Does the Internet Constitute a Global Educational Community?
Nicholas C. Burbules
Published in Globalization and Education: Critical Perspectives
Nicholas Burbules and Carlos Torres, eds. (Routledge, 2000)
The Great Community
"Community" is one of the keywords of American education. Partly out of a nostalgic memory of a time when most schools were intimately involved with other local institutions of civil society (families, churches, and so on), and partly out of a principled decentralization of educational policy from the national level to the state, and from the state to the city and district levels, American educational policy and practice continually invoke this term to conjure support for schools and to foster a sense of collective responsibility for what happens in them. For example:
The move away from the dominant ethic of bureaucracy and competitive individualism and toward more democratic values of support, diversity, and community is most possible within a political climate of shared responsibility and trust. Projects aiming to create learning communities, therefore, attend to establishing new political relations among teachers, administrators, parents, students, and community members.
Today, phrases like "community control," "community standards," "learning communities," and "communities of practice" are widely used in education, expressing the underlying, unquestioned idea that schools should be communities of some sort and should be closely integrated with larger communities of which they are a part.
This nostalgic vision of community rests upon a recollection, also, of a time when affiliation was based upon proximity, relative homogeneity, and familiarity: the community of a small town, a neighborhood, an extended family. We see this nostalgia quite clearly, for example, in the influential ideas of John Dewey, who recalled the town hall meetings and small-town bonhomie of his childhood in rural New England, while seeking to reconstruct a vision of community that could sustain the modern urban contexts of schooling that he was analyzing in his later career. For Dewey, the challenge was to reconceive "community" in contexts where proximity, homogeneity, and familiarity no longer held; he called this vision the "Great Community," and for him it underlaid the conception of citizenship within the modern nation-state. His remembrance of, and faith in, the virtues of a local, face-to-face community carried over to his vision of democracy, as in Democracy and Education, where he argued that citizens are simultaneously part of two sorts of communities, those based upon like-mindedness, to which members hold one sort of allegiance, and those based upon broader civic obligations and a sense of common interest, to which members hold a different sort of allegiance. In one of the most memorable passages of his book, he argued that it is how democracies manage communication within and across these groups — two values that are by necessity often in tension with one another — that the vitality and self-governance of a democratic public can be maintained. Dewey (famously) notes in this context the related roots of the terms "community," "communication," and what is held in "common." Hence even as he acknowledged the pluralism of modern urban contexts, his vision of community rested upon the idea of recognizing (or creating) elements of commonality that could sustain a sense of "community." At its broadest level, the Great Community, this meant a politically constituted public that rested not only upon "conjoint activity," but on the recognition of consequences of collective actions and decisions that were of import to all, of common concern to all.
As noted, Dewey understood that this collective sense of community was often in tension with local senses of community, and that citizens often had to balance split loyalties between their affiliations based upon (as I have put it) proximity, homogeneity, and familiarity, and those based upon a more rational calculation of the long-term, aggregated consequences of personal and local decisions, the shared interests of a larger community. We see this sort of conflict, for example, today between local groups, often motivated by religious sentiment, who want to exclude from "their" schools curriculum content that brings students in contact with cultures and values that exist within the larger society (and so, from that standpoint, which students should be prepared to think about, consider, and in many cases learn to tolerate), but which are repugnant to their own local values. Dewey recognized such tensions, but seemed to believe that they were generally reconcilable, partly because of his faith in the force of reason to persuade citizens of their larger obligations and interconnectedness, and partly because he believed in the mythic force of the ideal of the nation and of the democratic public sphere.
Hannah Arendt had a very different and, I would say, more agnostic vision of this problem. For Arendt, the public space is fundamentally identified with plurality, not with commonality, and the political constitution of public decision-making often will not rest upon identifying real or perceived similarities, or commonalities of interest, but upon reaching provisional conclusions that contending groups agree to accept. Such outcomes of political deliberation may rest upon some rational assessment of common interest or common purpose (Dewey’s vision), or they may rest upon quite different considerations, each group for their own reasons, but balanced against one another in a compact acceptable to all. If this is a vision of "community," it is one much more attenuated and provisional than the idea of the Great Community. Yet another situation is one in which even this level of agreement may not obtain, and in which the only ground for co-existence within a pluralistic context is one of tolerance and co-existence, despite unreconciled difference.
This is the view, for example, of Iris Marion Young, one of the foremost critics of the ideal of "community" as it has come to us from liberal democratic theorists such as Dewey. Young writes:
The ideal of community…expresses a desire for the fusion of subjects with one another which in practice operates to exclude those with whom the group does not identify. The ideal of community denies and represses social difference, the fact that the polity cannot be thought of as a unity in which all participants share a common experience and common values. In its privileging of face-to-face relations, moreover, the ideal of community denies difference in the form of the temporal and spatial distancing that characterizes social process. As an alternative to the ideal of community, I develop…an ideal of city life as a vision of social relations affirming group difference. As a normative ideal, city life instantiates social relations of difference without exclusion. Different groups dwell in the city alongside one another, of necessity interacting in city spaces….[D]ifferent groups…dwell together in the city without forming a community.
From this standpoint, we must always ask who is seeking to foster a sense of community, among which groups, and for what purposes? Who is being included within this community, and who is being left out?
