CREATING ELECTRONIC COMMUNITIES: MASS AND VERNACULAR TECHNOLOGIES FOR INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION VIA COMPUTER

Communication forms the foundation for the growth of community, and in an information society, computers prove fundamental for facilitating such communication. Instead of extending the historical trend of facilitating large social organizations and centralized bureaucracies, computer networking today uses a "mass media" approach to appeal to a broad audience through presentation of a wide variety of database services. Other groups augment this trend by utilizing computers in a vernacular manner. Like vernacular languages, these arenas for communication grow from the people who use them. Electronic communities emerge within both mass and vernacular computer networks.;Mass systems provide a forum well-adapted for interpersonal communication through computers, and offer both private and public arenas for interaction through electronic mail, bulletin boards, and special-interest groups. "Fictional" communities, where participants play the role of fictional characters and engage in a sort of ongoing improvisational theatre, are also popular. Vernacular systems tend to locate terminals in public places rather than in private homes, so that the online communication does not grow to be so intricate. Instead, participants form communities in the areas that surround terminals as well as online.;Over time, mass systems take on aspects of the vernacular (such as allowing more user control) while the vernacular systems become "massified" by growing larger, more differentiated, and allowing operators to exert more control over the content of messages. The two appear to be merging into a single form of citizen/consumer-oriented computer communications system that provides a range of services with some degree of user control. These pockets of community appear to provide a gemeinschaftliche alternative to the predominantly Gesellschaft nature of today's world.;Six systems were examined through observation, interviews, qualitative content analysis of database materials and other techniques in order to determine how computers influence patterns of communication and aid the development of community. The systems, ranging from mass to vernacular, include CompuServe Information Service, the Source, CommuniTree Group, ComputerTown USA, the Office for Open Network, and Community Memory.