Virtual communities may also be more egalitarian than the real communities in which we live. At least for the foreseeable future, computer-mediated communication drastically truncates information about one’s discussion partners. Rheingold argues that the invisibility of text-based communication prevents people from forming prejudices prior to their encounters. As the canine cybernaut in the famous New Yorker cartoon put it, “On the Internet no one knows you’re a dog.” Thus, assuming widespread cyberaccess, “virtual communities” may be more heterogeneous with regard to such physical factors as race, gender, and age, although as we shall see later, they may be more homogeneous with respect to interests and values.88
Anonymity and the absence of social cues inhibit social control—that is, after all, why we have the secret ballot—and thus cyberspace seems in some respects more democratic. (Ironically, this advantage of computer-mediated communication depends on the fact that at least with current technology, it actually transmits less information among participants than face-to-face communication does.) Research has shown that on-line discussions tend to be more frank and egalitarian than face-to-face meetings. Thus computer-mediated communication may lead to flatter hierarchies. In workplace networks, experiments have shown, computer-mediated communication is less hierarchical, more participatory, more candid, and less biased by status differences. Women, for example, are less likely to be interrupted in cyberspace discussions.89
Some of the allegedly greater democracy in cyberspace is based more on hope and hype than on careful research. The political culture of the Internet, at least in its early stages, is astringently libertarian, and in some respects cyberspace represents a Hobbesian state of nature, not a Lockean one. As Peter Kol-lock and Marc Smith, two of the more thoughtful observers of community on the Internet, observe, “It is widely believed and hoped that the ease of communicating and interacting online will lead to a flourishing of democratic institutions, heralding a new and vital arena of public discourse. But to date, most online groups have the structure of either an anarchy [if unmoderated] or a dictatorship [if moderated].”90
The high speed, low cost, and broad scope of mobilization that is possible on the Internet can be an advantage for political organizers, by reducing transaction costs, particularly for widely scattered groups of like-minded citizens. For example, the 1997 Nobel Prize–winning International Campaign to Ban Landmines was organized by Jody Williams primarily over the Internet from her home in rural Vermont. As early as 1995, Mark Bonchek reported, “27,000 people read the alt.politics.homosexuality newsgroup regularly with an average of 75 messages per day. As its name suggests, alt.politics.homosexuality is a forum for people to discuss issues and distribute information related to politics and homosexuality.” Bronchek found a surprising range of positions on these issues in the postings to this forum, both sympathetic and hostile toward homosexuality.91
On the other hand, computer-mediated communication so lowers the threshold for voicing opinions that, like talk radio, it may lead not to deliberation, but to din. Consider, for example, the following advertisement that appeared on the inside back cover of Mother Jones in April 1999:
If you care
you can do something … easy!
www.ifnotnow.com
Be a full-time citizen activist …
… for 5 minutes a week!
Over a dozen of the best social advocacy groups
provide the information
—you read alerts, send letters, get responses,
and monitor results—all at the click of a button.
It’s a one-stop shop for staying involved.
We want to make it easy for you to make a difference!
Make your voice heard!
www.ifnotnow.com
Sign up for a free trial now!
If generalized, this shortcut to civic expression would simply exacerbate the imbalance between talking and listening that is a prominent feature of contemporary civic disengagement, as we noted in chapter 2 and table 1. John Seeley Brown and Paul Duguid point out that “the ability to send a message to [email protected] … can give the illusion of much more access, participation, and social proximity than is actually available.”92 Millions more of us can express our views with the click of a mouse, but is anyone listening?
Nevertheless, the potential benefits of computer-mediated communication for civic engagement and social connectedness are impressive. The Internet offers a low-cost and in many respects egalitarian way of connecting with millions of one’s fellow citizens, particularly those with whom one shares interests but not space or time. In fact, liberating our social ties from the constraints of time—through what the experts term “asynchronous communication”— may turn out to be a more important effect of the Internet than liberation from the constraints of space.
AGAINST THIS PROMISE, on the other hand, must be weighed four serious challenges to the hope that computer-mediated communication will breed new and improved communities. I shall discuss them in order of increasing complexity.
The “digital divide” refers to the social inequality of access to cyberspace. Certainly in the early years of the Internet heavy users were predominantly younger, highly educated, upper-income white males. An exhaustive 1997 study by the Census Bureau found that the least connected groups in American society were the rural poor, rural and inner-city racial minorities, and young, female-headed households. Moreover, these gaps by education, income, race, and family structure appeared to be widening, not narrowing. Media specialist Pippa Norris found that both in the United States and in Europe the Internet has not mobilized previously inactive groups (with the partial exception of young people) but has instead reinforced existing biases in political participation. Sociologist Manuel Castells argues forcefully that
because access to computer-mediated communication is culturally, educationally, and economically restrictive, and will be so for a long time, the most important cultural impact of computer-mediated communication could be potentially the reinforcement of the culturally dominant social networks.93
This specter of a kind of cyberapartheid, in which bridging social capital is diminished as elite networks become less accessible to the have-nots, is indeed frightening. For that very reason, however, it is widely recognized as a key challenge that must be addressed. Given political will, this problem is tractable. If the Internet is seen as a kind of twenty-first-century public utility, then inexpensive, subsidized access (including both hardware and user-friendly software) can be made available in libraries, community centers, Laundromats, and even private residences, much as low-cost telephone service was subsidized in the twentieth century. This first challenge of the Internet to community connectedness is serious but not insurmountable.
