The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier @ richardeward.com

The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
by Howard Rheingold
from The MIT Press

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

• Not very honest
  The virtual community is, in reality, at best a bunch of people disagreeing and regularly indulging in shark-like small group attacks. The WELL, of which Howard speaks so much, hounded one of its early members - Blair - to his death by suicide, a matter described, but not really examined with much thoroughness. Yes, he touches on flaming, but does not examine a deeper pattern of common harrasment, particularly of outliers. How Howard himself participated in this type of online gang harassment activity, not... more info

• Wrote the book on Virtual Communities
  Howard Rheingold is the most important lens through which the entire culture of the Virtual Community and Virtual Environment dynamics should and can be seen. This book, in any of its print runs or versions, is essential for anyone who wants to understand contact between people who's only connection is online via computers.

• A seminal 1992 work with update tacked on
  Rheingold provides a comprehensive, broad sweeping portrayal of the virtual communities landscape, particularly as it was in the early 1990s. In particular, the book provides a fascinating history of the development of virtual communities from back in the 1960s. The many stories of the development of virtual communities and of life in virtual communities provide a rich account.

  The books' style is more journalistic that academic. It reads something like an extended newspaper article, with some fine... more info

• Prophet of Electronic Power to the People
  

  Everyone seems to miss what I think is the most important the point of Howard's book. First published in 1993 and now in the expanded edition, the bottom line on this book is that the Internet has finally made it possible for individuals to own the fruits of their own labor--the power has shifted from the industrial age aggregators of labor, capital, and hard resources to the individual knowledge workers. The virtual community is the social manifestation of this new access to one another, but the real... more info

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