Boundary stories about virtual cultures

A summary of:
Stone, A. R. 1991. Will the real body please stand up?: boundary stories about virtual cultures. In Cyberspace: First Steps, M. Benedikt, Ed. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 81-118.
(Part 2)

Stone also describes a virtual community called CommuniTree, which began ambitiously as “a community that promised radical transformation of existing society and the emergence of new social forms” (88). It was born out of New Age, seemingly, as the writers of the How To manual was a “rich intermingling of spiritual and technological imagery” with chapters such as “’Downscale, please, Buddha’, and ‘If you meet the electronic avatar on the road, laserblast hir!’” (89). I suppose this is a lesson about how not to describe spiritual technology in my PhD, lest it become laughable 30-40 years later. How easily discussions about spiritual technology can lean toward the ridiculous if words are not chosen carefully and earnestly.

Unfortunately, CommuniTree failed: “Within a few months, the Tree had expired, choked to death with what one participant called ‘the consequences of freedom of expression’” (91). That seems ominous. I suppose it’s a lesson about a lack of purpose that members could coalesce around, something which requires thought and design. This does imply some need for control: “Thus, in practice, surveillance and control proved necessary adjuncts to maintaining order in the virtual community” (91).

I should probably study CommuniTree and its death in more detail. I should also probably have a look at another early community and see what inspiration can be mined from it, namely Habitat, designed by Chip Morningstar and Randall Farmer (93).

I have noticed that “success” of a virtual community tends to be measured in the amount of time people spend on it. I’m starting to wonder if this is a useful measurement for an alternative vision of the Internet. Is less but more meaningful engagement a more useful metric? – surely we don’t aspire to be plugged into our computers to a greater and greater extent!

There is a quote in this chapter from Steve Williams: “The illusion will be so powerful you won’t be able to tell what’s real and what’s not” (99). This made me think that one could equally make this substitution – and this is the one that interests me: ‘The illusion will be so powerful you won’t be able to tell what’s valuable and what’s not’; i.e. the more we are engaged with a technology that seeks an illusionary, mesmerizing power, the less we are able to recognize our own human values as separate from those generated by the technology.