Published (1997) in Joseph E. Behar, ed., MAPPING CYBERSPACE: Social Research in the Electronic Frontier. It is posted here with permission from Dowling Press.
INTRODUCTION
In April, 1992, I started PSN, the Progressive Sociologists Network. My goal was to create an electronic network for the Section on Marxist Sociology of the American Sociological Association. I believed that the use of telecommunications would bring greater social and intellectual cohesion to the Section, thus increasing its attractiveness among younger faculty and graduate students. This was an unrealistic understanding of the potential of the media: while PSN facilitated communication among some members, including Section officers, it has not changed the Section in noticeable ways. On the other hand, PSN developed in unexpected ways; watching it grow and change has been a very interesting, frustrating, often time consuming, but exciting experience through which I learned a great deal about the characteristics of emergent social structures in virtual space, and about the connections between virtual and face to face social interaction.
Prior to creating PSN, my only experience in the Internet was my participation in the Argentine electronic network. This network, created in the 1980s by some Argentine professionals working in the U.S. and Canada, grew very fast and today it brings together over 2000 Argentine professionals and students disseminated all over the world, including a small proportion still living in Argentina. My involvement was limited to "lurking" a lot and participating once in while in spirited debates about whatever issues concerned the group at a given time. The Argentine network is one among the many national origin based networks in cyberspace. As capital circulates and moves South to the developing countries, labor also circulates and moves North, to the developed capitalist countries. These migration flows include millions of students, professionals and technical workers most of whom have access to telecommunications. The Internet has created the objective conditions for the emergence of countless national origin based networks which allow mostly (but not exclusively) highly educated expatriates, the ability to maintain their ties with the culture and ongoing processes of economic, social and political change in their motherland. This is why for me, being part of the Argentine network is so rewarding; it is a home away from home.
In light of that experience, and influenced by the way people involved with telecommunications viewed the potential effects of virtual interaction, I expected PSN would "naturally" become a virtual community; i.e., a "place" where people would spontaneously and quickly develop friendly relationships, based on trust, respect for each other ideas and so forth . This naive belief has been replaced with the realization that what goes on in cyberspace is far more complex than what simple extrapolations from real to virtual life would lead one to believe.
Because of its power in influencing common sense and social science perceptions of the effects of telecommunications, I will first discuss the sociological concept of community together with some arguments for and against the possibility of "virtual communities." I will afterwards describe PSN's patterns of interaction, the problems that eventually emerged and intended resolutions. Given the nature of those patterns, and taking also into consideration observations based in my participation in other electronic networks, I will present a sociological analysis of PSN at its present stage of development with the goal of establishing 1) whether or not it is appropriate to refer to an electronic discussion network as a community and, if so, in what sense; 2) the features of electronic discussion networks (EDNs) favorable and inimical for the emergence of a virtual community; and 3) whether PSN could be adequately described as a potential, emergent or already existing community. I will end with some considerations about the future role of professional EDNs in the process of collective knowledge production. I hypothesize that professional EDNs create the conditions that will eventually lead to the overthrow of the individualistic and commodified forms of knowledge production prevalent today.
COMMUNITY AND SOCIETY
The idea that cyberspace is the realm of virtual community
is by now commonplace in the mass media and in the everyday talk
of people actively involved in telecommunications (Rheingold,
1994; Wellman and Gulia, 1996). Sociologically, the concept of
community is the opposite of the concept of society and has been
used to characterize the presumably better, more humane social
relationships that preceded the emergence of modern society. The
idea of community also has a utopian dimension, when used to
depict the kinds of social relations people envision as desirable
alternatives to current forms of sociability.
In the ideal typical opposition between community and society, as outlined in conservative classical sociological thought, community entails social relationships characterized by loyalty, honor, intimacy, moral commitment, social cohesion, emotional depth. Relationships are primary; i.e., relationships of solidarity, cooperation, and fellowship. According to Toennies, in community, individuals are essentially united despite separating factors whereas in society, members are essentially separated despite unifying factors (cited in Nisbet, 1966: 75). Society is the realm of impersonality, individualism, competition, utility, self-interest and rationality, where social relationships are instrumental, rationally motivated, reflecting the rational calculation of interests, without emotional identifications. Communal social relations entail the subjective feeling of belonging together, of being implicated in the existence of others, of being part of a whole greater than oneself, whose standards, objectives and traditions matter and come before individual needs and interests.
These ideal types are useful for capturing qualitative differences among groups and modes of social organization. In real life, however, communities include instrumental dimensions and societies, whatever their degree of industrialization, rest upon non-instrumental, "non-contractual elements of contract" which guarantee the existence of the social order (Durkheim, [1893] 1984: 149-175). This interpenetration of apparently opposite modes of organization and interaction is also typical, as I will argue, of today's so-called virtual communities.
TECHNOLOGY AND COMMUNITY FORMATION
Many today believe that the Internet, facilitating the
practically unlimited circulation and exchange of information,
has become the material basis for the development of virtual
communities. The idea and the practice of sharing as a basis for
community building are very powerful and are best exemplified by
the availability of free information and by the eagerness with
which many have ensured the free distribution of their work.
