virtual barnraising. There are jerks online; pranksters, cyber-romeos, and well-meaning, but ill-informed doofuses. We have tools to help deal with them: the delete key, commands called ignore, stonewall, and bozofilter. But believing as I do that everyone has something to contribute in cyberspace, I use these tools infrequently. That's an important point. Because cyberspace is so vast, so new, so uncharted, and so different from better understood forms of communication and media, it's a very important social experiment. It has already challenged our notions of privacy, freedom of speech, ownership, freedom of assembly, democracy, and geography. Net heads like those gathered here today have glimpsed some of the possibilities of this medium for enriching others' lives as it has ours. That leads us to support community-based, grass roots projects like La Plaza at the same time we cast a jaundiced eye at the 500 channels to the home, programmed from the top down, overly-hyped information superhighways rumored to be bulldozing their way into our towns Real Soon Now. As you know from the superhighways of cement and steel, the really interesting stuff happens after you take an off ramp and motor onto a blue highway. I promised you two Mike Godwin stories. One afternoon we were both logged onto The WELL, he from DC, me from San Francisco. I got a 'send' from him; "wanna see a picture of my kid?" A few keystrokes, a few seconds, and this picture of the lovely Ariel Godwin flashed across my screen. Thanks for your time, let's schmooze some more as the afternoon and evening wear on.