Excellent, and very very true. I worked on an HIV/AIDS prevention site for teenagers back in 1991 (Unix based BBS system with some text based interactivity), and the vast majority of kids we were helping were gay and lesbian, because they didn't know where else to go (e.g., they couldn't actually go to a youth group, etc.) I'll take it a step further: the Internet saves some kids lives. And that is *not* shit.

→ Posted by: liz at July 6, 2003 7:11 PM

It appears as though people who only bother to take a peek at the badside have been so influenced by it, they don't bother to take a look at the rest of it, ie the good side to it. As you pointed out, the internet makes a great help community, especially for those outcasted by normal society, or in some cases, even their own families. In other cases, it makes a good tool for distributing information, such as sites like allaboutsex.com, or others along those lines.

While they can be biased sometimes, that's another example of what makes the internet great. Feedback. Television is a one-way street, and other mediums (radio, newspapers) dictate themselves what gets said and when. With the internet, messages good and bad, dull and painfully exciting, pointless and perfected can all be passed along with little to no interception from a "big brother"-type authority. Case and point, the fact that in order to spread their anti-internet message, the above mentioned sites had to in fact use the internet themselves to spread it. How deliciously ironic.

→ Posted by: Rie at July 6, 2003 8:34 PM

I completely agree Tom. When I was first 'struggling' with my sexuality around age 14 or 15, the first place I turned was the internet. I read the experiences of others, I made some lasting friends, and even met a few people from my school who also ended up in gay chat rooms for one reason or another. I even met my boyfriend of 3 years online. I'm 20 now, and I recognize that without the internet I would likely still be a miserable closet-case who never had the courage or the resources to learn more about my true self.

→ Posted by: Bryan at July 6, 2003 9:27 PM

Anyone who thinks or says that the internet is shit doesn't actually understand what the internet is. It's as simple as that.

→ Posted by: MacDara at July 6, 2003 10:00 PM

People who say "the Internet is shit" are confusing the tool with what it produces.

Sure, the Internet produces shit. But so does everything else--from individuals to schools to governments to businesses. To define the Internet by the worst it produces is simply an inability to see it as a tool or an environment rather than a product.

→ Posted by: Liz at July 6, 2003 10:38 PM

The Internet is not shit. Mcdonalds.com and Disney.com are shit. As are their contemporaries (large corporates doing uninspiring things). The rest (cool people doing cool things with new technology) isn't. Simple as that really.

→ Posted by: Tom Morris at July 6, 2003 11:54 PM

Without wanting to repeat verbatim what everyone else has been saying, I agree totally. As a gay teenager I found the internet invaluable during the difficult few years before I came out, and the huge online network of people (who know - like few of your other friends can - what you've been through) that you have access to is something that all gay and questioning teenagers would be have benefitted from. The internet is at its best when it is a tool that helps people to communicate, and helps people to live happier lives, safe in the comfort that they are not alone. Long may it be so.

→ Posted by: sceefy_uk at July 7, 2003 12:27 AM

I agree on that point, Tom. I hate what I shall refer to as the "industrial" internet. I think we all do. The mass-produced, glamour sites that serve no purpose other than being there. Those sites suck. But, keep in mind, no one is forcing anyone to visit them. I have been online for 5 years or so, and I can safely say I have *never* talked to a single person who tells me "Dude, you need to check KFC dot com. They've got some really interesting articles on there." Pathetic.
However, on the other hand, they do have a point on one thing. The community spirit, as I like to call it, has died a bit over the years. Whether it be battle fatigue, or just a case of boredom, one can only do so much before its been done a million times. I think what a lot of the internet moaners need is a good injection of some original content. Though, to be fair, some of the more recent crap (ie: online fundraising, goatse fandom) does get an webcrawler depressed with the online future, I do admit.

→ Posted by: Rie at July 7, 2003 1:57 AM

Amen, Tom.

→ Posted by: Cory Doctorow at July 7, 2003 3:29 AM

This is all very polarised - "it's shit!" "No it's not it's great!" The fact is the internet is *both*. Yes it helps connect people etc, but it also allows people to network who have criminal interests, and it allows corporate powers to extend their influence even further.

Tim Berners-Lee said a few years ago that the web would reflect human culture and that is exactly what it does - for good and bad.

I think what we need is a balanced appraisal which recognises both facts, rather than partial and one-sided rhetoric.

→ Posted by: James at July 7, 2003 12:33 PM

To a very large number of people, the internet is neither shit or 'not shit'. Simply irrelevant.

→ Posted by: Mark at July 7, 2003 3:23 PM

Yes, I guess you're right. But actually a lot of what is said on the internetisshit site is interesting. I think we are losing a bit of serendipity (blogging notwithstanding), journalists are lazier, and the web has made it easier to become obessive with subjects that might otherwise be just part of a normal range of interests. Sure, for every depressed gay teen, there's a chance to understand you're not alone. But I worry about the anorexics getting together to feed their compulsion or the people who would have had a minor interest in Star Trek had it not been for the 24/7 availability of Trekkie sites and chat rooms (OK, crass exmaple, but you know what I mean...). Anyway, I agree with the sentiment that it's neither shit nor good. It's like saying paper is shit, isn't it?

→ Posted by: Richard at July 7, 2003 6:20 PM

James - it may reflect human culture, but it does also facilitate it. Mark - to a very large number of people, the internet is irrelevant. If it's because they have more important issues to deal with (like getting money for food etc) then that's something the world has to address. Once their fundamental needs have been addressed, I think it's not the case that the internet is irrelevant to anyone simply that some people aren't aware of the utility they could derive from it - everyone gets anxious about illness, everyone needs advice from peers or information about local services and government stuff. And Richard - for all the anorexics who can meet one another, there are also places where they can meet people who are trying to heal themselves. I'm not saying that bad things won't happen as a result of the internet's existence, but I do honestly believe that on the whole it's a force for good. And even if it wasn't - it's with us now and it's not going anywhere...

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at July 7, 2003 10:00 PM

Yes and the internet facilitates certain kinds of criminal inclination and corporate marketeering! - Not to mention its own kind of addiction. The point is, there's a good and bad side to it. I'm an internet fan - I understand how interesting and useful it is. But that doesn't mean the 'internet is shit' camp have nothing valid to say. They do; it's not all good. Both sides exist.

