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Book Reviews
H. Rheingold. 1993. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier.
Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-60870-7
H. Rheingold. 2000. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (2
nd
Edition). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-68121-8
Ian Goodwin
School of Communication Studies
Auckland University of Technology
In the past 10 years, alongside the swift expansion of the Internet, scholarly
attention to virtual community has grown rapidly. The analysis of virtual social
relations has emerged as a clear, key theme in the study of new media. For the
foreseeable future at least, studies of virtual community are set to play their part in
informing our wider understanding of technological and social change. As such,
conducting a retrospective review of Rheingold’s (1993) seminal text The Virtual
Community is a timely exercise. No figure has loomed as large, or as controversially,
over the study of virtual community as Howard Rheingold. The Virtual Community
remains one of the most commonly discussed texts on the subject, and as such
remains required reading for anyone interested in online sociability.
Rheingold’s basic argument is, by now, well known. After publication in 1993 The
Virtual Community was widely reviewed from a variety of perspectives (e.g. Adams
1994; Lehman 1995; Plotkin 1995; Stimson 1995; Wellman 1997a), and has been
analysed and discussed in innumerable books and articles since then. In essence
the book is constructed around recounting Rheingold’s experiences in various
online environments, most notably the WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link - one
of the Internet’s earliest bulletin board systems). In drawing upon his personal
history, Rheingold constructs a pragmatic and compelling case for the emergence
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Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture © 2004 (University of Westminster, London), Vol. 1(1):
103-109. ISSN 1744-6708 (Print); 1744-6716 (Online)
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of communal relations online, noting that people use words on screens to engage
in the full range of social activities: ‘People in virtual communities do just about
everything people do in real life, but we leave our bodies behind’ (Rheingold 1993,
3).
He also, tellingly in terms of stimulating subsequent debate, links the formation of
virtual community to a chance to revitalise the public sphere, arguing that the
means necessary to ‘revitalise citizen based democracy’ (Rheingold 1993, 14) are –
with the advent of virtual communities – back in the hands of the public. Rather
than produce yet another analysis of these views, I focus primarily on how The
Virtual Community was received. Such a focus allows the considerable influence the
book had upon ensuing debate to be acknowledged; there are few texts in the area
which have provoked similar amounts of attention. More importantly, reviewing
debate over The Virtual Community provides an opportunity to raise key issues for
current, ongoing analyses of virtual community.
Almost all who have engaged with Rheingold’s work note that he provides a well-
written and highly readable account of his time online. Yet it is not necessary to
delve too deeply into the literature to realise that the dominant response to The
Virtual Community has been to label Rheingold a technological ‘utopian’ (e.g.
Fernback and Thompson 1995; Robins 1996, 1999; Stoll 1995; Webster 1999;
Wellman 1997). That is, he has been frequently criticised for taking an uncritical
and celebratory stance on virtual community. Indeed, critics have drawn on
Rheingold’s work in order to dismiss the entire notion of virtual community
outright; for example Robins (1999) labels it an ‘impoverished’ vision that
overlooks the Internet’s links to corporate capitalism, focusing instead on ‘an
escape from the real world of difference and disorder into a mythic realm of
stability and order’ (Robins 1999, 47). As a result, debate over The Virtual
Community, and over ‘virtual community’ more generally, has been characterised by
a decade of polarised discussion.
However, whilst criticisms of Rheingold’s utopian position undoubtedly contain ‘a
degree of truth… [they] are at the same time misleading and misplaced’ (Jankowski
2002, 39). This is because Rheingold’s argument is more nuanced than he is often
given credit for. Whilst The Virtual Community does indeed focus upon describing
the potential of the Internet as a communal medium, Rheingold is also guarded
about the likelihood of this potential being realised. He argues that the WELL
tolerates a large range of opinions being expressed online in a way that encourages
communal relations. However, he also acknowledges ‘fragmentation,
hierarchization, rigidifying social boundaries, and single niche colonies of people
who share intolerances could become prevalent in the future’ (Rheingold 1993,
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207). Moreover, he argues that the potential for citizen-based democratic renewal
is not necessarily going to be realised via virtual community on the Internet:
We temporarily have access to a tool that could bring conviviality and
understanding to our lives and might help revitalise the public sphere. The
same tool, improperly controlled and wielded, could become an
instrument of tyranny (Rheingold 1993, 14. Emphases added).
There is a cautionary element to these aspects of Rheingold’s argument, a warning
of the potentially ‘darker’ side of virtual relations that sits directly alongside his
vision of communal development. Thus, Rheingold’s text is not entirely a utopian
celebration of the technology, although it does indulge in hyperbole. Examined in
its entirety, it reads more like a call to social action by a committed user of the
medium (one who is aware of potential pitfalls in developing virtual forms of
community).
