Communicating Community

"A 'community' is a set of persons involved in stable patterns ofcommunication. Communities vary widely in the range of their interactions,the capacity of their networks, and the links between information andmaterial exchange. A community is developed by actions which increase theirrange, capacity, or integration.-- S. J. Mandelbaum." "Critical to the rhetoric surrounding the information highway is the promiseof a renewed sense of community and, in many instances, new types andformations of communities." -- Steven G. Jones. So what's new? Once upon a time, in 1680 to be exact, it was the postalsystem. In that year a merchant called Dockwra set up a 'penny post' inLondon, quickly establishing over four hundred receiving offices and sevensorting offices. In parts of central London this service provided up totwelve deliveries daily. Similar services were subsequently established in avariety of provincial towns throughout England. A century and a half later aninsightful schoolmaster called Rowland Hill saw a huge potential for growth,arguing that the, by now well established, local penny posts be expanded toinclude all inland postal transit: his rationale being that the existence ofsuch a cheap service would precipitate an upsurge in personal correspondence.This increased volume, sensibly handled of course, would so reduce the unitcost as to make it profitable to carry a letter all the way from Glasgow toLondon for the princely sum of one penny. In 1840 the penny post was indeedexpanded to incorporate all such inland post; the benefits of providing sucha cheap and efficient communication infrastructure lying in its potential toenhance society by facilitating stability and unity -- by making societyinto a community. Of course it shouldn't be forgotten that in order to availoneself of this service it was necessary that one have 'access' to certain'tools': literacy and a spare penny being not least among them.In nineteenth century England one demographic that most certainly had accessto the tools which would allow them to make full use of the newcommunication network was the upper class. Many of those who couldreasonably be said to have fitted this description lived within a couple ofmiles of Hyde Park Corner in London. The outstanding frequency of the postalservice available to this relatively small group meant that it wastheoretically possible for one of their number to mail a message, receive areply, reply to the reply, and so on . . . all in the course of a singleday. If we accept Mandelbaum's criterion for the development of communities,then, this availability of a cheap, regular, and easy to use mailing networkmust have gone some way towards the development of a sense of communityamongst those who had access to the communications 'technology' of the day.In 1957 there was something new in the skies: a U.S.S.R.-launched satellitecalled Sputnik. One of the American responses to what they perceived astheir sudden disadvantage in the space race was the setting up of theAdvanced Research and Planning Association, ARPA. This was an interventionwhich ultimately led to the development of the global communicationsinfrastructure that we know today as the Internet. Prior to this rush ofARPA-funded research into new forms of, and uses for computing technology,computers were unwieldy monsters; owning one meant needing an inconvenientlylarge building to carry it around in (apologies to Douglas Adams). The newyoung programmers and engineers who developed such human-machine-interfacefacilitators as keyboards, screens, and graphics, quickly decided that whatthey wanted to do most of all with their newly networked machines was tocommunicate with each other -- computers, it seems, came to be conceived ofas communication tools almost as soon as they stopped being card-punching,number-crunching megacephalic giants, amenable only to an esoteric bunch ofFortran-wielding lab-coats.So, within a few years the demystification of computers had gotten under wayregardless. As Howard Rheingold puts it, "changes in the way computers weredesigned and used led to the expansion of the computer-using population froma priesthood in the 1950s, to an elite in the 1960s, to a subculture in the1970s, and to a significant, still growing part of the population in the1990s" (67-68). Electronic mail quickly became, and remains, one of the mostcommon uses to which networked computers are put. Initially this "e-mail"followed the post office model, with single messages being sent from oneindividual to another within a group. But the opportunities that the mediumafforded for the quick, easy, cheap and instantaneous dissemination ofinformation to large numbers of individuals, were soon recognised. Out ofthis new mode of communication grew concepts and practices such aselectronic bulletin boards, newsgroups and, ultimately, the burgeoningnetwork-within-a-network known as Usenet.Today, then, what's new is that messages may be sent, replied to, the repliesreplied to . . . and so on, all in the course of a day; only the individualsengaged in this feverish activity don't have to be geographically proximate;indeed, they can be situated on opposite sides of the globe while it alltakes place. The same message can be sent to many people without the need toundergo the strain of endlessly repeating your elegant copperplate (or, forthat matter, spending a lot of pennies). Indeed the message can just be putinto the public domain, read it who may. Of course, it shouldn't beforgotten that to engage in such untrammelled interaction with one's fellowtravellers requires that one have 'access' to certain 'tools'. I haveaccess; if you've read this far, then I guess you have too (one of thosetools, by the way, is the time to spare).References"Post Office." Chamber's Encyclopaedia. Vol. 2. Rev. ed. 1966.Jones, Steven G., ed. Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communications andCommunity. Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage, 1995.Mandelbaum, S. J. "Too Clever By Far: Communications and CommunityDevelopment." Communication 7 (1983): 103-14.Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Finding Connection in aComputerised World. London: Minerva, 1994. Citation reference for this articleMLA style:Paul Mc Cormack. "Communicating Community: Past and Present." M/C: A Journalof Media and Culture 1.1 (1998). [your date of access].Chicago style:Paul Mc Cormack, "Communicating Community: Past and Present," M/C: A Journalof Media and Culture 1, no. 1 (1998),([your date of access]). APA style:Paul Mc Cormack. (1998) Communicating community: past and present. M/C: AJournal of Media and Culture 1(1). ([your date of access]).