Internet Communities & Female Networks
pop~Topic
Pop~TARTS introduces a new topic: Female Networks and Internet Communities. To build this text thread, we want to involve the community of Telepolis readers. We are interested in your personal stories of Internet community involvement, including experiences in chats, and other online environments, which promise "community". We will use the Tp discussion forum to answer your responses on this topic.
This thread will also include various areas of investigation surrounding Female Networks. It will include projects about women who live online, like Debra Solomons The_Living. We will also look at variations on the topic of teleworking, especially the experiences of female escape, as practiced in online secretary chats.
TARTS will highlight on-line journals and web based projects by women that offer social connectivity, and community.
Beginning the topic with a real event, pop~ TARTS participated in the media art event "Face2Face" at the Forum Stadtpark, Graz (July 6-11). This event references a real life community of the female mailing list FACES. At Face2Face we pose the questions: why is a face-to-face (and in the flesh meeting) relevant for community building, and, why women only?
Virtual Communities
Net communities, which have developed in the "in-between" spaces of the electronic topology of the I-net are imbedded in the construction of net protocols, but their sociological and technological interpretations are "intertwinded". The side effects of Net.life are not just psychological, but are also political, cultural and foremost - social. Net.life reaches deeply into real life.
Now that the euphoria of Internet has calmed down, questions of individual, subjective personality construction in electronic environments have been revealed, in gender switching and embodiment, in Cyerporn and chat environments. The questions of conviviality --or the best possible socialization now becomes an urgent issue for Net.community.
Communities [are] people who share some interests and who want to get some support (whatever way) and to maybe show the rest of the world that they have a place to be there..something like that. also: an exchange of ideas, resources, etc..what i understand from other net communities is that they usually 'build' things...what online-communities often don't have for me which i associate with other communities is a sense of closeness to the members of the community. this might be just a net-specific problem.
Pat Futterer (faces)
Online communities: Info-networks - brother and sisterhoods
Communities on the Net have a history. Internet communities began long before1994, when the popular Internet graphic interface software Mosaic was introduced(Mosaic preceded Netscape and Explorer). The BBS communities of the 1970s weresubcultures of communicators, much like their cousins, the CB radio hacks, andshort wave radio freaks of the decade after WWII. The varieties of online Networksare extensive, and mirrors the real community, but without tangible borders. Netcommunities are large and small. Large can encompass providers like AmericanOnline, an international provider with millions of subscribers, as well as Peace Net(international), ZaMir (connecting the former Yugoslavia), Relcom (located inRussia), and artist servers like Public Netbase, the Thing.net, or geographically linked services like xs4all (Amsterdam), and ECHO (New York City). Communities are also gender specific like the Cybergrrl Webstation and Amazoncity, and 3D worlds like ColonyCity by Blaxxun.
What is different in the Net community is that Internet opens up the potential door of information exchange to millions of novice computer users, who only need to click and point and they are immediately immersed. Net communities congregate in chat forums, in Newsgroups, via mail exchanges, and in 2D & 3D worlds. Communities offer social and educational programming, live celebrity chats, performances, and entertainment (even live pop concerts). Mostly, they offer a strong sense of identity to the individual user.
In marketing the new 3D technology, on-line environments have been praised for being immersive. In reality, they are just 3D presentations with navigation links to Net chats with human-like representation that simulate the development of social communities in real life. In contrary to the anticipation which has been created by industry and software consortiums, online social units have evolved under conditions that parallel body analogy and space metaphors. Cyberspace, then, can be regarded as a fluid model of attention, in contrast to the traditional meaning of the word space. Especially in Europe, the critique on the understanding of I-net as an environment for role playing and psycho-hygenics has become an important discussion in many forums. The utopian model of the eradication of social differences by egalitarian information excess, and distance education in the horizontal information network, is more and more an obvious issue.
Building Internet Communities-Networking in action
Conviviality 2 Social Connectivity
The personal data_set is built-up in the electronic environment which could be considered liquid. Now, the online environment is completely thematized through linking and networking, affecting real life by partly supporting it with communication technology. This activity can be expressed differently if you think of 93community94 in relation to the Internet having a specific cultural and social effect. Another way to approach 93community94 is by starting off from real life activity, and then using the Net to describe and continue these activities. After all, the topics of socialization and gender have a long tradition in discussion, and were in place long before the technologically mediated networks existed. Online, one must change ones perspective, and think beyond real life, and transcend the physical problems of community building in real life.