→ Posted by: James at July 7, 2003 11:04 PM

The internet is just like everything else in life it is what you make of it. It can be shit and it can be "the shit". It just depends on how you use it. If you want to corupt your mind with sex, bomb making, racism and the like its on the net. However if you want to make someones day , check the stock market, connect with friends, and or spread knowledge to millions you can.

→ Posted by: Stanley Smith at July 7, 2003 11:31 PM

"criminal inclination and corporate marketeering"

There IS a difference? Wow.

→ Posted by: Tom Morris at July 8, 2003 1:27 AM

I've been supporting a community of married men coming out for over 6 years now. Thousands of guys have come through our servers and hundreds of them have come out to their wives and children. I don't see how the service I provide could be made to work in any other media.

→ Posted by: filchyboy at July 8, 2003 7:24 AM

I wish I could say the Internet had helped greatly with my own experiences of depression and loneliness. I still feel like I'm standing alone in a corner a lot of the time, but maybe that's because I'm just horrible. :-( Nonetheless, I still believe in its potential for good... I have reasons not to, but the rational me says it's not shit and has helped a lot of people. (Just not me.)

→ Posted by: chrissie at July 10, 2003 1:47 PM

I don't think that site needs any kind of rebuttal... he could have said "the internet is a flying herring", and he would be as right or wrong. The only thing he's done is to register a domain and write some stuff, and he's instantly famous...

→ Posted by: JJ at July 11, 2003 4:37 PM

The internet is definitely not shit. I wouldn't be in my chosen career if it wasn't for the internet (and many echo my sentiments). I wouldn't be contacting faraway friends with as much frequency if it wasn't for the net. There are many forums out there that give out support to various different subjects -- from the silly (like fan sites where people can lament about their shows without being ridiculed for their fandom) to the serious (sites promoting youth and raising funds for important causes).

And if anything else, it's a place to vent. ;)

→ Posted by: Lea at July 12, 2003 7:04 AM

This is still polarised into "shit!" "No not shit - great!". It is obvious: any statement which says one thing or the other exclusively is incorrect, because it is both. Yes it sometimes connects people who feel excluded etc; yes it also creates 'net addicts and confirms people's isolation stuck in front of a VDU. Yes it helps create community, yes it also extends corporate influence. See what MIT's Sherry Turkle says: yes it can help provide a social learning experience, yes it can unbalance people even more (http://www.edge.org/digerati/turkle/). The Internet Is Fab rhetoric started in the 90s, it still continues, and I believe it will ultimately be counter-productive when people see for themselves what the 'net is actually like, on a day to day basis, for the majority of people. There's a difference between potential and actuality, ideal and fact, the enthusiastic few and the indifferent majority, light-hearted and personally appreciative remarks and wider sociological consideration.

→ Posted by: James at July 12, 2003 11:19 AM

The Internet is Caliban's mirror - it is built from the thoughts dreams and ideas of billions of people. All human nature is there.
If you don't like what you find, consider that it reflects what you went looking for, and that it is your face leering out from the glass.

→ Posted by: Kevin Marks at July 18, 2003 9:22 AM

That's only partly true, although the notion that all human nature is there is correct. The trouble is, some of it is 'in your face' and unwanted. I guess this debate depends on your perspective: that of an enthusiastic 'user', a cynical 'dismisser' or - which in my view is the only way of having a proper appraisal - someone who acknowledges the full panorama of internet activity. Saying A, B and C are great is OK, so long as you recognise X, Y and Z in equal measure and do not have only a partial focus. One further thought: the 'net is shit' site says hey, let's start again. I disagree. I think the good stuff began decades ago and the current good stuff is a continuation of that earlier trajectory. Its only when the net became hugely popular in the last 5-10 years that all the bullshit started to appear. If we 'started again' all those exploiters, the corporations, the spammers, the pop-up code monkeys, the sick stuff etc. would have an even GREATER presence on the net because they would be starting out level with everyone else and with lots of experience.

→ Posted by: James at July 18, 2003 6:49 PM

You are right. The internet can sometimes be used in the absence of a real social life. As long as it's used in moderation it is the best thing ever.

→ Posted by: Quote at July 23, 2003 5:10 PM

For all it's worth, the web can eliminate barriers (sex, race, etc...) as far as you know, I am a man from America named Joe. nothing wrong with that, I like it. -- The web grants us much more than freedom of speach, it allows freedom from our earthly selves. -- -^- I don't care if the web is good or bad, I like it, and if you didn't, then you wouldn't be reading this. -^- It's not my fault, I was born this way.

→ Posted by: Anonymous Coward at August 24, 2003 6:02 PM

"Rheingold is a self-styled visionary. His ideas are projected as exercises in radical imagination. It is this preachy posture that seems to give cyberspace ideology its popular appeal" (1)

"Rheingold's image of a virtual community turns out to be no more than an electronic variant of the Rousseau-ist dream of a transparent society in which the ideal of community expresses a longing for harmony among persons, for consensual and mutual understanding" (2)

"There is the invocation of community, but not the production of a society. There is groupmind, but not social encounter. There is online communion, but there are no residents of hyperspace. This is another synthetic world" (3).

"THE MYTHOLOGY OF CYBERSPACE IS PREFERRED OVER ITS SOCIOLOGY" (4).

Fractal Dreams 1996 pages 19 (1), 20 (2), 21 (3), and 26 (4).