There are thousands of bulletin boards and EDNs where people seek
and usually find anything they want, from parental care tips,
recipes, therapy, financial advice to companionship, potential
marriage partners or partners for virtual sex.
Another and equally important potential basis for community formation is the experience of daily exchange of personal, often intimate virtual messages among individuals dispersed over a physical space that varies in size with the kind of network; some are local community networks aiming to provide information and strengthen social integration within a city, while most have a regional and international scope. Virtual intimacy would appear to be a viable and appealing alternative to the impersonal and competitive world in which we live, reflected in the automobile and concomitant suburbanization, geographical and social mobility, class, socio-economic status, gender, race divisions and many other social forces that divide and alienate people: "... the wired world is a response to certain cultural changes over the last two or three generations -- the breakup of the family, the breakdown of community, the degradation of the physical environment" (Slouka in Barlow et al, 1995: 37).
Another powerful inducement to become "wired" is the perceived egalitarian nature of virtual interaction. In virtual communities class, gender, race/ethnicity and other differences are, in principle, invisible; they do not create barriers and conflicts among people as they do in "real" life. Unlike what often happens in "real" social settings, people are not excluded nor rejected because of who they are and how they look; everyone is welcome to participate, to share, to express his/her views. Real life communities and societies predate their members and coerce them through custom, tradition, and class power working through the market's "invisible hand." On the other hand, most virtual communities are freely created, and membership and participation is largely freely chosen, though office workers, bureaucrats and professionals might have to participate in specific networks as part of their employment.
Finally, the explosive growth in the numbers of people
cruising the "information superhighway" and the yet untapped
potential of the technology to affect practically every aspect of
our lives have led many to believe that it ushers the way for
dramatic changes in social relations which not only privilege
communal, rather than societal, patterns of interaction and
sharing but also create the conditions for an effective challenge
to existing hierarchies and power structures. In the words of an
enthusiastic supporter of these changes,
"with the development of the Internet, and with the
increasing pervasiveness of communication between networked
computers we are in the middle of the most transforming
technological event since the capture of fire....the
biggest thing since Gutenberg, but....you have to go back
farther" (Barlow in Barlow et al, 1995: 36).
There are, however, those who are critical of the very idea
of virtual communities and are skeptical of the possibilities for
social change many consider inherent in telecommunications. From
their standpoint, the notion of virtual community is misplaced,
for the groupings of self-selected individuals in bulletin
boards, discussion lists, activist lists and so on reproduce the
main features of the dominant society: class, gender, age,
racial, ethnic, bureaucratic and occupational hierarchies are
well and alive in cyberspace.
From the standpoint of the critics (e.g., Slouka in Barlow et al, 1995; Stallabrass, 1995; Cockburn, 1995: 43; Scheer, 1995) belief in virtual communities is an ideology that obscures the reality underlying the pseudo-communitarian patterns of virtual interaction. To speak of virtual community to engage in "cyberbabble" (Cockburn, 1995: 43); it is a projection, the product of wishful thinking and desire for the sense of belonging, fellowship, solidarity, nurture and safety that the daily living in modern capitalist societies routinely denies to most of its citizens. The virtual community is a fantasy, an illusion, a way to escape alienated conditions of existence because, paradoxically, people seek togetherness through a medium that requires their physical isolation. The kind of community feeling or sense of belonging they achieve is thoroughly ideological, in the Althusserian sense: "[I]deology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (Althusser, 1971: 162). Cyberspace communitarians live in an imaginary relationship (community) to their real conditions of existence (competition, and spacial and physical isolation).
Furthermore, while most virtual communities seem to be open to everyone, there have to be numerous exceptions. True, in the U.S., admission to countless public networks is open to most college faculty and students and to everyone who can afford the equipment and the access fee. But there is bound to be countless private networks formed for a variety of reasons; e.g., a virtual support group for dieters who know each other, or narrowly defined networks created by intellectuals and professionals (famous or not) wishing to communicate only with their peers. Underlying the world of "democratic," visible public networks, open to anyone to wishes to join, there is a world of "elitist," invisible, private networks known exclusively to their members, where membership is by invitation only. While the price of admission to public virtual communities is primarily the equipment and the price of the Internet connection (some employers subsidize the latter for millions of users), recognized competence or membership in a particular "in-group" is the price for joining a private one. This means that despite appearances, there is less egalitarianism and openness in cyberspace than it is usually assumed. Professional virtual communities, for example, could be ranked on the basis of the professional prestige of their organizers and members and the intellectual quality of their archived discussions. However, to the extent that in cyberspace, as in real social space, the "inner circles" remain invisible and inaccessible to the public, the actual characteristics of network stratification will remain beyond the reach of empirical research, at least for the foreseeable future.
To these criticisms, one can add a sociological critique: virtual communities lack the distinguishing features of real, historical communities because of several reasons; 1) they are open, they lack traditions and stability for they create and recreate themselves as their membership shifts; 2) they reproduce the stratified and competitive relations of the larger, historical society and, consequently, offer no real refuge from the oppressive and competitive social relations within which most people live their real, non-virtual lives; and 3) they are extremely vulnerable to attacks by disgruntled members or by outsiders who resent what a given network might stand for.
