I’ve believed in the potential of online communities since logging onto my first BBS in the late 1980s looking for help on how to use my Kaypro computer and it’s 300-baud modem. I saw the potential of like minded individuals virtually interacting to socialize, to get answers to questions, to share their victories and their struggles, to find their tribe and to not be limited by space or time. But at those slow speeds it was text only, usually asynchronous (not real-time) and usually anonymous. Thus, if a connection with someone was made, those connections tended to disappear randomly. Eventually BBSs gave way to Instant Messaging, for me still not a community thing, but a good way to stay connected to people that you might have met before in “real life.” It was still a very nerdy thing that was far from mainstream. 

fs-emdt blogging central
fs-emdt blogging central

By 2002 I had earned my Master’s Degree online and that made me believe all the more what could successfully be done online. As part of our degree program I’d learned how to build websites and turned in my assignments via the websites. That led to blogging on LiveJournal, then MySpace, and Twitter and Flickr. I remember trying to push a small church I was working with to put more of their stuff online, thinking that that would help them grow and extend their reach. They didn’t get it. I tried to put more of my teaching assignments online, thinking that by pre-loading assignments, that would reduce all of the wasted time of having to share physical instruction materials and set a consistent classroom process. They didn’t get it either. 

The technologies got better (voice, video, mobile), but relationships or a sense of community not so much. Maybe that was just me and where I was in my journey. Online gamers, for example, they seemed to be a pretty strong community. One of my nieces married someone she met playing an MMORPG. Meanwhile, actual interaction and commenting on my Twitter account seemed to slow down to zero and I was spending far more time on FaceBook. I had a sense of what those whom I’d “friended” were posting but there seemed to be very little real communication. Add to that I had quite a few friends whom I cared about who weren’t on any social media. And those who were on social media, it felt like I couldn’t depend on the algorithm to surface their posts in my feed. 

I saw so much potential way back when, but now I felt like everything was reduced to a little Dopamine hit when someone would send a little emoji response on something I’d posted. But that was it. And during the 2016 Presidential election, boy howdy, things got ugly and heated. Some folks got really used to sharing horrendous things and I got exhausted trying to swat down all the shit that was flying about. All of which made me think how the major platforms were not interested in anything except keeping us locked to their platforms and none of this was necessary. 

social media platforms logos
social media platforms logos

Going back to the days of the earliest BBSs we knew how to create and espouse online communities and that’s what I experienced when working on my Master’s and Doctorate at Pepperdine. While at Pepperdine I was introduced to Harold Rheingold’s two books, Smart Mobs and The Virtual Community, which spelled out what was essential for the online experience to be a largely positive community experience. But I’ve come to understand that the commercial online platforms have always had an entirely different agenda. It dawned on me that through my usage of social media/networking everyone I “knew” had been reduced to something much less than friends. Everyone was a virtual acquaintance. What passed for social networking was little more than digital voyeurism. 

And now, let’s see a short video from Professor Rheingold and continue the conversation from there…

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