Online Communities: Commerce, Community Action

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Randy Connolly gives a historical description of the dispersal of other technologies such as the telegraph, railway, canals, and other technologies that impinge ...
The Information Society, 18:303– 305, 2002 c 2002 Taylor & Francis Copyright ° 0197-2243 /02 $12.00 + .00 DOI: 10.1080 /0197224029007514 7

Online Communities: Commerce, Community Action, and the Virtual University, edited by Chirs Werry and Miranda Mowbray. Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR, 2001. ISBN 0-13-032382-9. 416 pp., $47.00 Reviewed by Rebecca Scheckler Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA

Sasha Barab Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/ genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. (Anderson 1991, p. 6)

The phrase “online community” is widely and some say indiscriminatel y used in education and commerce. It seems to imply warmth and personal commitment to spaces and tools that might otherwise be regarded as anonymous and impersonal. There are other recent books on online communities (Smith & Kollock, 1998; Kim, 2000; Preece, 2000; Barab et al., in press ). What distinguishes this collection from the others and how useful is it? In general, this book is broad and shallow rather than deep and narrow. It is composed of many short essays organized into three topics: business, education, and community action. As such it is most valuable for undergraduate students and others who want a general understandin g of online communities. Deeper and more exhaustive study of the many facets of online community discussed in this book will require reading the sources cited in the essays or in some cases the complete studies that were excerpted for other of the essays. The editors’ goal was to bring in more voices in the designing and planning of bitspace as a civic space. Thus, they brought together some authors who are not usually in the opus of academic literature and others who although in the academic literature are not usually seen in such a mix. They also sought no homogeneity of tone or style. Furthermore, they recognized that Internet-rendered

communities offered no utopian answers to civic spaces and human rights. Therein lie both the strength and the weakness of this collection. It certainly attains more variability than other collections on community as it covers commercial, educational, and activist topics. Unfortunately, some of this variability is in the quality and warrant of the articles, which are uneven and so independent in regard to basic deŽ nitions such as that of community that one suspects that no community of collaboration marked the writing of this book. Some basic questions that were only tacitly broached are: Is there some common understanding of community that works across domains? What can educational, activist, and commercial communities learn from each other? Many online educational communities seek to be educational, activist, and commercial ventures; is this kind of synthesis of purpose possible? It would be useful for these issues to be explicitly addressed, an effort that will require, as these editors recognize, that new voices be brought into the more usual conversations. The conversation around communities persists in part because of the increasing recognition of what Dewey showed in the middle of the last century, that social context, historical context, and culture provide the background we can never escape in our work, in our schooling, our business, and in our activism (Dewey, 1938, 1980, 1981 ). The computer revolution has often paid more attention to the technical than to the social aspects of computer use, and we are now in a period of backlash to this attitude with a rash of books on community in cyberspace. Unfortunately,

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the talk of online communities is often more hype than actuality and denies the distinct differences in social context from copresent communications that computer mediation renders. In a sense, much of the talk about online communities is wishful thinking rather than rigorous study into the social happenings of these online spaces. A confounding difŽ culty in the rhetoric of online communities is the parallel conversations in Ž elds such as commerce and education where each discipline is essentially ignoring all other disciplines. The scope of this book is more inclusive than some of the others in its coverage of commerce, community action, and online education. This coverage is an advantage since the literatures of these Ž elds, although covering parallel topics, are not often read outside their respective Ž elds. Here we have a chance to gain some insights into Ž elds that are not necessarily central to our research but that overlap considerably. Unfortunately, this same coverage may have worked against the development of a coherent edited volume, as the editors did not take the opportunity to compare and contrast discussion of important and salient topics from multiple perspectives. What distinguishe s a collection of papers from an interesting edited volume is a unifying theme, papers that relate to each other and recognize those relations in the text, familiarity of the authors with each other’s essays, and introductory and concluding chapters that tie the essays together and deepen the readers insights. Few collections meet these standards, but many are useful for the range of opinions and viewpoints that get aired in one accessible volume. This collection took on a very demanding charge, that of connecting the use of online spaces as communities in commerce, education, and politics. Unfortunately, the editors did not heed their own words in fostering a cooperative community of authors who could have used online technologies to discuss their papers despite being geographically dispersed. Reviewing speciŽ c articles in the collection, we highlight some of what we view as useful contribution s of this volume. Most of the articles in the section commercial communities were quite eye opening to us educators and represented a fairly negative version of community that exploits the social intimacy of community. Particularly distressing was Janelle Brown’s case study of Smartgirl Internette where online discussion forums for teenage girls had the duplicitou s task of getting them to spill their guts about their likes and dislikes and immediately using this knowledge to market to this same audience. Here a communitylike atmosphere was used for market research that is not usually helpful to teenage girl’s sense of self and healthy actualization.1 Chris Werry similarly did not give a very positive usage of community in his tracing of the usage of community as marketing tactic in business texts. This trajectory shows how business went from

