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Community Technology and Democratic Rationalization

Article  in  The Information Society · May 2002

DOI: 10.1080/01972240290074940 · Source: DBLP

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[This article was published in The Information Society, no. 18, 2002, pp. 181-192.]

Community Technology and Democratic

Rationalization*
Andrew Feenberg
Maria Bakardjieva

Abstract
The objective of this paper is to explore questions of human agency and democratic
process in the technical sphere through the example of "virtual community." The
formation of relatively stable long term group associations - community in the broad
sense of the term - is the scene on which a large share of human development occurs. As
such it is a fundamental human value mobilizing diverse ideologies and sensitivities.
The promise of realizing this value in a new domain naturally stirs up much excitement
among optimistic observers of the Internet. At the same time, the eagerness to place
hopes for community in a technical system flies in the face of an influential intellectual
tradition of technology criticism. This eagerness seems even more naive in the light of
the recent commercialization of so much Internet activity. Despite the widespread
skepticism, we believe the growth of virtual community is significant for an inquiry into
the democratization of technology. We show that conflicting answers to the central
question of the present theoretical debate--Is community possible on computer
networks?—generalize from particular features of systems and software prevalent at
different stages in the development of computer networking. We conclude that research
should focus instead on how to design computer networks to better support community
activities and values.

Introduction
Unlike the broadcast media, computer networks are not merely additional "voices"
heard in everyday life, but actually construct a "virtual" social world paralleling the
world of face-to-face communication. Users establish all kinds of social relations in this
virtual world and undergo experiences and interactions that are significant for their
personal development. Two distinct models of the online world have emerged since the
mid 1980s when networking first reached a moderately large user base. We will label
them "the consumption model" and the "community model."
Today the consumption model is the one that we hear about most often in
connection with the Internet. The germs of the consumption model can be found in the
early efforts to put research centers, libraries and other information generating and
storing institutions online. These virtual worlds offer a limited set of options to users
who interact individually with the software for the purposes of information search and
retrieval. As more and more middle-class users went online, it dawned on business that
techniques for handling information could be adapted to sales. The conceptual step

1
from information retrieval to retrieval of goods and services was easy to make and a
promising new virtual market opened up. Technical solutions ensuring higher speed and
capacity of transmission, and graphical point-and-click interfaces further qualify the
Internet as a global electronic mall. The population inhabiting this space consists of free,
active consumers, viewing, picking, and clicking its way to goods. Users scarcely talk to
each other (as in traditional brick-and-mortar commercial sites), and never see or sense
each other's presence. Privacy, anonymity, reliability, speed, visual appeal are desired
properties of this virtual space mobilizing armies of designers in search of competitive
technical solutions.
Despite the excitement generated by these commercial applications, the older
practice of human communication on computer networks may well occupy more users
more of the time. In the early days of computer networking, communication was the
main public application. The structure of the virtual worlds opened by the early
communication applications was not given in advance. It was not ready-made for users
to enter as they do a room in a building, which bears evidence of its purpose in the
design of the space, the furniture, the walls and lighting. Instead, users had to work
together to define the online world they inhabited by imposing a communication model
on the emptiness of cyberspace. They might define their shared online world as a
meeting, a conference, a work team, a class, an information exchange among hobbyists
or medical patients, and so on. The performative establishment of such communication
models in the virtual world continues today in online settings such as newsgroups and
computer conferences. It is a generically new type of social act which has ethical and
political implications. In this act, users creatively invent the computer as a medium, not
necessarily confined to the norms and functions embodied in the technology by its
designers, nor simply reproducing practices originating in their face-to-face experience
(Feenberg, 1989: 266ff). Through the establishment of communication models,
computer networks become an environment within which communities form and ways
of life are elaborated. What is the quality of those communities and ways of life? This is
the first question to which this paper is addressed.
Community is the scene on which a large share of human development occurs. And
it is a fundamental human value. By online community we mean the formation of
relatively stable long term online group associations. Community involves the
participatory engagement in a collective practice aimed at constructing collective
identities. As such, communities are inherently capable of self articulation and
mobilization vis-à-vis society at large. We would like our notion to accommodate
features originating in the intellectual heritage of John Dewey who saw community as
connected to participation, commonness, and shared beliefs and hence as inherently
democratic: "Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of
associated life. It is the idea of community life itself" (Dewey, 1927). On these terms, the
question of virtual community is significant for an inquiry into the democratization of
technology.
In recent years we have seen increasing public debate about new issues involving
technology in relation to the environment, medicine, and education, as well as the
familiar problems of food purity, automation, job security, and worker health and safety.
To the extent that the demands of lay actors gain influence in these domains, the scope
of democratic public life expands to include technology. We call this process

