Virtual Communities: PC Revolution

The creation of the mouse and easy to use graphical interfaces helped transform computing from a geeky hobby to an experience of a new user exploring a new world. Artists started playing with interactive novels, where the reader can control what happens to a degree (Storyspace is an authoring tool for this). Also the first virtual worlds, MUDs emerged. One of the first at Stanford was a computer version of Dungeons and Dragons. VR seeks to go beyond movies by giving the participants a role 161 (cf Brenda Laurel and Bruce Damer). In MUDs, you grow in your ability to change the environment R149. Learning how the world works increases your power. In social MUDs mistakes aren't fatal, but in gaming MUDs you can die (sometimes to be reincarnated). MUDs are magic because description is creation. Brenda Laurel says strong identification with your role is an example of mimesis, the soul and thus society changing power of drama (R 155). TinyMUD at UCB had 3000 players and 15K rooms. This might be recognized as cooperative art some day, just as no one took Shakespeare seriously as art in his day. Actually the history of VR closely parallels that of early movies (just for one person). McLuhan stated that Gutenberg made everyone a reader. Xerox made everyone a publisher." Will computers/Internet make everyone a writer? 165 Computer speed up creation [and lessens the need for talent or years of practice drawing lines or playing scales?]. But of course you don't discover the realm of the imagination with a PC any more than you discover literature with a typewriter 249. However, computer can allow us to see patterns that are otherwise invisible to us, and to test ideas

Counter-Culture Origins.: Virtual reality is am extension of 60's consciousness experimentation, "group mind" tried to be achieved by Merry Prankster acid tests 1966 (the second one, held after a Rolling Stones concert in San Jose, which had an obscure Palo Alto band called the Grateful Dead, whose lyricist John Perry Barlow, also investigated and wrote about Virtual communities.(25). One of the first references to VR was by Stewart Brand, later editor of the Whole Earth Catalogue, a book that pulled together the ideas and tools of the counterculture. These ideas blurred low (going back to the land) and high tech, including the ideas of Buckminster Fuller, who argued that for the first time in history we had enough for everybody, if we just deployed the resources intelligently enough. His concept of tiprudder (a small rudder that turns the big rudder which turns the ship) His World Game simulation of this concept attracted programmers, creating the first simulation ofthe world (26). Brand was "on the bus" with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters (see Tom Wolfe's The Electric KoolAid Acid Test), and was one of the organizers of the Trips Festival that gave birth to Bill Graham presents, and the rock concert R 40).

Brand and Larry Brilliant, veteran of the Prankster affiliated Hog Farm (which at one point had over 1000 people working to create a self-sustaining agricultal community that still exists in Tenn (R 40), who later spearheaded the WHO's effort to eliminate smallpox, started the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Community), which, according to Howard Rheingold, felt like a community because it was in fact geographically based in the Bay Area (R 2). The goal of the WELL was to bring free email to the masses, a self-designing, self-governing experiment in which the early users would create the system for later ones. It was thought that business users would be its mainstay, but it turned out to be Deadheads, since it was the only way their community could manifest itself other than at a show.

PC Revolution: Ted Nelson's Computer Liberation was modelled on the Whole Earth Catalogue, called for a second American revolution . This book inspired folks at the People's Computer Company, Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniac, to build their own computer, espceially since corporate America (IBM) had copyrighted the words "perseonal computer." They also grew out of orignial hackers who demanded that " access to computers--and anything that ells you how the world works--should be unlimited and total" (30 Levy). Hacker ethos was open source, cooperative. HR says without the hackers that built the tools, ARPAnet never would have become the Internet, nor would there have been a PC revolution (R 48). Apple moved into desktop publishing, since as someone observed, the only way to have freedom of the press is to own one. (This overlooks the problem of distribution, which is perhaps solved by the Internet?). If democracy is to survive, we need high quality information, which is not being provided by mass media (R 13)

VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES

Building of the work of the researchers at ARPA, as well as ther PC pioneers, individual users began to network through modems and BBS, bulletin boards. Marc Smith, who has beeen researching the WELL and the Net holds that cooperative groups emerge in a competative world because they realize that they must do so to accomplish their aims. Collective goods are social network capital, knowledge capital and communion (R 13). Parallels Ray Oldenburg's The Great Good Place: three essential places are home, work and where we gather for conviviality. This last is public but also informal, having social equality, regular clientele, a playful mood and shared experience and support. Cyberspace has many of these qualities, especially equality R26. Virtual commmunities have a sort of gift economy, in which people give to each other in the spirit of building something together, rather than quid pro quo (R 59) Members of virtual communities have mobilized to help someone they'd never met in real life, having a medical emergency in India or in danger from an abusive spouse. Unfortunately, not everyone is saved, even someone who commited virtual suicide first by erasing every posting to the WELL. JPB observed that you're not a real community until you have a funeral" R37).

VIRTUAL WORLDS: A JOURNEY IN HYPE AND HYPERREALITY Benjamon Woolery penguin 1992 THE VIRTUAL COMMUNITY: HOMESTEADING ON THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER Howard Rheingold Addison-Wesley