ignoring or denying the possibilit y of online community to using the term as a metaphor for interactive marketing where businesses could get feed back on demographics and customer desires, as demonstrated in Smartgirl Internette. The section on educational communities was least innovative to us, perhaps a better re ection on us both being deeply immersed in research about online learning communities than on the quality of these essays. Norman Clark discusses campus portals and concludes that they do not represent a revolutionary change in education but rather provide convenience of one stop shopping for administrative services (p. 140 ). Very poignantly he points out that communication rather than information is the source of community (p. 143 ) and that rather than developing community, these online portals and administrative tools may actually decrease campus community. Tim Luke discusses the experiences of Virginia Tech’s cyberschool in a way that presupposes the existence of online community (p. 171 ). His attitude seems to be that we merely need to Ž nd the appropriate technology to support it and that commercial interests will create the online courses if academic organizations neglect to do so. From the money recently being poured into commercial ventures he is probably quite correct, although perhaps he should dialogue with Norman Clark about the possibly destructive nature of online educational communities. In his chapter Geoffrey Sauer joins some Internet activists such as Richard Stallman (also in this volume ) in arguing for open access to information. As Sauer recognizes, academics have often proŽ ted from their writings and are reluctant to give them away. This is one of the most interesting pieces in the educational section as it touches on the legal and marketing issues of publishin g that rarely get the attention of academics. Sauer recognizes, as MIT did, that online materials are not equivalent to courses and that as such they have less value than sitting in a seat at MIT and other copresent schools (Krazit, 2001 ). The most poignant comment in the book is the afterword to part 2, which describes the dismantlement of burn.ucsd.edu when its politics became too uncomfortable for the university that provided its server. This piece is an interesting foil to the open access to information argument in some of the other chapters in that it reveals how power plays a role in information dispersal, making us wonder if knowledge dispersal is ever free and open. Somewhat ironically, the last section on alternative online communities has the richest array of theoretical essays. In general, this section explores the possibilitie s of using the Internet as a “platform for change.” Douglas Schuler wisely recognizes that powerful forces such as large global corporations are conservative and in uential forces that often counteract grass-roots efforts for change. He introduces the concept of democracy into this online

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community discussion and examines how these concepts can interact when they can escape the pervasive in uence of “corporate media giants” (p. 295 ). The very last two chapters in the book provide richly satisfying discussion s of some of the theoretical issues that affect and are affected by the many notions of online community conveyed in this book. Randy Connolly gives a historical description of the dispersal of other technologies such as the telegraph, railway, canals, and other technologies that impinge communication and thus community. Luciana Paccagnella’s chapter is a look at the perils and possibilitie s of online community action and highlights the balanced nature of this book, which is certainly neither a utopian nor a dystopian view of online communities. More generally, this volume provides a forum for many interesting and diverse discussions with respect to online community. However, there are also several differing versions of the use of online community here. This is interesting and useful, but it could have been more interesting and useful had the authors discussed their varying concepts of online community. In general, this book is most useful for piquing the interest of students and others who want general coverage of online communities. Many readers will need to read the cited references and complete studies referred to by many of these essays in order to fully satisfy their curiosity about online communities. Regardless, we do view this volume as a

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valuable contributio n to the continuing dialogue on online communities. NOTE 1. The development of eating disorders in girls crazed by unattainable model images is just one possible destructive result.

REFERENCES Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined communities: Re ections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Barab, S., Kling, R., and Gray, J., eds. In press. Designing virtual communities in the service of learning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Dewey, J. 1981. Experience and nature. In John Dewey: The later works 1925 – 1953, ed. J. A. Boydston, vol. 1. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, J. 1938. Experience and education. New York: Collier Books. Dewey, J. 1980. Democracy and education. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. (Original work published 1916.) Kim, A. J. 2000. Community building: Secret strategies for successful online communities on the web. Berkeley, CA: Peachpit Press. Krazit, T. 2001. MIT to put course materials online for free. http:// IDG.net. Preece, J. 2000. Online communities: Designing usability, supporting sociability. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons. Smith, M., and Kollock, P., eds. 1998. Communities in cyberspace. London: Routledge.