CYBERVILLE: Clicks, Culture, and the Creation of an Online Town
By Stacy Horn
Warner Books, 340 pages, $23
In cyberspace, no one knows you’re a dog,” the famous New Yorker cartoon observes in a wry commentary on the anonymity of on-line exchange, surely one of the most alluring aspects of the Web for many people.
What would it be like if cyberspace were more like a local hangout where everybody knew your real name? Stacy Horn’s “Cyberville” provides a fascinating portrait of Echo, a remarkably successful on-line community where everyone does.
“How can you create history with people if you don’t know who they are?” Horn sensibly asks, adding that on other networks, “Anonymity freed everyone’s inner two-year-old.” When Horn founded Echo, she wanted to create “(a) place where we can have history again,” a place “that has character” (and characters). “Life on Echo is like some bizarro `Our Town,’ ” she suggests. “Think: Grover’s Corners–the Dark Side.”
Like the stage manager of that Thornton Wilder play, Horn acts as guide and ad hoc historian of Echo in “Cyberville.” At times, her analysis exaggerates the singularity of the on-line experience. Particularly wrongheaded is her contrast of the Echo community’s “Mystery Science Theater 3000”-like simultaneous commentary on the televised police pursuit of O.J. Simpson in his white Bronco to the experience of other TV events, such as Neil Armstrong’s walking on the moon or the Challenger explosion. “We’re not just a silent group of witnesses anymore,” she insists. “We’re sharing our responses and we’re sharing them in realtime, as history unfolds,” as though much the same thing hadn’t been going on for decades among friends and families gathered in front of their living-room TV sets. Most of the time, though, Horn’s observations seem accurate and illuminating.
Echo, like other on-line towns, does constitute a new form of community, and in Horn’s portrayal, a particularly appealing one.
Even in Manhattan, where Echo is based, it could take a lifetime off-line to gather a circle of friends this interesting, this much fun: writers, artists, editors of ‘zines and on-line magazines, TV and film producers (mostly alternative), actors, choreographers and assorted students and slackers. The Echoids, as they refer to themselves, are an uncommonly articulate, witty and thoughtful bunch.
The topics for Echo conferences, or discussion groups, are fairly predictable for a group composed primarily of New Yorkers: movies and TV, culture, politics, evil, angst, New York, Frank Sinatra and, above all, themselves and one another (there’s even a conference titled “Shameless Self-Promotion”). But what aren’t predictable are the exchanges themselves, which manage to be simultaneously passionate and ironic, edgy and engaging. Interspersed throughout “Cyberville” are excerpts, some quite lengthy, of a wide range of exchanges. Some are silly and trivial, but many are genuinely funny, and others, particularly those in which the community struggles with the question of what to do about their “resident Nazi,” are quite compelling.
A perennially popular Echo conference is titled “I Hate Myself.” As much as their nicknames and self-scripted biographical sketches (which anyone can look up anytime to find out who’s who), these postings give one a good sense of the personalities that make up Echo:
chameleon: “I hate myself for putting all my eggs in one basket and then dropping it (without even coloring the eggs or nothin).”
Neandergal: “I hate myself because there are things I should be doing and sort of want to do and want to have finished, but I lack structure and direction so I keep forgetting what they are.”
jneil: “There’s a little note at the bottom of the Mac’n Cheez box that sez: Makes 5 Servings. I hate myself for proving them wrong.”
Tumbleweed Topper: “I hate myself just like my momma taught me.”
The Strange Apparatus: “I hate myself for immersing myself in Echo on a Friday night of a holiday weekend, when I could either be dancing my shinbones off in some clubatorium, or leaving NYC for some beachy climate, and all I can think about is Trapper John, MD.”
SuZin: “I hate myself because I am going to the shore this weekend with women who worry about their manicures and bikini lines and by golly, I’m finding myself worrying about mine.”
When the Echoids aren’t busy hating themselves (or discussing culture in all its manifestations), they’re frequently falling in love. Unlike the rest of the Web, Echo has a fairly even male/female ratio, which creates plenty of opportunity for romance. And the medium offers “that perfect blend of distance and intimacy that just makes some people feel like they have nothing to lose by telling the truth.”
In one of the more interesting sections of the book, Horn profiles four Echo romances, only one of which survived long term. “Longing and distance create the most perfect (or nightmarish) pictures,” Horn notes, and it’s easy to see how one can fall in love with someone else’s words, supplemented by one’s own fantasy. Accounting rather insightfully for the frequent failure of attempts to transfer on-line love off-line, she observes that, “Misrepresentations and overexpectations are troublesome everywhere. It just happens in reverse online. In the physical world, sometimes you get fooled by what someone looks like on the outside. Online, you get fooled by what they look like on the inside.”
Sometimes you’d rather not know what they look like on the inside. “Cyberspace sometimes attracts people everyone else has stopped listening to,” Horn says. And while other people’s bad behavior, thoughts and words can evoke a degree of rubber-necking interest, there was nothing redeeming about the actions of the miscreants who were eventually exiled from Echo, among them Mr. Happy, who interrupted conference after conference with lengthy disquisitions on his bowel movements; Mr. Normal, the on-line stalker who followed the women around Echo and said things he thought would upset them; and finally, Parzival, the resident Nazi (who finally left of his own accord). The most interesting of these is probably Parzival, whose postings eventually prompted intense community debates on how to “promote free speech–which includes radical, disruptive speech–and community.”
Cyberspace turns out to be, in Horn’s words, “a revealing, not a transforming medium.” On-line conversions of racists turn out to be exceedingly rare: If anything, people’s on-line personas seem to be more distilled versions of their off-line selves. Nor does the dis-embodied quality of on-line discourse render hate talk harmless.
The Echo community has its being chiefly in its words, and the destructive power of Parzival’s postings made clear that, “The line between words and actions is not as clearly drawn as some long for it to be. This medium points that out more dramatically than any other. . . . (S)ometimes words are expression and action.” For the Echoids, Horn says, “The struggle over the right thing to do about our Nazi was also a struggle about the place and ourselves: how we felt and related to it and each other and how we resolve a difficult conflict.”
While “Cyberville” offers a detailed and intriguing portrait of life in one corner of cyberspace, it also raises important questions about the functioning of any community, on-line or off: how it forms, what holds it together, and how members of the community support one another and–when someone’s behavior becomes intolerable–discipline one another.