→ Posted by: James at August 24, 2003 9:42 PM

I wouldn't say the 'Net is shit, but it certainly has become a toilet that needs a good flushing. As for gay teenagers commiting suicide because they're lonely or confused or whatever, they could go old-school and call a crisis hotline. Or a 900 number like "Guy on Guy Talk - Only $.99 a Minute". Frankly, I wish gays would keep all their "gay pride" to themselves - we heteros don't have parades celebrating our sexuality (hmmm... maybe we should!). Actually, the idea sounds kind of stupid. It would become another Hallmark holiday and everybody would be expected to send cards. And no, I'm not a fag-hater - two of my best friends like to play hide the salami with each other and I love them like the gay brothers I never had. But enough of homosexuality and back the the state of the Internet - what I've seen since '93 (I was BBS'ing before that... perhaps some of you have heard of it) when I first signed up with CompuServe, I thought "My God, this is the coolest thing since canned beer." Okay, I didn't really think that... but I was truly facinated. Back then, advertising was virtually non-existent. Now look at it. You can't go to the lamest of websites without it's creator attempting to force-feed a link to another site selling crap so they can earn a nickle-a-click. Or you get spyware/cookies that track your surfing for some whore of an ad agency (DoubleClick, AdClick, DickClick...) who sells your "demographic information" to some other whore selling shit that they think you'll want to buy. Remember when cable television was commercial free and that's why you were willing to pay to watch it? That used to be cool too. The Intermercial, as I like to call it now, has become nothing more than an extension of the idiot box that sits in your living room that says "Click here for free shit! You're a winner!". Fuck the Internet. I wish one of these script kiddies who create all these world-wide-destructive-email viruses could figure out a way to take the whole damn thing DOWN. Maybe we could all remember what life was like 10 years ago and realize that we didn't really need this after all.

→ Posted by: Ben Heertoolong at September 10, 2003 10:01 PM

soz last post i didnt finish and i made a few mistakes soo i ment i didnt read after Tom Morris and as i was saying i am always online taking on msn messenger and in chatrooms but i heard a comment on gay people realying on chatrooms a while ago i would have support for that theory but as i said above i have changed i now think if you are gay and you are anbarassed, are you embarassed at yourself? well most people will say no at that but if you think about all the lies you have said the answer will turn out yes well now im just changing the subject lol well to get back on track i honesty love the internet but i regret getting "in" to it for the fact that it had taken my life away and made changes to my personality furthermore i think the internet is just aiding peadofiles and criminals and "practical jokes" as i only have been stating the bad facts there are good effects for bisiness but i still think they have spoiled it by advertising and making the internet even slower as i am blaiming people i might as well bring hackers into the story they have practically made me write this they have quite practically ruined this 4 all of us i close by reminding you that i am only 13 and i appoligse for any bad grammer or spelling

→ Posted by: Dipak Kanabar at October 11, 2003 11:55 PM

Yeah, all kinds of people get together on the Internet. Y'all are so quick to laud the Internet, let's not forget the rapid distribution of child pornography, or the ease with which sex abusers can connect with victims all over the country.

And this comment, from http://macdaraconroy.com/ is the worst kind of ignorance. "Anyone who thinks or says the the internet is shit doesn't understand what the internet is. It's as simple as that."

Imbecile. The problem with debating topics like this, on public forums, is that the Internet users don't have any comprehension of logic or fallacy.

→ Posted by: King Mongo at December 13, 2003 10:02 PM

But that's a ludicrous argument. Unpleasant material can be disseminated in thousands of different ways, people can be harrassed in dozens of different contexts. The internet doesn't make connecting to disseminate child pornography any easier than it makes connecting to share scientific research, tips for cooking or discussing religion, television or health problems (each of which could be shared in person, on the phone, at conferences or by bloody CB radio). As with every communications medium, you have to rely on the fact that the vast majority of uses that people find for it won't be illegal, and attempt to punish people who do decide to abuse it. Otherwise you might as well argue that people shouldn't be allowed to meet in public for fear that they might attack each other.

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at December 14, 2003 12:06 AM

You are contradicting yourself here in several ways. You stated correctly that the 'net facilitates culture (above), and now you are back-tracking and suggesting that it doesn't. 'Culture' is not just nice chit-chat; it's also the undesirable stuff. If the 'net facilitates one then obviously it also facilitates the other. Not that you have to apply logic to arrive at this conclusion: its a well known fact that the 'net is being used for undesirable purposes, and there is a steady trickle of news telling us about innapropriate meetings etc. Your objection is ludicrous: of course its easier to access illegal/depraved material on the 'net - its only a few clicks away from you, with a credit card! All this is well known. You're also back-tracking on the recipes, research, health problems etc since you originally stated that the 'net is great (unequivocally) because its helped homosexual people etc. Now you're saying it *doesn't* help with these things.

I think Mondo is merely stating the obvious: lets not get carried away with positive rhetoric, but have a more balanced appraisal where good and bad is acknowledged. I agree that you have to affirm the positive and expect that is how it will mostly be used; I do not agree with rhetoric which is actually not factual.

→ Posted by: James at December 16, 2003 6:59 PM

I think you're misreading my position. What I'm saying is that there is not necessarily a qualitative difference in the inter-personal distribution of information, but there is an enhancement of the speed, quantity and the like that can be transmitted and stored. For the most part, the internet only differs from letters, village notice-boards and conversation in the speed and depth of the ways that people can interact with each other. That speed and depth facilitates the creation of non-geographically restricted communities, allowing interest groups of all kinds to proliferate - whether they be positive ones or negative ones. Now it's interesting that you say it's easy to access illegal / depraved content on the web with only a credit card - well I'd argue two things there - firstly that it's actually not particularly easy to do so because it's generally pretty easy to get information on which people are maintaining illegal sites because so much of the action of the web requires financial transactions and credit cards that can be relatively traced and identified. I won't deny that it's easier to find pornography, though. Nor will I deny that there are things that are on the internet that most people don't like the look of or would prefer weren't there, because obviously there are. What I would say instead is that for every piece of content you can find that seems to you catastrophically unpleasant, I could find considerably more that has provided value or utility. The basic needs and interests that drive human beings haven't changed simply because they have a larger forum in which to research / discuss / publish about them. People still care about all kinds of dodgy sex, but they also care about their personal health, their financial status, their homes, their families, their ambitions and careers, their pets, their music collections, their computers, their governments, their news, their television programmes, their celebrities, their religions etc. etc. etc. Decrying the internet because it's a place where illegal activities happen is exactly analogous to decrying any environment in which people talk to people. Obviously, we need to find ways of dealing with those people who use the internet to break the law - just as we punish those who use cars in robberies, or use video cameras to make snuff movies or who mug old ladies in parks (and we don't declare parks, cars or video cameras to be somehow evil).

