Nobody mistakes
virtual life for real life, even though it has an emotional reality to many of
us. (Rheingold, 2000:22)
To many WELL members, the
intellectual connection they find online is beguiling, enticing them to stay
online and communicate with their friends.
There is an ease to virtual life that does not exist in many people’s
physical life, and some find it more satisfying to live most of their life in
their head, using online resources as an outlet and support system. Intellectual power and glibness of writing
rules online: people who may not otherwise have felt at ease while in the
company of others can shine in a place where they have time to think of exactly
what they want to say, and to communicate in writing, allowing them to rework
their thoughts easily for the better. Online,
wit is king. The constant availability
of any online community, where wit runs rampant (or at least attempts to), can
overshadow even physical cravings.
Howard Rheingold describes how one early WELL
member, Blair, was once addicted to cocaine, but managed to break that
addiction. Several years later, a friend
left some cocaine for him while he was online and busily posting on the
WELL. Blair was aware of the cocaine but
he could not tear himself away from the WELL long enough to consider taking the
drug—he had replaced one addiction with another. His online ties were cheaper than the drugs he
had coveted and more comforting. Blair
used the WELL as a much-needed psychological output, calling it ‘Compconf
Psychserv’ (Rheingold, 2000:19), and as Howard Rheingold said about Blair’s
WELL addiction, ‘He was smart enough to know what had happened to him, even as
it tightened its grip.’ (Rheingold,
2000:19)
Blair’s addictive personality
caused him to become essential to the WELL’s conferences; his posts were so
frequent that they enmeshed parts of the conferences. That made his last WELL act especially
antisocial: he used something called a scribble tool to seek out all his posts
and delete them, leaving gaping holes in the WELL’s conferences and destroying
whole sections of the community, as much as if he had set off a bomb in a busy
and crowded office building. Though
removing comments on the WELL was allowed, at the author’s discretion, it left
behind a blank post—glaring proof that something was once there. Blair’s scribbling of his entire WELL history
was ‘an act of intellectual suicide.’ (Rheingold,
2000:20) It was then less of a shock to
the community when he committed physical suicide several weeks later. Another member, Tom Mandel, later used the
scribble tool to erase much of his own history on the WELL as an act of anger,
and a very effective way to lash out at other community members, but he did not
take it as far as Blair. Mandel later
relied heavily on the WELL for emotional support through his traumatic death of
leukemia. Unlike Mandel, Blair used
scribbling as a way of violently withdrawing from his intellectual community
before forcibly removing himself from his physical community.
The scribble tool was invented by
Bandy, a former WELL staff member, who quit after having an online argument
with another WELL member. Then he created
a weapon—the scribble tool, which he used to damage the community by removing
all his posts on the WELL. Many WELL
members used their programming skills to create programs, freeware to help
other less technically inclined members, and to improve the community in
general, but Bandy was the first member to create a weapon. (Rheingold, 2000:20-22)
Webboards and MUDs got people used
to receiving responses to their thoughts through the interface of a computer. Another early aspect of personal computing
which acclimated users to a responsive computer was self-counseling software. It was a way for those who were not part of
an online community to work on their psychological issues while remaining
completely safe and anonymous. The
computer gave them the illusion of listening, but did not comprehend and thus
was safer than even a doctor’s rule of absolute patient privacy.
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