The most interesting concept from this week for me came from Howard Rheingold’s “The Virtual Community”, because it looks at the earlier stages of the internet and how it has evolved, or in some aspects, devolved. Rheingold talks about the virtual communities that are formed on the internet, how technologies like IRC, BBS and others started forming and connecting people. Rheingold describes the idea of cyberspace as, “a social Petri dish, the Net as the agar medium and the virtual communities… as colonies of microorganisms that grow in petri dishes. Each of the small colonies of microorganisms… is a social experiment that nobody planned but is happening nonetheless.” (276) The idea here, which I strongly agree with, is that nobody planned the rise of virtual communities on the internet; the internet, in fact, had started as a military technology designed to share information between military contractors. However, virtual communities were no accident; in fact, they were an eventuality.

Rheingold argues that the reason for this is the “hunger for community that grows in the breasts of people around the world as more and more informal public spaces disappear from our real lives.” (276) At the time, these communities were limited by nature to the social constraints and realities of the real world. Rheingold seems to think that, “People in virtual communities do just about everything people do in real life, but we leave our bodies behind.” (274) Rheingold wrote during the safe years of the internet. The communities that he described were of the highest caliber in terms of personal relationships. Rheingold describes a WELL party, where he recognized no one yet knew everyone. He also enjoyed communities that he connected with whenever he traveled to new places. However, if Rheingold were to write this article again today, the internet he would write about would be described as very different, evolved (or devolved) beyond its infant state into the turmoil of its teenage years.

The idea of virtual community in terms of pure numbers has been progressed. The teen generation has proven savvy to the internet language and usage. Internet usage in general has expanded exponentially. The community, one would think, would have expanded into a golden age. Yet ask someone on MySpace to meet in real life when you travel to their city and the response will be alarm and hostility. The community’s ties to real life have been cut off. High profile cases involving real life meetings set up through internet communities have shown that it is dangerous to meet the people you think you know. Gone are the WELL parties that Rheingold enjoyed. People are no longer the same in the virtual community and real life. A shy, nice and good mannered 14 year old can be a rude, confrontationalist racist in the internet, as cases similar to this are not uncommon. It seems that the communities have become less personal in real life and more personal with the online identities people form. This devolution of the virtual community I see more as an evolutionary stage. Even though the progress of connecting people in real life has diminished, I see the stage of needing connections in real life as training wheels. In its early stages, virtual communities needed meetings in real life to form the actual connections between people. The users needed to know that the person they had formed an internet bond with was real, that they were the person they envisioned.

However, the internet now needs to grounds in reality. The training wheels are off and people have assumed that the online identity of the person they talk with is just that. While there are still many examples of the virtual community expanding into real life, from my experiences in the world of airsoft, the larger virtual community is now able to stand on its own and accept the fact that the real user is NOT the same as the virtual one.