The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier

This is a review by Douglas B. Hindman of Howard Rheingold's 1993 book The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, a work about the social aspects of computer networks written by a self-described uncredentialed social scientist and participant in the political protests and social upheavals of the late 1960s. The review describes how Rheingold organizes the book around reviews of various types of computer networks: an opening case study of a low-cost Bay Area network created by the founders of the Whole Earth catalog, an accessible history of the Internet, chapters introducing 'groupmind systems' including Usenet, Multi-User Dungeons, and Internet Relay Chat, reviews of networks in Japan, France, and England, and a chapter on applications of networking to political organizing, closing with a critique of network domination by private enterprise informed by Habermas, Foucault, and Baudrillard.

The reviewer judges the strongest, most enduring parts to be the historical reviews at the beginning and the theoretical critiques at the end, while much of the rest is limited by the 1993 copyright date, since the book appeared before the World Wide Web's exponential growth and thus falls short of clearly presenting the state of the Net for democratic decision-making. Rheingold's discussions of antisocial online behavior and his critique of corporate domination of networks are singled out as particularly relevant, and the reviewer concludes he is an authoritative voice in the debate about the social impact of computer networks despite the dated material. The review mattered as a contemporaneous assessment of a foundational text on online community.