Cyberspace Innkeeping: Building Online Community
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Description: Essay by former Wells conferencing manager John Coate explaining what happens in an online social environment.
Cyberspace Innkeeping: Building Online Community Copyright 1992,93,98 by John Coate [email protected] Early January, 1998 In the five years since I wrote the last revision to this essay, a great catalyst has propelled the Internet and all things online into the forefront of world consciousness: the World Wide Web. Of course, developments such as the manufacturing of inexpensive routers, cheaper computers and faster modems have played a crucial role; there would be no popular use of the Internet and Web without them. But it is this easy-to-understand platform that integrates multimedia and communication using HTML, a code that anyone can easily learn, that has propelled the Internet to center stage. In the process, the once-obscure notion of online or "virtual" community has become commonplace to the point that it is now in vogue to declare almost any online gathering of people a "community." Recently I said in joking to a friend, "these days an online community seems to be defined as any group of people any place, for any length of time, for any reason, that communicates." And, indeed that may be right: I can concede that it is plausible to use the word "community" to describe a huge variety of social configurations. The first two entries of "community" in the American Heritage Dictionary call it 1.) a group of people living in the same locality and under the same government; and 2.) a group of people having common interests. If you believe the "space" part of "cyberspace," and you consider that a Terms of Service for use of an online service could be called a kind of government, then #1 works in the online realm. Second, consider that "common interests" are the only real reason that people get online to communicate, then #2 works well too. Make a hybrid of these two and it gives a pretty good working definition of "online community." But, assigning the mantle of "community" to one's enterprise before the fact as a
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