For the last two weeks of the quarter, my LIS 550 class is reading The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society by Manuel Castells and discussing it. So I've been reading it bit by bit on the bus, and I just finished a chapter called Virtual Communities or Network Society?
which makes me think about my own Internet experiences, for obvious reasons.
I started using the Net actively in 1998, when I went to Mount Holyoke. At that point I had more people to email, got more interested in the Web, and discovered Usenet. On one day late in November I read through the entire list of newsgroups that were available through MHC's news server and subscribed to lots, though I unsubscribed from most of those fairly quickly. The only newsgroup I really stuck with was alt.fan.pratchett, affectionately known as AFP. This whole chapter made me think of AFP, but especially the sentence:
In contrast with the notorious cartoon published by The New Yorker in the pre-history of on-line communication, on the Internet you better make sure that everyone knows that you are a dog, and not a cat, or you will find yourself immersed in the intimate world of cats.
AFP is an enthusiastic, friendly pile of intelligent and irrepressible geekery. Attempting to organize it is like herding cats. Trolling is well-nigh impossible, as the thread goes off-topic within two posts. If you're not careful, you'll start geeking bread and cats with everyone else.
Castells' next sentence is even more applicable to AFP:
Because on the Internet, you are what you say you are, as it is on the basis of this expectation that a network of social interaction is constructed over time.
AFPers are who they say they are. That's true in two ways; they tend to represent themselves as they would in face-to-face interaction, and even if they don't, they are the online persona for the purposes of AFP. I don't want to dwell on the construction of personas, though, because most people don't. They use their real names (though AFP knows me as Laurabelle, I have never tried to keep my real name secret) and share real details about their lives.
I found Castells' exploration of online social interaction interesting, since he comes to the conclusion that the Internet doesn't shut people off and is merely another medium for social interaction. AFPers all over the world become aquainted with each other online, and many of them even arrange face-to-face social gatherings. It's all the same thing.
It's interesting to observe people's reactions to internet socializing. I met my first boyfriend in AFP. The first time I saw Kevin in person, my mother said she thought it was wonderful that I could meet people all over the world. When he came to visit me the first time, my father got upset that he could be a psycho murderer or something. Every time anyone asked where I'd met him, I said either in a newsgroup
or on the Internet
and watched carefully for negative reactions.
Nevertheless, Kevin was far from the only friend I made in AFP. Three years ago I told AFP about Emily and was overwhelmed by the expressions of sympathy that I received. Ironically, I also knew Emily through the post-office network, though we never did email very much. Email felt different from hand-writing.
And now I'm writing this entry (the first part of my discussion of the book) on my blog. The Internet Galaxy was published in 2001, before blogging really took off, and I wonder if it would have any effect on his understanding of the network society
? I that it realistically wouldn't, since his discussion is vague and non-dependent on specific uses (email, Web, blog, etc.), but it's still interesting to think about how the world has changed in the two short years since 2001, and how that might invalidate certain parts of his analysis.
Oh by the way, my class is discussing this book on an online discussion board, natch.