An excerpt from

How to Publish on the Internet
New York: Warner Books, 1995

Authors: Andrew Fry and David Paul

What Is an Information Community?

Remember the old philosophical question, If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Well, try this cyberspace analogy: If you publish the greatest piece of creative work ever posted on the World Wide Web and nobody visits your Web site, is your work really the greatest piece ever posted?

The true answer to the first question is yes, the tree does make a sound. The physical definition of a sound is that it is a vibratory disturbance that is capable of being heard. If no one is around to hear it — not even forest animals (which seems unlikely) — the falling tree makes a sound nonetheless.

In the case of publishing the greatest piece of creative work to a nonexistent audience, though, we're not so sure the answer is similar. After going to the trouble and expense of publishing your work, you want people to see it. And more than that: You want them to stay with it, respond to it, and return to the Web site where your work is published. If your project is to have a lasting appeal, you need to cultivate an audience that has a continuing interest in it. To a large extent, this requires you to keep your content fresh and engaging, or to encourage your audience's participation. If what you publish is a journal dedicated to new poetry, you must be on the lookout for distinct new voices to include with every edition. If it's a catalogue of merchandise, you must have products with a lasting appeal, and you'd better make sure your customers' orders are filled promptly and satisfactorily. If you're publishing a "How-To" guide, you should periodically update it and seek to expand its usefulness.

But more than that. In the era of cyberspace travel, you are inevitably competing against a galaxy of other Web sites, many of them new, exciting, and innovative. How do you reach your audience, and how do you hold them?

By building an information community around your Web site.

An information community is an audience that is drawn to the content of your Web publications and brought into a continuing relationship to it. The members of this audience are attracted to your Web site because they share your interest in the subject matter, or they admire the writing or graphical style of your content, or they love the products you sell. You retain their interest by continuing to satisfy their expectations, giving them an opportunity to interact with you or your content, and making them feel connected to you and your work.

Building an information community is like building a circulation base for a magazine, an audience for a television program, or a listenership for a radio system. You don't need an information community to publish, but you do need one to sustain an ongoing program of publishing.

Virtual Communities

According to Howard Rheingold, editor of The Whole Earth Review and well-known guru on virtual communities, it is not information that attracts people into cyberspace, but other people — the communities that are forming around the new electronic media. When we talk about these communities, we are talking about something new under the sun. They are not communities in every sense of the word as we traditionally know it; Rheingold himself has acknowledged, for example, that the members of a virtual community do not necessarily share the same level of commitment to each other as members of a conventional community do.

There are other, more obvious, anomalies about virtual communities. We're not speaking of people who share the same streets, sidewalks, cafés, and sewers — at least not the blacktop streets, cement sidewalks, and walk-in cafés abuzz with conversation and pervaded by the aroma of freshly ground coffee. But we are speaking of a community, or quasi community, that exists by virtue of human interactions. These interactions do not occur face to face; they occur computer monitor to computer monitor. We don't see people in the electronic community physically shaking hands, shrugging their shoulders, or casting meaningful glances. We do, however, see them practicing certain evolving rules of conduct and doing their best to communicate through words and graphical images.

And even though we are definitely not talking about a geographical community, in its own way the electronic community allows people an opportunity to "gather." They engage in real-time chat sessions, contribute to newsgroups or conferences on topics of mutual interest, or participate in joint projects involving research and data exchange. They send e-mail messages, often more readily than they answer their telephones and almost always more readily than they write letters. And they participate in special-interest events organized around individual Web sites.

Specialized communities have grown up on the basis of particular interests. If you've followed a newsgroup or participated in a chat room, you might have noticed some of the same contributors returning regularly.

People can be welcomed into a given community by its existing members — and sometimes ostracized from one — according to how well they fit in or how deeply they offend others. You may be familiar with

Virtual people in a virtual community?   Just as there are virtual communities that exist only in the electronic world, so too are there virtual inhabitants of those communities — personalities who exist only as members of virtual communities.
        Of course there are flesh-and-blood people behind these virtual personalities, who present themselves on the Internet as their virtual alter egos. In a way, they bring to mind Samuel Clemens, ordinary Missourian, when he became Mark Twain, the great American writer; or Norma Jean Baker, girl next door, when she became Marilyn Monroe, screen star and sex idol. Virtual personalities may be known by aliases such as Webspinner or DarkCloud, and never by the names of the actual people behind them. To make things even more interesting, men may use female aliases, and women male aliases. (Gender switching is not necessarily something we advocate; we merely want to mention that it has been done electronically.)
        And who's to say that it's just a weird game? Think of the contributions made by people who plied their creative talents under pseudonyms or stage names, from George Eliot (a cross-gender alias) to Sarah Bernhardt and from El Greco to Cary Grant.

– end of excerpt –              

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