Online Communities: Commerce, Community Action, and the Virtual University

The phrase “online community” is widely and some say indiscriminately used in education and commerce. It seems to imply warmth and personal commitment to spaces and tools that might otherwise be regarded as anonymous and impersonal. There are other recent books on online communities (Smith Kim, 2000; Preece, 2000; Barab et al., in press). What distinguishes this collection from the others and how useful is it? In general, this book is broad and shallow rather than deep and narrow. It is composed of many short essays organized into three topics: business, education, and community action. As such it is most valuable for undergraduate students and others who want a general understanding of online communities. Deeper and more exhaustive study of the many facets of online community discussed in this book will require reading the sources cited in the essays or in some cases the complete studies that were excerpted for other of the essays. The editors’ goal was to bring in more voices in the designing and planning of bitspace as a civic space. Thus, they brought together some authors who are not usually in the opus of academic literature and others who although in the academic literature are not usually seen in such a mix. They also sought no homogeneity of tone or style. Furthermore, they recognized that Internet-rendered communities offered no utopian answers to civic spaces and human rights. Therein lie both the strength and the weakness of this collection. It certainly attains more variability than other collections on community as it covers commercial, educational, and activist topics. Unfortunately, some of this variability is in the quality and warrant of the articles, which are uneven and so independent in regard to basic deŽ nitions such as that of community that one suspects that no community of collaboration marked the writing of this book. Some basic questions that were only tacitly broached are: Is there some common understanding of community that works across domains? What can educational, activist, and commercial communities learn from each other? Many online educational communities seek to be educational, activist, and commercial ventures; is this kind of synthesis of purpose possible? It would be useful for these issues to be explicitly addressed, an effort that will require, as these editors recognize, that new voices be brought into the more usual conversations. The conversation around communities persists in part because of the increasing recognition of what Dewey showed in themiddleof the last century, that social context, historical context, and culture provide the background we can never escape in our work, in our schooling, our business, and in our activism (Dewey, 1938, 1980, 1981). The computer revolution has often paid more attention to the technical than to the social aspects of computer use, and we are now in a period of backlash to this attitude with a rash of books on community in cyberspace. Unfortunately,