2
"democratic rationalization" in a sense defined below. The Internet opens new struggles
between contesting visions of the future in cyberspace. The objective of this paper is to
explore dimensions of virtual community that relate to these broader questions of
human agency and democratic process in the technical sphere. We argue here for the
possibility of an outcome responsive to the need for community. Imposing the
community model of the Internet is a political intervention in a society such as ours in
which technology builds the scaffolding of social life.*
We will start our inquiry with a brief excursion into the theoretical debate on
virtual community. We argue the participants in this debate generalize from particular
features of systems and software prevalent at different stages in the development of
computer networking to conclusions assumed to apply to computer mediated
communication as such. The debate has not so far taken into account the results of
empirical studies that show the importance of user agency in the shaping of online
community. Constructivist technology studies provide a theoretical framework for
generalizing from these empirical studies and open larger questions of democratic
intervention into the evolution of the Internet (Feenberg, 1995: chap. 7). We argue that
instead of being taken for granted as intrinsic to computer networking, existing
configurations of the technology should be questioned, debated and eventually reformed
to better support community activities and values. Rather than debating the possibility
of online community, research should focus instead on how to design computer
networks to support it. In the concluding sections of this paper, we review several
important terrains of online community activity and research where the future of the
Internet is being decided.

The Debate Over Virtual Community

In this section, we review the different visions of online communication of early

enthusiasts, critics, and postmodern theorists. We do not hold these positions ourselves,
but attempt to go beyond them to a new and more empirically based appreciation of the
wide-ranging potentialities of the Internet. By contrast, all these commentators base
their judgment on features of the virtual world defined largely by the prevailing
groupware. Changes in software, combined with changes in the user base of computer
communication, account for the radically different conclusions they reach.

The Conditions of Virtual Community

Some of the earliest writing on computer networking promised universal
interconnectedness in electronically generated communities, a "network
nation" (Licklider and Taylor, 1968; Hiltz and Turoff, 1978). These writers assumed
implicitly that the structure of a technology determines its use and subsequent social
impacts. That impact, they claimed, would be revolutionary because computer
networking made it possible for the first time to mediate small group activity. The
telephone mediates one-to-one interactions, and radio and television broadcasting
mediates one-to-many interactions. But small group activity, many-to-many
communication, had escaped electronic mediation until the development of computer

3
networks. Computer mediated communication was expected to have social
consequences comparable in magnitude to other forms of electronic mediation.
The early enthusiasts believed that the technical possibility of mediated group
interaction would enhance and improve the quality of life, revivify public discourse, and
favor class, race and gender equality, and participatory forms of social organization.
These ideas represented the optimism of a generation of engineers and computer
enthusiasts heavily involved in creating the Internet, computer-conferencing systems,
and bulletin boards. Eventually, similar notions were taken up by public discourse and,
for good or ill, gave birth to a persistent metaphor: the Internet as a community
technology. Because the technology was still in its earliest stages, this popular metaphor
influenced design with results we see today.
The first publicly accessible virtual communities organized themselves not on the
Internet but on independent computer conferencing systems such as EIES (Electronic
Information Exchange System) (Hiltz and Turoff, 1978). Although conferencing
software was not widely used by current standards, it had a significant impact on the
image of computer communication. Early computer conferencing designers such as
Murray Turoff developed software that met what we consider the four minimum
technical conditions for effective online community. These conditions include the
possibility of:
1) Bounding: forming closed online groups;
2) Tracking: listing how far each participant has read in community discussions;
3) Archiving: maintaining accessible records of community discussions;
4) Warranting: ensuring stable and (most of the time) genuine participant
identities.
Whether other conditions of community must be met depending on the nature of the
interests and tasks of specific online groups remains an important research question.
We will return to the problem of the conditions of community in the concluding section
of this paper.
Among the creators of the Internet, there were also community oriented
visionaries. Although they had much less control over the shape of their evolving
system, they too saw in it the promise of renewed community life.* But as the Internet
became the dominant medium of computer communication, the early vision of online
community met with problems. Internet groupware in general public use does not
always support the kind of friendly, supportive interaction that early Internet users and
the original computer conferencing enthusiasts experienced on their systems.
The paradigmatic group communication applications found on the Internet were
and still are mailing lists and newsgroups. The design of newsgroups supports the values
of free speech, universal participation, mutual aid and information sharing. However,
important defining attributes of community life are missing. Because they are
completely open, the acceptance of common rules, mutual respect, stable identity and
authentic communication are not easily assured. Hence the notorious frequency of
flaming and lack of trust experienced by participants in these fora (Sproull and Kiesler,
1991: 49ff). It is impossible to know who is reading as passive participation leaves no
traces on the system. This can be discouraging for users who may feel isolated and

4
ignored in the midst of their community. Many Internet users are turned away by the
recent assault of commercial advertising and outright hoaxes such as pyramid schemes.
Netiquettes encode social practices for regulating behavior in newsgroups, but they are
voluntary and have had only limited success.
Mailing lists provide for various degrees of restricted participation and
performance through partly technological solutions - for example closed and moderated
groups. Yet they too suffer many of the problems of the newsgroups. To the degree that
mailing lists represent more strictly governed communication spaces compared to
newsgroups, this has happened at the expense of vesting extraordinary power in the
gate-keepers, the persons acting as list owners or moderators. Depending on the type of
mailing list, these gate-keepers can allow members in or force them out of the list, as
well as preview and censor contributions. It is as difficult to trace passive participation
by readers, or "lurkers,”on mailing lists as it is in newsgroups. Furthermore, there is
little or no continuity in the exchanges since the database cannot be accessed
thematically and past messages are usually not easily accessible. (It should be noted that
this is changing in the latest generation of listserv programs.)

