http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1999/01/cov_19feature.html
is a good article on the meaning and misuse of online "community"
- - - - - - - - t h e r e_.g o e s_.t h e
___neighborhood
ARE COMPANIES LIKE GEOCITIES
TRULY "BUILDING COMMUNITIES" -- OR
JUST PLASTERING ADS ON INCOMPLETE,
OUT-OF-DATE WEB PAGES?
BY JANELLE BROWN | Welcome to my home at GeoCities. I live at 9258 Fashion
Avenue, in a neighborhood appropriately called Salon. I moved in here
earlier last week because I was told that "Design, Beauty and Glamour are
the toast of Fashion Avenue," but so far there's not a whiff of glamour to
be seen -- my neighborhood is a ghost town of hundreds of empty pages,
half-started Web sites and vacant lots; only a handful of the members seem
to be at all interested in fashion. I suppose my bare-bones Web page is no
better.
GeoCities may call itself the "largest and fastest growing community of
personal Web sites on the Internet," but there's no community to be found
in my neighborhood.
"Community" is quite possibly the most over-used word in the Net industry.
True community -- the ability to connect with people who have similar
interests -- may well be the key to the digital world, but the term has
been diluted and debased to describe even the most tenuous connections,
the most minimal interactivity. The presence of a bulletin board with a
few posts, or a chat room with some teens swapping age/sex information, or
a home page with an e-mail address, does not mean that people are forming
anything worthy of the name community.
Nowhere is this more apparent than on the free Web page services -- sites
like GeoCities or
theglobe.com that give away free Web space and then sell
ad space based on the traffic that "user-generated content" attracts. Such
companies have been the darlings of Wall Street over the past year. But it
remains to be seen if they can preserve the cozy promises of community
that they've made to their constituency with the lavish promises of
profits that they've had to make to their investors and shareholders.
Free Web page services are one of the fastest growing sectors of the Web
industry, enabling any person with Net access to slap up a Web site using
simple tools. You can choose from scores of services: Not only the
granddaddies like GeoCities, Angelfire, Tripod,
theglobe.com and Xoom, but
smaller services like FreeYellow, FortuneCity, Nettaxi and Homestead. You
can even create a home page at your favorite portal; all they ask is that
they be allowed to put ads on your page.
Undoubtedly, you've visited one of these services at some point -- whether
you are a member of one of them yourself (together, the top seven services
boast more than 20 million members) or have simply stopped by one of the
member pages (GeoCities' member pages alone claim 8 percent of the content
on the Web). If you haven't visited one, perhaps you've invested in them
instead: Xoom, GeoCities and
theglobe.com had three of the hottest initial
public stock offerings of 1998, and Lycos picked up Tripod for $58
million, which it now runs along with the previously acquired Angelfire.
These companies have ambitiously promoted their "communities," boasting of
their astronomical numbers of members and interactive interest groups. But
there's a breakdown between what's being hyped and what's actually
happening at these sites: Few of the members actually seem to be
communicating with one another. Most people, it seems, just want a place
to slap up a picture of their cat.
And there's more. This is an excerpt.