In making sense of such a call to social action, it is worthwhile taking account of
certain contextual factors at the time Rheingold was writing. Although the roots of
the Internet can be traced back to the development of ARPANET in the 1960s, in
1993 the Internet remained relatively unknown. At the time, just before the advent
of the World Wide Web, Rheingold (1993, 5) even felt the need to introduce his
readers to “the Net”, about which he assumed most would know nothing. As he
points out, popular understandings equated computer use with the figure of the
lonely ‘computer nerd’. Moreover, as Baym (1998) and Hine (2000) both point out,
academic analyses of computer mediated communications (CMC) were then
dominated by a “reduced cues model” that also stressed its nature as an anti-social
medium.
Popular understandings have now shifted, and many social scientists now
comfortably comment that ‘online sociability [in virtual communities] is a fact of
everyday life’ (Feenberg and Bakardjieva 2004, 37). Yet it is important to
remember that Rheingold (1993) was one of the first to popularise this counter-
argument, by arguing for the “visionary” possibility of virtual communities against
a dominant, well established view of computer use as anti-social. Furthermore, he
was doing so at a time when he, alongside many early Internet adopters, was
growing fearful of the increasing commercialisation of the medium. As such the
main thrust of The Virtual Community is twofold: first to identify this “new” form of
social relations for a broader population of readers/potential users; and second, to
point out its potential importance to social life and ‘political liberties’ (p.4) before
the Internet is commercialised by corporate interests. Rheingold argues, with the
passion of a committed user and community activist, for individuals to take action
in relation to this new medium, knowing that its “latent technical possibilities” will
not be realised outside of such action:
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More people must learn about [the Net’s] leverage and learn to use it,
while we still have the freedom to do so, if it is to live up to its
potential… What we know and do now is important because it is still
possible for people around the world to make sure this new sphere of
vital human discourse remains open to the citizens of the planet before
the political and economic big boys seize it, censor it, meter it, and sell it
back to us (Rheingold 1993, 4-5).
To label The Virtual Community an uncritical utopian celebration of technology is to
overlook these aspects of Rheingold’s text. In this sense, when Webster (1999)
objects to Rheingold’s ‘suggestion that the technology can create community of
itself’ (1999, 83), or when Robins (1996, 1999) critiques Rheingold as a utopian
fantasist that overlooks corporate control of the medium, their views need to be
qualified.
Nevertheless significant problems with Rheingold’s account remain. If a
retrospective review of debate suggests that attempts to pigeonhole Rheingold as a
utopian are misleading, at the same time it reveals that aspects of critics’ concerns
remain valid. Here we need to differentiate criticisms of Rheingold’s utopian and
celebratory style from a more central issue, namely the way that “virtual
community” itself is (under-) conceptualised in The Virtual Community. Regardless
of Rheingold’s awareness of growing corporate interest in the Internet, or of the
guarded nature of his final conclusions, it is this feature of The Virtual Community
that remains highly problematic.
For example, Rheingold’s (1993) conceptual analysis is, somewhat paradoxically
given his broader concerns over corporate control, prone to treating online
interaction as an isolated social phenomenon. He fails to take full account of how
online interactions fit within people’s broader social lives or of “offline” contextual
factors important to the creation and maintenance of virtual community. Indeed,
in regard to the latter, his oft-cited definition of virtual communities as “social
aggregations” that ‘emerge from the Net’ (Rheingold 1993, 5) actually flies in the
face of much of the evidence he himself provides. That is, Rheingold (1993) goes
to great lengths to document the offline social relations upon which the WELL
was founded – ‘[t]he WELL is rooted in the San Francisco Bay area and in two
separate counter-cultural revolutions that took place there in past decades’ (1993,
39). The first of these “revolutions” was the (text based) publication of the Whole
Earth Catalogue – a periodical aimed at supporting people attempting to build
alternative lifestyles, which (secondly) brought together a critical mass of activists.
These people, including Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant, already shared a social
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and political vision for computer technology, were highly computer literate, and
were key figures in an early and distinct Internet culture (Castells 2001). There was
a great deal of the “communal” about these pre-existing relations. Brilliant and
Brand were indeed part of a broader counter-cultural activist community. Thus,
the WELL, as a community, arguably pre-existed its move into online space. Its
subsequent online development was also dependent upon a multitude of
connections that existed beyond the virtual realm, as well as within it (Hafner
1997).
As opposed to Rheingold’s (1993) “utopian” stance, it is these types of conceptual
issues that limit the analysis presented in The Virtual Community. For example,
Rheingold’s failure to take full account of pre-existing social relations in the
formation and maintenance of the WELL leaves him free to speculate that all users
will “inevitably” build virtual communities with Internet technology, ‘just as micro-
organisms inevitably create colonies’ (1993, 6). Yet, as he himself admits in
reflecting upon his original work, such views are too determinist:
One major difference between what I know now and what I knew when
I wrote the first edition of this book is that I’ve learned that virtual
communities won’t automatically emerge or grow… simply by adding a
forum or chatroom to a web page (Rheingold 2000, 341).