This brief discussion of the meaning of community and diverse perceptions about the potential of telecommunications for community building establishes a broad framework useful to make sense of the trajectory of PSN, the Progressive Sociologists Network.
THE CASE OF PSN
PSN is not "alone" in cyberspace; it is nested in a larger
virtual community, CSF (Communications for a Sustainable Future),
created and managed by Don Roper, professor of economics at the
University of Colorado at Boulder. CSF's communications
guidelines, incorporated in PSN's welcome message to all new
subscribers, state that "CSF was founded on the idea that
quality communications between people of different viewpoints can
be an avenue for securing a more promising future." People who
join any CSF list are told that they are "undertaking a modest
obligation to write in a way that is respectful of the views of
others." CSF has a strong sociological component; besides PSN,
CSF hosts WSN (World-System Network), ENVTECSOC (Environment,
Technology and Society), SOCGRAD (Sociology Graduate Students),
and PPN (Progressive Population Network). CSF is also the home
of several EDNs about economics, political economy, ecology and
feminism and their corresponding archives. Like PSN, they share
the values CSF stands for: social justice and sustainability.
PSN is more than a forum for discussion; it is also an extensive archive (http://csf.colorado.edu/psn) which includes, besides the monthly proceedings, a variety of other resources useful for sociologists such as, for example, PSN on The Bell Curve and PSN on Communitarianism (culled from the discussions), the proceedings of PPN (Progressive Population Network), REVS (Religious Racial EthnoNationalist Violence Studies) and the HOMELESS network's proceedings and collection of world wide resources and information on the homeless. PSN also offers the possibility of electronic publishing; works by thirty five former and current members of PSN are retrievable by anyone who "visits." In "Martha's Corner," people can find amusement as well as interesting articles I have collected through the years. PSN is also proud to be one of the three sites where the Marx Engels library is located (http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx).
PSN and the Section on Marxist Sociology
At the time I started PSN, I wrongly assumed that its
membership would come primarily from the Section on Marxist
Sociology. I thought PSN would benefit the section by creating a
virtual basis for an eventually stronger real community. Many of
the Section members have known each other since the heady days,
in the late 1960s, of the Sociology Liberation Movement, the
Radical Caucus and political struggles within the American
Sociological Association that eventually resulted in the creation
of the Section on Marxist Sociology. The Section was both
professional and political; its core was a dedicated community
of activist professionals who worked together in ways that made
the Section a little political community within the larger
association. As the years went by, the Section became larger
and more impersonal, and its members appeared less willing to
commit their time to Section activities during the annual
meetings. I thought that telecommunications could strengthen
the Section, by expanding its social networks and increasing its
social and political cohesion. The kind of community I had in
mind was similar to a cafe, like those I used to go to when I
was growing up and studying in Argentina, where people spent
hours discussing politics and other topics, where people knew and
trusted each other and respected each other's ideas despite deep
disagreements, where one felt comfortable, because one belonged
there. The cafe as a metaphor for the quality of virtual
interaction is intuitively appealing and widespread; the
Argentine network has its cafe and others have written about its
appropriateness to capture the possibilities open by virtual
interaction (e.g., Wellman et al, 1996: 226). But, as the
network developed, neither virtual community nor virtual cafe
turned out to be appropriate to capture the nature of PSN's
interaction patterns.
First of all, I naively thought that once Section members learned about PSN, they would all enthusiastically join. But, as it turned out, a variety of factors kept many away; e.g., lack of institutional access, a perception of e-mail as an arcane, difficult process, lack of time, lack of interest, dislike or rejection of telecommunications, etc. Consequently, while there is overlap between the Section and PSN, not everyone in the Section is in PSN. PSN does further the Section's interests by improving communications among some of its members, but its potential community building effects are broader for it brings together numerous faculty and students from the U.S. and abroad who, regardless of their philosophical and political differences, are attracted by PSN's self-styled "progressive" standpoint. Most of what goes on daily in PSN is not directly a function of the Section on Marxist Sociology except in the sense that, because of its support for Marxist and neo-Marxist thinking, and because it serves as a channel for communications among section members and announcement of Section activities, PSN is, effectively, the virtual branch of the Section.
Heterogeneity and Conflict
The first conflict PSN experienced, when it was still very
small and composed almost entirely of Section members, arose
from a debate about the Section's name. Some wanted it changed,
to end its identification with Marxism. This view did not
prevail but the debate brought into the open, from the very
beginning, the theoretical and ideological heterogeneity of the
Section and the fledgling network. This heterogeneity continues;
PSN members share a critical stance towards sociology and support
working class and civil rights struggles, but their actual
theoretical and political commitments vary a great deal. This is
reflected in daily exchanges as well as in occasional "flames"
(i.e., sneering, sarcastic, condescending remarks designed to put
down those with whom the writer disagrees).