The second challenge is technically more difficult to resolve. Computer-mediated communication transmits much less nonverbal information than face-to-face communication. MIT’s Dertouzos asks the right question: “Which qualities of human relationships will pass well through tomorrow’s information infrastructures and which ones will not?”94
Humans are remarkably effective at sensing nonverbal messages from one another, particularly about emotions, cooperation, and trustworthiness. (It seems possible that the ability to spot nonverbal signs of mendacity offered a significant survival advantage during the long course of human evolution.) Psychologist Albert Mehrabian writes in Silent Messages: Implicit Communication of Emotions and Attitudes that in the “realm of feelings” our “facial and vocal expressions, postures, movements, and gestures” are crucial. When our words “contradict the messages contained within them, others mistrust what we say—they rely almost completely on what we do.”95
Computer-mediated communication, now and for the foreseeable future, masks the enormous amount of nonverbal communication that takes place during even the most casual face-to-face encounter. (Emoticons in e-mail, like:), implicitly acknowledge this fact, but provide only the faintest trace of the informatio
n in actual facial expression.) Eye contact, gestures (both intentional and unintentional), nods, a faint furrowing of the brow, body language, seating arrangements, even hesitation measured in milliseconds—none of this mass of information that we ordinarily process almost without thinking in face-to-face encounters is captured in text.
Moreover, as organization theorists Nitin Nohria and Robert G. Eccles point out, face-to-face encounters provide a depth and speed of feedback that is impossible in computer-mediated communication.
Relative to electronically mediated exchange, the structure of face-to-face interaction offers an unusual capacity for interruption, repair, feedback, and learning. In contrast to interactions that are largely sequential, face-to-face interaction makes it possible for two people to be sending and delivering messages simultaneously. The cycle of interruption, feedback, and repair possible in face-to-face interaction is so quick that it is virtually instantaneous. As [sociologist Erving] Goffman notes, “a speaker can see how others are responding to her message even before it is done and alter it midstream to elicit a different response.” When interaction takes place in a group setting, the number of “conversations” that can be going on simultaneously when the interactants are face-to-face is even harder to replicate in other media.
The poverty of social cues in computer-mediated communication inhibits interpersonal collaboration and trust, especially when the interaction is anonymous and not nested in a wider social context. Experiments that compare face-to-face and computer-mediated communication confirm that the richer the medium of communication, the more sociable, personal, trusting, and friendly the encounter.96
Computer-mediated communication is, to be sure, more egalitarian, frank, and task oriented than face-to-face communication. Participants in computer-based groups often come up with a wider range of alternatives. However, because of the paucity of social cues and social communication, participants in computer-based groups find it harder to reach consensus and feel less solidarity with one another. They develop a sense of “depersonalization” and are less satisfied with the group’s accomplishments. Computer-based groups are quicker to reach an intellectual understanding of their shared problems—probably because they are less distracted by “extraneous” social communication—but they are much worse at generating the trust and reciprocity necessary to implement that understanding.
Cheating and reneging are more common in computer-mediated communication, where misrepresentation and misunderstanding are easier. Participants in computer-based settings are less inhibited by social niceties and quicker to resort to extreme language and invective—“flaming” is the commonly used term among cybernauts, a compelling image of communication as hand-to-hand combat with flamethrowers. Computer-mediated communication is good for sharing information, gathering opinions, and debating alternatives, but building trust and goodwill is not easy in cyberspace. John Seeley Brown and Paul Duguid point out that “interactions over the Net, financial or social, will be as secure not as its digital encryption, which is a relatively cheap fix, but as the infrastructure—social as well as technical—encompassing that interaction.”97
For these reasons, Nohria and Eccles suggest, widespread use of computer-mediated communication will actually require more frequent face-to-face encounters: “an extensive, deep, robust social infrastructure of relationships must exist so that those using the electronic media will truly understand what others are communicating to them.” Experience in the Blacksburg, Virginia, electronic community network suggests that “when you overlay an electronic community directly on top of a physical community, that creates a very powerful social pressure to be civil. If you’re going to yell at somebody on the Net, or flame them out, you may run into them at the grocery store, and they may turn out to be your neighbor.”98 In other words, social capital may turn out to be a prerequisite for, rather than a consequence of, effective computer-mediated communication.
