Searching for community online
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Weekend
Four years ago, Stephen Doheny-Farina, a professor in the technical communications department at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, immersed himself in the world of virtual communities and wrote a book about it, The Wired Neighborhood. At the time, his reaction was one part optimistic, one part cynical, one part too-early-to-tell. Recently, I hunted down
his e-mail address via www.amazon.com and asked him for an update. His response arrives late Saturday afternoon.
Doheny-Farina reports that most of the early nonprofit community-networking efforts he covered a few years earlier have grown slowly, if at all. The real growth, he says, has been in the commercial enterprises, which are employing the ideas generated by the community-network pioneers. Local newspapers and radio stations, for example, now recognize the power of providing local community information on their Web sites, and their well-promoted efforts are taking traffic away from the nonprofits. For example, later in the evening, I notice that boston.com is hosting a discussion on the benefits of casino gambling in Massachusetts - a debate that would have lived on a nonprofit community site a few years ago. This is all part of a trend, according to Doheny-Farina. ''If you look at the history of the media in the US and Europe,'' he writes in his e-mail, ''you quickly see that in the US, the private sector dominates the development of each new medium, while in many other countries those things were largely government controlled for much longer in their development. It's pretty obvious that that trend is holding for networked new media.''
Doheny-Farina has given up his observer status; he is now actively involved in an effort to connect his town's rural hospital to a larger health network via the Internet. Which strikes me, after a week on the civic-networking beat, as probably the way this whole movement will continue to grow: one connection at a time.
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