Trouble in Cyberspace
Because mailing lists and newsgroups were used at first by computer scientists and
enthusiasts and drew on actually existing professional solidarities and shared values,
their lack of community oriented software features did not pose a grave problem. Those
cozy beginnings are a thing of the past. Dutton (1996) refers to the new state of online
affairs exemplified by the difficulties in building community on Santa Monica's public
electronic system: "Much is said about the strong norms within the Internet community,
forgetting how homogeneous a community it serves. With the growth of commercial use,
the expansion of its user base and the diminishing influence of old timers on this
network, these norms are likely to be increasingly challenged” (Dutton, 1996: 285). In
the face of deteriorating online morals, Dutton calls for innovative approaches to the
development of rules and regulations for public electronic networks. If left normless, he
contends, key participants will be chased away and the viability of these fora will be
threatened.
But not everyone thinks that a solution is possible. Observing the problems of
community-building on the publicly accessible Internet, a number of theorists and
commentators have concluded that this nascent social space is morally "inert" and
socially disruptive. This is Albert Borgmann's view of what he calls "hyperintelligent"
computer networks. "More deeply considered, however, the nervous system of
hyperintelligence will disconnect us one from the other. If everyone is indifferently
present regardless of where one is located on the globe, no one is commandingly
present" (1992: 105). Borgmann fears that we can easily make people on a computer
network vanish when we need them no more. Not only is communication more
superficial, the network reduces our chances of meeting people face-to-face. In this way
"the immobile attachment to the web of communication works a twofold deprivation of
our lives. It cuts us off from the pleasure of seeing people in the round and from the
instruction of being seen and judged by them" (1992: 106).
Commitment as a conditio sine qua non of community is also at issue in Neil
Postman's critique of the Internet (Postman, 1992). Postman argues that the very

5
concept of community implies being together (from the Latin root cum ) in combination
with munis, meaning obligation. Network communities, insists Postman, lack this
essential feature of common obligation. He argues that applying the community
metaphor to groups of people associating over computer networks compromises the
genuine notion of community.
In an eloquent account of his experience in cyberspace, Mark Slouka (1995)
complains that online we inhabit worlds "cut loose from their moorings in reality." He
sees a substantial risk involved in setting up residence in these "metaphorical
communities," the risk of devaluing the significance of physical reality. Turning their
backs to the "real world," "cyberists" enter a "hybrid world" in which "every potential
virtue became its own dark double; in which freedom became the freedom to abuse and
torment; anonymity, the anonymity of the obscene phone call; and the liberation from
the physical body, just an invitation to torture someone's virtual one. With the checks
and balances of the real world barred at the door, all the worst in human nature quickly
sets up shop" (1995: 54). These observations lead Slouka to the conclusion that morality
matters only within the bounds of the physical world. He argues that there can be no
morality in heaven, hell, or cyberspace.
Strangely, many of these apparently negative traits of online communication are
evaluated positively by postmodern theorists who see in the Internet a paradigm of
desirable social transformations (Turkle, 1995; Stone, 1995). The liberation from the
body and the unlimited freedom to join and leave virtual groups that the critics fault
appears to these theorists as a positive characteristic of the medium. They see a new
culture emerging in the practices of multiple identity made possible by the users'
disembodiment. Invisible, the user can encounter others on his or her own terms,
practice virtual "cross-dressing," adopt fantasy personas, and unleash repressed
dimensions of the self.
As Sherry Turkle puts it, online interaction "brings postmodernism down to
earth....Multiple viewpoints call forth a new moral discourse....The culture of simulation
may help us achieve a vision of a multiple but integrated identity whose flexibility,
resilience, and capacity for joy comes from having access to our many selves" (1995:
268). A. R. Stone makes a similar point around the problem of online "warrantability,”
or accountability. Who or what is the person one encounters in an online community?
The difficulty of settling this question in the old way offers opportunities for
experimentation and self-transformation (Stone, 1995: 87).

Deterministic Assumptions
Although the authors discussed here follow different lines of argumentation, they
all seem to share the assumption that the technical structure of computer networks will
largely determine the character and the quality of the communication they make
possible. Presumably, technical feasibility will transform prevailing practice, overriding
the cultural ethos handed down from the past. They identify four features of online
communication that seem particularly important in this context.
1. As noted above, computer communications mediates small group activity.
Communities can assemble online despite the obstacles of time and space. This feature
of the new systems was the basis for the optimism of the early enthusiasts. But other
features appear decisive to the critics and postmodern theorists.

