Virtual Communities

An early use of communications technologies, even before the Internet became the de facto communication standard, was the bulletin board. This was similar to today's web forums, a place to post ideas, share and debate opinions, and often pass on software or media files.

Talking in real time with other people online has always been a popular use of the Internet, and it was initially achieved through an application called Internet Relay Chat or IRC. Internet Relay Chat has had a chequered history, since in its early days, it was the preferred communication medium of hackers, crackers and phreakers. Depending on the server you connect to, it is still dominated largely by hackers, software pirates, sex channels and teenage chat, and because of this, many sites (including Exeter) either don't support it or block it completely.

IRC, like most Internet services, is usually accessed through a client program, which connects to one of a number of interconnected servers, which then relay the messages around the world. When connecting to a server, the user chooses to listen to one or more channels, which usually have a theme or subject. The chat happens in real time, though sometimes there is a delay in the relay, called lag, which is caused by sections of the Internet being congested, or one of the servers being overloaded.

It's also possible to connect to some IRC servers using a web client, though the standard clients are usually more powerful and programmable.

More recently, other similar applications have emerged that achieve a similar function, notably ICQ (I-Seek-You), but including AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, Google Talk and others. These allow you to define a group of friends, all using the same client, whom you can send messages to, chat to in a group, send files to, etc. These clients are especially useful as they allow you to see at a glance which of your friends are online. Rather than connecting to a publicly open forum to chat, these allow you to chat easily and (relatively) privately with your friends.

One of the most popular applications of synchronous communication in the early days of the Internet was the role playing game. Here, players would log into a central computer and assume a character within a text-based world generated by the computer. Players could move around, talking to each other and perhaps to computer-controlled characters built into the game.

These games were a development of the text-based adventure games that were widely available for the emerging home computer market. Though primitive, they reached a level of interaction and literary description that made them highly immersive; despite the limitations of text, you had a real sense of “being there” in a world within the computer.

The power of the Internet's instant connectivity created from these adventure games an interative world in which the wildest fantasies could be acted out collaboratively. It was a natural step then to allow the participants to begin creating their own adventures (in fact, this had already been tried in the non-networked game market, with limited success). The power of this idea, the MUD (or Multi-User Domain) was the fact that participants could create `personal spaces', which reflected their own personalities and fantasies. A development of MUDs, the MOO (MUD Object-Oriented) made this even easier, with simple programming rules to create interactive objects and spaces.

Out of these MUDs came a less entertainment-oriented application, the online community. Many MUDs evolved into communities, often keeping their theme and characters, so that the “aim” was not to win some target, but to communicate and develop social relationships. These evolved into fully functional societies, many with semi-formal systems of government and organisation.

There are many accounts of life within these communities, such as Rheingold (1994) and Dibbell (1999).

With the Second Life virtual world, these online communities became graphical, three-dimensional representations of a physical environment. Whereas almost anyone could craft an evocative textual description of their environment without a steep learning curve, the 3D-graphics of the current generation of virtual worlds require rather more expertise. However, perhaps because of this, a whole economy has grown up within many worlds to allow created objects and environments to be traded in-world. For example, in Second Life, it's possible to buy (if you have the Linden dollars - the in-world currency) almost any object, or pay for services such as builders, cleaners, security guards, and so on.

The idea of a text-based landscape is of course nothing new, after all, we all read novels and stories which create a world, realistic or fantastical, using words. What is interesting about literary landscapes in online worlds is that we have some part in their creation and a way to interact within them according to our own choices.

Murray (1997)

The architecture and landscape of a virtual world has become known as its architexture, a compound term of the architecture of text and texture of words. Creating this architexture is in effect creating space, or a metaphor for space, out of the building blocks of language.

[Haynes1998]

The textual landscape is a figment of the reader's imagination no less than it is a product of the author's own creativity. It's like the difference between seeing a literary adaptation on TV and reading the original; the book allows us to form our own impressions and images in a more personal manner, and we in effect create our own interpretation of the text. The landscape of the online world is equally malleable in the mind of the participant.

