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