On the whole - the internet has done far more good than bad. It has helped many more people than it has hurt. It has published much more useful information than illegal information. It's for these reasons that third-world countries are clamouring for greater access, to have greater involvement and connection with the internet, why across Western Europe and the USA governments are often desperate to drive up digital literacy and access to the internet. I'm not speaking as a cultish devotee of a dark art. The internet may be complicated and nuanced, it certainly has negative things going on in it, but it is not shit - which - if you'll notice the title - was the limit of my assertion in this piece: that the internet matters and is not shit, not that it is perfect.

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at December 17, 2003 12:32 AM

I’m not sure all of that was focussed on the few simple points I was making: a shotgun going off in into different and peripheral areas. It may not be what you actually think, but you did say it: first, that it helps people link up, communicate and facilitate culture, and then no, it doesn’t do that. A contradiction.

“For the most part, the internet only differs from letters, village notice-boards and conversation in the speed and depth of the ways that people can interact with each other”

That is simply not true. I’ve spent time on web boards and you always encounter vociferous argumentative exchange, flames, trolls and a large amount of very banal little posts. On the one hand there’s the great idea of internet community, and on the other hand there’s the substantial evidence that for much of the time it’s really not that great: the characteristics and limitations of the medium limit what can be achieved and what you can reasonably expect. I think where it does succeed is when you have a very specialised interest group – technical, philosophical, whatever, and in my experience that is the only time all those Rheingoldian ideals are ever realised. The open, public and free-for-all enterprises are nothing to get excited about because they waste time at least as much as do something with it.

“Now it's interesting that you say it's easy to access illegal / depraved content on the web with only a credit card - well I'd argue two things there - firstly that it's actually not particularly easy to do so because it's generally pretty easy to get information on which people are maintaining illegal sites because so much of the action of the web requires financial transactions and credit cards that can be relatively traced and identified. I won't deny that it's easier to find pornography, though”

They are two separate issues. It is extremely easy to access that kind of stuff. The fact that you can be traced does not mean it is not easy: it means you can be traced. How widespread the surveillance is, I’m not sure. It’s obviously increasing and will continue to increase as the problem grows. I also suspect, as with the rest of the ‘net, much of the content is difficult to locate. Presumably the authorities aren’t hacking into databases, so they first have to find the people running them. So why don’t you hear of webmaster prosecutions, only the Pete Townsend type? I don’t know actually; I don’t know how it works.

“Nor will I deny that there are things that are on the internet that most people don't like the look of or would prefer weren't there, because obviously there are. What I would say instead is that for every piece of content you can find that seems to you catastrophically unpleasant, I could find considerably more that has provided value or utility.”

I don’t find it catastrophic, and agree that there’s more decent content than otherwise. I merely think that excessively positive rhetoric is partial and innacurate when we are speaking of the internet *as a whole, and as a cultural phenomenenon.*

“The basic needs and interests that drive human beings haven't changed simply because they have a larger forum in which to research / discuss / publish about them. People still care about all kinds of dodgy sex, but they also care about their personal health, their financial status, their homes, their families, their ambitions and careers, their pets, their music collections, their computers, their governments, their news, their television programmes, their celebrities, their religions etc. etc. etc. Decrying the internet because it's a place where illegal activities happen is exactly analogous to decrying any environment in which people talk to people”

I’m not decrying the ‘net; I think it’s great. Nor am I suggesting that human nature is being or will be corrupted – although clearly, where the dodgy stuff is concerned it is like drugs: if there’s a pusher on the street, people buy. The availability accounts for much of the ensuing market. Human nature is the same wherever you go – as you point out – so the same psychology applies to the ‘net: availability does increase the interest. However that’s tangential to my point: what I am decrying is the promulagation of what I referred to earlier as the mythology of cyberspace, as opposed to it’s sociology. The first is an exercise of the imagination, and only the second is grounded in sensible and factual observation.

“On the whole - the internet has done far more good than bad. It has helped many more people than it has hurt. It has published much more useful information than illegal information. It's for these reasons that third-world countries are clamouring for greater access, to have greater involvement and connection with the internet, why across Western Europe and the USA governments are often desperate to drive up digital literacy and access to the internet. I'm not speaking as a cultish devotee of a dark art. The internet may be complicated and nuanced, it certainly has negative things going on in it, but it is not shit - which - if you'll notice the title - was the limit of my assertion in this piece: that the internet matters and is not shit, not that it is perfect.”
I agree that on the whole it’s pretty good, although the way it’s been commandeered by corporations definitely isn’t. It wasn’t like that originally: when it was used by genteel academics, it was purely for communication rather than an enormous market place."

The entire “shit!” “no not shit!” dichotomy is not a useful way of forming an appraisal. You say "I can tell you right now why the internet matters and why it is not shit" and I could tell you right now why it is shit – see above. In other words, you can take either premise and find your own material to support it. I haven’t done that, because they are both partial. What I have done is redressed the over-enthusiastic i.e. positive generalisations, because they are false. You can spin out the visionary and utopian stuff as long as you like: it began in the 90s and continues today. But it never came true, and it never will.

→ Posted by: James at December 17, 2003 2:51 AM

With regards to my contradictions, I don't see them. Virtual community creates and supports enormous amounts of people. It could only happen to the extent and scale that it does on the internet. The basic quality of that community however isn't particularly different from a group of people meeting in their local village hall or writing letters to a newspaper, except in that everyone across the world who shares the rare disease can talk and support each other, instead of leaving people isolated by themselves in rural communities simply because the infrastructure isn't there to support their social contact.

Let me be blunt. I'm don't believe I'm being hopelessly utopian, I'm not - and never was - claiming perfection, I was presenting an alternative case to dystopianism. Your recurrent use of rhetoric to imply that I have an extreme naive position as opposed to your moderate balanced one is simply innaccurate. I was responding to a statement that the internet was shit. I was pointing out that for whatever negative things it affords, it does a disproportionately large amount of good. That's not hopeless utopianism at all, it's pulling the balance away from the people who decry the internet as something inherently evil into a place more like the real world - where there are many good things going on almost as a matter of course and some bad things going on as well that governments and police forces aspire to fight. With regards to utopian dreaming -you're quite right, we'll never achieve a utopia. On the other hand, I now live in a democratic and mostly liberal society with free healthcare for all citizens, in which most people have no problem feeding themselves, in which almost no one is killed by guns and in which most homes are heated and comfortable. We don't live in a utopia, but this is clearly an improvement in our quality of life over the world of fifty years ago in my mind, and I don't see any reason why the internet itself could not evolve in a similar way.