6
 2. They argue that the narrow bandwidth of the online communication channel is
the major difference between the “virtual” and the "real world." The social contexts
within which the acting subjects are situated in cyberspace is as thin and ephemeral as
the flow of electronic signals set into motion by the fingers hitting the keyboard. The
critics see in this a diminishing of experience itself; the postmoderns see it as an
opportunity to unleash fantasy.
3. Universal interconnectedness and the reduction of context blur human values
and choices in a universal relativism. Every piece of information is equally valuable and
every communication partner is equally present. The critics conclude that nothing is
really valuable and no one is really present. The postmoderns seize on the liberation
promised in a relativistic universe without Cartesian subjects and coordinates.
Postmodern individualism can thrive in the new virtual environment where everyone is
responsible for their own values and mobility between communities undermines
conformist pressures.
4. Because of the anonymity of computer interaction, every act vis-à-vis other
participants is equally permissible. The critics charge that under these conditions
morality is impossible, while the postmoderns find in anonymity the opportunity for
creating a new, more tolerant, and more self-conscious morality.
The various authors differ in the degree to which they share these deterministic
premises. The critics tacitly assume that certain obvious technical features of computer
networks define the social relations they mediate. The postmodern theorists appreciate
the role of user practices and appropriations. However, the users who interest them are
precisely the ones who appropriate the very features of the technology the critics
deplore. They fail to highlight the potential variety of outcomes where users appropriate
the network for different purposes. Thus in neither case is there much room left for the
sort of stable, predictable environment and personal identities supporting committed
exchanges we usually associate with the idea of community.

The Social Construction of Online Communities

Advocates of online community, critics of networking, and postmoderns all remain
preoccupied with the benefits and dangers to community arising from the features or
limitations of network technology. In contrast, sociologists and cultural analysts of
cyberspace have provided empirical accounts of what actually goes on in online social
groups. These researchers have concluded that the online social space is not governed by
the technical characteristics of the network but is socially constructed.
Empirical studies have shown that:
1. Participants find ways to overcome the narrowness of the communication
channel and, manage to create personal images of each other despite it (Walther et
al., 1994; Walther and Borgoon, 1992).
2. Rather than operating in ways dictated by the structure of the network,
participants actively appropriate what is available, at times using the technical
features of the system and preexisting cultural resources in unexpected ways
(Contractor and Seibold, 1993; Contractor and Eisenberg, 1990).

7
 3. Participants create dynamic and rich communities by inventing new forms of
expression and through interactive negotiation of meanings, norms and values
(Reid, 1991, 1995, Baym, 1995; Watson, 1997).
4. Different online communities demonstrate distinctive normative orientations
established and maintained through written ethical codes - "netiquettes," and
through "metacommunication" (see Baym, 1995, Herring, 1993, Feenberg, 1989,
Dutton, 1996).
It is interesting to contrast this sociological literature with the critical approaches
outlined in the previous section. The social research does not deny the existence of
problems such as those the critics identify, but it blames them on the way users
appropriate the technology rather than on technical features of computer networking.
For example, an online hooligan showing blatant disregard for group norms no doubt
takes advantage of certain technical affordances (e.g. free and often anonymous access
to the discussions of a group), but these might be blocked or altered by different
configurations of software or social organization. From this non-deterministic
standpoint the online environment embodies both obstacles and opportunities for
community. Along with obvious features, it contains "dormant affordances" that await
discovery and incorporation in new community-building practices.

From Determinism to Agency

The Politics of Technology

Early enthusiasts, critics and postmodern theorists, emphasize a few general
affordances vis-à-vis an unspecified and broadly conceived user population. Empirical
studies show that in practice, interacting users appropriate the technology as members
of particular collectivities with particular goals in mind. In that context, they manage to
discover and enact new affordances not always perceivable through abstract deduction
from the obvious technical features of a system.
The different positions regarding the Internet's community-building potential
correspond roughly to Langdon Winner's (1986) distinction between technologies that
are "inherently political," and technologies that acquire political implications through
contingent features of design. Is the very technical structure of the Internet biased
against community formation, or is its impact a matter of user initiatives and design
choice? We believe the latter position is correct. But that opens up important questions
concerning user agency in technological development.

The Social Construction of New Communication Technologies

Social constructivists (Pinch and Bijker, Law, Latour, Hughes and others) and
social historians (Marvin, Schivelbusch) have demonstrated convincingly that the design
of new technological systems emerges from a process of negotiation and struggle among
"relevant social groups" (Pinch and Bijker, 1987). Technologies do not start out clearly
defined. All technological artifacts exhibit "interpretative flexibility," that is to say, they
can be understood differently by different participants in the design process.
Interpretative flexibility provides the basis for contestation among the heterogeneous
actors involved in that process. The historian can study how specific sets of social

