The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, revised edition

Rating:
Summary: New expanded edition is forthcoming
Review: This is a classic work on the development of online communities immediately before the advent of the World Wide Web. A new expanded edition with a terrific follow up chapter and expanded bibliography is due this fall from The MIT Press. A must read!

Rating:
Summary: *Among the first and still one of the best Net commentaries*
Review: Though published only four years ago, Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community already feels like a classic. Perhaps this isn't too surprising given that its subject matter - the social implications of computer networking - is based on a technology that measures things in nanoseconds. A long-time member of a California based BBS called the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (or WELL), Rheingold describes, with sober affection, what that sort of connectedness has meant to him and can mean for the rest of us, particularly when it grows into an online community. Although he clearly champions computer networking, however, his book doesn't degenerate into one long Internet infomercial. On the contrary, Rheingold makes his readers acutely aware of the dangers to liberty and democracy that computer-aided surveillance and the commercialization of networking can pose. Despite this, the book remains hopeful, providing a kind of blueprint for the distributed, grassroots, on-going conversation that computer networking, at its best, can make possible. Like all true classics, the book's real value lies not in letting us remember how it was (back when the Internet was simple), but in helping us imagine what it can become again.