Besides ideological, political and theoretical differences, members differ greatly in their writing styles and in the thoughtfulness of their messages. At various times, the arrogance of some members, their sarcastic, patronizing and insulting ways of stating their views and criticizing others reached such a point that I considered asking them to leave the list. I never thought I would actually unsubscribe someone, until on one occasion I reached the limits of my tolerance and unilaterally did it. The membership was divided about the wisdom of my decision and I had to put up with a great deal of abuse from those whose behavior had prompted my decision. In the end, by a very narrow margin the membership supported the readmission of that subscriber. Against my better judgement but for the sake of the stability of the network I reinstated that person. He never again indulged in the kind of behavior that had led to his removal. Since then, "flames" have become infrequent in PSN though they are an endemic problem in all EDNs.
This example highlights the lack of common standards of civility and its potentially destructive effects on EDNS. To the effects of a heterogeneous membership we must add the attraction cyberspace exerts upon misfits and loners, individuals with serious problems in interpersonal relations whose antisocial behavior is likely to flare up in any EDN. Altogether these factors challenge the idea that electronic networks automatically generate community-like patterns of computer mediated social interaction. In fact EDNs are -- particularly in their early stages -- the site of political struggles about the standards of communication and the definitions of acceptable content which will eventually characterize the network and shape its identity. These struggles between subscribers and list owners, and among the subscribers themselves, have no predictable outcomes for they are very much affected by the unique combination of participants and the individual values, objectives and expectations they bring to the networks they create or join. These are also never-ending struggles because newcomers, accustomed perhaps to what goes on in other EDNs, learn about PSN's standards when they infringe them. I have "lurked" in networks where anything goes, where four letter words are routinely used and where people address each other with withering sarcasm and disdain. That was not the model I wanted for PSN but I alone, without strong support from the membership, would not have been able to impose any standards. Current PSN norms and standards, which are largely unstated, have emerged from confrontation and in the continuing process of learning, through trial and error, how to create the conditions for rewarding interaction among hundreds of people most of whom I have never met nor will I ever meet face to face.
From Flames to Moderation
Soon after PSN started, the problem of "flames" arose in
conjunction with a substantial proportion of personal messages of
marginal sociological relevance. Several members complained and
requested a moderated list. I agreed and for about two months I
had a parallel list called PSNM (PSN Moderated) which eventually
died out. It never included more than 10 members and the reason
why it dwindled away had to do with my having lost track of it,
as the list grew and demands upon my time increased.
To moderate a list entails the reading of every message to decide whether or not to approve it for distribution to the network. Consideration of the possibility of changing PSN into a moderated EDN never came up again until early in 1995, when the increase in the number of people unsubscribing from PSN (reaching, by March, between 80 and 100 per month) led me to request, from every person who decided to leave PSN, information about the causes of their decision. Setting aside personal reasons (e.g., loss of the account, graduation, holidays, sabbaticals, job changes, etc), the main factors prompting people to leave were a) the quantity of messages and lack of time to deal with them (we must keep in mind people generally subscribe to several EDNs); and b) the quality of the messages. Here the complaints ranged from lack of sociological substance and "too narrow a focus on U.S. issues" (from some European members) to dissatisfaction with the proliferation of cross-postings, occasional flames, personal exchanges, and requests for routine information about the network functioning; i.e., "administrivia."
The flame throwers have always been male; flames and the writing style of some male members contributed, at the beginning, to a very scant female participation in the network. Today women participate more often and they do so in ways which, in my view, always enhances the quality of the conversation, because their messages are well written and sociologically relevant, something I cannot say of everything that men post. True, women participate less than men and this probably reflects their smaller numbers; women comprise approximately 22 percent of PSN's total active membership of 724.
Freedom of Speech
Freedom of speech is an important and troublesome issue in
cyberspace (e.g., Wiener, 1994; Shapiro, 1995). On the one hand,
any attempts to deal with "flames" or speech that some members of
an electronic network may find offensive can be perceived as
instances of "censorship." But to allow such messages to
continue can eventually tear a network apart or push it in a
direction contrary to the list owner's and most members
objectives. I gave this matter a great deal of thought and
reached the following conclusion: while principled debates
matter, people's feelings also matter and one should be able to
exchange ideas in ways that challenge arguments without at the
same time making personal attacks on one's opponents. This
requires a kind of self-awareness and care in the crafting of
one's messages that many seem to be unable or unwilling to
develop. An incident occurred which forced me to make a decision
which changed PSN. A member who had problems with his address
asked me to forward a message to PSN which contained a very harsh
assessment of another member's views and intentions. I asked him
whether he would consider revising it, without changing the
substance of his argument but toning down the personal remarks.
He did not agree and, as PSN was an unmoderated list, I had to
post the message as requested. This resulted in the person under
attack publicly to quit the network. Later he joined us again;
though his views clash often with those of most people in PSN, I
am glad he returned, because we learn from confronting views
different from ours. The process leading to his resignation,
however, convinced me that PSN had to become a moderated list if
it was going to survive and grow.