8
practices, relations, and organizational forms are anchored to a new technology as a
dominant interpretation emerges in the course of its development.
Thus contrary to technological determinism, human agency is central to the
process of technological advance (See Williams, 1974 for an insightful discussion of the
case of television.) But note that this constructivist position is also different from the
common sense claim that technology is "neutral" and can be used for a variety of
purposes. Of course within certain limits that is true too, but the issue here is not merely
how the technology is used but what it becomes as a result of the different possible uses
that people imagine for it and design into it. Each of those possible configurations will
have an impact on society, as determinists claim. In the early stages of development of a
technology, it is fairly easy to uncover the role of human agents in this process. This is
the case with the Internet today. Later, as a technology is stabilized, its design tends to
dictate users’ behavior more successfully and agency recedes into the background, at
least until new demands emerge to challenge established designs. Thus not a one-sided
determinism, but reciprocity best describes the human-technology relation.
Latour explains these reversals of agency in terms of the notion that moral
obligations are often delegated to technical artifacts (Latour, 1992). Even though
Latour's examples (the door closer, the speed bump) sound a bit too mechanistic to
qualify as replacements for moral self-control, devices are fraught with intricate
"programs for action" which specify what behavior is considered right and what wrong
in the particular setting by a particular community. Artifacts "scaffold" human behavior
in compliance with customary and ethical standards. This raises important questions for
the Internet. How much and what type of "ethical guidance" do we find in the online
environment created by computer networks? Is it possible to embody such guidance in
the technical structure of online environments? With regard to the future of the
Internet, these are questions about design solutions that could reinforce the
"community model" as a democratic alternative for the development of this medium.
It is important not to underestimate the significance of the issues involved. The
Internet resembles radio and television in its early stages of development. It is still
unclear what it will become, but predictably, like these earlier communications
technologies, it will be a major factor in the shaping of our culture once its form is
settled. Just as we say of radio and television that they are entertainment media, and in
the process lump together our expectations and practice of listening and viewing with
certain technical characteristics, so we will someday have a widely accepted and
seemingly plausible definition of computer networking. What will it be? As with radio
and television, the answer to that question will depend on the emergence of standard
technical affordances, practices and organizational and cultural forms associated with
the technological device and determining its social meaning. That is in part a political
process in both the narrowest and the broadest sense of the term.*

Democratic Rationalizations
Social constructivism directs our attention to the importance of taking into account
all "relevant social groups" when analyzing the development of an artifact. However,
early constructivist research remained limited predominantly to immediately visible
groups of scientists, designers, engineers, administrators, and businessmen. But in the
case of the computer this is an oversight in obvious need of correction. Turkle (1984),

9
for example, found a lot of what constructivists call interpretative flexibility in her study
of diverse user communities. The openness of the machine allows for numerous
readings corresponding more to the personality of the user than to the plans of
computer designers or any technical characteristic of the artifact itself.
We need an account which emphasizes the inventiveness with which users engage
with such products as computers. To this end, Feenberg has introduced the concept of
"democratic rationalization," which refers to user interventions that challenge harmful
consequences, undemocratic power structures, and barriers to communication rooted in
technology (de Certeau, 1984: 30-31; Feenberg (1995, 1999). With this concept,
Feenberg emphasizes the public implications and consequences of user agency for
technical design.
The concept of democratic rationalization draws out the political implications of
constructivism. Constructivism frees the study of technology from the dogmatic
assumption that some ultimate technical criterion, such as efficiency, determines which
of the various possible interpretations and configurations of an artifact must prevail.
Where it used to be assumed that political "interference" in technical decisions would
inevitably reduce efficiency, on the constructivist account, there ought to be many
possible "rationalizations," each leading to a successful outcome. By “rationalization” in
this context is meant a technically and economically coherent realization of the basic
ideas associated with the technology. These alternatives are not comparable in some
simple quantitative sense, as they accomplish different goals and are embedded
differently in social institutions. However, they must all make sense technically to be
called rationalizations. (Obviously, there may also be “irrational” alternatives, i.e.
alternatives that make little or no technical sense, but that is another story, irrelevant to
our considerations on the Internet.) Some rationalizations may be heavily influenced by
lay actors and so could be called "democratic" in the sense that they involve citizen
agency.* Environmentalism has accustomed us to recognizing such lay interventions as
expressions of democratic public opinion. Feenberg proposes that we extend a similar
recognition to user involvement in the “information revolution.”
Feenberg identifies several types of democratic rationalization. In some cases, lay
actors force design changes through initiating public controversies, leading to boycotts,
regulation, or other challenges to the technical solutions preferred by experts,
corporations, or government agencies. In other cases, expert and lay actors may
collaborate in creating a product, as in participatory design. Feenberg calls the type of
democratic rationalization most relevant to the Internet "creative appropriation," the
process in which users innovate new functionalities for already existing technologies
(1999: chap. 5). Creative appropriation has been a significant shaping force in the
evolution of the Internet from the very beginning. It was originally designed for sharing
information for the purposes of military research, but users quickly appropriated it as a
medium for human communication (see Rheingold, 1993; Abbate, 1994, Feenberg,
1995: chap. 7). Subsequently, the new interpretation was incorporated into the structure
of the technology through a series of design changes and now belongs to its accepted
social definition.
The review of empirical studies of online community showed that the online
environment is neither inherently inimical nor conducive to community. Rather, certain
groups under specific circumstances manage to add a new sociotechnical "layer" to the

10
computer network in order to build community there. Layering in this sense involves
reappropriating the network in unexpected ways, as participants innovate or actualize
new or dormant affordances (Feenberg, 1999: 219). Because these participants are
differently situated with respect to the technology than its designers, they are able to
perceive and actualize overlooked potentialities not envisioned in the technical,
economic, and political rationality already inscribed in the network. Acting on the basis
of a "situated knowledge" rooted in their unique relation to the technology, participants
are able to give it a new meaning. These democratic rationalizations represent an
instance of the lived practice of technology.

