The Virtual Community 
Homesteading on the 
Electronic Frontier  

 
by Howard Rheingold

 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

ADDISON-WESLEY PUBLISHING COMPANY 
Reading, MA 

 
Copyright © 1993 by Howard Rheingold 

http://www.rheingold.com/howard


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
"When you think of a title for a book, you are forced to think of something short and 
evocative, like, well, 'The Virtual Community,' even though a more accurate title might 
be: 'People who use computers to communicate, form friendships that sometimes form 
the basis of communities, but you have to be careful to not mistake the tool for the task 
and think that just writing words on a screen is the same thing as real community.'" – 
HLR 
 
 
We know the rules of community; we know the healing effect of community in terms of 
individual lives. If we could somehow find a way across the bridge of our knowledge, 
would not these same rules have a healing effect upon our world? We human beings have 
often been referred to as social animals. But we are not yet community creatures. We are 
impelled to relate with each other for our survival. But we do not yet relate with the 
inclusivity, realism, self-awareness, vulnerability, commitment, openness, freedom, 
equality, and love of genuine community. It is clearly no longer enough to be simply 
social animals, babbling together at cocktail parties and brawling with each other in 
business and over boundaries. It is our task--our essential, central, crucial task--to 
transform ourselves from mere social creatures into community creatures. It is the only 
way that human evolution will be able to proceed. 

M. Scott Peck 
The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace 

 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 

 1



 
Contents 

 
Introduction 
 
Chapter One: The Heart of the WELL 
 
Chapter Two: Daily Life in Cyberspace: How the Computerized Counterculture Built a 
New Kind of Place 
 
Chapter Three: Visionaries and Convergences: The Accidental History of the Net 
 
Chapter Four: Grassroots Groupminds 
 
Chapter Five: Multi-user Dungeons and Alternate Identities 
 
Chapter Six: Real-time Tribes 
 
Chapter Seven: Japan and the Net 
 
Chapter Eight: Telematique and Messageries Rose: A Tale of Two Virtual Communities 
 
Chapter Nine: Electronic Frontiers and Online Activists 
 
Chapter Ten: Disinformocracy 
 
Bibliography

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/2.html
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/3.html
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/4.html
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/5.html
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/6.html
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/7.html
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/8.html
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/9.html
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/10.html
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/biblio.html


Introduction 
 
"Daddy is saying `Holy moly!' to his computer again!" 

Those words have become a family code for the way my virtual community has 
infiltrated our real world. My seven-year-old daughter knows that her father congregates 
with a family of invisible friends who seem to gather in his computer. Sometimes he talks 
to them, even if nobody else can see them. And she knows that these invisible friends 
sometimes show up in the flesh, materializing from the next block or the other side of the 
planet. 

Since the summer of 1985, for an average of two hours a day, seven days a week, I've 
been plugging my personal computer into my telephone and making contact with the 
WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link)--a computer conferencing system that enables 
people around the world to carry on public conversations and exchange private electronic 
mail (e-mail). The idea of a community accessible only via my computer screen sounded 
cold to me at first, but I learned quickly that people can feel passionately about e-mail 
and computer conferences. I've become one of them. I care about these people I met 
through my computer, and I care deeply about the future of the medium that enables us to 
assemble. 

I'm not alone in this emotional attachment to an apparently bloodless technological ritual. 
Millions of people on every continent also participate in the computer-mediated social 
groups known as virtual communities, and this population is growing fast. Finding the 
WELL was like discovering a cozy little world that had been flourishing without me, 
hidden within the walls of my house; an entire cast of characters welcomed me to the 
troupe with great merriment as soon as I found the secret door. Like others who fell into 
the WELL, I soon discovered that I was audience, performer, and scriptwriter, along with 
my companions, in an ongoing improvisation. A full-scale subculture was growing on the 
other side of my telephone jack, and they invited me to help create something new. 

The virtual village of a few hundred people I stumbled upon in 1985 grew to eight 
thousand by 1993. It became clear to me during the first months of that history that I was 
participating in the self-design of a new kind of culture. I watched the community's social 
contracts stretch and change as the people who discovered and started building the 
WELL in its first year or two were joined by so many others. Norms were established, 
challenged, changed, reestablished, rechallenged, in a kind of speeded-up social 
evolution. 

The WELL felt like an authentic community to me from the start because it was 
grounded in my everyday physical world. WELLites who don't live within driving 
distance of the San Francisco Bay area are constrained in their ability to participate in the 
local networks of face-to-face acquaintances. By now, I've attended real-life WELL 
marriages, WELL births, and even a WELL funeral. (The phrase "in real life" pops up so 
often in virtual communities that regulars abbreviate it to IRL.) I can't count the parties 

 3

http://www.well.com/


and outings where the invisible personae who first acted out their parts in the debates and 
melodramas on my computer screen later manifested in front of me in the physical world 
in the form of real people, with faces, bodies, and voices. 

I remember the first time I walked into a room full of people IRL who knew many 
intimate details of my history and whose own stories I knew very well. Three months 
after I joined, I went to my first WELL party at the home of one of the WELL's online 
moderators. I looked around at the room full of strangers when I walked in. It was one of 
the oddest sensations of my life. I had contended with these people, shot the invisible 
breeze around the electronic watercooler, shared alliances and formed bonds, fallen off 
my chair laughing with them, become livid with anger at some of them. But there wasn't 
a recognizable face in the house. I had never seen them before. 

My flesh-and-blood family long ago grew accustomed to the way I sit in my home office 
early in the morning and late at night, chuckling and cursing, sometimes crying, about 
words I read on the computer screen. It might have looked to my daughter as if I were 
alone at my desk the night she caught me chortling online, but from my point of view I 
was in living contact with old and new friends, strangers and colleagues: 

I was in the Parenting conference on the WELL, participating in an informational and 
emotional support group for a friend who just learned his son was diagnosed with 
leukemia. 

I was in MicroMUSE, a role-playing fantasy game of the twenty-fourth century (and 
science education medium in disguise), interacting with students and professors who 
know me only as "Pollenator." 

I was in TWICS, a bicultural community in Tokyo; CIX, a community in London; 
CalvaCom, a community in Paris; and Usenet, a collection of hundreds of different 
discussions that travel around the world via electronic mail to millions of participants in 
dozens of countries. 

I was browsing through Supreme Court decisions, in search of information that could 
help me debunk an opponent's claims in a political debate elsewhere on the Net, or I was 
retrieving this morning's satellite images of weather over the Pacific. 

I was following an eyewitness report from Moscow during the coup attempt, or China 
during the Tiananmen Square incident, or Israel and Kuwait during the Gulf War, passed 
directly from citizen to citizen through an ad hoc network patched together from cheap 
computers and ordinary telephone lines, cutting across normal geographic and political 
boundaries by piggybacking on the global communications infrastructure. 

I was monitoring a rambling real-time dialogue among people whose bodies were 
scattered across three continents, a global bull session that seems to blend wit and 
sophomore locker-room talk via Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a medium that combines the 

 4

http://tanuki.twics.com/
http://www.calva.net/
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet-faqs/html/FAQ-List.html
http://www.gorgon.com/tech.support/effguide/eeg_119.html#SEC120
http://cnn.com/WEATHER/accu.data/swsat.gif
http://www.kei.com/irc.html


features of conversation and writing. IRC has accumulated an obsessive subculture of its 
own among undergraduates by the thousands from Adelaide to Arabia. 

People in virtual communities use words on screens to exchange pleasantries and argue, 
engage in intellectual discourse, conduct commerce, exchange knowledge, share 
emotional support, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, find friends and lose 
them, play games, flirt, create a little high art and a lot if idle talk. People in virtual 
communities do just about everything people do in real life, but we leave our bodies 
behind. You can't kiss anybody and nobody can punch you in the nose, but a lot can 
happen within those boundaries. To the millions who have been drawn into it, the 
richness and vitality of computer-linked cultures is attractive, even addictive. 

There is no such thing as a single, monolithic, online subculture; it's more like an 
ecosystem of subcultures, some frivolous, others serious. The cutting edge of scientific 
discourse is migrating to virtual communities, where you can read the electronic pre-
preprinted reports of molecular biologists and cognitive scientists. At the same time, 
activists and educational reformers are using the same medium as a political tool. You 
can use virtual communities to find a date, sell a lawnmower, publish a novel, conduct a 
meeting. 

Some people use virtual communities as a form of psychotherapy. Others, such as the 
most addicted players of Minitel in France or Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) on the 
international networks, spend eighty hours a week or more pretending they are someone 
else, living a life that does not exist outside a computer. Because MUDs not only are 
susceptible to pathologically obsessive use by some people but also create a strain on 
computer and communication resources, MUDding has been banned at universities such 
as Amherst and on the entire continent of Australia. 

Scientists, students, librarians, artists, organizers, and escapists aren't the only people 
who have taken to the new medium. The U.S. senator who campaigned for years for the 
construction of a National Research and Education Network that could host the virtual 
communities of the future is now vice president of the United States. As of June 1993, the 
White House and Congress have e-mail addresses. 

Most people who get their news from conventional media have been unaware of the 
wildly varied assortment of new cultures that have evolved in the world's computer 
networks over the past ten years. Most people who have not yet used these new media 
remain unaware of how profoundly the social, political, and scientific experiments under 
way today via computer networks could change all our lives in the near future. 

I have written this book to help inform a wider population about the potential importance 
of cyberspace to political liberties and the ways virtual communities are likely to change 
our experience of the real world, as individuals and communities. Although I am 
enthusiastic about the liberating potentials of computer-mediated communications, I try 
to keep my eyes open for the pitfalls of mixing technology and human relationships. I 
hope my reports from the outposts and headquarters of this new kind of social habitation, 

 5

http://www.minitel.fr/
http://www.clock.org/muds/
http://www.whitehouse.gov/
http://thomas.loc.gov/


and the stories of the people I've met in cyberspace, will bring to life the cultural, 
political, and ethical implications of virtual communities both for my fellow explorers of 
cyberspace and for those who never heard of it before. 

