Virtual Communities Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Following the dramatic loss or decline of real human communities, the highly contentious sociological conception of ”virtual communities” signifies a decisive historic break with material human geography and the subsequent emergence of Net-based ”social aggregations” (Rheingold 1993), complex electronically grounded networks of interactive social relations. In particular, the advent and rapid growth of Internet bulletin boards, electronic mailing lists, chat rooms, MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs, IRCs, forums and blogs since the mid-1990s has triggered radically new and diverse modes of social bonding, subjectivity, experience, identity formation and political intervention (e.g. cyborg politics).

Virtual communities, originally anticipated by J. C. R. Licklider and R. W. Taylor as early as 1968, increasingly move towards the overwhelming creation of a global (or local/global) virtual society which optimistically promises unlimited democratic freedom of speech and self-expression, as well as the general revision and revival of the public sphere: ”The vision of a citizen-designed, citizen-controlled worldwide communications network is a version of technological utopianism that could be called the vision of ‘the electronic agora”’ (Rheingold 1993: 14). In that sense, a virtual community, as an essentially anonymous online community of common interests, tasks, goals and orientations, is much ”more than just an array of computer-mediated communication messages; it is a sociological phenomenon” (Matusitz 2007: 24).

This ultimately requires new automated data extraction techniques, quantitative methods of rigorous analysis and robust empirical findings about the organization, governance and performance of the large Internet-connected communities, where the real/corporeal (or physical) as we have known it is dynamically reconfigured. However, serious epistemological doubts have been repeatedly raised about the extent to which the public and urban places of social and cultural life, rich human experience and real face-to-face interaction could be actually telemediated, or reconstructed within imagined, unaccountable, solipsistically self-referential or ”hyper-realistic” electronic regimes.

In principle, there is nothing more social than virtual communities; they are genuine collective discursive products. Everyone is freely communicating and socializing with everyone (who is not physically present!) and through the computer humanity (as a whole) is reflexively communicating with itself. Yet, the most social of the social worlds is at the same time the loneliest of the lonely worlds. Like in Husserl’s transcendental monadology, the world is our subjective representation (an ideal world or a mindscape) and, in the absence of the embodied other, we can thus never be sure that we are not alone in the world and that virtual communities are not only a dream (or a nightmare)!

Nevertheless, virtual communities still provide real alternative humanistic choices and opportunities for self-realization, self-awareness, political conscious-raising, empowerment (letting dissenting voices speak out) and critical discussion of public issues (with adequate human feelings) that may otherwise not be discussed on such an open macro-scale, albeit with continuing serious problems of access and discrimination that need to reflexively and meaningfully be addressed by both participants and policy makers.

Bibliography:

Matusitz, J. (2007) The implications of the Internet for human communication. Journal of Information Technology Impact 7 (1): 21-34.
Rheingold, H. (1993) The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.