Groupware for Community

It is reasonable to ask if democratic rationalizations stand a chance against the

consumption model supported by powerful commercial interests. With these interests
driving development toward more efficient forms of consumption, the creative,
participatory, community-building potential of network technology faces the threat of
obliteration. But the social shaping of the Internet is not yet finished. The technology
and its social institution have not reached the point of stabilization. As computer
networks penetrate the everyday lives of new and diverse social groups and enter into
the operations of a broad range of organizations, new interpretations, meanings,
problems, conflicts, struggles and design solutions proliferate. There is evidence of this
in the survival and growth of quite a few early experiments in online community (Agre
and Schuler, 1997). In addition, the last few years have seen the emergence of new
commercial applications of computer networking that support community building. In
this section we review these important terrains on which researchers and activists alike
will need to focus in the next phase of the growth of online community.

Computer Supported Collaborative Work

One specialized area of computer networking - groupware, or computer supported
cooperative work (CSCW) - has suggestive implications for online community. CSCW
represents a prominent strand in mainstream computer network research and
application. Improving group productivity, reducing so-called "process losses,"
overcoming time and space constraints on group collaboration, and increasing the range
and speed of access to information have been among the motives driving
experimentation with computer systems designed to support group collaboration
(Galegher and Kraut, 1990; McGrath and Hollingshead, 1994). The work situation in
multinational companies, characterized by an increasing number of long-distance
collaborations, has intensified interest in CSCW and made it an area of commercial
competition already by the mid 1980s (Holtham, 1994).
Designers started out by focussing on the "rationalization" of the collective work
process. This they accomplished through tight, deterministic structuring of group
activities. As Lea and Giordano (1997:8) note, CSCW research and development still
primarily aims to support small, short-lived, interactive, task-oriented groups which
would normally meet face to face. This is of course due to the fact that CSCW

11
applications are designed in a business context where the paradigmatic group is a work
team tackling a concrete task set by the management.
But the focus of the field has gradually opened up, in many cases thanks to the
contribution of social scientists, to recognize the importance of informal interactions
among group members (McGrath and Hollingshead, 1994; Bowker et al., 1997). The
concept of community has begun to attract interest within the CSCW field. In a recent
article published in CSCW: The Journal of Collaborative Computing, Elizabeth Mynatt
and her colleagues define "network communities" as an emergent "genre of
collaboration". The authors see the architectural principles of systems such as Media
Spaces and MUDs (Multi-User Domains) as providing the exemplar for developing
"network communities." These are defined as computationally based environments that
provide access to a persistent online world possessing technical and social affordances
for nurturing community (see Mynatt et al., 1998: 123). Notable in Mynatt et al.'s
analysis of how such communities work is the effort to draw on social anthropology,
rather than social psychology alone, in generating guidelines for the technical support of
group interaction. They argue that "Network communities emerge from the intertwining
of sociality and technology. It is the appropriation, and re-appropriation, of technology
to accomplish the daily workings of social life that influences the character of a network
community, including its eventual failure or success. Affordances suggest and support
this appropriation" (Mynatt et al., 1998:130).
The five affordances that Mynatt and her colleagues find spanning the various
network community technologies include:
1) Persistence: durability across time of both users and particular uses;
2) Periodicity: rhythms and patterns through which activity is structured over time
in a meaningful way;
3) Boundaries: spatial divisions, often metaphorical, that make possible different
social groupings;
4) Engagement: possibility for participants to establish diverse forms and modes of
communication;
5) Authoring: possibility for participants to change the configuration of their space.
To support community practice, Mynatt et al. start mapping out a software
structure that would be conducive to community life online. They propose such things as
software facilities for improving links between members' offline and online identities,
providing means for members to monitor each others' background presence online,
providing for redesign, so that the community can rebuild the software that structures
its activities to suit its evolving needs, incorporating techniques and features for
acculturating new members. These suggestions seem keyed directly to the objections of
the critics of online community, who argue that identity and commitment are
impossible in cyberspace. Mynatt and her collaborators have instead studied the
practice of actual participants in online communities and attempted to generalize from
the empirically identifiable procedures they employ to get around the very real but not
insurmountable obstacles to community inherent in networking.
As in our earlier list of minimum (software) conditions for online community, the
emphasis here is on enabling groups to define themselves through control of

12
membership and to access a collective memory (points one and three on both lists).
Mynatt and her collaborators also suggest the usefulness of some sort of tracking feature
(our point 2), and their call for linking online and offline identity is a way of achieving
the goal of our point 4, which we call warranting. Thus the conclusions are quite similar
up to this point. The additional notions of “periodicity,” “engagement,” and “authoring”
could be added to a common list. Periodicity is generally achieved through moderating
practices that skillfully open and close phases in online discussion, giving a sense of
progress to what might easily degenerate into random and directionless monologues.
Engagement in Mynatt’s sense of the term is now commonplace on Web portals, which
we discuss below. Authoring concerns the ability of users to innovate features, precisely
the sort of thing we refer to with the concept of democratic rationalization.
Given the influence of CSCW in the business world and the increasing commercial
interest in it, this new focus on online community must be taken seriously as a possible
source of significant innovation.

