Feature: The growth of online communities

The internet has proved that if you give people the means to communicate freely, they will quickly form strong communities with common interests.

The original Arpanet was one such community, and the groups that grew up around bulletin boards and online services like The Well, Compuserve, BIX and CIX formed other groups that became more tightly knit than anyone outside a psychology lab could have suspected.

So, the dramatic growth in social networking sites such as Friendster and Myspace, shared experience sites such as Flickr, and blogging sites such as Blogger came as no surprise to those who had been around in the earlier pre-web days.

The main difference now is scale, given that any site on the internet is equally visible and available to a community of up to a billion users, and this causes problems. The early online communities were self-selected groups of those interested in technology and skilled enough to use it, while the new groups can include anyone who can point and click a mouse and type with one finger.

This is more democratic, but can also swamp communities with idiots, ‘lurkers’, ‘trolls’, ‘sock puppets’ and other entries from the lexicon of abuse users have developed to describe them. These types have always existed, but new technologies have increased their numbers and given them unprecedented power to mess things up for everybody else.

Just as the internet’s technologies were developed organically and collaboratively, its social spaces are having to develop their own methods of social control and codes of etiquette through trial and error. The rules are enforced by the attitudes of the group members, so that the wish to belong can be used to combat the wish to destroy and, with any luck, keep it within manageable limits.

The internet is a laboratory for social experimentation, and has developed an evolving culture of its own. There is material for thousands of doctoral theses in just one day’s traffic on Myspace, as well as plenty of ammunition for those who argue that courtesy, decency, grammar and spelling are already dead in the online world.