The difference between the worlds of MUDs and MOOs and the rest of the Internet is the ability to create your own personal “space”. This space can be private or public, can be fantastical or realistic, but it remains a “place” that you can interact within, and provides you with a background to your social relationships online. In comparison, most other `places' on the net have little “sense of place”; they are bland and impersonal areas. It's a bit like trying to maintain real-life relationships in large empty rooms, compared to having you own home, styled to reflect your personality, and into which you can invite friends.

The elements that make up a real-life community are mostly present in the virtual equivalent. The primary purpose of communities is the create a place for social interaction, where we feel safe and confident and can discuss subjects with other interested participants. Communities generally may be thematic or general and may be accidental or deliberate. Most of us participate in at least one accidental community: the neighbourhood we live in. And we are all participating now in a deliberate and purposeful community, the University.

Societies need rules to make them work. Most of our community activities are governed by a set of laws restricting or licensing our behaviour, and stepping outside those laws usually brings some consequence to bear. We conform also to a system of ettiquette, which tells us what is polite or acceptable or rude; a system of rules for certain social situations and circumstances.

Online communities are no different, they need rules to operate successfully. Often termed netiquette, these systems of rules differ from community to community, are seldom written down, but play an important role in the virtual lives of the participants.

[Curtis1996], [Valauskas1996]

Because the participants of online communities have no physical clues as to the body or expression of the other participants, many disabilities become invisible, or at least possible to hide, which can have an empowering and equalising effect for many people. The community is an interaction of the mind without the encumberance of a (perhaps imperfect) body.

Online communities also allow their participants to experiment with their own identities; in effect to lie about themselves or to project a truer picture of their identity than their physical reality portrays.

[Bruckman1996], [Curry1996], [Reid1996]

The anonymity of the virtual world also means that some of the consequences of anti-social behaviour can disappear. Being abusive in an online world will usually lead (in a well-managed community) to be excommunicated, or toaded. The punishment for being bad is exclusion from the society. Many virtual communities have developed a complex set of rules and procedures to control anti-social participants, and it is often a sign of a mature VC that these exist.

Many VCs are thematic, and often discuss subjects which would not provide sufficient interested participants for a geographically based group. The VC provides an opportunity for specialists to meet others in their field, and for those from diverse cultures to discuss common topics.

The virtual world is not limited by physical constraints -- it is almost limitlessly expandable at little cost and can be changed around at will. It may not even be a direct metaphor for the physical world; it's possible to suspend the laws of mathematics and physics and create spaces that are multidimensional or topologically experimental (e.g. with curved space), in which objects disobey our conventional understanding of physical laws like gravity.

The virtual community can also provide an environment for social experimentation.

The idea of a social “sandbox”, where we can try out new models of society, has excited sociologists and anthropologists. In effect, the virtual community is a partial “moratorium”, a place where our actions are to some extent divorced from our responsibilities. Taken further, the online world can be a place where we can vent our frustrations, or experiment with the consequences of actions without damaging real people or objects (similar to the idea of the paraspace, a common thread in many Science Fiction stories, see [Bukatman1993]).

We can also experiment with the laws of reality themselves. What would it be like to live in a world of four or five spatial dimensions? Or no gravity? Virtual worlds can be used to play with our concept and experience of reality in the most basic sense.

Whilst the worlds, communities and characters within the virtual realm are all just arrangements of bytes of computer code, the interaction they represent is very real and very human. It has happened that people meeting as characters in a MUD have then developed relationships beyond the virtual world, some have fallen in love (with at least one couple marrying in the virtual world - [Whitty2006]); sometimes real events can happen inside a virtual world (I know of one PhD student who was assessed by viva within a MOO).

It can be difficult to determine where the real begins and where the virtual ends. One participant from LambdaMOO ([Dibbell1999]) describes how virtual crimes can affect our real emotions--rape in a virtual world can have as much of an impact on someone's emotions as the real, physical crime. Where humans are concerned, there is as much real social interaction in a virtual world as there is in the physical world, and we disregard our social norms at our peril.

	Further Reading...
	Since this is such a fascinating human-centred aspect of Internet use, there's a wide variety of material on the web and in print. See for example: [Turkle1995], [Connery1996], [Dyson1997], [Foster1996], [Giese1998], [Rheingold1994], [Winner1995], and chapter four of [Rawlins1996]