The technology that makes virtual communities possible has the potential to bring 
enormous leverage to ordinary citizens at relatively little cost--intellectual leverage, 
social leverage, commercial leverage, and most important, political leverage. But the 
technology will not in itself fulfill that potential; this latent technical power must be used 
intelligently and deliberately by an informed population. More people must learn about 
that leverage and learn to use it, while we still have the freedom to do so, if it is to live up 
to its potential. The odds are always good that big power and big money will find a way 
to control access to virtual communities; big power and big money always found ways to 
control new communications media when they emerged in the past. The Net is still out of 
control in fundamental ways, but it might not stay that way for long. What we know and 
do now is important because it is still possible for people around the world to make sure 
this new sphere of vital human discourse remains open to the citizens of the planet before 
the political and economic big boys seize it, censor it, meter it, and sell it back to us. 

The potential social leverage comes from the power that ordinary citizens gain when they 
know how to connect two previously independent, mature, highly decentralized 
technologies: It took billions of dollars and decades to develop cheap personal computers. 
It took billions of dollars and more than a century to wire up the worldwide 
telecommunication network. With the right knowledge, and not too much of it, a ten-
year-old kid today can plug these two vast, powerful, expensively developed technologies 
together for a few hundred dollars and instantly obtain a bully pulpit, the Library of 
Congress, and a world full of potential coconspirators. 

Computers and the switched telecommunication networks that also carry our telephone 
calls constitute the technical foundation of computer-mediated communications (CMC). 
The technicalities of CMC, how bits of computer data move over wires and are 
reassembled as computer files at their destinations, are invisible and irrelevant to most 
people who use it, except when the technicalities restrict their access to CMC services. 
The important thing to keep in mind is that the worldwide, interconnected 
telecommunication network that we use to make telephone calls in Manhattan and 
Madagascar can also be used to connect computers together at a distance, and you don't 
have to be an engineer to do it. 

The Net is an informal term for the loosely interconnected computer networks that use 
CMC technology to link people around the world into public discussions. 

Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough 
people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to 
form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace. 

 6

http://www.loc.gov/
http://www.loc.gov/


Cyberspace, originally a term from William Gibson's science-fiction novel Neuromancer, 
is the name some people use for the conceptual space where words, human relationships, 
data, wealth, and power are manifested by people using CMC technology. 

Although spatial imagery and a sense of place help convey the experience of dwelling in 
a virtual community, biological imagery is often more appropriate to describe the way 
cyberculture changes. In terms of the way the whole system is propagating and evolving, 
think of cyberspace as a social petri dish, the Net as the agar medium, and virtual 
communities, in all their diversity, as the colonies of microorganisms that grow in petri 
dishes. Each of the small colonies of microorganisms--the communities on the Net--is a 
social experiment that nobody planned but that is happening nevertheless. 

We now know something about the ways previous generations of communications 
technologies changed the way people lived. We need to understand why and how so 
many social experiments are coevolving today with the prototypes of the newest 
communications technologies. My direct observations of online behavior around the 
world over the past ten years have led me to conclude that whenever CMC technology 
becomes available to people anywhere, they inevitably build virtual communities with it, 
just as microorganisms inevitably create colonies. 

I suspect that one of the explanations for this phenomenon is the hunger for community 
that grows in the breasts of people around the world as more and more informal public 
spaces disappear from our real lives. I also suspect that these new media attract colonies 
of enthusiasts because CMC enables people to do things with each other in new ways, 
and to do altogether new kinds of things--just as telegraphs, telephones, and televisions 
did. 

Because of its potential influence on so many people's beliefs and perceptions, the future 
of the Net is connected to the future of community, democracy, education, science, and 
intellectual life--some of the human institutions people hold most dear, whether or not 
they know or care about the future of computer technology. The future of the Net has 
become too important to leave to specialists and special interests. As it influences the 
lives of a growing number of people, more and more citizens must contribute to the 
dialogue about the way public funds are applied to the development of the Net, and we 
must join our voices to the debate about the way it should be administered. We need a 
clear citizens' vision of the way the Net ought to grow, a firm idea of the kind of media 
environment we would like to see in the future. If we do not develop such a vision for 
ourselves, the future will be shaped for us by large commercial and political 
powerholders. 

The Net is so widespread and anarchic today because of the way its main sources 
converged in the 1980s, after years of independent, apparently unrelated development, 
using different technologies and involving different populations of participants. The 
technical and social convergences were fated, but not widely foreseen, by the late 1970s. 

 7

http://www.idoru.com/
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/%7Ebrians/science_fiction/neuromancer.html


The wide-area CMC networks that span continents and join together thousands of smaller 
networks are a spinoff of American military research. The first computer network, 
ARPANET, was created in the 1970s so that Department of Defense-sponsored 
researchers could operate different computers at a distance; computer data, not person-to-
person messages, were the intended content of the network, which handily happened to 
serve just as easily as a conduit for words. The fundamental technical idea on which 
ARPANET was based came from RAND, the think tank in Santa Monica that did a lot of 
work with top-secret thermonuclear war scenarios; ARPANET grew out of an older 
RAND scheme for a communication, command, and control network that could survive 
nuclear attack by having no central control. 

Closed World? Computer conferencing emerged, also somewhat unexpectedly, as a 
tool for using the communication capacities of the networks to build social relationships 
across barriers of space and time. A continuing theme throughout the history of CMC is 
the way people adapt technologies designed for one purpose to suit their own, very 
different, communication needs. And the most profound technological changes have 
come from the fringes and subcultures, not the orthodoxy of the computer industry or 
academic computer science. The programmers who created the first computer network 
installed electronic mail features; electronic mail wasn't the reason ARPANET was 
designed, but it was an easy thing to include once ARPANET existed. Then, in a similar, 
ad hoc, do-it-yourself manner, computer conferencing grew out of the needs of U.S. 
policymakers to develop a communications medium for dispersed decision making. 
Although the first computer conferencing experiments were precipitated by the U.S. 
government's wage-price freeze of the 1970s and the consequent need to disseminate up-
to-date information from a large number of geographically dispersed local headquarters, 
computer conferencing was quickly adapted to commercial, scientific, and social 
discourse. 

The hobbyists who interconnect personal computers via telephone lines to make 
computer bulletin-board systems, known as BBSs, have home-grown their part of the 
Net, a true grassroots use of technology. Hundreds of thousands of people around the 
world piggyback legally on the telecom network via personal computers and ordinary 
telephone lines. The most important technical attribute of networked BBSs is that it is an 
extremely hard network to kill--just as the RAND planners had hoped. Information can 
take so many alternative routes when one of the nodes of the network is removed that the 
Net is almost immortally flexible. It is this flexibility that CMC telecom pioneer John 
Gilmore referred to when he said, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes 
around it." This way of passing information and communication around a network as a 
distributed resource with no central control manifested in the rapid growth of the anarchic 
global conversation known as Usenet. This invention of distributed conversation that 
flows around obstacles--a grassroots adaptation of a technology originally designed as a 
doomsday weapon--might turn out to be as important in the long run as the hardware and 
software inventions that made it possible. 

The big hardwired networks spend a lot more money to create high-speed information 
conduits between high-capacity computing nodes. Internet, today's U.S. government-

 8

http://www.chaos.com/learn/History.html
http://www.rand.org/
http://www.cygnus.com/%7Egnu/
http://www.cygnus.com/%7Egnu/


sponsored successor to ARPANET, is growing in every dimension at an astonishing pace. 
These "data superhighways" use special telecommunication lines and other equipment to 
send very large amounts of information throughout the network at very high speeds. 
ARPANET started around twenty years ago with roughly one thousand users, and now 
Internet is approaching ten million users. 

The portable computer on my desk is hundreds of times less expensive and thousands of 
times more powerful than ARPANET's first nodes. The fiber-optic backbone of the 
current Internet communicates information millions of times faster than the first 
ARPANET. Everything about Internet has grown like a bacterial colony--the raw 
technical capacity to send information, the different ways people use it, and the number 
of users. The Internet population has grown by 15 percent a month for the past several 
years. John Quarterman, whose book The Matrix is a thick guide to the world's computer 
networks, estimates that there are nine hundred different networks worldwide today, not 
counting the more than ten thousand networks already linked by the Internet "network of 
networks." 

Real grassroots, the kind that grow in the ground, are a self-similar branching structure, a 
network of networks. Each grass seed grows a branching set of roots, and then many 
more smaller roots grow off those; the roots of each grass plant interconnect physically 
with the roots of adjacent plants, as any gardener who has tried to uproot a lawn has 
learned. There is a grassroots element to the Net that was not, until very recently, 
involved with all the high-tech, top-secret doings that led to ARPANET--the BBSers. 

The population of the grassroots part of the Net, the citizen-operated BBSs, has been 
growing explosively as a self-financed movement of enthusiasts, without the benefit of 
Department of Defense funding. A BBS is the simplest, cheapest infrastructure for CMC: 
you run special software, often available inexpensively, on a personal computer, and use 
a device known as a modem to plug the computer into your regular telephone line. The 
modem converts computer-readable information into audible beeps and boops that can 
travel over the same telephone wires that carry your voice; another modem at the other 
end decodes the beeps and boops into computer-readable bits and bytes. The BBS turns 
the bits and bytes into human-readable text. Other people use their computers to call your 
BBS, leave and retrieve messages stored in your personal computer, and you have a 
virtual community growing in your bedroom. As the system operator (sysop) of the BBS, 
you contribute part of your computer's memory and make sure your computer is plugged 
into the telephone; the participants pay for their own communication costs. 

Boardwatch magazine estimates that sixty thousand BBSs operated in the United States 
alone in 1993, fourteen years after the first BBSs opened in Chicago and California. Each 
BBS supports a population of a dozen to several hundred, or even thousands, of 
individual participants. There are religious BBSs of every denomination, sex BBSs of 
every proclivity, political BBSs from all parts of the spectrum, outlaw BBSs, law 
enforcement BBSs, BBSs for the disabled, for educators, for kids, for cults, for nonprofit 
organizations--a list of the different flavors of special-interest BBSs is dozens of pages 

 9

http://www.mids.org/jsq.html
http://www.tic.com/books/matrix.html
http://www.boardwatch.com/


long. The BBS culture has spread from the United States to Japan, Europe, Central and 
South America. 