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at December 17, 2003 9:45 AM

"The basic quality of that community however isn't particularly different from a group of people meeting in their local village hall"

Don't be silly Tom: this is what I mean by mythology and utopianism. Or maybe science fiction is a better description. We're not talking about abstract information - which is expedited magnificently over the internet - we're talking about flesh and blood people. An actual meeting is far more meaningful than tapping on a keyboard. It is *substantially* different. Physically congregating with other folk is the same as being on the internet as is reading a book about Tibet compared to actually going there. Or reading a menu and eating the food. You can't reduce and flatten the physical, sensory, emotional, kinaesthetic and social world in that way. What it does is confuses basic semantic parameters, the

"Blending of reality and metaphor: a willingness to equate the real highway with the digital one, physical space with cyberspace, real communities with virtual ones" Slouka, Mark 1996 War of the Worlds Abacus, London: page 68.

I know what you're saying, and I have no dispute with the benefits of the internet. But there's so much silly utopian rhetoric flying around, and it gets us nowhere because it's more imaginative than factual.

→ Posted by: James at December 18, 2003 6:52 PM

Look, calling it utopian rhetoric doesn't make it so! Your analogies are hideously flawed for a start - if I communicate on the internet or by phone with someone, it's not like a transcript of that person or a decription of that person. You're talking as if whenever you talked to people who weren't present physically (say via the telephone), that what you were actually doing was listening passively to bloody recordings! Of course they're not - it's not bloody radio! People are talking to each other!

Now obviously there are things that you can do in person that you can't do physically online. It's harder to guage someone's mood, it's harder to have sex with them, it's harder to get intonation or a tone of voice. But it's still communication! And the possibility of community still exists! I mean, there are many circumstances in which certain elements of the experience an interaction can be truncated - if you're on a phone for example and can't see the person concerned, or if they're wearing sunglasses so you can't see their eyes, or if you're actually bloody deaf and are forced to lip-read, for Christ's sake! But none of these things stop the possibilities of communication, and none of them stop people being supportive, helpful, useful, friendly or even forming communities through them. I work on the internet, and often my first experience of people is online. Sometimes my only experience of them is online. And yet we can be friends! Most of them have helped me out in some ways in the past, and I've helped most of them out in the past as well. Those I haven't met, I'd like to and those I have I see regularly. But that our relationships have moved sometimes from purely online to a mix of both online and off doesn't mean they weren't real to begin with.

You talk about 'tapping on a keyboard' as if touching keys was the entire point. You're confusing the method of communication with the communication itself. It would be like me saying, "There's a substantial difference between communicating with someone (online) and just causing air to vibrate with your vocal chords". It's trivialising, innaccurate, clumsy and - frankly - stupid.

Your quote - by the way - is interesting, although let me say straight off that I'm not terribly impressed by chapter and verse citations of things that amount to little more than opinion pieces in books. I've had my own opinions published in books and do not consider them to have suddenly taken on a magic form of authority simply because they're in print. There's a lot of conflation in that quote, a degree of truth and very little evidence.

I'm going to end with two points. Firstly a fairly simple one - I think - that your arbitrary (shall I say 'imaginative' rather than 'factual') distinction between online community and real-life communities are beginning to collapse into each other. Specifically, people are increasingly knowing more people in real-life that they have met online, they are using online community software more and more to manage, handle and keep in touch with their real-life friends and families, and that these two activities are heavily bleeding into one another. Communities like the one I run at Barbelith.com met online but many of the people on the community see each other now very regularly. When members of the board travel abroad, they go and stay with people that beforehand they have little or no real-life contact with. Friends of these people who didn't meet through the board are being introduced to it as a way of meeting new like-minded people and keeping up with their older friends. It's the same with most online communities - people communicate, they know each other, they share information and support one another. Local geographical groups will form to do those things you can't do through computers (like have sex and drink), and then they go online to do other kinds of activities that they couldn't do in the flesh - communicate with each other in the background while they're at work, getting engaged in long, slow-paced conversations about things that matter to them that they don't need to be immediately present for. And on the site that I project-managed and designed (UpMyStreet Conversations), people are using the site to meet people in their local areas to share information with them, which may then evolve into conversations and communities maintained through all kinds of different media, technologies and spaces (speaking in cafés, going to the cinema together, phoning each other, chatting online with one another, going to the same concerts, using similar discussion boards).

Which brings me to my other point - the stuff you can do in an online space that you CAN'T do in real-life. There's the wonder of asynchronous communication - that a discussion can be ongoing over many many days with none of the people needing to be in the same place at the same time. There's the security of being able to introduce yourself without anxiety or threat (I know a few people who don't necessarily find it easy to just go out and meet new people in the flesh, who have found discussion online a better way to break the ice). There are the benefits of being able to maintain conversations with people all over the world and to join communities that bring together the most dedicated people in any given field.

Now I'm quite prepared to say that with online communities - just like with anything else on the internet - people can use the physical power of the technology to do bad things as well as good. Although, I will mantain - like I have throughout this long (and extremely irritating, unproductive) conversation - that individuals will find more positive uses for the technology than they will illegal and immoral ones. I will base that on the evidence of hundreds of millions of people getting value from e-mail and accessing the web every day for considerably more things than pornography and snuff movies, from governments clamouring to get more access to the internet and from the specific benefits I've got out of it and the friends I've met from it. I'm even prepared to stand by that because of the potential uses I've seen to come. If you think that it's some kind of imaginative notion to se the value in these things, then I think you're insane.

