The Internet and computer-mediated communication are creating not just new ways of viewing communities, but new communities all together. Howard Rheingold explores the new societies that have sprung up around CMC in his book, The Virtual Community. Rheingold uses his personal experience in various online forums as ground work for his analysis of the effect computers are having on the way people congregate and communicate. He defines virtual communities as "social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace" (5). The specific communities he examines include the WELL, Multi-user Dungeons (MUDs), Internet Relay Chat (IRC), the Habitat in Japan, and the national Tèlèmatique service in France. He sees these and other communities as affecting perceptions of self, interpersonal relationships, and political identity at fundamental levels. He views these communities as having definite boundaries, defined by the disembodied nature of the medium, but argues that "a lot can happen within those boundaries" (3). To Rheingold, CMC is both the next great escape medium and means of getting very personal (147).
The majority of Rheingold's own experience has been as a user of the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), a multi-user computer service "rooted in the San Francisco Bay area" (39). Rheingold has been a member of this community since 1985 and calls on a daily basis to read and post messages with other members in electronic dialogues on various topics. The WELL sets Rheingold's standard for how electronic communities should, a standard that is very much defined by their ability, or inability, to convey identity. What authenticates the WELL for him is its ties to a physical community, San Francisco. He sees the WELL as "grounded in the physical world" and those who are unable to attend the embodied aspects of the community as being "constrained in their ability to participate" (2). For Rheingold, living within a virtual community without participating in the "indisputable real-life part" amounts to false substitution. He believes "more than words on a screen [are required] at some point if [virtual communities] want to be other than ersatz" (21-23). To Rheingold there is a very definite distinction between the virtual and the real. He recognizes that people are tied to their physical bodies, and though they may leave those bodies behind to communicate in virtual spaces, they must ultimately return. It is for this reason Rheingold makes the bold assertion that "nobody mistakes virtual life for real life, even though it has an emotional reality to many of us" (36).
Rheingold recognizes the power of CMC to "dissolve boundaries of identity" much as "previous media dissolved social boundaries related to time and space" (147). Without a physical context, members of virtual communities must trust that the people they talk to are what they claim to be. He recognizes that "the medium will, by its nature, be forever biased toward a certain kind of obfuscation" (27). This deception can take on many forms as "gender, age, national origin, and physical appearance are not apparent unless a person wants to make such characteristics public" (26). The removal of the physical aspect of community worries Rheingold. Without a corporal context to ground relationships, virtual communities are vulnerable to all sorts of identity deception as "the possibility of an electronic impostor invading people's most intimate lives is inherent in the technology" (164). He calls such invasions "identity predation" and warns that it is such predation that can undermine the "sense of trust essential to any group that thinks of itself as community" (165). By way of example he point out that in many virtual communities, members that claim to be female are "usually presumed to be lying until they can prove otherwise" (166). Rheingold also recognizes that lack of physical context can often undermine the effectiveness of CMC as an intimate communication medium, pointing out that "part of the ontological untrustworthiness of cyberspace is the lack of body language and facial expression," an issue that Neil Stephenson addresses directly when creating the virtual community of the Metaverse in Snow Crash (Rheingold 172). Rheingold refers to this as the masking effect of cyberspace, but points out that while people may often find it necessary to question the authenticity of their encounters in cyberspace, people still seem to "use these depersonalized modes of communication to get very personal" (147).
Despite his misgivings, Rheingold does recognize the expanding properties that the disembodied freedom of virtual communities allow. This is particularly true in communities like MUDs where a certain level of identity ambiguity is not just assumed, but encouraged. Rheingold, like Sherry Turkle, points to the work of Jean Piaget, who saw "play as a powerful form of learning" (161). MUDs, and to some extent Internet Relay Chat, are spaces to play with identity, "intellectual playgrounds" people can use to explore new concepts of both personal in community identity from angles that may not be available to them in the real world. As Rheingold points out, "in computer technology, playgrounds often are where real innovations occur" (179-80). Rheingold also appreciates the leveling power of CMC, pointing out that "some people - many people don't do well in spontaneous spoken interaction" (23). He gives as an example the Experts forum in the WELL as a place where "the ability to think and compose a reply and publish it within the structure of conversation enables a group of people to build a living database of Experts ... at their own pace" (62).
Virtual communities, existing outside normal contexts of time and geography, leave themselves open to many of the ambiguities Rheingold warns of, but they also open up the possibility for a new kind of community, founded not on common location but common interest. Donna Haraway calls such communities "affinity groups - related not by blood, but by choice. (Haraway 155). Rheingold points out that CMC's tendency to create communities based on affinity is inherent. He cites a 1968 report by Licklider and Taylor, the creators of ARPANET - the Internet's predecessor. In their report they describe on-line interactive communities as "consist[ing] of geographically separated members ... communities not of common location, but of common interest" (Rheingold 24). Rheingold sees virtual communities as existing in "a specific place ... and time" but it is "a cognitive and social [place], not a geographical one"(61).
In the final chapter of his book, titled "Disinformocracy," Rheingold points out some of the pitfalls of expecting the construction of virtual societies to solve all the world's problems. He talks about the hyper-realist movement and their belief that "information technologies have already changed what used to pass for reality into a slicked-up electronic simulation" (281). They see CMC as moving us toward "total replacement of the natural world ... with a technologically mediated hyper-reality ... in which ... we don't see our environment as an artificial construction" (297). The appeal of simulated societies is undeniable, and much of it is derived from their simplification of reality. Rheingold describes Sherry Turkle's concept of mastery, the way "people define themselves in terms of competence, in terms of what they control" (153). To make the hyper-realist concession that such simplified realities will replace what is perceived as reality now is a blurring of the boundary between what is currently defined as real and simulated. Rheingold believes this border must always be kept clearly in focus, arguing that the price members of virtual communities must pay for access to each other is
"forever questioning the reality of [their] online culture. The land of the hyper-real begins when people forget ... a computer conference only conveys the illusion of a town hall meeting. It's when we forget about the illusion that trouble begins" (299).
Rheingold, like Turkle and Haraway, sees much of the power of CMC as being at its fringes, noting that "most of the most profound technological changes have come from the fringes and subcultures ... people adapt[ing] technologies designed for one purpose to suit their own, very different communication needs" (7). He recognizes the computer's power to transcend the boundaries between the real and the simulated and is appreciative of the what playing along these boundaries can teach about the nature of identity. However, Rheingold is ultimately dubious of allowing these borders to blur together to the point where one may consume the other.
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