Each BBS started out as a small island community of a few people who dialed into a 
number in their area code; by their nature, like a small-wattage radio station, BBSs are 
localized. But that's changing, too. Just as several different technologies converged over 
the past ten years to create CMC--a new medium with properties of its own--several 
different online social structures are in the process of converging and creating a kind of 
international culture with properties of its own. 

Technical bridges are connecting the grassroots part of the network with the military-
industrial parts of the network. The programmers who built the Net in the first place, the 
scholars who have been using it to exchange knowledge, the scientists who have been 
using it for research, are being joined by all those hobbyists with their bedroom and 
garage BBSs. Special "gateway" computers can link entire networks by automatically 
translating communications from the mechanical languages used in one network to the 
languages (known as protocols) used in another network. In recent years, the heretofore 
separate groups of Internet and BBS pioneers worked together to gateway the more than 
ten thousand computers of the worldwide FidoNet, the first network of small, private 
BBSs, with Internet's millions of people and tens of thousands of more powerful 
computers. 

The Net and computer conferencing systems are converging too, as medium-size 
computer conferencing communities like the WELL join Internet. When the WELL 
upgraded to a high-speed connection to Internet, it became not just a community-in-
progress but a gateway to a wider realm, the worldwide Net-at-large. Suddenly, the 
isolated archipelagos of a few hundred or a few thousand people are becoming part of an 
integrated entity. The small virtual communities still exist, like yeast in a rapidly rising 
loaf, but increasingly they are part of an overarching culture, similar to the way the 
United States became an overarching culture after the telegraph and telephone linked the 
states. 

The WELL is a small town, but now there is a doorway in that town that opens onto the 
blooming, buzzing confusion of the Net, an entity with properties altogether different 
from the virtual villages of a few years ago. I have good friends now all over the world 
who I never would have met without the mediation of the Net. A large circle of Net 
acquaintances can make an enormous difference in your experience when you travel to a 
foreign culture. Wherever I've traveled physically in recent years, I've found ready-made 
communities that I met online months before I traveled; our mutual enthusiasm for virtual 
communities served as a bridge, time and again, to people whose language and customs 
differ significantly from those I know well in California. 

I routinely meet people and get to know them months or years before I see them--one of 
the ways my world today is a different world, with different friends and different 
concerns, from the world I experienced in premodem days. The places I visit in my mind, 
and the people I communicate with from one moment to the next, are entirely different 

 10

http://bbs.owls.com/%7Ejerrys/fidonet.html


from the content of my thoughts or the state of my circle of friends before I started 
dabbling in virtual communities. One minute I'm involved in the minutiae of local 
matters such as planning next week's bridge game, and the next minute I'm part of a 
debate raging in seven countries. Not only do I inhabit my virtual communities; to the 
degree that I carry around their conversations in my head and begin to mix it up with 
them in real life, my virtual communities also inhabit my life. I've been colonized; my 
sense of family at the most fundamental level has been virtualized. 

I've seen variations of the same virtualization of community that happened to me hitting 
other virtual groups of a few hundred or a few thousand, in Paris and London and Tokyo. 
Entire cities are coming online. Santa Monica, California, and Cleveland, Ohio, were 
among the first of a growing number of American cities that have initiated municipal 
CMC systems. Santa Monica's system has an active conference to discuss the problems 
of the city's homeless that involves heavy input from homeless Santa Monica citizens 
who use public terminals. This system has an electronic link with COARA, a similar 
regional system in a remote province of Japan. Biwa-Net, in the Kyoto area, is gatewayed 
to a sister city in Pennsylvania. The Net is only beginning to wake up to itself. 

Watching a particular virtual community change over a period of time has something of 
the intellectual thrill of do-it-yourself anthropology, and some of the garden-variety 
voyeurism of eavesdropping on an endless amateur soap opera where there is no 
boundary separating the audience from the cast. For the price of a telephone call, you can 
take part in any kind of vicarious melodrama you can dream of; as a form of escape 
entertainment, the Minitel addicts in Paris and the MUDders of Internet and the obsessive 
IRC participants on college campuses everywhere have proved that CMC has a future as 
a serious marketplace for meterable interactive fantasies. 

CMC might become the next great escape medium, in the tradition of radio serials, 
Saturday matinees, soap operas--which means that the new medium will be in some way 
a conduit for and reflector of our cultural codes, our social subconscious, our images of 
who "we" might be, just as previous media have been. There are other serious reasons 
that ordinary nontechnical citizens need to know something about this new medium and 
its social impact. Something big is afoot, and the final shape has not been determined. 

In the United States, the Clinton administration is taking measures to amplify the Net's 
technical capabilities and availability manyfold via the National Research and Education 
Network. France, with the world's largest national information utility, Minitel, and Japan, 
with its stake in future telecommunications industries, have their own visions of the 
future. Albert Gore's 1991 bill, the High Performance Computing Act, signed into law by 
President Bush, outlined Gore's vision for "highways of the mind" to be stimulated by 
federal research-and-development expenditures as a national intellectual resource and 
carried to the citizens by private enterprise. The Clinton-Gore administration has used the 
example of the ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) venture of the 1960s and 
1970s that produced the Net and the foundations of personal computing as an example of 
the way they see government and the private sector interacting in regard to future 
communications technologies. 

 11

http://www.coara.or.jp/oldhtml/E-default.html
http://www.biwa.or.jp/index-e.html
http://cas-www.arc.nasa.gov/nren.html
http://cas-www.arc.nasa.gov/nren.html
http://r-server.tamu.edu/internet/nren-bill.html


In the private sector, telecommunication companies, television networks, computer 
companies, cable companies, and newspapers in the United States, Europe, and Japan are 
jockeying for position in the nascent "home interactive information services industry." 
Corporations are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the infrastructure for new 
media they hope will make them billions of dollars. Every flavor of technological 
futurist, from Alvin Toffler and John Naisbitt to Peter Drucker and George Gilder, base 
utopian hopes on "the information age" as a techno-fix for social problems. Yet little is 
known about the impact these newest media might have on our daily lives, our minds, our 
families, even the future of democracy. 

CMC has the potential to change our lives on three different, but strongly 
interinfluential, levels. First, as individual human beings, we have perceptions, 
thoughts, and personalities (already shaped by other communications technologies) that 
are affected by the ways we use the medium and the ways it uses us. At this fundamental 
level, CMC appeals to us as mortal organisms with certain intellectual, physical, and 
emotional needs. Young people around the world have different communication 
proclivities from their pre-McLuhanized elders. MTV, for example, caters to an aesthetic 
sensibility that is closely tuned to the vocabulary of television's fast cuts, visually 
arresting images, and special effects. Now, some of those people around the world who 
were born in the television era and grew up in the cellular telephone era are beginning to 
migrate to CMC spaces that better fit their new ways of experiencing the world. There is 
a vocabulary to CMC, too, now emerging from millions and millions of individual online 
interactions. That vocabulary reflects something about the ways human personalities are 
changing in the age of media saturation. 

The second level of possible CMC-triggered change is the level of person-to-person 
interaction where relationships, friendships, and communities happen. CMC technology 
offers a new capability of "many to many" communication, but the way such a capability 
will or will not be used in the future might depend on the way we, the first people who 
are using it, succeed or fail in applying it to our lives. Those of us who are brought into 
contact with each other by means of CMC technology find ourselves challenged by this 
many-to-many capability--challenged to consider whether it is possible for us to build 
some kind of community together. 

The question of community is central to realms beyond the abstract networks of CMC 
technology. Some commentators, such as Bellah et al. (Habits of the Heart, The Good 
Society), have focused on the need for rebuilding community in the face of America's loss 
of a sense of a social commons. 

Social psychologists, sociologists, and historians have developed useful tools for asking 
questions about human group interaction. Different communities of interpretation, from 
anthropology to economics, have different criteria for studying whether a group of people 
is a community. In trying to apply traditional analysis of community behavior to the 
kinds of interactions emerging from the Net, I have adopted a schema proposed by Marc 
Smith, a graduate student in sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles, 
who has been doing his fieldwork in the WELL and the Net. Smith focuses on the 

 12

http://www.frc.org/pff/aspen96/toffler.html
http://www.startribune.com/stonline/html/digage/naisbitt.htm
http://ksgwww.harvard.edu/%7Eksgpress/druckerb.htm
http://www.discovery.org/ggindex.html
http://www.mtv.com/
http://www.smsu.edu/bellah.html
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/grads/smithm/smithm.htm
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/grads/smithm/smithm.htm


concept of "collective goods." Every cooperative group of people exists in the face of a 
competitive world because that group of people recognizes there is something valuable 
that they can gain only by banding together. Looking for a group's collective goods is a 
way of looking for the elements that bind isolated individuals into a community. 

The three kinds of collective goods that Smith proposes as the social glue that binds 
the WELL into something resembling a community are social network capital, 
knowledge capital, and communion. Social network capital is what happened when I 
found a ready-made community in Tokyo, even though I had never been there in the 
flesh. Knowledge capital is what I found in the WELL when I asked questions of the 
community as an online brain trust representing a highly varied accumulation of 
expertise. And communion is what we found in the Parenting conference, when Phil's and 
Jay's children were sick, and the rest of us used our words to support them. 

The third level of possible change in our lives, the political, derives from the middle, 
social level, for politics is always a combination of communications and physical power, 
and the role of communications media among the citizenry is particularly important in the 
politics of democratic societies. The idea of modern representative democracy as it was 
first conceived by Enlightenment philosophers included a recognition of a living web of 
citizen-to-citizen communications known as civil society or the public sphere. Although 
elections are the most visible fundamental characteristics of democratic societies, those 
elections are assumed to be supported by discussions among citizens at all levels of 
society about issues of importance to the nation. 

