Page 173 -

156 Chapter 5

argued that there are two basic forms of human will: the essential will, which is the
underlying, organic, or instinctive driving force; and arbitrary will, which is delibera-
tive, purposive, and future (goal) oriented. Groups that form around essential will, in
which membership is self-fulfi lling, Tonnies called Gemeinschaft (often translated as
community). Groups that were sustained by some instrumental goal or defi nite end
he termed Gesellschaft (often translated as society). The family or neighborhood exem-
plifi ed Gemeinschaft; the city or the state exepmlifi ed Gesellschaft.
More recently, Anselm Strauss (1978) another sociologist, described Internet com-
munities as “ social worlds. ” Even before there was an Internet, there were “ invisible
colleges, ” which consisted of academics, who though spread out around the world,
nonetheless developed a sense of collective identity with their colleagues, their fi eld,
and their professional position within that fi eld via constant communications ( Price
1963 ). Their shared communications and mental models gave rise to a discipline, a
professional group. Sharing and circulating knowledge appears to be age-old effective
social glue. These early communities were made possible by the printing press and are
sometimes referred to as “ textual ” communities as they primarily circulated written
documents. An important characteristic that these early communities share with
today ’ s virtual communities is that they organized themselves. The biggest divergence
is that whereas documents tend to be fi xed, information or knowledge to be shared
is fl uid in nature.
The fi rst virtual communities emerged about a decade after the establishment of
the Internet. The Internet itself was an initiative called ARPANET, which was intended
as a means of making it easier to for researchers to share large data fi les. In the early
1980s, a network called USENET was set up to link university computing centers that
used the UNIX operating system. One function of USENET was to distribute “ news ”
on various topics throughout the network. Initially, all of the newsgroups focused on
technical or scholarly subjects, but so-called alt and rec groups that focused on non-
technical topics such as food, drugs, and music began to appear, which constituted
the fi rst evidence of people organizing themselves into virtual networks.
Before long, the number of newsgroups started to grow exponentially. USENET, for
example, had 158 newsgroups in 1984. The number grew to 1,732 groups in 1991 and
to 10,696 groups in 1994. Today there are more than 25,000 different newsgroups in
existence. The Well, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, fl ourished as a place where
online pioneers could gather to meet and talk with one another and is one of the
oldest virtual communities around. Rheingold (1993) was one of the fi rst to assert that
online networks were emerging as an important social force that could provide rich