Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy

The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community

           

FRED TURNER

           

Published in Technology and Culture, July 2005, Vol 46 Pages 485-512

           

                                

In 1993, freelance journalist Howard Rheingold published The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier and with it defined a new form of technologically enabled social life: virtual community.1 For the last eight years, he explained, he had been dialing in to a San Francisco Bay area bulletin-board system (BBS) known as the Whole Earth  Lectronic Link, or the WELL. In the WELL s text-only environment, he conversed with friends and colleagues, met new people, and over time built up relationships of startling intimacy. For Rheingold, these relationships formed an emotional bulwark against the loneliness of a highly technologized material world. As he explained, computer networks like the WELL allowed us  to recapture the sense of cooperative spirit that so many people seemed to lose when we gained all this technology. 2 In the disembodied precincts of cyberspace, we could connect with one another practically and emotionally and  rediscover the power of cooperation, turning cooperation into a game, a way of life a merger of knowledge capital, social capital, and communion. 3

               

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