Pondering these issues and the reasons people gave for leaving PSN, I realized that I had established two somewhat contradictory goals for the network. I wanted PSN to be a community, a virtual cafe where people could feel free to participate without fear of being trampled over by those who might disagree with them. While the notion of community does not entail the absence of conflict, I believed --- and I still do -- that intellectual conflicts and principled debates preclude the use of "flames." Hence the PSN rule of discourse included in the welcome message: "Replicate in our virtual space the rules of civility we abide by when we meet face to face."
At the same time, I wanted PSN to grow and become a respected forum for progressive views, a strong intellectual community attractive to faculty and students everywhere, which would contribute, like many other progressive discussion lists, to keep alive among the younger generations of scholars the vision of a just and equitable world. The two goals appeared to be incompatible, for the open, often chatty, friendly though sometimes unfriendly cafe could not, at the same time, be the kind of intellectual resource many sought when joining PSN. To put it differently, while many joined PSN and stayed because they liked the openness and lack of rules of the virtual community they thought they found, many others joined and left because they found perhaps too much community, too much conversation, too much sharing of whatever members thought was interesting in other lists (i.e., unsolicited cross-postings) and less sustained sociological discussions than expected. These ex-PSNers joined because of manifest professional self-interest; they were not seeking friends or community (at least, not primarily); they were rationally seeking intellectual stimulation, an opportunity to learn and contribute which they saw diminished or precluded by the volume of mail and the perceived lack of sociological relevance in many messages.
I dealt with the situation by creating, in June 1995, a moderated PSN and maintaining my original vision in what is now called the PSN-CAFE. Members were given the option to stay in the moderated list or join the unmoderated cafe which automatically receives everything posted to PSN. Some members chose to define moderation as censorship and joined the cafe which, at this time, has about 50 members. Moderation, however, is not equivalent to censorship; it is an editing process because "communication in cyberspace is closer to ordinary publishing than to a new realm of freedom" (Wiener, 1994: 827).
The overwhelming majority (about 650 active members) stayed in the moderated list, which is also the choice of most new subscribers. True, at the beginning, inertia might have been a factor in determining why most subscribers did not switch to the cafe; today, a year after, membership in either list is determined by choice. Early every month all members receive a monthly reminder of the list's main commands and options, including clear instructions about how to change from PSN to PSNCAFE and vice versa. Since moderation started in June, 1995, membership in PSN-CAFE declined from 60, immediately after moderation was implemented, to 50 members; membership in PSN, on the other hand, increased about 20 percent.
I created an editorial board selected from the nucleus of early subscribers. I chose individuals whose judgement I respected and whose messages demonstrated concern for process, thus contributing to the quality of the discussions. This board is notified of incoming messages and each member of the editorial board uses his or her own judgement to accept, ignore or discard a message. We don't coordinate our activities and we don't see eye to eye in everything. But we respect each other's decisions. The criteria we use are rather general and give moderators ample room to exercise their judgement. To be posted in PSN, messages have to be cogent and sociologically relevant (in whatever way each moderator may define that relevance). We reject "flames," short personal responses to other people's messages, most unsolicited cross-postings and advertisements, incoherent or poorly written messages, etc. If the criteria seem vague, it is because they are; we try to exert some quality control without rigid limitations on each moderator's definition of quality.
While the absence of moderation has its advantages in the eyes of those who prefer it, it also has some disadvantages, in terms of the quantity and relative quality of messages, the style of discourse that develops and patterns of participation. For example, cross-posting can become a problem in an unmoderated list and it happened, to a limited extent, in PSN. While some members liked it, others didn't, complained about the volume of unsolicited mail and unsubscribed. When carried to extremes, regardless of the good intentions of the senders, cross-posting can objectively become a form of network abuse because it undermines dialogue, changing the nature of the EDN away from discussion and towards a sort of clearing house for other EDNs. Another practice, similar in its objective effects to crossposting, is the sending of messages reflecting the author's political views, intellectual or current affairs interests, etc. without any attempt, by the author, to engage the membership in dialogue. Usually, persons engaging in those practices send such messages to several EDNs at the same time and most of the time those messages elicit no public responses.
It would, of course, be desirable if professional EDNs could be self-regulated (i.e., unmoderated) while offering, at the same time, a consistently high proportion of intellectually rewarding messages. Moderation, however, becomes eventually necessary, especially in the case of a network like PSN which has extremely broad intellectual and political objectives. A year after it started, moderation has been very successful in lowering in half the volume of mail; quality has improved and total subscriptions are again rising. Between January and May 1995, prior to moderation, 9 messages were posted daily; in the same time period in 1996, the average number of daily messages is 4. Since moderation, PSN receives an average of 4.4 daily messages whereas PSN-CAFE receives 8.