The Net community discussion exists parallel to the older discussion of social science, where "community" stands in contrast to "virtual society". Global communication, and the art of networking, means something different from the perspective of everyday community life. It is time to clarify the term. To do this, we have to ask what "community" means in the electronic Net? Is it a tribe, an info network, or an emotional affair? How do all its ideas get transported and to whom?
"Virtual Groups on the Internet (Sudweeks, 1998), brings research on virtual communication practices. One of the recent findings is a new understanding of computer-mediated groups and face-to-face groups, especially the strategies for control and how members attempt to influence group outcomes. For example, Weisband (1992) shows, 9385that advocacy sequences produce different outcomes in mediated versus face-to-face groups. Advocates in face-to-face groups, and early advocates in mediated groups, were significantly more likely to converge toward a group opinion. Third advocates (the final person in three-person groups) in computer-mediated groups were more likely to retain and express their pre-group opinions regardless of how discrepant that stance had become by the time it was made public." "Network & Netplay", page 16.
Communities and bodies
Net. communities are set up as social bodies. The individual Net.body is questioned by the existence of its cyber-groupbody. An example is the emancipation of women from the washing machine, a current cyborg metaphor is a development of the 50s techno positivist view, concurrent with The Race for Space. Female emancipation through machines is often realized in online communities, which seem to reflect an obsession for physical space with bodily presence. The body is the focus in virtual space, which then influences networked social encounters.
Community Simulation
An example of technological applications for community building simulation come from the Italian Infomatics professor, Dr. Carla Simone, of the department of computer science, University of Torino, Italy. She establishes thematic conditions of online environments in a specific software that she developed, called "morpho genetic spaces", in which the space metaphor is dissolved and replaced by an organic model (a biological reference), where the coordinates of various identities are put in a reaction diffusion relation.
On-line relations
The roles assigned to the female home worker by industry also have side effects, notably as creative, self-ironic Net experiments and fem-networks. The accelerated speed of the development of new technologies and media has also impacted the social revolution, and therefore the social and economic organization 96the formats of life-- are changing radically. A new culture for the electronic everyday life is necessarily evolving, especially the definition of gender roles and gender specific online behavior, which stands in direct relation to the growing of women online, many of whom are building important examples of online communities. From sex to mentor relationships, gender technologies signify strategies which link structures among real personalities and interest groups, as well as to the relationships between technological developments and telework. Online organizations (with similar aims of Trade Unions) are evolving with the rise of women in the computer industry. For example, the support organization Women in Multimedia. Questions over the emancipation of the cyborg metaphor and the female data_set refer to both the working conditions and to electronic commerce in online communication environments.
Online techno dj techno culture and net communities
The techno community has built an important experimental group action based on sampling culture. There have been many creative strategies and experiments in trans-disciplinary interpretations of media 91living 92 conditions, and special group actions that respond to the info-net with its own language, aesthetic, and product (including graphic design identities). A concept image in an acoustic environment that transports the same coded message in image, sound and program, is described by the djs themselves as building memory. dj spooky calls this 93memorex94. The social evolution, recombination and repetition in the electronic milieu of cyberspace - is often expressed on live audio webcasting, and in massive party chats in a special language. (See also the article Dj Spooky the subliminal kid)
Net Community Reading list:
In preparation for the upcoming series of texts, pop~TARTS suggests the following books as reference sources:
Cherny, Lynn and Elizabeth Reba Wise, editors. 1996. Wired_women: gender and new realities in cyberspace. Seattle: Seal Press.
Hooffaker, Gabriel and Rena Tangens. 1997. Frauen & Netze. Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH.
Luber, Burkhard. 1993. The World at your Keyboard: an alternative guide to global computer networking. Oxford: Jon Carpenter Publishing.
Rheingold, Howard. 1994. The Virtual Community: finding connection in a computerized world. London: Secker and Warburg,
Schuler, Douglas. 1996. New Community Networks: wired for change. New York: ACM Press.
Sherman, Aliza. 1998. Cybergrrl!: A Woman's Guide to the World Wide Web. New York: Ballentine Publishing Group.
Sudweeks, Fay, Margaret McLaughlin and Sheizaf Rafaeli, editors. 1998. Network and Netplay: Virtual groups on the internet. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Tangens, Rena, Peter Mandrella, padeluun, Gabriele Hooffacker, Wolfgang Mixner und anderen, editors. 1996. MailBox auf den Punkt gebracht. Bielefeld: Art d'Ameublement.
Zajovic, Stasa, editor. 1997. Women for Peace. Beograd: Women in Black.