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at December 18, 2003 7:47 PM

Look yourself: not calling it utopian rhetoric doesn’t mean it isn’t. But I’m not going to get into that level of argumentation using spiky remarks, exaggerated adjectives etc, but stay with the simple facts. You try to emphasise the complete similarity between physically based and technologically mediated communication, but in doing so illustrate perfectly certain widespread themes which are just conceptual nonsense. Talking, for example, is something you do with your voice and not via a keyboard. The two different ‘mediums’ define in a very basic way what kind of exchange is possible, and I don’t think the two things should be confused. There are plenty of studies on this – how people engage emotionally via mouse and VDU – and I think the conclusion is that it is profoundly ambivalent because it is symbolic. And the ambivalence has to be emphasised, or you become immersed in a strange fantasy world where everything is ‘virtual’. I never said the internet wasn’t communication; I merely highlighted the problematic area where distinctions between online and offline are routinely blurred. It’s quite common: there are people who actually argue that you can change your personality or gender with online interaction. I think those people are lost in a technological fantasy world. Somewhat deranged, in fact.

Nor did I say there is no possibility of online community. To repeat: I highlighted the difference between online and offline, counteracting the tendency to merge the two, which is done quite frequently by cyberspace theorists as part of their overall rhetoric. I know you can get help, support etc, but I don’t agree with people who discuss this as if it were no different from physically based community. Thus, saying “The basic quality of that community … isn't particularly different from a group of people meeting in their local village hall" is just ridiculous. For example, it’s well known that people play around with online personas, even genders, which are different from the real one. I am considering internet usage across its full range; I get the feeling you are only thinking about quite narrow and specialised groups of people. Which is fine: but it means you cannot universalise your ideas as if they represented all online life. And that’s what you tend to do.

I’m not confusing the content and method of communication at all; I’m pointing out that tapping on a keyboard is inherently a very restricted means of expression: so we can’t get too carried away with what you can achieve with it. In fact you confuse the two in your distinction between voice and internet: you express this in purely technical/physical terms, and the point is what you can convey, how you can convey it, how it feels for you and the other person is very different! I agree the ‘technological’ kind of comparision is stupid: I didn’t do it, you did!

I am fully aware that random quotations aren’t really worth very much. What they do is point towards substantial material that someone may or may not find useful or accurate. I personally found it quite a good book; whether you or anyone else decides to investigate it is up to you and no real concern of mine. But it has to be taken for what it is: a signpost away from the discursive limitations of the internet and into the domain of more substantive research.

If the distinctions between online and offline community are collapsing – as you say – then that is an interesting and additional factor to my own ideas about this. But I suspect it’s not as common or universal as you suggest, if you look at the internet as a whole – not just the limits of your personal experience.

You keep defending the internet as if I’m decrying it, and I have to keep saying no I think it’s great, that my objection concerns the way it is THEORISED. I think this is pretty clear from my posts. In fact, this discussion illustrates the problems/limitations of keyboard tapping: had it taken place otherwise, the background context for what I’ve said would have been abundantly clearer.The best you can do is summarise your message in text form which has to be snappy and concise, knowing it doesn’t fully articulate your position and can be misunderstood. Which is quite ccommon, hence all the arguments, flames etc. with millions of people each with their own agenda. In a 60 or even 30 minute café conversation you could probably give a reasonable account of a book you had written to another person. I don’t think you could do that with the ‘net; it’s too vague and open to misunderstanding, as each person reads while they sit in a different location and has an entirely different set of thoughts, feelings and ideas going through their head: you don’t have the same rapport, or the means of establishing it. Much ‘net communication is an attempt to understand what the other person actually means, and it’s 100 times harder if they are not face to face. Anyway I’m getting pretty bored with this; it’s got to the stage when I’m more or less repeating myself. Utopian internet rhetoric is undoubtedly out there, blurring online and offline experiences, you sometimes do this yourself, and I have highlighted this fact.

→ Posted by: James at December 20, 2003 4:06 PM

You see I don't know that this debate would be resolved if we were in the same place, because you keep cheating by just stating that I'm indulging in utopian rhetoric, and I contend that I'm not. You keep presenting my position as extreme utopianism, as a way of propping up your position. Until the point where you are prepared to say that my rhetoric isn't insanely off-wack, but simply represents a different position to yours - one which may or may not have sufficient evidence to back it up, then we're going to continue to argue.

You may have different experiences of the internet to me or I may also have considerably longer experience of online communities than you. It's also quite possible that your understanding of online communities is increasingly outdated. I mean, the fact that at the moment we don't tend to ask for ways for people to demonstrate their identity or their gender or whatever doesn't mean that it can't be done, won't be done or shouldn't be done. Online community software is nascent and evolving and people who use it are becoming increasingly comfortable with its use. The identity experiment stuff is as a result of people's fleeting connections with communities, not their long-term connection to them and it just tends to end after a while. People become generally less interested in them, look for slightly different cues about other people's behaviour etc. And in the future I see no reason to expect that identity online will solidify. It's already beginning to do so around social networking software where it only makes sense to participate if you're actually self-representing in some way.

Now obviously there are differences in some of the modes of interaction, obviously there are certain limitations in the ways people can communicate - but in my experience this doesn't undermine the fundamentals that people go onto these things to socialise, discuss, flirt, cause fights and get support - just the same things they do in every day life. If you'd like me to introduce you to communities where that kind of thing is happening, I will. If you want me to talk about ways in which I've worked to try and increase some of the bandwidth for social cues and the like to emerge, then I'll do that too. But if you're just going to stand there and assert that I'm being stupid or naive, then I think we should call this thing to an end.

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at December 20, 2003 5:20 PM

I’m not suggesting this debate would be resolved, but making the general distinction between online and offline interaction. I don’t think I’m cheating, merely reiterating fundamental points that keep getting lost. If you choose not to engage with it then that’s fine; that in itself doesn’t change the validity of what I’m saying. You tend to exaggerate and over-characterise everything eg "extreme" utopianism. No, I wouldn’t say that and never did. I’m sure you do have a greater experience of online community because that’s your job. It’s also possible – as I have suggested – that what you say is based on quite a narrow sector of internet activity, relatively speaking, used to generalise about all of it. Even a massive site like the BBC’s, for example, is just a small dot in the entire medium.

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"Insanely off-whack"? You’re just exaggerating and being colourful again, to have an effect. You suggest my experience is outdated with regard to gender games, but respond with a speculative projection into the future. Which doesn’t make sense. Since my comment is about the way it is now.

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I would be interested in examples of successful long term communities, though you may just be thinking of the obvious/well known ones which I have looked at. I’m sure there are success stories, and it does interest me. I also maintain that they are exceptions, that like the dot coms, for every good one there were/are 10, 20, or more that failed and/or weren’t ultimately very interesting. That when you make comments about the internet it necessarily includes those, or you are misrepresenting the cultural phenomenon in its entirety.

