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February 13, 2005
Virtual Communities
The classic book about virtual communities, originally published in 1993 by Howard Rheinold, is his The Virtual Community which can be found online. He wrote about his experiences with The Well, a vibrant and very successful & sustainable online community based in the SF Bay Area. Katie Hafner has written a book about the Well, and an excerpt from this appears in a May 1997 issue of Wired Magazine. In 1997 Stephen Doheny-Farina wrote a nice book called The Wired Neighborhood, and I reviewed in in CMC Magazine. A rambling talk/paper on the nature of virtual communities was also written by Moi, for the Canadian Cultural Research Network Colloquium, "Cultural Policies and Cultural Practices: Exploring The Links Between Culture and Social Change," Theme Two: `Virtual' Communities and Identities in an Information Society, June 3, 1998, University of Ottawa, www.non-digerati.com: who are you? If it wasn't for Google I wouldn't have remembered doing this. One of the earlier articles exploring the nature of virtual communities is by Barry Wellman and Milena Gulia, Net Surfers Don't Ride Alone: Virtual Communities as Communities. Peter Kollock and Marc Smith's Communities in Cyberspace , in their Routledge book of the same name, is also a 'classic'. Steve Jones' Cybersociety (Sage, 1994) is also one of the earliest and most influential works; an excerpt Computer-Mediated Communication and Community: Introduction, can be found in CMC Magazine.
Posted by shade at February 13, 2005 11:56 AM