If a government is to rule according to the consent of the governed, the effectiveness of 
that government is heavily influenced by how much the governed know about the issues 
that affect them. The mass-media-dominated public sphere today is where the governed 
now get knowledge; the problem is that commercial mass media, led by broadcast 
television, have polluted with barrages of flashy, phony, often violent imagery a public 
sphere that once included a large component of reading, writing, and rational discourse. 
For the early centuries of American history, until the telegraph made it possible to create 
what we know as news and sell the readers of newspapers to advertisers, the public 
sphere did rely on an astonishingly literate population. Neil Postman, in his book about 
the way television has changed the nature of public discourse, Amusing Ourselves to 
Death, notes that Thomas Paine's Common Sense sold three hundred thousand copies in 
five months in 1775. Contemporary observers have documented and analyzed the way 
mass media ("one to many" media) have "commoditized" the public sphere, substituting 
slick public relations for genuine debate and packaging both issues and candidates like 
other consumer products. 

The political significance of CMC lies in its capacity to challenge the existing political 
hierarchy's monopoly on powerful communications media, and perhaps thus revitalize 
citizen-based democracy. The way image-rich, sound-bite-based commercial media have 
co-opted political discourse among citizens is part of a political problem that 
communications technologies have posed for democracy for decades. The way the 
number of owners or telecommunication channels is narrowing to a tiny elite, while the 

 13

http://explorer.csc.com/CSC_Vanguard/bios/u_postman.html


reach and power of the media they own expand, is a converging threat to citizens. Which 
scenario seems more conducive to democracy, which to totalitarian rule: a world in which 
a few people control communications technology that can be used to manipulate the 
beliefs of billions, or a world in which every citizen can broadcast to every other citizen? 

Ben Bagdikian's often-quoted prediction from The Media Monopoly is that by the turn of 
the century "five to ten corporate giants will control most of the world's important 
newspapers, magazines, books, broadcast stations, movies, recordings and 
videocassettes." These new media lords possess immense power to determine which 
information most people receive about the world, and I suspect they are not likely to 
encourage their privately owned and controlled networks to be the willing conduits for all 
the kinds of information that unfettered citizens and nongovernmental organizations tend 
to disseminate. The activist solution to this dilemma has been to use CMC to create 
alternative planetary information networks. The distributed nature of the 
telecommunications network, coupled with the availability of affordable computers, 
makes it possible to piggyback alternate networks on the mainstream infrastructure. 

We temporarily have access to a tool that could bring conviviality and understanding into 
our lives and might help revitalize the public sphere. The same tool, improperly 
controlled and wielded, could become an instrument of tyranny. The vision of a citizen-
designed, citizen-controlled worldwide communications network is a version of 
technological utopianism that could be called the vision of "the electronic agora." In the 
original democracy, Athens, the agora was the marketplace, and more--it was where 
citizens met to talk, gossip, argue, size each other up, find the weak spots in political 
ideas by debating about them. But another kind of vision could apply to the use of the Net 
in the wrong ways, a shadow vision of a less utopian kind of place--the Panopticon. 

Panopticon was the name for an ultimately effective prison, seriously proposed in 
eighteenth-century Britain by Jeremy Bentham. A combination of architecture and optics 
makes it possible in Bentham's scheme for a single guard to see every prisoner, and for 
no prisoner to see anything else; the effect is that all prisoners act as if they were under 
surveillance at all times. Contemporary social critic Michel Foucault, in Discipline and 
Punish, claimed that the machinery of the worldwide communications network 
constitutes a kind of camouflaged Panopticon; citizens of the world brought into their 
homes, along with each other, the prying ears of the state. The cables that bring 
information into our homes today are technically capable of bringing information out of 
our homes, instantly transmitted to interested others. Tomorrow's version of Panoptic 
machinery could make very effective use of the same communications infrastructure that 
enables one-room schoolhouses in Montana to communicate with MIT professors, and 
enables citizens to disseminate news and organize resistance to totalitarian rule. With so 
much of our intimate data and more and more of our private behavior moving into 
cyberspace, the potential for totalitarian abuse of that information web is significant and 
the cautions of the critics are worth a careful hearing. 

The wise revolutionary keeps an eye on the dark side of the changes he or she would 
initiate. Enthusiasts who believe in the humanitarian potential of virtual communities, 

 14

http://www2.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/smoke/interviews/bagdikian1.html
http://www.rtvf.nwu.edu/classroom/E84/SURV2.html
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/%7Edon/foucault.html


especially those of us who speak of electronic democracy as a potential application of the 
medium, are well advised to consider the shadow potential of the same media. We should 
not forget that intellectuals and journalists of the 1950s hailed the advent of the greatest 
educational medium in history--television. 

Because of its potential to change us as humans, as communities, as democracies, we 
need to try to understand the nature of CMC, cyberspace, and virtual communities in 
every important context--politically, economically, socially, cognitively. Each different 
perspective reveals something that the other perspectives do not reveal. Each different 
discipline fails to see something that another discipline sees very well. We need to think 
together here, across boundaries of academic discipline, industrial affiliation, nation, if 
we hope to understand and thus perhaps regain control of the way human communities 
are being transformed by communications technologies. 

We can't do this solely as dispassionate observers, although there is certainly a strong 
need for the detached assessment of social science. Community is a matter of emotions as 
well as a thing of reason and data. Some of the most important learning will always have 
to be done by jumping into one corner or another of cyberspace, living there, and getting 
up to your elbows in the problems that virtual communities face. 

I care about what happens in cyberspace, and to our freedoms in cyberspace, because I 
dwell there part of the time. The author's voice as a citizen and veteran of virtual 
community-building is one of the points of view presented in this book: I'm part of the 
story I'm describing, speaking as both native informant and as uncredentialed social 
scientist. Because of the paucity of first-person source material describing the way it feels 
to live in cyberspace, I believe it is valuable to include my perspective as participant as 
well as observer. In some places, like the WELL, I speak from extensive experience; in 
many of the places we need to examine in order to understand the Net, I am almost as 
new to the territory as those who never heard about cyberspace before. Ultimately, if you 
want to form your own opinions, you need to pick up a good beginner's guidebook and 
plunge into the Net for yourself. It is possible, however, to paint a kind of word-picture, 
necessarily somewhat sketchy, of the varieties of life to be found on the Net. 

Much of this book is a tour of widening circles of virtual communities as they exist 
today. I believe that most citizens of democratic societies, given access to clearly 
presented information about the state of the Net, will make wise decisions about how the 
Net ought to be governed. But it is important to look in more than one corner and see 
through more than one set of lenses. Before we can discuss in any depth the way CMC 
technology is changing us as human beings, as communities, and as democracies, we 
need to know something about the people and places that make the Net what it is. 

Our journey through the raucous immensity of Usenet, the subcultures of the MUDs and 
IRC channels, the BBSs, mailing lists, and e-journals, starts with a glimpse over my 
shoulder at the WELL, the place where cyberspace started for me. The ways I've 
witnessed people in the virtual community I know best build value, help each other 
through hard times, solve (and fail to solve) vexing interpersonal problems together, offer 

 15



a model--undoubtedly not an infallible one--of the kinds of social changes that virtual 
communities can make in real lives on a modestly local scale. Some knowledge of how 
people in a small virtual community behave will help prevent vertigo and give you tools 
for comparison when we zoom out to the larger metropolitan areas of cyberspace. Some 
aspects of life in a small community have to be abandoned when you move to an online 
metropolis; the fundamentals of human nature, however, always scale up.  

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 16



Chapter One: The Heart of The Well 

In the summer of 1986, my then-two-year-old daughter picked up a tick. There was this 
blood-bloated thing sucking on our baby's scalp, and we weren't quite sure how to go 
about getting it off. My wife, Judy, called the pediatrician. It was eleven o'clock in the 
evening. I logged onto the WELL. I got my answer online within minutes from a fellow 
with the improbable but genuine name of Flash Gordon, M.D. I had removed the tick by 
the time Judy got the callback from the pediatrician's office. 

What amazed me wasn't just the speed with which we obtained precisely the information 
we needed to know, right when we needed to know it. It was also the immense inner 
sense of security that comes with discovering that real people--most of them parents, 
some of them nurses, doctors, and midwives--are available, around the clock, if you need 
them. There is a magic protective circle around the atmosphere of this particular 
conference. We're talking about our sons and daughters in this forum, not about our 
computers or our opinions about philosophy, and many of us feel that this tacit 
understanding sanctifies the virtual space. 

The atmosphere of the Parenting conference--the attitudes people exhibit to each other in 
the tone of what they say in public--is part of what continues to attract me. People who 
never have much to contribute in political debate, technical argument, or intellectual 
gamesmanship turn out to have a lot to say about raising children. People you knew as 
fierce, even nasty, intellectual opponents in other contexts give you emotional support on 
a deeper level, parent to parent, within the boundaries of Parenting, a small but warmly 
human corner of cyberspace. 

Here is a short list of examples from the hundreds of separate topics available for 
discussion in the Parenting conference. Each of these entries is the name of a 
conversation that includes scores or hundreds of individual contributions spread over a 
period of days or years, like a long, topical cocktail party you can rewind back to the 
beginning to find out who said what before you got there. 

Great Expectations: You're Pregnant: Now 
What? Part III 
What's Bad About Children's TV? 
Movies: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly 
Initiations and Rites of Passage 
Brand New Well Baby!! 
How Does Being a Parent Change Your 
Life? 
Tall Teenage Tales (cont.) 
Guilt 
MOTHERS 
Vasectomy--Did It Hurt? 
Introductions! Who Are We? 