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I don’t think you’ve really grasped my fundamental ideas and don’t think you’re especially interested. Which is fine. I could explicate further but there is no point; in any case I don’t wish to do it. You kept defending the ‘net, I kept reiterating my THEORETICAL objections i.e. to certain kinds of rhetoric. The former interests you, the latter mostly doesn’t. Which is fine. That doesn’t mean there are currently no books or web sites spinning out utopian stuff which lacks some really fundamental phenomenological distinctions between online and offline experience. There are plenty of those books and they are essentially science-fictional, based on a kind of technological enchantment. They also tend to ignore real life issues like internet access. Huge it may be, but it is still used predominantly by specific socio-economic sectors with a certain standard of education. So: to give one specific example, rhetoric about how the ‘net encourages community and will enhance society etc is flawed. Because there are real life political/educational/socio-economic factors that just don’t fit that cosy rhetorical world. It makes sense for the digerati, but not for others. Similarly for all the benfits of online interaction, it remains keyboard tapping and staring at a VDU. The ambivalence is a fact, i.e. that you are ultimately engaging only in symbolic communciation, and this gets lost and forgotten in all the glossy verbiage. The kind of stuff that people say about the ‘net is outdated, because it derives from the 90s when everyone was really really excited. Naïve might be a better word: it wasn’t grounded in sociological, psychological and phenemenological reality.

→ Posted by: James at December 21, 2003 1:18 AM

Two things - you say I'm talking about things 'in the future' while you're talking about 'things as the are now'. But actually you're making statements about the possibilities of the medium - and at basic levels like the kinds of interaction that are possible and the types of relationships that are possible - that the internet is inherently not a good place for community because of lack of signals etc. etc. I'm merely arguing that you're generalising from a few - fairly old - generic types of online community, that crossover examples like instant messaging have demonstated that on and offline communities can be one and the same thing, that boards like the one I maintain at http://www.barbelith.com/underground are successful long-term communities that have existed for five years and have many of the same people involved in them and operate at a useful level and that there's a considerable amount of work (like the social networking stuff that's around now) that already resolves the problems that are connected with CERTAIN TYPES of boards and MUDs used it CERTAIN WAYS by CERTAIN PEOPLE at CERTAIN TIMES in history. I could give you dozens of examples of different types of online community.

Clay Shirky has an interesting take on this - he says that when a new technology emerges everyone looks at the extreme possibilities - in the case of online communities talking about how personal identities would become fragmented and contextual, that people would be women or men or multiple personalities or whatever. In fact, as any of us who do this long-term know, these things do happen, but they're normally undertaken by naive users in nascent or ill-formed early communities.

Now I'm not going to deny that there's a lot of utopianist rhetoric about the internet. I've read and been irritated by a lot of the same books as you have. But just because it's utopian rhetoric doesn't mean coincidentally some of it can't be right - just like some of the nay-sayer stuff couldn't accidentally be right too. I find both positions irritating, but I put my professional reputation on the line REGULARLY on the basis that software and the internet can facilitate and enable communities (both on and offline) to form and work, and if you really want to fight the issue to the bloody end, I'll cite Outlook meeting requests in work environments as a way in which they help offline communities to self-organise and operate.

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at December 21, 2003 12:57 PM

I think much of what you write at your site revolves around your career, that sometimes it’s like a politician building up his ideological position. And as with politicians, what you say sometimes appears to be OK, but if you think it about in a more penetrating manner, beyond the snappy process of read-digest that characterises internet browsing, you realise it is flawed. Not necessarily in a dramatic or obvious way, but flawed nonetheless. Thus, saying people seek sex, pick fights etc on the ‘net in the same way they do in RL is ostensibly accurate, but actually misleading. The significant point is the frequency and degree with which this happens compared to less colourful socialising, and the extent to which it makes the ‘net a kind of lowest common denominator medium, and ultimately unpleasant. Consider it the other way round: is real life like the ‘net? No, of course it isn’t. A Saturday night city would have to be a military-policed zone full of soap-box activists and a metropolitan sized orgy, to reflect what happens on the ‘net. Therefore, it is not correct to equate online and offline in that way. That kind of facile thinking is what I object to, when the ‘net is theorised. You might think that’s nit-picking, but actually it isn’t: people pursue those kind of ideas and create a semi-intellectual, digerati milieu, which is ultimately science-fictional nonsense. Who needs William Gibson when people talk like that? I have my own ideas about why this happened (and why those books were published): one is that programmers and coders suddenly had a public platform, central to the internet phenomenon. Those people are not philosophers or social theorists – and yet they had entered those intellectual domains.
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I don’t really know what you’re trying to achieve by offering to show your Outlook documentation. I’ve never denied that you’re involved in some interesting projects, in fact I’ve never even referred to this. You’ve got it wrong re. my remarks and future possibilities; you’re reading into it some of your own concerns. I rarely think about the future – literally just a few times, in the most vague ‘what’s going to happen’ manner. And never in terms of what specific interactions might be possible; only in terms of how it reflects human capacity. If you’re trying to find ways of antidoting well known problems via software architecture, that’s quite interesting. However I don’t think you have full clarity on this: instant messaging is still online, despite the fact that is live and instant, and it has the same potential problems as web boards. It’s not "crossover" at all.
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I think I read the Shirky stuff, and probably agreed with it. I don’t think it’s especially pertinent or unique; other people have said similar things, for example in the book The Victorian Internet: exploring the impact and general sociology of technology, noting sociological parallels with different technological forms. And Carl Jung described the way humanity projects psychological ‘energies’ onto inanimate technological form.
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It seems to come down to this: your interests and writings refer to quite specific activities, whereas my intellectual interests concern the bigger picture, i.e. the entire phenomenon of the cultural internet: good and bad, past and present, hugely public and relatively private, used by digerati elite, distracted American students, deranged personalities, average e mailers, and all the rest. That’s the context from which my comments come; your responses continually revolve around your relatively small scale activities. I may have been unfair in attacking this, since we all refer to our own lives and our own experience. However much of the BS rhetoric *is* generalised extrapolation from small scale experience, so it is legitimate to criticise this when it occurs.