Cyber-roles
Just as it happens in face to face on-going group meetings
in which a variety of predictable forms of individuals'
participation emerge, in EDNs subscribers sort themselves into
roles such as the cross-poster, the curmudgeon, the devil's
advocate, the humorist, the one who replies sending back to the
entire list the entire original message, no matter how long it
was, with a line or two at the bottom; the one with an axe to
grind, the sarcastic one, the incredibly smart and articulate
one, the incoherent one, the one compelled to say a word or two
about almost everything it is said; the paranoic; the kind warm
fuzzy, etc. etc. I am sure these and other cyber-roles are
familiar to anyone who subscribes to several EDNs. It soon
becomes possible, by glancing at the messages, to recognize the
senders and decide whether or not the message might be worth
opening. The great role divide, of course, is between the
"lurking" or "silent majority," who seldom participate, and a
small number of "regulars" whose contributions can become fairly
predictable. Over the last two years out of approximately 1,500
subscribers 432 posted messages at least once, and no one posted
over 5 percent of all messages. In the short run, participation
is more uneven, though PSN is moderated; from the last 500
messages, one subscriber posted 18 percent while another posted
12 percent of all messages.
The "regulars" set the tone, a tone that can be friendly, informative and intellectually challenging, intimidating, irritating or inane. Among them, there are those who claim the right to post whatever they wish while defending their right to do so on the basis of freedom of speech. In the absence of moderation, it is possible for one person to destroy a list (focusing members' energy in pointless but heated debates) or to make it unpalatable to most members except those who share their views. PSN is less vulnerable to this sort of thing. PSN-CAFE, on the other hand, is at risk like all unmoderated EDNs. One can safely assume that within PSN and PSN-CAFE there are at least some shared standards: e.g., PSN members prefer fewer and more substantive mail and are willing to trust some of their fellow PSNers to decide what they will get in their mailboxes. Those who prefer the cafe presumably do so because they cherish "freedom of speech," which is ideally a desirable good, but in practice is tantamount to giving everyone the right to stuff their mail boxes with whatever they wish to post.
From Virtual Community to Virtual Journal
Some argue that moderation is censorship and no objective
criteria can differentiate between the two. That argument places
the burden of sorting trough the mail and deciding what matters
in the hands of each subscriber, many of whom would rather save
time and delegate the task. In my view, moderation is not
censorship: it is similar to editorial work. Nobody would expect
professional journals to publish everything submitted to them; in
fact, nobody would subscribe to a journal which did not claim to
publish the best. In the same way, judicious moderation can, in
time, raise the quality of messages posted in EDNs so that they
eventually become electronic journals in which intellectual
products are collectively produced. This is why I call myself
PSN's Founding Editor, rather than "list owner," for I envision
PSN and similar EDNs as electronic journals of the future. Why?
Because it is more exciting and rewarding, far less alienating,
to produce knowledge collectively, through dialogue, than to
work alone in the competitive conditions created by the old
journal format. I believe that, as the quality of communications
in EDNs improves and the rewards people attain participating
increase, younger scholars will dedicate increasingly more time
to writing for their favorite EDNs rather than for paper
journals. One could test this hypothesis by finding out, five
years from now, if the rate of acceptance in major professional
journals has risen or, most likely, whether they still exist.
The idea that journals could be replaced by electronic publication may seem today utopian, especially in the context of the publish or perish constraints within which academics work. Besides, there are many who make a fetish of their refusal to learn the new technologies and if one takes into account the profit motives of publishers and the convenience of reading print, rather than screens, the notion that publications might become primarily electronic seems indeed farfetched. But the high costs of printed materials, especially journals, is already straining the budget of most libraries. Electronic publication, allowing readers to purchase and download only the article that interests them instead of the whole journal, coupled with easy access to printers, might become a feasible and desirable alternative. And, as once downloaded, an article can be made universally available, electronic publishing will intensify the process towards a qualitative change in intellectual production and consumption, away from commodity production and towards collective production and consumption.
Reassessing the Possibility of Virtual Community
Is it appropriate to refer to PSN and, for that matter, to
EDNs as communities? Public EDNs are virtual spaces without
boundaries, circumscribed only by language and accessibility.
They have no virtual walls limiting the number of people who can
"hang out" at the virtual cafe or whatever metaphor we use to
name them. Constant changes in the size and composition of the
membership conspires against the development of communitarian
ties characterized by cooperation, intimacy, common standards,
trust and so forth. People join, stay or leave for different
reasons, personal or professional, related or unrelated to what
goes on within the EDN. Subscribers also differ in many other
ways (e.g., class, SES and other forms of stratification,
professional status, theoretical and political allegiances,
intellectual background, etc.) and this heterogeneity is a
permanent feature of all EDNs, though it might vary with the
scope of their concerns and with the nature of their discipline.
Other barriers to the emergence of a virtual community stem from the behavior of the more active subscribers and the list owner. To the extent they set a confrontational style, or adopt a preponderance of roles with negative effects on group cohesion, the membership turnover will be high and remaining members will most likely opt to remain silent, adopting the passive role of observers, without developing a sense of identity as members of the EDN; i.e., the feeling of belonging to that group and sharing responsibility for its development and potential success. Whether or not the list owner or owners exercise some leadership is also a crucial factor. Hands-off list owners usually wait until their network is about to disintegrate in flames to take action and introduce moderation.