Web-Based Community Applications

In addition to work-oriented groupware, the relatively young Internet service
industry offers another source of online community development and experimentation.
Community is interpreted by this industry as a commodity which commands adequate
supply efforts. Web communities have become a big business in little more than a year.
Their potential audience of loyal participants has attracted portal sites. Here is a typical
ad for one of them: "A virtual community is a group of people with a common interest
who are connected through the Internet. People with a common interest can create their
own virtual community, and it can all be done using the ICQ tools and services. The
easiest way you can form a virtual community is by creating an ICQ Interest Group. The
ICQ Interest Groups are located on the ICQ server” (www.icq.com/
cybercommunities.html).
The simple-minded philosophy of the early Internet newsgroups can be found in
this statement: all you need to create a community is common interest and a
communication medium. In fact, the software tools offered by the contemporary
"community services" such as ICQ, Excite, Yahoo! are fairly sophisticated and fulfill
most of the conditions of community we have so far identified. They enable participants
to create both listed (visible to everyone through the WWW) and unlisted "clubs",
"groups", "communities"; the ones are open (to the public), the others closed (by
invitation only). Not only can clearly defined and recognizable group boundaries be
established, the process of boundary drawing is prompted by the software itself so even
beginners can understand it. Summary information on community membership, how
many pages have been viewed each day, times of posting, and other similar parameters
are automatically presented by the system. Thus some form of participation tracking is
available. Users are prompted to provide "profiles," e-mail addresses, and home page
URLs. By these means the anchoring of online personae in real identities is possible and
encouraged. Mynatt’s “engagement” is supported as well. Some of the services allow the
creation of shared online "photo albums" as visual complements to the usual text-only
formats. And along with asynchronous discussions via message boards and simple
conferencing formats, participants can engage in a synchronous chat, or exchange e-
mail by clicking a single button. The records of the asynchronous discussions are

13
typically available for further reference, thus constituting a form of community memory.
As was the case with moderated mailing lists, the power structure of the resultant social
formations is again centered on one person or gate-keeper, the so called founder or
administrator who created the group/club/community. In this case, however, the
software allows for different authorizations to be given to various members by the
founder/administrator. For example, some members can be delegated to invite new
members to the group, others can create new area folders, or prune the archives, etc.
This makes it possible to innovate various structures of rights and responsibilities and to
engage in a weak form of authoring.
These services must balance simplicity of use against sophistication of features.
Specialists complain that a seamless combination of a web browser and a computer-
conferencing client is technically tricky to achieve. Thus, some characteristics of
computer conferencing (for example threading; structuring by subtopic) are missing
from some systems. But the technical features that are typically in place do satisfy the
minimum conditions for community building demonstrated by early conferencing
systems as well as some of the recommendations of Mynatt and her collaborators. At the
same time, unlike early conferencing, which was available only to a select few, these
services are in principle open to everybody with Internet access and cater to a
technically literate and yet non-expert user population building on the accessible point-
and-click interface of the World Wide Web.
Of course, there are a number of issues related to such commercially provided
groupware. Critics’ fears of abusive forms of sociability and postmoderns’ hopes for
multiple and disengaged identities can all be verified in some of the public clubs,
however, we would argue that this is more a matter of social practices chosen by
participants than an essential consequence of networking. More worrisome are the
problems resulting from private ownership of the hardware infrastructure of online
community. The services are offered to participants at no cost for the time being but the
companies reserve the right to impose fees in the future. At this stage, users are asked to
pay by exposing themselves to advertising and electronic direct marketing disseminated
by the company hosting the community. These commercial intrusions certainly affect
the atmosphere. The service provider can at its sole discretion terminate a club/group/
community and discard its content for any reason (see for example Yahoo! Clubs Terms
of Service, section 13). That could have dire consequences for an established community
relying on the provider.* Their collective product, the archive of their interactions, could
be simply erased as a result of a change in ownership or policy. Marginal groups
advocating unpopular political views or lifestyles would seem to be particularly
vulnerable.
Along with that go all the privacy and intellectual property issues typical of online
communication in general. Under Yahoo! Clubs terms of service (section 8), Yahoo
claims ownership of all non-graphical content that participants post in publicly
accessible areas of the service; they automatically grant Yahoo the “royalty-free,
perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive and fully sublicensable right and license to use,
reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute,
perform and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it
in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed.” It is a
little as though the YMCA claimed ownership of everything said at public meetings held

14
on its premises; this policy does not foster trust and free expression. Despite these
problems, the rapid growth of online communities on portals offers a rich terrain for
experimentation and research.

