2. Learning to live in an online community: The WELL

The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link is one of the most well-known and longest-lasting online communities.  It was created by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant in 1985 for the Whole Earth Review magazine.  Originally based in the Whole Earth Review’s offices in Sausalito, CA, the WELL was bought by Salon.com in 1999, and is now based in San Francisco.  The actual location of the WELL servers, while now immaterial, was very important when the WELL first started.  The WELL was first a regional dial-up service in the San Francisco Bay Area, and those members who lived in that area were the ones who most directly benefited from its existence, as the online network led to social events in the area that helped to firmly cement the members together in the feeling that they were a community, and a special community to boot.  There is an important feature to the WELL besides the fact that access to it is by subscription only: anonymity is not allowed in the WELL conferences.  A user may have more than one pseudonym but their real user ID is always attached to every message.  There is no evading responsibility on the WELL, no splitting of personalities and pretending to be other than how you first presented yourself.  (Hafner, 2001:2-25; Rheingold, 2000:36-38; Salon.com <http://www.thewell.com/aboutwell.html>) 

The routine face-to-face meetings were initiated with a party in September of 1986.  It was a strange experience for everyone, knowing each other intellectually but being unable to recognize each other when they came together in the physical world.  Howard Rheingold found his first WELL party, in the mid-1980s, extremely unsettling:

I had contended with these people…shared alliances and formed bonds, fallen off my chair laughing with them, become livid with anger at some of them.  But there wasn’t a recognizable face in the house.  I had never seen them before.  (Rheingold, 2000:xvi)

The WELL’s face-to-face meetings helped to establish it as a real community.  The people who were using the WELL at its beginning in the 1980s were computer-savvy by default: it took more effort and considerably more knowledge of how computer technology works to connect to a virtual community in the 1980s than it does today.  It was still a strange thing to be able to connect to other people’s written words and to interact with them through messages, using your computer to access telephone lines and pick them up from a distant place.  The ability to meet the other people leaving messages for you in person made them more real, and made the computer very important as a means of communication.

Sherry Turkle addresses the evolution of our psychological relationship to computers in her book Life on the Screen.  When confronted with a complex electronic machine whose workings cannot be readily described, children are not satisfied by knowing simply that it works with wires and chips and batteries.  This does not explain how it works, merely what it needs to be able to work.  Therefore, children start to think of the computer as something that has a psychology of its own, that has a personality and thoughts of its own.  Eventually they come to understand that though the computer does not really understand, it gives the appearance of understanding, and the façade of a personality.  Their thinking of computers ‘retain an animistic trace.’  (Turkle, 1995:83)  The thought, then, of using a computer to communicate with other people does not seem so absurd; we become used to this interactive device, personifying it though we know intellectually it is only a machine.  It ‘gives the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.  One can be a loner yet never be alone.’  (Turkle, 1995:30)  We can spend the majority of our time both alone and with constant human interaction.  The only thing mainstream users lack now is virtual touch, which is within our technological grasp.

In a recent class trip to HIVE (the Hull Interactive Virtual Environment at the University of Hull), I had the opportunity to experience a small machine that simulated touch: you moved a small stylus, ostensibly across a spongy surface, which you could poke with the stylus.  It felt very authentic, but in reality, I was merely looking at an image on a screen and manipulating a stylus attached to a machine.  My senses accepted the illusion as authentic.  However, Turkle asks a compelling question of our ever-growing dependence on computers: ‘To what degree are we willing to take simulations for reality?  How do we keep a sense that there is a reality distinct from simulation?’  (Turkle, 1995:73)  This really becomes a question of how much we are willing to live in our own heads, and does living most of your life only in your head damage the quality of your life?  It may, if you have a rich family life and become addicted to the ease of online interaction, something not likely to happen if you are content with your physical social life.  Nevertheless, for those who have lives with little interaction, who live alone and are socially isolated, being part of an online community greatly improves their lives.  It gives them a sense of belonging, and the knowledge that someone else is online to talk to at any time of the day or night is a great comfort; you are not the only lonely person around at 3AM.

The WELL was originally run by ‘Fig’ (Matthew McClure) and ‘Tex’ (John Coate), people who understood the mechanics of community very well.  They were both veterans of The Farm, a self-sustaining commune in Tennessee that was founded in 1971 and still is successful today.  They knew how to build and sustain communities, especially those with lots of visitors—the Farm continually had visitors who were unable or unwilling to work, averaging about 15,000 visitors a year over the years they lived there.  They also dealt with having very many people in a small space, and their main form of entertainment in their low-technology community was getting to know other people and to understand how their minds worked.  Both Tex and Fig became sick of how there was never enough money or food and too much work to go around, and left the Farm.  They were then hired by Whole Earth to head their new online community, the WELL.  (Rheingold, 2000:40-42; Hafner, 2001:39-40)

From the beginning the hippie philosophy of the Whole Earth Review people dominated the WELL conferences, but it was also discovered by Deadheads, who stayed mainly in their own conferences, but whose interest in using the WELL to communicate about their own alternate hippie lifestyle helped keep the WELL funded in its early stages when it was tottering on the edge of bankruptcy.  Some Deadheads did go into the more mainstream WELL conferences and served to influence them as well.  (Rheingold, 2000:30; 37)  These two close-knit groups made the WELL into a club of sorts: not only did you have to pay for admission; you also had to fit into their group.

The WELL is firmly established as one of the most influential and successful online communities.  Often imitated, it can never be reproduced.  This sort of community cannot be forced; it grew.  It is still a closed community to the rest of the internet--which both limits and shelters it.  Protecting the community allowed it to stagnate.  It is such a big and convoluted place that the edges could have become fuzzy, blending into the net.  Instead, the WELL is still accessible only by subscribers.  In today’s webboard world, the WELL is an unnecessary elitist place.  The argument that it is closed to keep unwelcome people out, those who would abuse the other users and harm the community with their attitude is unrealistic.  Social pressure can be exerted by other users to get people off free webboards.  There are still moderators and administrators, sometimes paid and sometimes volunteers.  Someone has to own the web address where the free webboard is hosted—even if they do not run the board; it means that someone, somewhere has a way to shut down the board if its members should get out of hand.  The WELL was first known and appealed to San Francisco bay area people who read the Whole Earth Review, and it remained mainly composed of those people for years.  Now one cannot even get a look at the forum topics without subscribing, so why should you bother?  You are paying to belong—back when the WELL first began, a subscription bought you an email address when email was not readily available, and access to somewhere unique.  Now it is easy to get online, you do not even have to own the equipment, as public access is readily available at local libraries and schools, and there are many webboards one can access for free.  The closed nature of the community made it stand still.  Howard Rheingold eventually stopped accessing the WELL on a daily basis, saying ‘I found that I could predict who would react and how.  And so I started asking myself: why bother?  Eventually I turned into little more than a lurker.’  (Hafner, 2001:178, quoting from a Wired magazine article written in July of 1999)  Consequently, the WELL lost one of its most loyal supporters when Howard Rheingold became a lurker in a community where he had once been an eager member.