Finally, the motives leading people to join a network are also important factors in determining the degree to which those networks evolve into virtual communities. People who subscribe for purely professional instrumental reasons are less likely to care whether or not the network is community-like in its functioning, as long as it delivers the information and the intellectual stimulation they seek. Conversely, people seeking community may be more tolerant of messages falling outside a network's professional goals. People's motives in joining PSN and other progressive professional networks will vary also in relationship to their place of study and/or employment. Those from small institutions located in small towns as well as those who find themselves isolated in conservative departments will be more likely to join an EDN, especially a progressive one, with the twofold goal of having access to intellectual stimulation and a community of peers, something they may lack in real life. Those from prestigious, elite institutions are less likely to be interested in the "progressive" aspect of what goes in an EDN and might seek more "straight" social science. But public EDNs (especially progressive ones) are less likely to attract professional "stars" who, one can safely surmise, already belong to exclusive private EDNs. If they ever subscribe to a public EDN, they are likely to do so out of curiosity and will be more inclined to unsubscribe for lack of time or, in light of their status and professional interests, perceived lack of "substance." Progressives who live in large urban areas will have so many more competing demands on their time and so many more like-minded "real" friends that they will also be less likely to join EDNs and, if they do so, their involvement might be constructive but sporadic.
There are, then, structural (lack of boundaries and a heterogeneous membership constantly changing in size and composition) and individual level factors (positive and negative roles, list owners' degree of involvement, individuals' status within the profession, subscribers' place of residence, study and/or employment) which can hinder and further community development in EDNs. I identified these factors on the basis of my experience in working with PSN, but I could have easily generated most of those categories a priori. However, there is one other crucial determinant of virtual community development which I learned about from PSN. There is in PSN a small core of people who has been there from the beginning, some of whom are Section members also and know each other personally. It is in this small core that one could identify the existence of real, not imaginary, comunitarian ties based on their commitment to the Section and to PSN and what it stands for. The interpenetration of communitarian and societal characteristics that one find in real life social contexts is replicated in successful EDNs; they have a small communitarian inner circle surrounded by the more instrumentally oriented subscribers some of whom might, in the future, join the communitarian core. But it is important to notice that the basis for the development of this communitarian inner core is not purely virtual, but rests on previous social and professional bonds established through membership and participation in professional organizations. In the case of PSN, crucial for its strength as a network is the core of its members who belong to the Section on Marxist Sociology of the ASA. It is also during ASA meetings and in other professional contexts that PSN members, whether or not they belong to the Section, meet face to face to initiate or continue existing personal and professional relationships.
As writers about these matters have pointed out, once virtual networks develop they tend to spill over in real life. People arrange to meet to carry on the EDNs' purposes or mainly to socialize and build real, in addition to virtual, friendships and collegial relations. After participating for over a year in the Argentine network, for example, I went to Argentina where I met in Buenos Aires with a group of about thirty members of the network. It was a very rewarding experience for we met as old friends, cutting through all the tedious preliminaries typical of most first time face to face social encounters. Something similar happens at the American Sociological Association meetings among PSN members and this is one of the very positive sides to network membership. Subscribers from small towns and colleges who, in the past, might not have felt inclined to attend the national meetings will be more likely to attend those as well as regional meetings now that they can meet fellow members of the EDNs they belong to. One could hypothesize that attendance to professional meetings will grow as more and more people feel inclined to go to strengthen their social/professional network by making, through face to face interaction, their virtual community real. Networking, job hunting and community building have always been an important aspect of professional meetings and they might become their sole raison d'etre in the future, while intellectual exchanges increasingly take place in virtual conferences and private EDNs. Some subscribers, in personal communication, have told me that, for them, perhaps one of the most rewarding aspects of PSN is the way in which it has expanded their professional and social networks. In my experience, a couple of PSN members have visited me in Boulder and at the ASA I have enjoyed meeting a fair number of them. One of the reasons why I look forward to the meetings is the annual PSN event, in which a number of us go out to dinner, as well as the encounters with individuals who may or may not attend the main event.
The experience of PSN leads me to hypothesize that the initial impulse for the development of successful EDNs comes from real life contacts among like minded people. In the absence of real, i.e., face to face relations among people, I believe it is more difficult for EDNs to develop. I am hypothesizing that the emergence of the virtual community core within successful EDNs rests upon real life community bonds. These bonds might be a mix of professional, ideological, political and personal ties with a varying component of geographical proximity; but they have to be present at the very beginning for an EDN to succeed. I base this hypothesis not just on the experience of PSN but also upon the very different trajectory of two other EDNs I created; PPN, the Progressive Population Network, and MATFEM, Materialist Feminism. I created PPN with a group of graduate students who attended a seminar on population theory I taught three years ago. We were on equal footing as editors of PPN. But their work and study commitments kept them away from actively participating in PPN. My teaching other subjects also made it difficult for me to invest the time to keep PPN as an active network. I created MATFEM with two co-editors whom I have never met personally. It was active at the beginning but it eventually became silent. I surmise that work demands, especially the "publish or perish" pressures most academics work under, stand in the way of frequent and high quality contributions to an EDN so that, in the absence of an active core of daily contributors, EDNs become dormant.