→ Posted by: James at December 21, 2003 5:59 PM

Wow. I don't even know where to start. Presumably I should be impressed by you presenting your position (which I think I now finally understand to be "some people in books in the late 1990's wrote loads of utopian books which I don't agree with and as far as I'm concerned you're continuing what they wrote") as 'intellectual interests [concerning] the bigger picture' in contrast to my 'small scale efforts'. Well I think I'd be more impressed if you evidenced any specific expertise in what it means to participate in, create or maintain any kind of online community space. And frankly, I think I'd be keener to continue these arguments (and less likely to stoop to saying that you don't know what you're talking about) if you'd generally been a little less superior all the way through this whole bloody exercise. Still, never mind.

With regard to your statements about the rhetoric of the people from the late 1990s that you don't agree with. Ok. Whatever. I don't agree with a lot of that stuff either. PEOPLE WRITE BOOKS BECAUSE THEY WANT TO MAKE MONEY OR REPUTATIONS. OFTEN THEY WRITE THINGS THAT ARE INFLATED OR DETACHED FROM REALITY. Able men and true - you and I both, I assume - don't have to believe what they say. That may come as a shock to you. After three and a half years of (ncomplete) doctoral work, it doesn't come as a shock to me. Obviously, I don't agree with much of that rhetoric and your regular attempts to lump me in with it have been less than endearing to me.

With regards to the differences between online and offline communities - I maintain that your position (based as it has been on references to things like a lack of corporeality and problems with input devices) can't just be considered to apply to 'the mean average quality and typology of things that currently exist' as you seem to be suggesting, both because corporeality and input devices aren't going to change any time soon (which means you're talking about the possibilities of the medium as well as it's common usage, and at that point I can point enough useful and valuable, friendly, on/offline based communities in your direction to rather skewer any universalising point), but also because such a statement would be both fairly obvious and not particularly useful. It would also not seem to be in particular discord with the utopianists, who would presumably argue (as I would) that different models of online interaction emerge all the time, gradually seem to be improving and that some models are more (or will be more) successful than others and that some individual communities are more successful than others. In terms of understanding online communities and what they mean for the world, it seems that we should be looking towards those faltering steps that have succeeded and trying to work or build from those. They show us the possibilities - not some dot coms failed venture from five years ago. The statement here is not of utopianist, "all the world will be solved with information architecture", but that models (good and bad) improve, or are demonstrated to be useless/damaging and are replaced. That should be familiar enough to you as a social scientist. In a nutshell on that last paragraph, my position would be recapped:

1) Finding what 'is' wanting and ascribing causes to those failures that aren't going to change isn't a statement about 'most' or 'current' communities but a statement about the possibilities of the medium as a whole.
2) If you're going to universalise, then be prepared to have people cite specific examples that go against your vision and be prepared to account for them.

Now the other strut of your position is that there are fundamental differences between online and offline instantiations of community (with a bracketed 'and are profoundly limiting'). The big crux of our disagreement then seems to be 'at what level do those differences emerge' and 'are those differences really that fundamental'. With regards to the first question: Do they emerge at the level of human motivation? Do they emerge at the level of the way that motivation is funnelled and contained? Do they emerge in the limitations of the environment to communicate them? Do they emerge in the distinctions between on and offline communities as groups of people? Do they emerge in the types of discussion / possibilities of discussion etc. that are possible in different contexts? All good questions.

Personally, I don't see a particular difference in motivations, or in the fundamental needs of human contact. I see minimal differences in the uses people put these communities to. I see a variety of different ways in which people bond with one another - that's definitely there. Many people do operate with degrees of anonymity in place and utilise the distancing afforded to them by software to say things they wouldn't or couldn't say in the flesh. On the other hand, many communities or pieces of community software are designed to be little more than additional channels for people who already know each other (or ways that people who are getting to know one another) to communicate through - whether that be an alternative to phones, texting, conference calls, or going to the pub - and although they may have a different register or pitch perhaps, that doesn't necessarily the 'type' of community that they have fundamentally different from one that is being conducted exclusively offline. The interest community is still one of the most fundamental that exists online, but those people who actually engage with them rather than kind of ricocheting off them are tending more and more to extend that community off-site.

To summarise again:

1) There are differences between some aspects of on and offline community.
2) You think those differences are profound and important.
3) For a large and growing, perhaps even the most part of people who actually engage in them, I think those differences are fairly academic and uninteresting.

I think it's important at this stage again not to get confused those people who hit a community a few times a year and bounce off again with the people who are engaging in the places, just like we wouldn't think of the man who walked by the flower club social and popped in for a sandwich on his way somewhere else as engaging actively in that community. Most human-to-human connections and involvements are pretty fleeting, and I don't think that's particularly different online.

Now, having been - I think - pretty reasonable throughout this latest post, I'm not going to get a bit irritable. I personally think that no matter what you're actually arguing you'd claim you were taking the middle and most reasonable ground and that the people who disagreed with you were evidencing skewed positions that were evidence of vested interest or weird ideological positions. I don't think your MA expertise gives you the license you require to maintain your position as representative of the obvious and common truth, as the only person who really gets what's going on, and the only one who is looking at all parts of the picture. I don't think it's NEARLY enough to justify that. And with regard again to your statement about my small-scale endeavours versus your far-reaching intellectual feats of endurance, can I echo your sentiment about criticising generalised extrapolation from small-scale experience with regard to your own position, and also remind you that the best way to test a broad thesis is to see if it holds up against specific examples. I think your vision of the possibilities and qualities of online communities doesn't hold up to specific examples of online communities that work well, blur the on and offline distinction and don't appear to suffer from the problems you believe are endemic. There's a double danger in academic work - firstly that you build castles in the sky and secondly that you DON'T look towards the creative possibilities and instead merely criticise. If you want to do legitimate and interesting work in this area, I would suggest that you actively get involved in the creation or repositioning of this stuff online rather than being stuck arguing with pundit ghosts from five years ago.

Anyway, I'm going to close this post to further comments now, I think since this whole bloody enterprise has so massively derailed itself. Thanks to everyone who has posted and good night.

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at December 22, 2003 1:27 AM