Indeed Rheingold’s (1993) model of the WELL, dependent upon a core sub-
culture of technically literate individuals committed to utilising computing for
social change, contrasts with the mainstream diffusion of the Internet into society,
which has been marked by the observation that ‘[the Internet’s] effects on
sociability [have become] considerably less dramatic’ (Castells 2001, 119). This is
why Rheingold’s (1993) vision of a computer mediated world rapidly headed
towards “panoptic control” or “inclusive agora” paints a false picture. Such
dualistic thinking contrasts with the more mixed reality technological change
presents to us, even when it arrives with unparalleled pace, as in the case of the
Internet. Indeed, it encourages the type of polarised debate that saw Rheingold
(1993) labelled a “utopian”, but the heart of the issue remains his failure to
adequately conceptualise the phenomenon under study, not his celebratory style.
Differentiating between such elements is not a matter of semantics. The need to
create adequate conceptual models, capable of rigorously interrogating empirical
data, is the central issue now facing virtual community studies (Jankowski 2002;
Wellman 2004). The application of social network analysis (Wellman 1997b, 1998,
2001), or the development of Baym’s (1995, 1998) “emergent” model of virtual
community, reveal that steps have been taken in the right direction, but much
remains to be done. If we look beyond criticisms of Rheingold as a celebratory
utopian, reviewing the seminal contribution to debate made by The Virtual
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Community provides an opportunity to reinforce this much needed direction. This
text will remain widely read and discussed, despite dismissals of Rheingold as a
utopian. In 1993 it was a timely and provocative intervention at a salient point in
the Internet’s history. It should be read today as a springboard to thinking through
conceptual issues.
References
Adams, P. 1994. Review - The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the
Electronic Frontier. Professional Geographer 46(3): 402-403.
Baym, N. 1995. The Emergence of Online Community. In Cybersociety: Computer-
Mediated Communication and Community, S. Jones (ed.), 138-163. London: Sage.
Baym, N. 1998. The Emergence of Online Community. In Cybersociety 2.0: Revisiting
Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, S. Jones (ed.), 35-68. London:
Sage.
Castells, M. 2001. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Feenberg, A. and M. Bakardjieva. 2004. Virtual Community: No “Killer
Implication.” New Media and Society 6(1): 37-43.
Fernback, J. and B. Thompson. 1995. Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?
URL (consulted August 2004): http://www.well.com/user/hlr/texts/
VCcivil.html
Hafner, K. 1997. The Epic Saga of the Well: The Worlds Most Influential Online
Community (and its not AOL). Wired 5.05: 98-142.
Hine, C. 2000. Virtual Ethnography. London: Sage.
Jankowski, N. 2002. Creating Community with Media: History, Theories and
Scientific Investigations. In The Handbook of New Media, L. Lievrouw and S.
Livingston (eds.), 34-49. London: Sage.
Lehman, S. 1995. Review - The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the
Electronic Frontier. Environment and Behavior 27(4): 592-594.
Plotkin, W. 1995. Review - The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the
Electronic Frontier. Journal of the American Planning Association 61(2): 284.
Rheingold, H. 1993. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier.
Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley.
Rheingold, H. 2000. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
(2nd Edition). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Robins, K. 1996. Cyberspace and the World We Live In. In Fractal Dreams: New
Media in Social Context, J. Dovey (ed.), 1-30. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Robins, K. 1999. Foreclosing the City? The Bad Idea of Virtual Urbanism. In
Technocities, J. Downey and J. McGuigan (eds.), 34-59. London: Sage.
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Stimson, J. 1995. Review - The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the
Electronic Frontier. Social Science Computer Review 13(1): 284.
Stoll, C. 1996. Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway. New York:
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Webster, F. 1999. Information and Communications Technologies: Luddism
Revisited. In Technocities, J. Downey and J. McGuigan (eds.), 60-89. London:
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Wellman, B. 1997a. The Road to Utopia and Dystopia on the Information
Highway. Contemporary Sociology 26(4): 445-449.
Wellman, B. 1997b. An Electronic Group is Virtually a Social Network. In Culture
of the Internet, S. Kiesler (ed.), 179-205. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Wellman, B. 1998. Networks in the Global Village. Boulder: Westview Press.
Wellman, B. 2001. Physical Place and Cyberplace: The Rise of Personalised
Networking. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25(2): 227-252.
Wellman, B. 2004. The Three Ages of Internet Studies: Ten, Five and Zero Years
Ago. New Media and Society 6(1): 123-129.