Community Networks
Community networks have been around for 20 years, far longer than CSCW and
much longer than portals. They attempt to use computer networking to advance the
goals and values of existing local communities. The focus has been on enhancing civic
life, education, and economic development (Agre and Schuler, 1997). This involves a
complex combination of political, organizational and technical innovations emerging
out of the joint efforts of civic activists, computer professionals, schools, universities,
local governmental agencies, libraries, and non-profit organizations (see Schuler, 1996:
25).
According to Schuler (1996: 296), the basic services that community networks
provide include forums (both moderated and unmoderated), access to static information
contained in files, e-mail, and file download-upload capabilities. Other services typically
offered by community networks include chat, remote login, search capabilities, WWW
access and database facilities. Community networks have used a whole range of
technologies to deliver these services, gradually evolving from dial-up bulletin board
systems to Internet tools, and more recently, to WWW-based applications. These
networks have served as a testbed for a huge number of different technical solutions. As
one would expect, the various conditions of community we have identified can be found
fulfilled in many of these experiments, and it is here that authoring is carried on with
the most freedom.
Computer professionals, academic researchers, and hobbyists associated with such
projects have developed a number of software packages tailored to the needs of local
community networks. FreePort written by Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) for
the Cleveland Free-Net (CFN) has been the software of choice of the majority of the
Free-Nets in the United States. In Halifax, Canada, the university and the local hobbyist
community collaborated on an original software package. Csuite, as it was called, was
initially developed for the needs of the local Chebucto Community Net, but subsequently
adopted throughout the country and abroad (Gurstein, forthcoming).
This spontaneous creativity represents an important instance of democratic
rationalization of computer network technology that deserves the attention of theorists
and researchers. Schuler (1999) has argued that the field of Computer Supported
Cooperative Work, narrowly perceived as a branch of office automation, should be
expanded to include Computer Supported Community Work. Presumably, groupware
systems specially tailored to support broad participation in community affairs thus
would be drawn into commercial R & D. However, before that can happen, an extensive
review of the widely disparate programs already in use will have to be carried out.

The Internet Alternatives

The three distinct areas of computer networking discussed in this section show
that community-building groupware is proliferating on different platforms and in the
context of different structures of ownership and regulation. Future developments in

15
these areas hold the answer to a series of crucial questions with regard to the
democratization of computer network technology: Will the Internet become the ultimate
entertainment and/or information medium, a seamless environment for business
transactions of all kinds? Or will the Internet emerge as a community technology,
enlarging human contact and debate both globally and locally in accordance with the
early visions and the subsequent practice of community building? Will "network
communities" be accepted as a technical response to the human need for meaningful,
reliable and consequential relationships with others, and become central to the
definition of this technology, or will they remain in the category of those technical
possibilities that emerge for a short historical instant and fall into oblivion? Through
what strategy can online communities be "liberated" from the narrow confines of the
corporate rationality within which they are increasingly emerging. Can these systems,
originally conceived to enhance the effectiveness of work-team performance or to
generate revenue for Internet service providers, be subverted by their creators and users
so as to take on a new life in the public sphere? A multitude of social contexts and
actions have to be aligned for a democratic appropriation of community technology to
take place.

Myth and Reality

Critics of online community are right to dampen naive enthusiasm for computer
networking. They are right to deconstruct the rhetoric of the Information Highway,
including its easy praise of online togetherness, and oblivion to the commercialization of
the Internet. The idea of virtual community is indeed a "powerful myth" playing on
people's genuine desire to control their lives and to be a part of a larger social totality
that provides emotional and intellectual support (see Mosco, 1998). But in the realm of
technology, myth is not always opposed to reality, but sometimes guides development
toward real possibilities. Here, in our evaluation of the significance of myth, our
constructivist view of technology contrasts most sharply with the determinist
assumption that technology is an independent social variable. We argue for a
discriminating approach to the possible realization of the myth of community in the
evolving technology of computer networking.
The "consumption model" of the Internet is a plausible version of its future given
the structural realities of the world in which we live. The alternative “community model”
would take much more conceptual work, design efforts, and political mobilization. Yet,
as we have tried to show, there are technical formats that could potentially pave the way
to a more community-friendly Internet. It is the human actors involved, putting their
competencies and resources to work, fighting for their values and desires, who will
determine which of the emergent formats and structures prevail. From this perspective,
demanding the dedication of resources to the development and proliferation of online
community is not a naive or futile effort. A political process oriented toward this goal
can be seen as a logical extension of the human right to free assembly. The demand for
actual opportunities for free assembly in the online world is a vital moment of its
democratization. The struggle for online community thus places technical
democratization in the service of democracy itself.

16
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*Forthcoming in The Information Society Journal. This paper was written under National
Science Foundation Award 9818724.
* For a critical discussion of the Internet and democracy, see Kurland and Egan (1996).
*For example Vincent Cerf, one of the two men who created the TCP/IP protocol wrote the
following poem:
Like distant islands sundered by the sea,
we had no sense of one community.
We lived and worked apart and rarely knew
that others searched with us for knowledge, too...

But, could these new resources not be shared?

Let links be built; machines and men be paired!
Let distance be no barrier! They set
that goal: design and build the ARPANET!

("Requiem for the ARPANET", quoted in Abatte, 1995)

*For an illuminating discussion of the struggle over the early development of radio, see
McChesney, 1999: chap. 5.
* Agency is of course only one of several important features of democracy, however, if its
importance is overlooked, citizen action by concerned minorities may be trivialized or even
treated as undemocratic. This issue is discussed at length in Feenberg (1999: chap. 6).
*Ito (1997) describes an incident that occurred with a university-hosted MUD community that
fell victim to a system failure and a subsequent ban on ‘mudding’ imposed by the university. Ito
emphasizes the importance of machine materiality that virtual communities depend on.

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