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.
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