We hear a great deal
lately about "virtual community" --
community that emerges in cyberspace, on the Internet
and the World Wide Web. What exactly is virtual
community?
I have to reply, simply,
that I don't know. Perhaps that's because I'm
no longer sure I could answer that query in regard
to real community. Yet I've become involved in
a Web project, The Nearby Café, whose motive
could probably be described as "community-minded,"
and whose ambition is to further something that
might at least resemble what we imagine (or remember)
community to look and feel like.
Simply put, that venture
is essentially a multi-subject, content-heavy
electronic magazine of which I'm the editor. It
offers an international mix of material -- images
and texts -- about art, photography, music, politics,
life here on Staten Island, and other subjects,
provided by a consortium of people and organizations
active in those fields.
My work as a writer and
teacher assumes various commonalities among constituencies:
shared language, shared symbol systems, shared
interests, shared (or negotiable) values. If I
did not think that my professional activities
mattered to others, I'd do something else entirely.
But affecting others, even positively, does not
of course necessarily define or produce community.
Nor does wishing for community, or acting as if
it existed and one were a member of it, necessarily
actualize that "salvation romance" (Vivian
Gornick's term) and make it real.
Authentic community emerges
and develops organically; it may very well depend
on co-existence in a particular physical place,
and is unquestionably enhanced by such proximity.
Certainly it's not something you can create overnight,
simply by throwing a bunch of people together
either in one geographic location or out there
in cyberspace, or else by bringing together temporarily
those who have one or another area of common interest.
Our capacity for community
in this culture has been under serious, concerted
attack from many sources -- real-estate developers
who physically uproot and disperse us, Mad Ave.
hucksters who fragment us into target markets,
mass-media entrepreneurs who commercialize and
thus trivialize the very imagery of community,
so many more -- for a long time. The blame does
not automatically fall to technology -- the telephone
(especially the party line) enhanced community
life in many ways; but human beings, and not their
tools, generate community. Or fail to. It takes
long-term commitment to a specific cluster of
others to make a village.
I haven't felt myself part
of a functioning community -- in either my private
or my professional life -- since sometime back
in the early 1970s. And I seem to encounter less
and less genuine communitarian energy in my travels
than I used to. Yet I refuse to succumb to the
tempting assumption that this has vanished for
good, at least for others in my own day and in
the future. Which is perhaps a way of saying that
while I'm not sure that "community"
now exists in our culture here in the U.S., I
believe that maintaining the idea of community,
and trying to exemplify some of its possibilities,
remains a useful project. So I choose to act as
if I were a responsible member of a community
I could identify and describe, though I have not
a single shred of evidence that, if my house burned
down, anyone would send me a can of peas, much
less join in a barn-raising party.
This Internet project of
which I'm the organizer and (still) primary sponsor
began as a simple act of self-publishing. In mid-1995,
finding my writing opportunites diminishing due
to the protracted economic recession, I decided
to establish at long last one dependable outlet
for my work that was entirely under my control.
The then-recent emergence of the World Wide Web
as a technology and communications system allowed
me to begin producing what I thought of as a newsletter
in the form of a personal home page, at a cost
so low that it proved irresistible. This went
online in mid-1995, and was an enormously self-empowering
step to take.
Soon after, enough other
individuals and organizations with whom I was
in contact had become interested in this new medium
that I decided to enlarge the site considerably,
adding approximately a dozen more content providers
whose material would be organized and made Web-viable
by myself and several part-time assistants. I
thought a certain synergy might result that would
benefit all of us, by attracting a wider mix of
visitors. That project went on-line in October
of 1995.
The ultimate aim, on my
part, is to create a cyberplace that has the ambiance
of the classic international café with
an Internet spin, a venue in which those who (like
myself) think of themselves as citizens of the
world can feel comfortable, meet kindred spirits,
and engage in provocative dialogue. Others seem
to share my vision. We get lots of e-mail from
folks who tell us they've spent hours browsing
through our site. It comes from people and places
around the world that none of us -- neither we
who run the site nor our various content providers
-- have previously reached with our activities.
Does this constitute the
creation of community? I'm not sure it does, but
that doesn't impeach it or render it meaningless.
The image that comes to mind for me is that of
the "pen pal." I remember, from back
in grade school, how we were offered the chance
to correspond with someone from another country
-- someone we'd probably never meet, from a different
culture, who we'd know only from what could be
transmitted through the postal system. That didn't
breed community, but it engendered an increased
openness to the reality of cultural difference
and the experience of communication across national
borders. If that proved to be all the Internet
achieved, I'd still consider it a major force
for good.
Separately and collectively,
we at the Café haven't yet figured out
how to make this venture economically self-sufficient,
but it's getting there. Thus, at least for now,
it may be more realistic to think of such ventures
less as for-profit ventures than as a give-back
to one's community, something akin to the religious
practice of tithing.
I have always tithed to
my constituencies, in various ways: visiting colleagues'
classes and even giving public lectures in return
for travel expenses, offering essays to "little"
journals that pay a pittance if anything, providing
free consultancy services and serving on the boards
of non-profit ventures. Tithing -- which, broadly
construed, represents the return of a portion
of one's income to the common pot, a version of
the Kwakiutl custom of potlatch -- strikes me
as one of the fundamental acts underpinning the
idea of community. At present, this Website is
my primary form of tithe.
Yet if something we'd agree
to call community results from my activities in
general, or from this Café, or from the
Internet and the Web and their evolution, I don't
expect it to be a tribal form of community --
people bonded for life, living side by side, intimately
involved, standing back to back permanently against
their enemies. I predict it'll be more like the
looser connectedness that the agora encourages,
a varied mix of people coming from all over, a
context for the barter and exchange of goods,
ideas, skills, energies. And, somewhere in the
middle of that marketplace, a few spots with a
kettle kept boiling for the making and sharing
of stone soup. For the foreseeable future, you'll
find me tending one of those fires, here at The
Nearby Café.