Once I created and announced those networks, people joined in, but they never developed a sustained level of conversation. Members sporadically post messages but these seldom elicit responses. The silence in both lists is partly my responsibility; I have been too busy and involved in teaching and writing projects unrelated to PPN and MATFEM, so I lacked the time to participate consistently and urge members to join in the conversation. But, I strongly believe that the silence also reflects the lack of an inner group of people some of whom know each other personally, and who share theoretical and political commitments in addition to professional interests. Through early and ongoing dialogue, inner groups set the tone or climate of the network as well as the emergent norms about acceptable content and styles of communication, establishing limits of tolerance and, most importantly, a level of trust and mutual respect. These unintended effects of communication among people who already know one another or about each other, are likely to clash (as it happened in PSN) with subscribers who want immediate "professional gratification" (i.e., substantively relevant messages) and complain about lack of acceptable content, and with others whose style of communication violates the unstated and emergent standards of the network. It is in the process of solving these initial conflicts that the fledgling virtual community begins to attain a degree of self-consciousness which can eventually culminate in the development of a moderated network with an editorial board formed by old timers in the net. In the absence of this initial core, a network formed exclusively by people who joined for purely instrumental reasons is likely to stall and flounder until, in time, a core is formed through subscribers' efforts to revitalize the network; e.g., together with a PPN subscriber we are planning to get together at the forthcoming meeting of the American Sociological Association. We plan to invite others to join us and, if we are successful, we might set the basis for the initial core group which, I hypothesize, is necessary to set an EDN in motion.
CONCLUSION
It is not technology in itself but the social relations
within which technology is used which produce the community
effects which entice many people to "get wired." Face to face
social relations are precarious, for the most part, because the
demands of family, work and suburbanization tend to privatize
people and narrow their circle of intimate friends. These
conditions of existence have led many to romanticize virtual
communities and assume that all it takes is simply to get the
necessary equipment and join in. But a close examination of the
stages through which an EDN develops, together with the lessons
learned in the process of creating EDNs and subscribing to a
variety of networks leads me to the realization that the
achievement of community is as precarious and fraught with
uncertainty in cyberspace as in the physical world. Both virtual
and real communities partake of similar contradictions and
tensions between their tradition, boundary and norm making forces
and the challenges of individualism and instrumental/utilitarian
patterns of behavior. And equally important, of course, are the
structural barriers to community created by the heterogeneity,
and changing size and composition of virtual and real
populations. This is why I conclude that EDNs, if viewed in
their totality, will never fully achieve community-like forms of
virtual interaction. PSN as a whole will never be a community in
practice, though each member might imagine that it is. People
communicate in ways characterized by "affective neutrality" and
conflict lies just below the surface.
There is within PSN, however, a group of people who do constitute an emergent community; those who agreed to share the moderating process with me; those who send me private messages of support and encouragement; those who take advantage of travel for professional and personal reasons to seek out PSN members; and those who find in PSN colleagues and friends who share their specific research interests and communicate frequently outside the public network. I have no way of knowing, without asking, the extent to which PSN serves to bring people together in collegial relationships but many members have told me this is one of the aspects of PSN they like the most. One could, therefore, speak more accurately of PSN, and most EDNs, as an emergent set of communities, virtual, real, public and private. Each of them will always be a subset of the membership. In time, if the moderation process works and both PSN and PSN-CAFE thrive in their divergent ways, there is the potential for the virtual community to include a larger subset of the membership. But the creation of virtual communities is not, for me, the most revolutionary implication of EDNs and telecommunications technology. These technologies entail a momentous qualitative change in the forces of knowledge production (the combination of technologies and social relations within which knowledge is produced) and their development is undermining the property relations within which knowledge and information are produced, distributed and appropriated. Under capitalism, knowledge and education are commodities which are bought and sold; intellectual production is a form of property protected by copyright laws and we are trained to see our ideas not as something to be shared but as something we own, control, and have the right to sell and get credit for, in the form of money and prestige. The Internet and the new technologies developing around it have already made possible not only the sharing of information but the almost instantaneous transmission of extremely large amounts of information. Virtual universities are likely to flourish also.
The most important aspect of the sharing process that goes on in the Internet is, therefore, the challenge to the private ownership of knowledge and information. EDNs create the possibility for the collective production of knowledge. To give a concrete example: I felt while writing this paper a bit disloyal to PSN for I realize that I am presenting a one-sided view of a complex process that includes many actors whose voices should be heard. Perhaps the way I feel is determined by PSN's "community effect," for I think that a more complex and more informative account could be written with the collaboration of its members. At any rate, I come to the conclusion that community building, to the extent it is possible, is the first step towards knowledge sharing, collective knowledge production and the possibility to begin to unlearn patterns of possessiveness and ownership that sustain the competitive world which we seek to escape from by fleeing to cyberspace. Whether cyberspace becomes totally a mirror image of the "real" world or ushers the way for the practice of different social relations and forms of consciousness remains to be seen; but networks like PSN will be there at the forefront of the struggle for social change.
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