Parenting in an Often-Violent World 
Children's Radio Programming 
New WELL Baby 
Home Schooling 
Newly Separated/Divorced Fathers 
Another Well Baby--Carson Arrives in 
Seattle! 
Single Parenting 
Uncle Philcat's Back Fence: Gossip Here! 
Embarrassing Moments 
Kids and Death 
All the Poop on Diapers 
Pediatric Problems--Little Sicknesses and 

 17

http://www.well.com/user/flash/


Fathers (Continued) 
Books for Kids, Section Two 
Gay and Lesbian Teenagers 
Children and Spirituality 
Great Parks for Kids 
Quality Toys 

Sick 
Little Ones 
Talking with Kids About the Prospect of 
War 
Dealing with Incest and Abuse 
Other People's Children 
When They're Crying 
Pets for Kids 

People who talk about a shared interest, albeit a deep one such as being a parent, don't 
often disclose enough about themselves as whole individuals online to inspire real trust in 
others. In the case of the subcommunity of the Parenting conference, a few dozen of us, 
scattered across the country, few of whom rarely if ever saw the others face-to-face, had a 
few years of minor crises to knit us together and prepare us for serious business when it 
came our way. Another several dozen read the conference regularly but contribute only 
when they have something important to add. Hundreds more every week read the 
conference without comment, except when something extraordinary happens. 

Jay Allison and his family live in Massachusetts. He and his wife are public-radio 
producers. I've never met any of them face-to-face, although I feel I know something 
powerful and intimate about the Allisons and have strong emotional ties to them. What 
follows are some of Jay's postings on the WELL: 

Woods Hole. Midnight. I am sitting in the dark of my daughter's room. 
Her monitor lights blink at me. The lights used to blink too brightly 
so I covered them with bits of bandage adhesive and now they flash 
faintly underneath, a persistent red and green, Lillie's heart and 
lungs.

Above the monitor is her portable suction unit. In the glow of the 
flashlight I'm writing by, it looks like the plastic guts of a science-
class human model, the tubes coiled around the power supply, the 
reservoir, the pump.

Tina is upstairs trying to get some sleep. A baby monitor links our 
bedroom to Lillie's. It links our sleep to Lillie's too, and because 
our souls are linked to hers, we do not sleep well.

I am naked. My stomach is full of beer. The flashlight rests on it, and 
the beam rises and falls with my breath. My daughter breathes through a 
white plastic tube inserted into a hole in her throat. She's fourteen 
months old.

Sitting in front of our computers with our hearts racing and tears in our eyes, in Tokyo 
and Sacramento and Austin, we read about Lillie's croup, her tracheostomy, the days and 
nights at Massachusetts General Hospital, and now the vigil over Lillie's breathing and 
the watchful attention to the mechanical apparatus that kept her alive. It went on for days. 
Weeks. Lillie recovered, and relieved our anxieties about her vocal capabilities after all 

 18

http://www.well.com/user/jwa/


that time with a hole in her throat by saying the most extraordinary things, duly reported 
online by Jay. 

Later, writing in Whole Earth Review, Jay described the experience: 

Before this time, my computer screen had never been a place to go for solace. Far from it. But there it was. 
Those nights sitting up late with my daughter, I'd go to my computer, dial up the WELL, and ramble. I 
wrote about what was happening that night or that year. I didn't know anyone I was "talking" to. I had 
never laid eyes on them. At 3:00 a.m. my "real" friends were asleep, so I turned to this foreign, invisible 
community for support. The WELL was always awake. 

Any difficulty is harder to bear in isolation. There is nothing to measure against, to lean against. Typing out 
my journal entries into the computer and over the phone lines, I found fellowship and comfort in this 
unlikely medium. 

Over the years, despite the distances, those of us who made heart-to-heart contact via the 
Parenting conference began to meet face-to-face. The WELL's annual summer picnic in 
the San Francisco Bay area grew out of a face-to-face gathering that was originally 
organized in the Parenting conference. We had been involved in intense online 
conversations in this conference all year. When summer rolled around we started talking 
about doing something relaxing together, like bringing our kids somewhere for a 
barbecue. In typical WELL fashion, it quickly amplified to a WELLwide party hosted by 
the Parenting conference. Phil Catalfo reserved a picnic site and the use of a softball field 
in a public park. 

Parents talk about their kids online--what else?--and therefore we all already knew about 
my daughter Mamie and Philcat's son Gabe and Busy's son, the banjo player, but we had 
not seen many of them before. I remember that when I arrived at the park, Mamie and I 
recognized one particular group, out of the first half-dozen large parties of picnickers we 
saw in the distance. There was just something about the way they were all standing, 
talking with each other in knots of two or three, while the kids ran around the eucalyptus 
grove and found their way to the softball diamond. I remember playing on the same team 
with a fellow who never ceases to annoy me when he wrenches every conversation online 
around to a debate about libertarianism; I remember thinking, after we had darn near 
accomplished a double play together, that he wasn't such a bad guy. 

It was a normal American community picnic --people who value each other's 
company, getting together with their kids for softball and barbecue on a summer Sunday. 
It could have been any church group or PTA. In this case, it was the indisputably real-life 
part of a virtual community. The first Parenting conference picnic was such a success that 
it became an annual event, taking place around the summer solstice. And kids became a 
fixture at all the other WELL parties. 

Another ritual for parents and kids and friends of parents and kids started in the winter, 
not long after the picnic tradition began. For the past four or five years, in December, 
most of the conference participants within a hundred miles, and their little ones, show up 
in San Francisco for the annual Pickle Family Circus benefit and potluck. One of the 
directors of this small circus is a beloved and funny member of the WELL community; 

 19

http://www.well.net/mwec/wer.html
http://www.arts-online.com/talent/NAPAMA/SRO/pfc.htm


he arranges a special block of seats each year. After the circus is over and the rest of the 
audience has left, we treat the performers, the stagehands, and ourselves to a potluck 
feast. 

Albert Mitchell is an uncommonly fierce and stubborn fellow--many would say 
pugnacious--who argues his deeply felt principles in no uncertain terms. He can be 
abrasive, even frightening, in his intensity. He gets particularly riled up by certain topics-
-organized religion, taxation, and circumcision--but there are other ways to cross him and 
earn some public or private vituperation. I discovered that I could never again really be 
too frightened by Albert's fierce online persona--the widely known and sometimes feared 
"sofia"--after seeing him and his sweet daughter, Sofia, in her clown suit, at a Pickle 
potluck. He gave me a jar of honey from his own hive at that event, even though we had 
been shouting at each other online in ways that probably would have degenerated into 
fisticuffs face-to-face. At the Pickle Family Circus or the summer picnic, we were 
meeting in the sacred space of Parenting, not the bloody arenas of WELL policy or 
politics. 

Leukemia  
 
The Parenting conference had been crisis-tested along with the Allisons, and had 
undergone months of the little ups and downs with the kids that make up the normal daily 
history of any parent, when one of our most regular, most dear, most loquacious 
participants, Phil Catalfo, dropped a bombshell on us. 
 
Topic 349: Leukemia

By: Phil Catalfo (philcat) on Wed, Jan 16, '91

404 responses so far

<linked topic>

I'd like to use this topic for discussing leukemia, the disease, both 
as it affects my family and what is known about it generally.

We learned early last week that our son Gabriel, 7 (our middle child), 
has acute lymphocytic leukemia, aka ALL. I will be opening one or more 
additional topics to discuss the chronology of events, emotions and 
experiences stirred up by this newly central fact of our lives, and so 
on. (I'm also thinking of opening a topic expressly for everyone to 
send him get-well wishes.) I intend for this topic to focus on the 
disease itself--his diagnosis and progress, but also other cases we 
know about, resources (of all types) available, etc. etc.

If Tina has no objection, I'd like to ask the hosts of the Health conf. 
to link any/all of these topics to their conf. I can't think offhand of 
where else might be appropriate, but I'm sure you'll all suggest away.

 20



The first thing I want to say, regardless of how it does or doesn't 
pertain to this particular topic, is that the support and love my 
family and I, and especially Gabe, have been receiving from the WELL, 
have been invaluable. This turns out to have a medical impact, which 
we'll discuss in good time, but I want to say out loud how much it's 
appreciated: infinitely.

With that, I'll enter this, and return as soon as I can to say more 
about Gabe's case and what I've learned in the past week about this 
disease and what to do about it.

404 responses total.

# 1: Nancy A. Pietrafesa (lapeche) Wed, Jan 16, '91 (17:21)

Philcat, we're here and we're listening. We share your hope and a small 
part of your pain. Hang on.

# 2: Tina Loney (onezie) Wed, Jan 16, '91 (19:09)

Phil, I took the liberty of writing to flash (host of the Health conf) 
and telling him to link whichever of the three topics he feels 
appropriate. I very much look forward to you telling us all that you 
can/are able about Gabe. In the meanwhile, I'm thinking about Gabriel 
and your entire family. Seems I remember Gabe has quite a good Catalfic 
sense of humor, and I hope you're able to aid him in keeping that in 
top form. . . . Virtual hugs are *streaming* in his direction. . . .

The Parenting regulars, who had spent hours in this conference trading quips and 
commiserating over the little ups and downs of life with children, chimed in with 
messages of support. One of them was a nurse. Individuals who had never contributed to 
the Parenting conference before entered the conversation, including a couple of doctors 
who helped Phil and the rest of us understand the daily reports about blood counts and 
other diagnostics and two other people who had firsthand knowledge, as patients 
suffering from blood disorders themselves. 

Over the weeks, we all became experts on blood disorders. We also understood how the 
blood donation system works, what Danny Thomas and his St. Jude Hospital had to do 
with Phil and Gabe, and how parents learn to be advocates for their children in the 
medical system without alienating the caregivers. Best of all, we learned that Gabe's 
illness went into remission after about a week of chemotherapy. 

With Gabe's remission, the community that had gathered around the leukemia topic 
redirected its attention to another part of the groupmind. Lhary, one of the people from 
outside the Parenting conference who had joined the discussion of leukemia because of 
the special knowledge he had to contribute, moved from the San Francisco area to 
Houston in order to have a months-long bone-marrow transplant procedure in an attempt 
to abate his own leukemia. He continued to log onto the WELL from his hospital room. 
The Catalfos and others got together and personally tie-dyed regulation lab coats and 
hospital gowns for Lhary to wear around the hospital corridors. 

