The return of the community

There is an interesting phenomenon afoot in the Internet world and it`s to do with online communities. For those of us who have been using live messaging services or chat lines for a couple of years, this seems like a "natural" feature of the Internet that we don`t spend a lot of time thinking about. The Net, it seems, is naturally made up of e-mail, Web sites and live communication services.

It`s a feasible assumption that in the age of cocooning we`ll look elsewhere for public, semi-anonymous wide area discourse.

But I think there`s deeper meaning here, and that these services require a little psychological exploration and probing. If we are to believe the public opinion pundits of the past few years (such as Faith Popcorn, recently "on tour" in SA) most industrialised societies are undergoing a process that engenders less public life and increasing cocooning.

Cocooning is the act of staying at home, bunkered in one`s living quarters and doing things domestic, such as watching the telly and videos, playing with one`s Playstation, entertaining friends with home cuisine, and last but definitely not least, surfing the Net.

I think humans have a basic need for public social interchange. Thus, I think it`s a feasible assumption that in the age of cocooning we`ll look elsewhere for public, semi-anonymous wide area discourse. And what better place than the Internet? Any social activity, from playing games to meeting people to shouting one`s opinion for all to hear, finds its place on the Net - and I think that in the age of hiding inside rather than going outside, they fill an increasing social need.

People throughout history have flocked together into communities. Geographic communities are the most obvious example. It is only during this century that we`ve become an internationally mobile people with potential roots (or a lack thereof) wherever work or other things have taken us. During the pre-industrial age, there were communities centred on types of work: artisans flocked together and lived together. During the industrial revolution, this led to class communities and the differences between people in urban ghettos.

If we accept that community building speaks to a basic, perhaps even genetic need in humans, it follows naturally that there have to be an inordinate number of communities on the Internet, which is after all, the social space of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Content creators have already begun to successfully tap into the community building drive, and of course the first - and the most! - online communities were built long before the notion of a content provider even existed. Usenet news is still a living example of this, despite its ever-growing number of unmanageable and ultimately meaningless newsgroups.

Today, content providers and portal operators are beginning to address the increasing need for all types of communities much more effectively. Live messaging technologies, such as ICQ, are rapidly becoming good entertainment. So far they merely hint at their full promise of becoming a fully-fledged, integrated work and play environment which people will use on a daily basis to help them lead more efficient digital lives.

Chat technologies, the second most "live" technology in my rudimentary list of community facilities, are much better developed, and many large vendors have increasingly powerful offerings in that arena, often including collaborative work tools such as shared whiteboards and application showing/sharing.

Looking farther afield, there are numerous Web sites that attempt to create better, more manageable and ultimately safer Web-based discussion environments. These are similar in concept to newsgroups, but attempt to fragment the discussion space into more useful and focused environments, hopefully eradicating unsolicited commercial postings and other items that aren`t user (and ultimately, family) friendly.

People are rooting together worldwide around the new community tools on the Net. And while I don`t think this is a particularly novel observation, I`m truly intrigued by what this will mean for society, or perhaps humanity, in the long run. Right now, Internet users are still a subset (albeit a significant and growing one) of the world`s population at large. What will happen once the majority of the globe`s population is connected?

There will be an immense opening of borders, along lines that our governments` current limited grasp of such issues can only begin to hint at. If the authorities are currently concerned with questions of encryption and how to curb online tax evasion, then they`re in for quite a surprise in the months, years and decades to come. Science fiction novels often depict the citizen of the future as someone who leads his/her only "official" life on the Net, where authentication and identification is absolute. In the real world, the current playing ground for the majority of community-based activities, this citizen is merely a body focused on food intake, physical recreation and other activities that are purely physical.

While I`m sure that we`re still quite far away from following the sci-fi authors into the future, I`m also convinced that our current community building technologies have grown up tremendously. I predict that the next wave of Internet desktops - a "Web top" of sorts - will focus strongly on messaging and community building tools and less on basic browsing. Personally, having been a denizen of chat services of one type or another since 1993, I can`t wait. The sooner, the better!