I once saw Suw Charman present on different sorts of online social space. I only caught the last 20 minutes of her session, and I’m probably mis-remembering it (and I hope she’ll correct and expound), but what I remember is this:

Some places have clear ownership (like blogs), others have shared ownership (like wikis), and others have no apparent ownership (like forums) and perhaps as a result can be less likely to be civil. I think of Commentisfree less as a blog and more as a forum in which each page begins with a short essay acting as a spark to the flame. The authors rarely, if ever, engage in the discussion that follows.

I think that people forget that the internet is not magic (well, it enables search which is magic, but that’s the only thing). The kinds of interactions that happen online are exactly the same as the kinds of interactions that happen in real life. Child predators trawling for victims, bullying, slander, name calling, terrorists exchanging information, isolation, education, pen pals, love, poetry, education, creativity, support groups, political action. All of these interactions were happening long before the internet. The relevant thing about “cyberbullying” (another neologism we don’t need) is not that it is “cyber”, but that it is “bullying”. So rarely do people remember that the network is amoral, it’s people and their interactions that are right or wrong.

It’s the fact that the author seems to get this, that makes the rest of his post all the more puzzling.

‘there is no such thing as the “online community”‘

You what? Any small group of people anywhere can create a community, regardless of how they communicate.

“will have noticed how people on the web coalesce into homogeneous groups, based on age, class, tastes. Tribes form and reinforce their identity with codes and shibboleths….. The web is no community.”

Really? Because what you just described there sounds exactly like most real life communities.