All these problems are less serious in dealing with clear, practical issues, but more serious in situations of uncertainty and ambiguity. If computer-mediated communication is nested within an ongoing face-to-face relationship, the complications are much reduced. Arranging to meet your spouse at the restaurant might be easily handled via computer-mediated communication, but wrangling with a new neighbor about her loud parties would not. The archetypal interaction with a new pal on the Internet lacks precisely the social embeddedness that seems essential to overcome the lack of social cues within the medium itself. Face-to-face networks tend to be dense and bounded, whereas computer-mediated communication networks tend to be sparse and unbounded. Anonymity and fluidity in the virtual world encourage “easy in, easy out,” “drive-by” relationships. That very casualness is the appeal of computer-mediated communication for some denizens of cyberspace, but it discourages the creation of social capital. If entry and exit are too easy, commitment, trustworthiness, and reciprocity will not develop.99
Video and audio enhancements of computer-mediated communication may in time reduce these difficulties, but that is unlikely to happen soon. The “bandwidth” requirements (communications capacity) necessary for even poor-quality video are so high that it is unlikely to be commonly and cheaply available for at least a decade or more. Moreover, some experimental evidence suggests that the negative effects of computer-mediated communication—de-personalization, psychological distance, weak social cues, and so on—are reduced but not eliminated even by high-quality video.100 The pace and breadth of technological change make predictions about the effects of computer-mediated communication on social exchange risky, but this second obstacle to community building in cyberspace looks even more forbidding than the digital divide.
The third obstacle goes by the evocative label of “cyberbalkanization.”101 The Internet enables us to confine our communication to people who share precisely our interests—not just other BMW owners, but owners of BMW 2002s and perhaps even owners of turbocharged 1973 2002s, regardless of where they live and what other interests they and we have. That powerful specialization is one of the medium’s great attractions, but also one of its subtler threats to bridging social capital. A comment about Thunderbirds in a BMW chat group risks being flamed as “off topic.” Imagine, by contrast, the guffaws if a member of a bowling team or a Sunday school class tried to rule out a casual conversation gambit as off-topic.
Real-world interactions often force us to deal with diversity, whereas the virtual world may be more homogeneous, not in demographic terms, but in terms of interest and outlook. Place-based communities may be supplanted by interest-based communities. As communications specialist Stephen Doheny-Farina, a thoughtful and sympathetic commentator on the prospects for cyber-community, observes.
In physical communities we are forced to live with people who may differ from us in many ways. But virtual communities offer us the opportunity to construct utopian collectivities—communities of interest, education, tastes, beliefs, and skills. In cyberspace we can remake the world out of an unsettled landscape.102
Interaction in cyberspace is typically single stranded. Members of my e-group on nineteenth-century American history are connected to me only in terms of that topic, unlike my neighbor, who may also meet me at the supermarket, in church, or on the ball field. We cannot be sure, of course, how Internet communities will evolve, but if virtual communities do turn out to be more single stranded than real-world communities, that will probably increase cyberbalkanization.
Local heterogeneity may give way to more focused virtual homogeneity as communities coalesce across space. Internet technology allows and encourages infrared astronomers, oenophiles, Trekkies, and white supremacists to narrow their circle to like-minded intimates. New “filtering” technologies that automate the screening of “irrelevant” messages make the problem worse. Serendipitous connections become less likely as increased communication narrows our tastes and interests—knowing and caring more and more about less and less. This tendency may increase productivity in a
narrow sense, while decreasing social cohesion.
On the other hand, we should not romanticize the heterogeneity of the real-world communities in which we now live. “Birds of a feather flock together” is a folk adage that reminds us that tendencies toward community homogeneity long predate the Internet. Whether the possibility of even more narrowly focused communities in cyberspace will turn into reality will depend in large part on how the “virtual” facet of our lives fits into our broader social reality, as well as on our fundamental values. Moreover, as computer scientist Paul Resnick has pointed out, perhaps what will evolve are neither all-encompassing “cybercommunities,” nor watertight “cyberghettos,” but multiple “cyberclubs” with partially overlapping memberships. In this sort of world, weak ties that bridge among distinct groups might create an interwoven community of communities.103
The final potential obstacle is more conjectural and yet more ominous: Will the Internet in practice turn out to be a niftier telephone or a niftier television? In other words, will the Internet become predominantly a means of active, social communication or a means of passive, private entertainment? Will computer-mediated communication “crowd out” face-to-face ties? It is, in this domain especially, much too early to know. Very preliminary evidence suggests, hopefully, that time on the Internet may displace time in front of the tube: one survey in 1999 found that among Internet users, 42 percent said they watched less TV as a result, compared with only 19 percent who said they read fewer magazines and 16 percent who said they read fewer newspapers. On the other hand, an early experimental study found that extensive Internet usage seemed to cause greater social isolation and even depression.104 Amid these scattered straws in the wind, a final caution: The commercial incentives that currently govern Internet development seem destined to emphasize individualized entertainment and commerce rather than community engagement. If more community-friendly technology is to be developed, the incentive may need to come from outside the marketplace.
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