 21

http://www.stjude.org/Medical/default.htm


Many people are alarmed by the very idea of a virtual community, fearing that it 
is another step in the wrong direction, substituting more technological ersatz for yet 
another natural resource or human freedom. These critics often voice their sadness at 
what people have been reduced to doing in a civilization that worships technology, 
decrying the circumstances that lead some people into such pathetically disconnected 
lives that they prefer to find their companions on the other side of a computer screen. 
There is a seed of truth in this fear, for virtual communities require more than words on a 
screen at some point if they intend to be other than ersatz. 

Some people--many people--don't do well in spontaneous spoken interaction, but turn out 
to have valuable contributions to make in a conversation in which they have time to think 
about what to say. These people, who might constitute a significant proportion of the 
population, can find written communication more authentic than the face-to-face kind. 
Who is to say that this preference for one mode of communication--informal written text-
-is somehow less authentically human than audible speech? Those who critique CMC 
because some people use it obsessively hit an important target, but miss a great 
deal more when they don't take into consideration people who use the medium 
for genuine human interaction. Those who find virtual communities cold places point 
at the limits of the technology, its most dangerous pitfalls, and we need to pay attention to 
those boundaries. But these critiques don't tell us how Philcat and Lhary and the Allisons 
and my own family could have found the community of support and information we 
found in the WELL when we needed it. And those of us who do find communion in 
cyberspace might do well to pay attention to the way the medium we love can be abused. 

Although dramatic incidents are what bring people together and stick in their memories, 
most of what goes on in the Parenting conference and most virtual communities is 
informal conversation and downright chitchat. The model of the WELL and other social 
clusters in cyberspace as "places" is one that naturally emerges whenever people who use 
this medium discuss the nature of the medium. In 1987, Stewart Brand quoted me in his 
book The Media Lab about what tempted me to log onto the WELL as often as I did: 
"There's always another mind there. It's like having the corner bar, complete with old 
buddies and delightful newcomers and new tools waiting to take home and fresh graffiti 
and letters, except instead of putting on my coat, shutting down the computer, and 
walking down to the corner, I just invoke my telecom program and there they are. It's a 
place." 

The existence of computer-linked communities was predicted twenty-five years ago by J. 
C. R. Licklider and Robert Taylor, research directors for the Department of Defense's 
Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), who set in motion the research that 
resulted in the creation of the first such community, the ARPANET: "What will on-line 
interactive communities be like?" Licklider and Taylor wrote in 1968: "In most fields 
they will consist of geographically separated members, sometimes grouped in small 
clusters and sometimes working individually. They will be communities not of common 
location, but of common interest. . . ." 

 22

http://www.well.com/user/sbb/
http://www.media.mit.edu/
http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/7.html
http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/7.html
http://www.arpa.mil/


My friends and I sometimes believe we are part of the future that Licklider dreamed 
about, and we often can attest to the truth of his prediction that "life will be happier for 
the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be 
selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity." I 
still believe that, but I also know that life online has been unhappy at times, intensely so 
in some circumstances, because of words I've read on a screen. Participating in a virtual 
community has not solved all of life's problems for me, but it has served as an aid, a 
comfort, and an inspiration at times; at other times, it has been like an endless, ugly, long-
simmering family brawl. 

I've changed my mind about a lot of aspects of the WELL over the years, but the sense of 
place is still as strong as ever. As Ray Oldenburg proposed in The Great Good Place, 
there are three essential places in people's lives : the place we live, the place we 
work, and the place we gather for conviviality. Although the casual conversation that 
takes place in cafes, beauty shops, pubs, and town squares is universally considered to be 
trivial, idle talk, Oldenburg makes the case that such places are where communities can 
come into being and continue to hold together. These are the unacknowledged agorae of 
modern life. When the automobilecentric, suburban, fast-food, shopping-mall way of life 
eliminated many of these "third places" from traditional towns and cities around the 
world, the social fabric of existing communities started shredding. 

Oldenburg explicitly put a name and conceptual framework on that phenomenon that 
every virtual communitarian knows instinctively, the power of informal public life: 

Third places exist on neutral ground and serve to level their guests to a condition of social equality. Within 
these places, conversation is the primary activity and the major vehicle for the display and appreciation of 
human personality and individuality. Third places are taken for granted and most have a low profile. Since 
the formal institutions of society make stronger claims on the individual, third places are normally open in 
the off hours, as well as at other times. The character of a third place is determined most of all by its regular 
clientele and is marked by a playful mood, which contrasts with people's more serious involvement in other 
spheres. Though a radically different kind of setting for a home, the third place is remarkably similar to a 
good home in the psychological comfort and support that it extends. 

Such are the characteristics of third places that appear to be universal and essential to a vital informal 
public life. . . . 

The problem of place in America manifests itself in a sorely deficient informal public life. The structure of 
shared experience beyond that offered by family, job, and passive consumerism is small and dwindling. 
The essential group experience is being replaced by the exaggerated self-consciousness of individuals. 
American life-styles, for all the material acquisition and the seeking after comforts and pleasures, are 
plagued by boredom, loneliness, alienation, and a high price tag. . . . 

Unlike many frontiers, that of the informal public life does not remain benign as it awaits development. It 
does not become easier to tame as technology evolves, as governmental bureaus and agencies multiply, or 
as population grows. It does not yield to the mere passage of time and a policy of letting the chips fall 
where they may as development proceeds in  

other areas of urban life. To the contrary, neglect of the informal public life can make a jungle of what had 
been a garden while, at the same time, diminishing the ability of people to cultivate it. 

 23



It might not be the same kind of place that Oldenburg had in mind, but so many of his 
descriptions of third places could also describe the WELL. Perhaps cyberspace is one of 
the informal public places where people can rebuild the aspects of community that were 
lost when the malt shop became a mall. Or perhaps cyberspace is precisely the wrong 
place to look for the rebirth of community, offering not a tool for conviviality but a life-
denying simulacrum of real passion and true commitment to one another. In either case, 
we need to find out soon. 

***  

The feeling of logging into the WELL for just a minute or two, dozens of times a day, is 
very similar to the feeling of peeking into the café, the pub, the common room, to see 
who's there, and whether you want to stay around for a chat. As social psychologist Sara 
Kiesler put it in an article about networks for Harvard Business Review: "One of the 
surprising properties of computing is that it is a social activity. Where I work, the most 
frequently run computer network program is the one called `Where' or `Finger' that finds 
other people who are logged onto the computer network." 

Because we cannot see one another in cyberspace, gender, age, national origin, 
and physical appearance are not apparent unless a person wants to make such 
characteristics public. People whose physical handicaps make it difficult to 
form new friendships find that virtual communities treat them as they always 
wanted to be treated--as thinkers and transmitters of ideas and feeling beings, 
not carnal vessels with a certain appearance and way of walking and talking (or 
not walking and not talking).  

One of the few things that enthusiastic members of virtual communities in Japan, 
England, France, and the United States all agree on is that expanding their circle of 
friends is one of the most important advantages of computer conferencing. 
CMC is a way to meet people, whether or not you feel the need to affiliate with them 
on a community level. It's a way of both making contact with and maintaining a 
distance from others. The way you meet people in cyberspace puts a different spin on 
affiliation: in traditional kinds of communities, we are accustomed to meeting people, 
then getting to know them; in virtual communities, you can get to know people and then 
choose to meet them. Affiliation also can be far more ephemeral in cyberspace because 
you can get to know people you might never meet on the physical plane. 

How does anybody find friends? In the traditional community, we search through our 
pool of neighbors and professional colleagues, of acquaintances and acquaintances of 
acquaintances, in order to find people who share our values and interests. We then 
exchange information about one another, disclose and discuss our mutual interests, and 
sometimes we become friends. In a virtual community we can go directly to the place 
where our favorite subjects are being discussed, then get acquainted with people who 
share our passions or who use words in a way we find attractive. In this sense, the topic is 
the address: you can't simply pick up a phone and ask to be connected with someone who 

 24

http://pecan.srv.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/hcii/www/people/members/kiesler.html
http://pecan.srv.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/hcii/www/people/members/kiesler.html
http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/groups/hbr/


wants to talk about Islamic art or California wine, or someone with a three-year-old 
daughter or a forty-year-old Hudson; you can, however, join a computer conference on 
any of those topics, then open a public or private correspondence with the previously 
unknown people you find there. Your chances of making friends are magnified by orders 
of magnitude over the old methods of finding a peer group. 

You can be fooled about people in cyberspace, behind the cloak of words. But that can be 
said about telephones or face-to-face communication as well; computer-mediated 
communications provide new ways to fool people, and the most obvious identity 
swindles will die out only when enough people learn to use the medium critically. In 
some ways, the medium will, by its nature, be forever biased toward certain kinds of 
obfuscation. It will also be a place that people often end up revealing themselves far more 
intimately than they would be inclined to do without the intermediation of screens and 
pseudonyms. 

The sense of communion I've experienced on the WELL is exemplified by the Parenting 
conference but far from limited to it. We began to realize in other conferences, facing 
other human issues, that we had the power not only to use words to share feelings and 
exchange helpful information, but to accomplish things in the real world. 

Barn Raiser  
 
The power of the WELL's community of users to accomplish things in the real world 
manifested itself dramatically when we outgrew our first computer. The computing 
engine that put-putted us around as a group of seven hundred users in 1985 was 
becoming inadequate for the three thousand users we had in 1988. Things started slowing 
down. You would type a letter on your keyboard and wait seconds for the letter to be 
displayed on your screen. It quickly became frustrating. 

Because we had such a large proportion of computer experts among the population, we 
knew that the only solution to the interminable system lag that made it agonizing to read 
and even more agonizing to write on the WELL's database was to move to more up-to-
date hardware, better suited to keeping up with the communication tasks of a hive 
numbering in the thousands. But the WELL's managing director, Clifford Figallo, himself 
an active member of the WELL community, reported that the WELL as a business entity 
was unable to find the kind of financing we'd need to upgrade our system. 

