Wednesday, September 20, 2006
The Heart of the WELL-- by Howard Rheingold
"In the summer of 1986, my then-two-year-old daughter picked up a tick. There was this blood-bloated thing sucking on our baby's scalp, and we weren't quite sure how to go about getting it off. My wife, Judy, called the pediatrician. It was eleven o'clock in the evening. I logged onto the WELL. I got my answer online within minutes from a fellow with the improbable but genuine name of Flash Gordon, M.D. I had removed the tick by the time Judy got the callback from the pediatrician's office."
This article speaks about the online community--known by "WELLites" as "the WELL"--was a site created to discuss family issues, specifically pertaining to health. Rheingold talks in depth about his encounters with other members of the WELL--the meaning of which he never mentions in the article. While the article is based soley on his experiences as a member of this social network, the purpose of the article is to describe the advantages of being linked to a network (or networks) on the World Wide Web in contrast to the social networks that we have been accustomed to prior to the evolution of the internet from a military tool to the internet we know today. The WELL was a "place"--as he refers to it--where members created a online coffee house that was available twenty-four/seven for friendly advice and social comforting when the need was there. The members of the WELL became lasting friends, and though they never saw each other in person, the bond was there based only on their common interest and their alliance to the purpose of the WELL's existance.
"One of the few things that enthusiastic members of virtual communities in Japan, England, France, and the United States all agree on is that expanding their circle of friends is one of the most important advantages of computer conferencing. CMC is a way to meet people, whether or not you feel the need to affiliate with them on a community level. It's a way of both making contact with and maintaining a distance from others. The way you meet people in cyberspace puts a different spin on affiliation: in traditional kinds of communities, we are accustomed to meeting people, then getting to know them; in virtual communities, you can get to know people and then choose to meet them. Affiliation also can be far more ephemeral in cyberspace because you can get to know people you might never meet on the physical plane.
How does anybody find friends? In the traditional community, we search through our pool of neighbors and professional colleagues, of acquaintances and acquaintances of acquaintances, in order to find people who share our values and interests. We then exchange information about one another, disclose and discuss our mutual interests, and sometimes we become friends. In a virtual community we can go directly to the place where our favorite subjects are being discussed, then get acquainted with people who share our passions or who use words in a way we find attractive. In this sense, the topic is the address: you can't simply pick up a phone and ask to be connected with someone who wants to talk about Islamic art or California wine, or someone with a three-year-old daughter or a forty-year-old Hudson; you can, however, join a computer conference on any of those topics, then open a public or private correspondence with the previously unknown people you find there. Your chances of making friends are magnified by orders of magnitude over the old methods of finding a peer group."
There are many social networks that exist today--i.e. Facebook, AOLIM, MySpace, etc.-- where we meet to discuss issues. And though those of us who are members of the MySpace community appear to talk about topics that are of little value in relation to those outside of one's own social circle, the scoial "place" exists, just like the WELL in the earliest stages of the public internet back in '93 when this article was written. Members of the WELL wrote down the events of their lives, pertaining to the well-being of their families, advice on how to solve health issue for one another, and responses to these topics and stories that would be beneficial to the other members of this online social community. Rheingold describes in depth the events that unfolded in the life of "Elly", one "WELLite":
"...So Elly had decided to become a Buddhist nun in Asia, and therefore threatened to pass into the annals of WELL legend. The topic stayed dormant for six months. In June, former neighbor Averi Dunn, who had been typing Elly's correspondence into the WELL, reported hearing that Elly had some kind of amoeba in her liver. At the end of July 1992, Flash Gordon reported that Elly was in a hospital in New Delhi. In a coma. She had severe hepatitis and reportedly suffered liver failure. If that report turned out to be true, Flash and the other doctors online agreed that the prognosis was not good.
Within hours, people started doing things in half a dozen directions on their own initiative. The raw scope and diversity of the resources available to us by pooling our individual networks was astonishing. People who had medical connections in New Delhi were brought in; airline schedules and rates for medical evacuation were researched; a fund was started and contributions started arriving. Casey used the net to find a possible telecommunications site in New Delhi where they could relay information for Frank, Elly's ex-husband, who had flown to Asia to help with what was looking like a grave situation.
After a tense few days, the news made its way through the network that she did have some liver function left and might need access to special blood-filtering equipment before she could be moved. Within hours, we knew how to get such medical equipment in New Delhi and whose name to mention. We knew whom to call, how to ask, what it cost, and how to transfer funds to get Elly delivered to a hospital in the San Francisco region. "It gives me goosebumps," reported Onezie, as the topic unfolded on the WELL. "This is love in action."
Elly recovered enough strength to travel without medical evacuation. Her next message was direct, via the WELL:
#270: Elly van der Pas (elly) Fri, Sep 11, '92 (16:03)
Thanks to everyone for your generous WELLbeams, good wishes, prayers, advice, and contributions of green energy. The doctor thought the fast recovery was due to Actigall, but in fact it was due to beams, prayers, and pujas. He even said I might be able to go back to India in February or so.$SW-)"
The qoute below summarizes what Rheingold intends to present as a whole in his description of the WELL. Even in 2006, the question he presents still remains to be answered in the years to come, and more than a decade of the internet as we know it has passed...
"Perhaps cyberspace is one of the informal public places where people can rebuild the aspects of community that were lost when the malt shop became a mall. Or perhaps cyberspace is precisely the wrong place to look for the rebirth of community, offering not a tool for conviviality but a life-denying simulacrum of real passion and true commitment to one another. In either case, we need to find out soon."
The WELL was the first online community. The key question is what is a "virtual community" and how is it different from a "real" community? Rheingold is speculating on the possiblities of virtual communities to make a better world for all of us. Is he a visionary or a just another dreamer?
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