Crocels: Centre for Research into Online Communities and E-Learning Systems

Road Testing social networking services for e-dating

Defining the cyberspace constitution

At the dawn of the Worldwide Web when there was a heating up of imposition of laws by nation states on the international communications networks, one isolated voice spoke out and was cross-posted more times than the author could imagine. In March 1999, the strategy for regulating government exploitation of the Internet in the UK was set out for the first time in the Modernising Government White Paper.

Until late 2005 the focus of policy development in respect of interactive and transactional services online had been based upon consideration of how to drive up access and demand. However, government intervention with regard to the Internet has to some people been unwanted, as was voiced quiet vehemently by John Perry Barlow in his ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’. He openly declared in this document, ‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.’

This text is now one of the cornerstones in the history of the Internet. Barlow’s concept of cyberspace as a homeland without and beyond frontiers is somewhat challenging to the concept of a nation state put forward by Adam Smith but perhaps more consistent with the view of a nation as an ‘imagined community’ put forward by Benedict Anderson.

Barlow’s separation between the virtual world and the “real world” has been overturned by legislation and legal cases as soon as analysts began to worry about “spillover” from problems in cyberspace to problems in the real world. However, as Manjikian suggests, the legal and political systems are only one part of the story. Legitimate questions on the authority of websites in Cyberspace and its users as opposed to whether it can be considered a sovereign body can still be asked.

Cyberspace may still exist as a cultural society, where its users share the same technologies and share similar networks of mental artefacts, such as beliefs, values and experiences. A question that must be asked is whether Barlow’s document could be considered a constitution for the Internet. If so what impact does it have on the way we think about the constitutional and administrative laws that make up ‘the British Constitution’.

Definitions abound as to what a constitution is. It has been pointed out that a source that can be used to find information on such a definition would be the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), a California-based online community (Rheingold, 2000). It has also been argued that our current understanding of what a constitution is largely depends on the constructions which nineteenth-century constitutionalism placed upon it, locking the constitution into a series of complex relationships with liberal views of the modern nation state.

A current understanding of constitution is that it is a set of principles which determine the way a country will be governed, and a description of the order in which the principles should be invoked. Others have defined a constitution as something to which people subscribe to which sets out rules they agree to abide by. Based on these definitions, John Perry Barlow’s document could be considered a constitution for the Internet as it was at one point cross-posted by 40,000 websites who accepted the ethos of an ungoverned community called Cyberspace driven by a distinct order of statelessness.

However, a constitution is not only a repository of values, it also has considerable legal and political consequences. From this it can be seen that the United Kingdom’s constitution, while not written, has a structure of institutions governed by a set of shared economic and legal frameworks subscribed to by all those subjects who are deemed British citizens. This suggests that while Barlow’s document serves as a symbol of Internet users’ wish to be untouched by State-like institutions and legal rules, the unwritten British constitution has shown there is more meaning to the term than a document that prescribes a set of common values and beliefs. Indeed, it has been argued that the British constitution is at a critical historical, political and institutional juncture in which a number of inter-linked emerging agendas are altering the relationship between parliament and the executive. A constitution could perhaps therefore be defined as ‘a common agreement between a network of actors as to how they agree to co-exist as a society’.

More information

Further information can be found in our research paper comparing the Cyberspace constitution with the UK constitution.

The role of the vendor in consumer-orientated online communities

The rise of online communities has set in motion an unprecedented power shift from goods and services vendors to customers. Vendors who understand this power transfer and choose to capitalise on it are richly rewarded with both peerless customer loyalty and impressive economic returns they argue In contemporary business discourse, online community is no longer seen as an impediment to online commerce, nor is it considered just a useful website add-on or a synonym for interactive marketing strategies.

Rather, online communities are frequently central to the commercial development of the Internet, and to the imagined future of narrowcasting and mass customization in the wider world of marketing and advertising. Online communities offer vendors an unparalleled opportunity to really get to know their customers and to offer customized goods and services in a cost executive way and it is this recognition of an individual’s needs that creates lasting customer loyalty. Needs are not the only cognitive element that affects an actor’s behavior, then vendors that want to use online communities to reach their customers will benefit from taking account of the knowledge, skills and social networks of their customers as well.

It is possible to effectively create an online community at a click of a button as tools such as Yahoo! Groups, Facebook and Google+ allow the casual Internet user to create a space on the Net for people to talk about a specific topic or Interest. Online communities can be defined according to the forms they take. These forms range from special interest discussion websites to instant messaging groups. A social definition could include the requirement that an information system’s users go through the Membership Lifecycle identified by Amy Jo Kim.

Kim’s lifecycle proposed that individual online community members would enter each community as visitors, or “Lurkers.” After breaking through a barrier they would become “Novices,” and settle in to community life. If they regularly post content, they become “Regulars.” Next, they become “Leaders,” and if they serve in the community for a considerable amount of time, they become “Elders.”

Primary online community genres based on this definition are easily identified by the technology platforms on which they are based. Using this definition, it is possible to see the personal homepage as an online community since users must go through the membership lifecycle in order to post messages to a ‘guestbook’ or join a ‘Circle of Friends’.

The Circle of Friends method of networking, developed as part of the VECC Project has been embedded in social networking sites, some of which meet the above definition of an online community. One of the most popular genres of online community is the bulletin board, also known as a message board. A message board is one of the most familiar genres of online gathering place, which is asynchronous, meaning people do not have to be in the same place at the same time to have a conversation.

An alternative to the message board is the email list, which is the easiest kind of online gathering place to create, maintain and in which to participate. Another genre of online community that facilitates discussion is the Chat Group, where people can chat synchronously, communicating in the same place at the same time.

Two relatively new types of online community are the Weblog and the Wiki. Weblogs, or blogs. These are websites that comprise hyperlinks to articles, news releases, discussions and comments that vary in length and are presented in chronological order. The community element of this technology commences when the owner, referred to as a ‘blogger’, invites others to comment on what he/she has written. A Wiki, which is so named through taking the first letters from the axiom, ‘what I know is;’ is a collaborative page-editing tool with which users may add or edit content directly through their web browser.

Despite their newness, Wikis could be augmented with older models of hypertext system. A genre of online community that has existed for a long time, but is also becoming increasingly popular is the Virtual World, which may be a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORG) or some other 3D virtual environment, such as World of Warcraft.

More information

For more information on this topic you can read our researcher papers on increasing revenue using avatars and characters and genres of online communities.