"Are virtual communities really communities, or is physical proximity necessary?"

  In this blog post I will try and wrap my head around a question posed by Steinkuehler and Williams. Whether virtual communities are real. I read this article before I read the small town gossip and all I kept thinking of was a debate I had just yesterday over free speech and the “market of ideas.” The idea that people can say what they want and hide behind anonymity. As I read the argument about “the Internet's capacity for connecting people across time and space fosters the formation of social networks and personal communities (Wellman & Gullia, 1999) and bridges class and racial gaps (Mehra, Merkel, & Bishop, 2004)” I couldn’t help but remember my first racist encounter was on an MMO. My brother who is much a part of the popular MMO “world of warcraft” constantly mentions the racial and sexist slurs that are so frequently changed on the community. Much like the small town gossip article where this “flaming”, as Baym identifies it, occurs from anonymity, the idea that people can speak freely and not have any consequences clashes with my idea of a “real community.”  In my opinion, if we do not have to factor other people’s emotional or moral standings in a space then we are not in a community.

The article argues that “the habitat of the typical third place thus enjoys a richness of human contact that is denied the timid, the bigoted, the pretentious, and others who choose to insulate themselves from human variety” but I would argue that this third place is full of the timid, pretentious and those who insulate themselves from the human variety. Much of the exchanges on these MMO’s or sites like topix would never be uttered in a real community. Not to mention that many of these MMO’s form guilds whereby you can be kicked out so the sub communities in these so-called communities are consisted only of like-minded people that lack human variety.

In my high school we had a guestbook page on our website whereby people could post anonymous comments. Much of the comments came from the students and was similar to what was being discussed about Jennifer Jam. I remember I was once victim to rumors and online bashing and my sixteen-year self was distraught that everyone in the school had the wrong impression of me. In remembering this traumatic teen story I remembered how another high school also had a guestbook with similar comments however we were never interested in reading them because we did not know the subjects of the matter. In thinking of the idea that “online negativity seems to dissipate naturally in a large city”, I would argue is dissipates because not enough people know the subjects of the matter. Gossip is only interesting if you know who is being gossiped about.

In case you couldn’t tell I am not a fan of MMO’s or sites like Topix because I think they have real consequences in life. Even with Facebook, whilst you have to have a name, people constantly create alter egos and participate in online bullying. If you have time read this article about a mother creating a fake myspace account to bully a 13 year old girl (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,315684,00.html) Stories like this make me really worry about this third place that is being created through MMO’s and online forums. I think there are real advantages to them, however I am very skeptical about readily calling them real communities.