The inadequacy of community

Just a very quick post as I’m only halfway through the article and desperately need to get it finished…

On Internet community:

Even so-called communities on the web, often defined by special interests, are but a ghostly caricature of the intimacy possible in a genuine community with flesh and blood others who are lived as possessing depth and personhood, and not as mere objects of my attention or interest (196).

Garza, Gilbert (2002) “The Internet, Narrative, and Subjectivity”. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 15:3, 185-203

Um… what??

Granted that this article was written in 2002, pre-web2.0 explosion, but still. The Internet had been a fully fledged part of everyday life for a good six or so years by then; surely a scholarly researcher did not honestly believe that online community was a “ghostly caricature” of offline experience?

I shouldn’t be so judgmental. There are many aspects in which online experience is inferior to offline human interaction, especially if the kind of support you want from community comes in the form of hanging out face-to-face. Online community won’t go with you to a football game or to the beach, and it won’t sit down and have a beer with you (or maybe it will – I suppose that depends upon your propensity to sit at home and drink ‘by yourself’, in a physical sense!). On the other hand, there are many, many ways in which online community far outshines “genuine community”. There are many people in this world who suffer from debilitating issues that simply will not allow them to go out and interact with others in a therapeutic, much less a social, sense. There are people who are isolated. There are people who simply do not want to share certain elements of themselves with people that they know “in real life” (and I scoff at that term!) for fear of persecution or simply because they are too embarrassed.

I might be getting ahead of myself here. I should really finish the article before I start ripping Garza to shreds. Much of his article has been quite interesting – although, on the other hand, he does seem to believe that ‘place’ is dependent upon embodiment, and that the first requisite condition of being online is that you must be prepared to leave your body at the door. How very William Gibson of him. Is it simply the case that our attitude towards the Internet and online experience has indeed changed that much in just six years? I’m thinking so. I wasn’t studying the Internet six years ago – I was only surfing it. It’s not until you take a step back that you realise just how things have changed. I can’t remember what the Net was like six years ago, perhaps because it has changed so quickly (and yet smoothly). I can remember it in 1996/7, up until around 2001. Isn’t it funny that I can’t remember from around 2002, though? Then of course, in the past few years we’ve seen the explosion of social networking. The Internet has gone from being a resource for information, to being a resource for people.

So perhaps I find myself today writing from the perspective of someone who has spent a hell of a lot of time online over the past decade, and has come to think of ‘virtual’ community as simply another form of real community, whereas Garza wrote six years ago probably from the perspective of someone who had spent an awful lot of time researching offline, pre-Internet (pre-1996!), and was still not entirely convinced that the Internet was the way to go. And that in itself is a reflection of the way in which the Net has become integrated into everyday life.