That's when some of the armchair experts online started talking about their back-of-the-
envelope calculations. If the hard-core users who had grown so irritated about the 
system's performance (but had realized that there was no place remotely like the WELL 
to turn to as an alternative) were willing to pay their next few months bills in advance, 
how much money would it take to buy the big iron? Half-seriously, Clifford Figallo 
named a figure. Within a few days, enough people had pledged hundreds of dollars each, 
thousands of dollars cumulatively, to get the show on the road. The checks arrived, the 

 25

http://www.well.com/user/fig/


computer was purchased, the hardware was installed, and the database--the living heart of 
the community--was transferred to its new silicon body. 

After suffering through the last months of the Vax, the first months of our new computer, 
the Sequent, was like switching from a Schwinn to a Rolls. And we had flexed our first 
barn-raising muscles in a characteristically unorthodox way: here were the customers, 
and the producers of the value that the customers buy, raising money among themselves 
to loan the owners of the business so they could sell themselves more of each other. 

Casey's operation was another barn raising. This one was her idea. Casey was another 
WELL old-timer who had a job--freelance transcription and word processing services--
that enabled her to work at home. Nobody ever doubts her intelligence, although her 
manner is often indelicate. The way she would say it, I'm sure, is that she has a "relatively 
low need for affiliation." The way others might say it is that Casey is a tough cookie. 

Casey, whose real name is Kathleen, needed an operation that she could almost, but not 
quite, afford; her ability to walk was at stake. So she put up $500 to have a poster of her 
own design printed. The poster showed the silhouette of a head, with the title "This Is 
Your Mind on the WELL," and the head was filled with words and phrases that WELL 
users would recognize. She offered copies for sale as a benefit for her operation at $30 
each. She raised the money she needed. 

The most dramatic barn raising, however, was the saga of Elly, a shy and gentle and 
much-loved WELLite who left the virtual community, possibly forever, to travel to the 
farthest reaches of the Himalayas. Her saga, her crisis, and the WELL's response 
unfolded over period of months, and climaxed over a few intensely active days: 

Topic 198: News from Elly

By: Averi Dunn (vaxen) on Wed, Aug 28, '91

263 responses so far

<linked topic>

This is the place to post any news which may come your way about 
Northbay's vacationing host, Elly van der Pas.

# 1: Elly van der Pas (elly) Wed, Aug 28, '91 (18:03)

Right now, I'm almost finished moving out of my house. Later tonight, 
I'm going to look at my stuff, and see if I have what I need for my 
trip, and maybe do last minute shopping tomorrow. Cleaning Friday. Gone 
Saturday to parts unknown. The plane leaves Monday morning. Phew!

# 6: Averi Dunn (vaxen) Mon, Sep 23, '91 (18:44)

I got another postcard from Elly on Saturday:

 26



13 Sept

Amsterdam

So far, so good. The weather's been beautiful, and I've been riding all 
over by bike. Tomorrow I'm going to London for a few days, and then to 
Italy by train. Should be an adventure. I went to a piano concert last 
night with friends of a friend, and may be sailing today. Greetings to 
everyone. Elly

# 22: Averi Dunn (vaxen) Thu, Nov 7, '91 (23:25)

Well, Kim, you can post the parts that don't repeat. It's good to hear 
any news from Elly. And with that in mind I post the following from 
her-own-self:

27 Oct 1991

I got your letter from Sept 14 yesterday, forwarded from Italy. 
Apparently they were having a post office strike of something, because 
one of the workers drowned in the elevator. Anyway, they didn't process 
mail for at least a week, so I didn't get any letters.

Anyway, you have no idea how weird it is to be sitting on a mountain in 
Kathmandu reading about AP2 and the WELL. Oh, I took a picture of the 
WELL coffee shop in London and sent it to the office. I hope they get 
it. I thought it was quite appropriate. Janey Fritsche showed up about 
a week ago, and then took off trekking. It was good to see her. My 
friend Peter will be here, too, in a few days, and I guess I'll come 
down off the mountain to spend some time renewing visas and stocking up 
for the month-long course. We have to stay put for that, and no mail, 
either, so this might be it for awhile. Happy Thanksgiving, Merry 
Christmas, and Happy New Year. They've just finished their big holiday 
here--everyone was off work for a week, and dressed in new clothes. The 
kids made huge bamboo swings and went out kite flying.

I've been studying Dzogchen, which is like Tibetan Zen--meditating on 
the empty mind. Different from what I've done before. We stayed for 
awhile at a monastery way up in the hills, where there's an old abbot 
who specializes in pointing out the nature of the mind. It was rather 
an unusual opportunity.

You guys are all asleep now, except maybe for you. It's 2 pm--too late 
for lunch and too early for tea. Just about bath time, though, because 
we have a solar heater on the roof. I'm taking all my baths now, 
because in a week, 300 people will come here for the course, and 
bathing will be a fond dream. Or showering, that is.

Tell Brian and June and Josephine I said hi, and that I'm OK. I hope 
they got my card. I'll try to write, but don't know when I'll get time.

Take care of yourself and be happy,

Elly

 27



# 26: Averi Dunn (vaxen) Sat, Dec 28, '91 (01:26)

The following are excerpts from a letter I received from Elly on Dec 
21.

********

7 Nov

The course starts today so I'm incommunicado for a month.

13 Dec

Hmmm. I guess I never finished this. Lots of things have happened since 
then. Mainly, I've become a nun. I sent details to Hank so he could 
post, because I have to write about 10 letters for Peter to take back 
when he goes.

It's a little strange, but I feel really good about it, and I really 
feel it's the right move for me. Even Peter agrees.

I never wanted to be a nun (at least not before now). I always felt a 
little sorry for the Catholic nuns. This is a little different, though-
-much more freedom. It's interesting to have short hair, though. I 
think I'll grow it out to about 3/4$S0.:-)

PPS. My ordination name is Jigme Palmo: Glorious fearless woman (!!!?)

********

She also sent an address she can be reached at for the next six months. 
Drop me Email if you want it.

So Elly had decided to become a Buddhist nun in Asia, and therefore threatened to pass 
into the annals of WELL legend. The topic stayed dormant for six months. In June, 
former neighbor Averi Dunn, who had been typing Elly's correspondence into the WELL, 
reported hearing that Elly had some kind of amoeba in her liver. At the end of July 1992, 
Flash Gordon reported that Elly was in a hospital in New Delhi. In a coma. She had 
severe hepatitis and reportedly suffered liver failure. If that report turned out to be true, 
Flash and the other doctors online agreed that the prognosis was not good. 

Within hours, people started doing things in half a dozen directions on their own 
initiative. The raw scope and diversity of the resources available to us by pooling our 
individual networks was astonishing. People who had medical connections in New Delhi 
were brought in; airline schedules and rates for medical evacuation were researched; a 
fund was started and contributions started arriving. Casey used the net to find a possible 
telecommunications site in New Delhi where they could relay information for Frank, 
Elly's ex-husband, who had flown to Asia to help with what was looking like a grave 
situation. 

 28



After a tense few days, the news made its way through the network that she did have 
some liver function left and might need access to special blood-filtering equipment before 
she could be moved. Within hours, we knew how to get such medical equipment in New 
Delhi and whose name to mention. We knew whom to call, how to ask, what it cost, and 
how to transfer funds to get Elly delivered to a hospital in the San Francisco region. "It 
gives me goosebumps," reported Onezie, as the topic unfolded on the WELL. "This is 
love in action." 

Elly recovered enough strength to travel without medical evacuation. Her next message 
was direct, via the WELL: 

#270: Elly van der Pas (elly) Fri, Sep 11, '92 (16:03)

Thanks to everyone for your generous WELLbeams, good wishes, prayers, 
advice, and contributions of green energy. The doctor thought the fast 
recovery was due to Actigall, but in fact it was due to beams, prayers, 
and pujas. He even said I might be able to go back to India in February 
or so.$SW-)

Addiction  
 
If paying attention to other people's interests is a kind of attracting force in cyberspace, 
Blair Newman was a superconducting megamagnet. He acted the same way in person that 
he acted in his online persona of Metaview. Metaview had a jillion wonderful schemes 
for what you could do with new technology. Friends of his had become billionaires. How 
could you make a million on the blanking interval in television signals? How about a 
service that records only the television programs you want to watch? How many other 
intelligent crazies would pay good money for Compconf Psychserv? 

He had a story to tell you. His eyes would get wide, and his overgrown mustache would 
twitch with excitement. His hair, a magnificent and irrevocably unruly dirty-blond mop, 
seemed to reflect his mental state; the curlier and more out of control his hair looked, the 
faster it seemed his mind had been moving. At WELL parties, his mental state was 
manic. He'd grab you, laugh in your face, drag you halfway through the crowd to 
introduce you to somebody. He would start laughing at somebody's joke, and the laughter 
would turn into a spasm of coughing that went on for frightening lengths of time. 

To me, Blair Newman's defining characteristic was his habit of calling me--and any of 
several dozen people he liked and admired--via telephone if I wasn't online, to tell me to 
turn my television or radio to one channel or the other, immediately, because there was 
something on that I simply must pay attention to. He was often right, and it was well 
meant, but there was always something eerie about it. Here is an acquaintance of many 
years, but not a bosom buddy, who was thinking about what television program he knew 
I would really like to watch at 11:30 p.m. on a weeknight. That's the way he acted on the 
WELL, too. 

 29

http://www.comedia.com/people/blair/


My most important bond with Blair was the kind of bond that regulars in any informal 
public space share. In the late 1980s, Blair and I were among a floating group of ten to 
thirty WELLites you could count on at any time of day to be online. We often joke about 
the addictive qualities of the WELL. And there always seem to be several nonjoking 
discussions about WELL addiction going on in different parts of the WELL. At two 
bucks an hour, obsessive computer conferencing is cheaper than every other 
addiction except tobacco.  

