Tech And Culture - Fred Tuner

Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy
The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community

FRED TURNER

In 1993, freelance journalist Howard Rheingold published The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier and with it defined a new form of technologically enabled social life: virtual community.1 For the last eight years, he explained, he had been dialing in to a SanFrancisco Bay–area bulletin-board system (BBS) known as the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, or the WELL. In the WELL’s text-only environment, he conversed with friends and colleagues, met new people, and over time built up relationships of startling intimacy. For Rheingold, these relationships formed an emotional bulwark against the loneliness of a highly technologized material world. As he explained,computer networks like the WELL allowed

Dr. Turner is assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author of Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory (New York, 1996; 2nd rev. ed., Minneapolis, 2001) and Counterculture into Cyberculture: How Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Network Transformed the Politics of Information (Chicago,forthcoming). This article developed from a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in 2003. There it received very helpful comments from Michael William Doyle, Jordan Kleiman, and Thomas Parke Hughes. The author also thanks AnnaLee Saxenian, Nancy Van House, Walter W. Powell, and audiences at the School of Information Management and Systems, University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, and the Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research for their feedback. The article benefited enormously from close readings by Pablo Boczkowski, Geoffrey Bowker, Theodore Glasser, Robert Horwitz, John W. Kim, Chandra Mukerji, Jonathan Sterne, and three anonymous referees. Finally, thanks to John Perry Barlow, Reva Basch, Stewart Brand, Lois Britton, John Coate, HowardRheingold, Gail Williams, and the many other contributors to the Whole Earth Catalog and the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link who generously shared their time and materials. ©2005 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/05/4603-0001$8.00 1. Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Reading, Mass., 1993). This book marked theentry of the term “virtual community” into widespread public use. Rheingold had also been the first person to use it in

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us “to recapture the sense of cooperative spirit that so many people seemed to lose when we gained all this technology.” 2 In the disembodied precincts of cyberspace, we could connect with one anotherpractically and emotionally and “rediscover the power of cooperation, turning cooperation into a game, a way of life—a merger of knowledge capital, social capital, and communion.” 3 In the years since Rheingold’s book appeared, the Internet and the Worldwide Web have swung into public view, and both the WELL and Rheingold’s notion of virtual community have become touchstones for studies of thesocial implications of computer networking.4 Yet, despite the
print, in his 1987 article about the WELL, “Virtual Communities: The Computer Network as Electronic Watering Hole,” Whole Earth Review no. 57 (winter 1987): 78–80. He went on to develop the notion in a widely reprinted 1992 essay, also focused on the WELL, titled “A Slice of My Life in My Virtual Community”; see High Noon on theElectronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace, ed. Peter Ludlow (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 413–36. 2. Rheingold, The Virtual Community, 110. 3. Ibid. 4. It is hard to overestimate the impact of Rheingold’s writing on new media scholarship. Before his articles and his 1993 book appeared, researchers generally did not take up the question of on-line communities as such. Rather, they focused on...