According to my recollection of Blair's own account, he had been a newly minted 
Harvard M.B.A. with a high daily cocaine intake, working with Howard Hughes's 
notoriously abstemious legal staff, deep in their Vegas bunkers. A chain-smoker and 
died-in-the-wool pothead (and also, according to his own account, one of the founders of 
the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws), Blair had been, in his past, 
a paradigm of the classic addictive personality. He was clean in regard to his cocaine 
problem when he came to the WELL, however. In a series of postings, Blair related to us 
how he'd realized that the WELL was for him more insidiously addictive than cocaine 
had been. 

Years after he had kicked his cocaine habit, he claimed, somebody put a line of the 
substance next to Blair's computer while he was logged on. It dawned on him, several 
hours later, that the white crystals were still there, and he had known about them, but had 
not mustered the energy necessary to sniff them. It wasn't a moral decision but a battle of 
obsessions, Blair explained--he couldn't tear his hands from the keyboard and his eyes 
from the screen of his current, deeper addiction long enough to ingest the cocaine. Blair 
shared his insight with us, as he shared every single thing that crossed his unpredictable 
and unrelenting mind for hours a day, every day, for years. 

You have to be careful with the addiction model as applied to the range of human 
behavior. Is a prodigy who practices day and night a violin addict? Perhaps. Is a great 
actor addicted to the attention of audiences? Probably. Is addiction the proper lens for 
evaluating the violinist's or actor's behavior? Probably not. But nobody who has let her 
meal grow cold and her family grow concerned while she keeps typing furiously on a 
keyboard in full hot-blooded debate with a group of invisible people in faraway places 
can dismiss the dark side of online enthusiasm. If a person has a compelling--even 
unhealthily compelling--need for a certain kind of attention from intelligent peers, the 
WELL is a great place to find it. Blair called it Compconf Psychserv. It was cheaper than 
drugs, cheaper than shrinks, and it kept him off the street. He was smart enough to know 
what had happened to him, even as it tightened its grip. 

Going after the juice of people's attention, especially large groups of intelligent people, 
was always part of Blair's story. He wanted to help. He wanted to impress. 

Blair also got on people's nerves. His good-natured and totally unbelievably bald-faced 
self-promotion was part of it. He had a mythology about himself. One of his roommates 
had started one of the most successful software companies, according to Blair. He had 
worked for the upper echelons of the Howard Hughes organization, according to Blair. 

 30



He had been a principal organizer of the marijuana legalization movement, according to 
Blair. He introduced famous computer entrepreneurs to one another in dramatic 
circumstances, according to Blair. It wasn't difficult to do a parody of a Blair Newman 
rap. 

Then, after years online, and dozens of parties and excursions with other WELL 
members, and all the late-night phone calls with television recommendations to fellow 
WELLites, Blair Newman removed everything he had ever written on the WELL. For a 
day and a night and a day, most of the conversation on the WELL was about the trauma 
of mass-scribbling--the term that had emerged for the act of removing years' worth of 
postings. It seemed an act of intellectual suicide. A couple of weeks later, in real life, 
Blair Newman killed himself. A kind of myth seems to have grown up around this event, 
on the Net and in the mass media. The story has been distorted into a more dramatic 
form. In the urban folklore version that has been printed in some magazine articles, 
people from the WELL allegedly desperately tried to find Blair as his postings 
disappeared, and when his last comment was scribbled, the legend has it that he killed 
himself. 

Most of the people at the funeral were from the WELL. But there was a surprising 
number of odd characters. We who were there remember the thoroughly slick fellow in 
the thousand-dollar suit and the three-hundred-dollar sunglasses who flew the corporate 
jet in from L.A. to the funeral, to tell the kind of story about Blair that Blair so frequently 
had told about himself. White Rastafarians showed up--marijuana legalization activists. 
Founders of successful software companies arrived. It was a great last laugh. As that 
amazing parade of people stood up in the funeral home and said their piece about Blair, it 
dawned on all of us that he had been telling the outrageous truth. 

But when he was alive and in our faces, metaphorically speaking, in every conference on 
the WELL, many of us struck back with words: "Calm down, Blair," was something I 
said to him publicly. Bandy, who later gave Blair the software tool that enabled him to 
mass-scribble, started a topic in the Weird Conference (the WELL's subconscious free-
fire zone) on "Day Sixteen of Your Lithium Holiday." Other remarks were even less 
kind, on my own part and the part of others. When you grab people's attention often, and 
monopolize the public soapbox, the response can be cruel. Like the legendary audience at 
the Apollo theater in Harlem, the WELL's audience can create a star or boo a bad 
performer off the stage. Blair experienced both reactions at the same time. 

Sometimes, when the online banter got a little cruel, I would call Blair on the telephone 
and try to see what might really be the matter. We'd talk. He'd ramble until his beeper 
wrenched him off to another tangent. Blair was always one step ahead of the state of the 
art in message-forwarding technology. 

It was after some weeks of fairly stormy psychic weather on the WELL that Blair 
obtained the virtual suicide weapon, the scribble tool. Weeks before that, Bandy, one of 
the WELL's technical staff, quit his job in a dispute over a personal relationship with 
another online character. When he quit, he used his programming expertise to create a 

 31



tool that searched out everything he had ever posted to any public conference on the 
WELL, and deleted it, all of it. Quite a fancy trick, that, an act of programming virtuosity 
calculated to test the structural integrity of the social system. Bandy posted the source 
code for the scribble tool to the Net, which means that forevermore, anybody who wants 
to obtain the scribble weapon can post a request on the Net and sooner or later somebody 
will point to an archive where the program is stored. 

The WELL's early history had established a strong relationship between the WELL and 
the anarchic subcommunity of volunteer programmers. For years, people had created 
tools, for free, and for the prestige, and because we needed them. Bandy was the first to 
create a weapon. 

Every person who posts words in the WELL has the right to remove--scribble--those 
words later. Hosts have the power to scribble other people's words, but that power is 
severely constrained by the knowledge that the act is likely to be followed by weeks of 
acrimonious and repetitive debate. Hosts traditionally have scribbled comments written 
by other WELL users no more than once a year. Scribbling one's own comment is not as 
rare, but it is still far from the norm. Better to think twice before saying something, 
instead of saying too many things that you regret enough to scribble them, seems to be 
the unwritten law. Perhaps one in a thousand comments is scribbled. 

You used to have to track down each comment, then follow a series of steps to scribble it. 
Of course, everybody should have the right to automatically remove every comment 
they've ever posted, now that the tool/weapon to do that exists, we decided in the endless 
arguments that followed its first use by Bandy, then Blair. But to actually do it is, in the 
eyes of many, despicably antisocial. 

When Metaview used Bandy's scribble tool, the shock of ripping out several years' worth 
of postings from a very prolific writer made the fabric of recorded conversations, the 
entire history of the WELL's discourse to that point, look . . . moth-eaten. Often, as in 
particularly Metaview-intense topics, so much is missing that the entire thread is rendered 
indecipherable. It's annoying. Why be an enthusiastic member of a multiperson, 
multiyear word-weaving project if you plan to rip out your contributions to the 
conversational fabric when you leave? 

The novelty of the act tempered our reactions, I think, when Bandy first mass-scribbled. 
The design problem of rebuilding our mental models of the WELL was perversely 
intriguing. The idea that the WELL seems to have a critical mass of thought-force in it 
that is greater than the destructive power of any one person is reinforced by the way it 
can withstand assaults on the commons. A lot of people cursed Blair for vandalizing the 
WELL that had nourished him for so long. I picked up the telephone and called him. 

"Why did you do it, Blair?" I asked. 

"It seemed like the thing to do at the time" is precisely what he told me. There was a 
flatness of affect to the way he said it. Nothing unusual there for Blair, who jumped from 

 32



mood to mood during the course of a conversation. I think he really meant it. It was an 
impulse. The tool/weapon made it possible to follow the impulse. And that's what I 
reported back to the WELL community. 

Nobody mistakes virtual life for real life, even though it has an emotional reality to many 
of us. Some kinds of impulses are simply more serious than others. Impulsive acts in real 
life can have more permanent consequences than even the most drastic acts in 
cyberspace. I asked Blair if he was feeling suicidal. He talked about it. I told him the old 
cliché about suicide being a permanent solution to a temporary problem. After that 
conversation with Blair, I talked with his friend and psychiatrist. His toying with suicide 
was not new. One of these times, Blair was bound to succeed. This time he did. 

From the moment we heard the news, the population of the WELL went through a period 
of transformation. Joking around with words on a computer keyboard is one thing. Going 
to Blair's funeral and talking to his family face-to-face was another. 

Several topics on the WELL were devoted to Blair. One of the topics, at his family's 
request, was for people to post eulogies. Many of the other topics, those that were not 
donated to his parents, were hideously violent flamewars over the way people behaved 
and did not behave. In the heat of argument over one topic, people who had simmering 
resentments dating back to previous arguments took the opportunity to haul out the big 
guns. Suicide brings up unusual feelings in any family or social group. Fortunately, there 
were one or two among us who knew exactly how to understand what was happening to 
us; a fellow who had struggled with years of feelings over his brother's suicide was able 
to offer wise and caring and credible counsel to many of us. 

There was the real-life funeral, where we brought our physical bodies and embraced each 
other and Blair's family. We were learning how fond we had grown of Blair, and how his 
death put a milestone in cyberspace. Marriages had happened and others had unraveled. 
Businesses had started and failed. We had parties and picnics. But death seems somehow 
more real, even if your only participation is in the virtual funeral. How could any of us 
who looked each other in the eye that afternoon in the funeral home deny that 
the bonds between us were growing into something real?  

The feelings ran just as high during the virtual part of the grieving rituals as they did 
during the face-to-face part--indeed, with many of the social constraints of proper funeral 
behavior removed, the online version was the occasion for venting of anger that would 
have been inappropriate in a face-to-face gathering. There were those who passionately 
and persistently accused the eulogizers of exhibiting a hypocrisy that stank unto the 
heavens, because of our not altogether charitable treatment of Blair online when he was 
alive. Those of us who h