The ideal of community has been similarly questioned, particularly in the context of the formation of the modern nation-state, by Benedict Anderson, who argues that communities, particularly at the national level, are always imagined (or to use alternative language, "constructed" or "constituted"), not givens. This analysis is especially important as a corrective to visions of community (or nationhood) as something naturalized or based on essential similarities (as in defined communities of ethnicity or race). "Community" is imagined, or constituted, then, in specific historical conditions and against a background of political interests. The analysis of Young, or Anderson, belies the connotations of "community" as something based solely on warm feelings of affiliation, and views such ascriptions as something experienced by various "others," excluded or marginalized by communities, as a judgment or a threat — indeed, as something often meant precisely to do so. Hence, it is important not to read Anderson as stressing the term "imagined" as meaning something merely made up and ephemeral. Even "imagined" communities are "real" in their effects on people.
The dichotomy of real or imagined obscures the actual dynamics of belief and action, which motivate and reinforce one another: believing that something is true makes people act and treat one another in certain ways; these actions and influences can come to create realities that (retrospectively) confirm and support those beliefs. This may be nowhere more clear than in the case of communities, where imagining certain affinities reinforces and is reinforced by ways of speaking and acting together, and by practices of inclusion and exclusion that reify the borders imagined. Thus, communities that may be formed initially merely on grounds of efficacy or convenience, can over time take on stronger and stronger feelings of affiliation and commonality, even when (previously) these would not have been thought to exist. Conversely, commonalities (of character or interest, for example) that one might argue "really" exist may in fact exacerbate conflicts and heighten the feelings of competition and opposition between groups. According to this line of argument, then, commonality and difference are not the sole driving conditions of the politics of community, and identified communities may exist along multiple dimensions and forms, often based more in who they are excluding as "other," than in what binds them together.
This, in turn, raises a fundamental question that always needs to be posed in the face of ascriptions of community: What are the conditions under which this "community" is being secured?
With this background in place, I can turn now to the issue animating this essay: The idea that the Internet is becoming a sort of community (or "virtual community") itself and, because it is becoming the primary medium for the transmission of communication, information, culture, and goods and services around the world, that it is becoming a kind of "global community." What do these notions mean: "virtual community" or "global community"? And how do these emergent, imagined communities affect our understandings of educational policies and practices? I hope that this essay can provide a helpful way of thinking about these issues.
The Conditions of Community
The idea of community, as discussed in the previous section, rests between two sets of values: on the one hand, the idea that cooperation and shared responsibility provide the best context for human effectiveness in accomplishing social goals; and on the other, the idea that close ties of affiliation are beneficial and supportive, if not necessary, for the living of a good life. This makes the notion of "community" uniquely flexible in being able to appeal to both pragmatic, ends-oriented ways of thinking, as well as those based more on warm personal ties and strong group identification. It is, in short, an ideology. To call it ideological is simply to point out the way that it operates within these different discourses, unifying and motivating social reform agendas that arise from quite different premises and intentions. It is the very vagueness and open-endedness of the term that allows it to be used in these different ways, but always wrapped up in what Raymond Williams calls a "warmly persuasive" mood; as Williams says (not having Young’s work before him), nobody has anything bad to say about the value of "community." I believe this faith can be seen especially, though not uniquely, in contemporary discourses about American education, across the entire political spectrum.
But today, the developments of post-Foucauldian theory cause us to ask a different, more skeptical set of questions about this ideal. We are more aware of how ascriptions of community, either as a description of a state of affairs or as an ideal to work toward, are based not in natural commonalities but in mediated relations that are politically constituted in specific historical conditions and spaces. The existence of a "community" is not a given, therefore, but a claim, a proposal, that is bounded by a set of conditions and practices that have given rise to it. Hence it is a very different perspective on community to ask, under what conditions is it thought to obtain? A corollary question, in light of Young’s concerns, is to examine the dynamics of exclusion, as well as those of inclusion, necessary to the formation of any particular community — to appreciate that there can never be, so to speak, a "Great Community." The very conditions that include some, exclude others (sometimes inadvertently, though often quite intentionally).
In this section I want to explore three sets of conditions that are part of the dynamic of creating and identifying a community: mediating conditions, political conditions, and conditions of space and place. I will then use these three sets of conditions to examine the sorts of communities the online environment seems to be fostering, and their meaning as educational communities.
Mediating Conditions of Community
All human interactions are mediated, even apparently "direct" face-to-face interactions. As Erving Goffman’s work explores, even the most immediate social interactions are in fact still mediated by a variety of performances, gestures, and rituals that do as much to keep the participants opaque to one another as to facilitate some degree of understanding and cooperation. It is a myth to imagine that the more immediate interactions are always the most honest, open, and intimate ones. In other contexts, these mediating conditions may be more visible to people, but this does not in itself grant them more import or influence.
One type of mediating condition is the medium of interaction itself: through face-to-face conversation, different types of writing, or telephone or some other distance medium (including the Internet itself, which I will discuss later). It is important to see, I think, that these are not degrees of mediation, or contrasts between mediated and unmediated (face-to-face) interaction, but alternative forms of mediation, each of which works in its own distinctive ways to disclose and to conceal — which is what media do. and what they are often explicitly designed to do. Any medium acts as a type of frame, highlighting certain elements of interaction and making them more visible, while at the same time serving to block out elements that fall outside the frame. Some media have costs associated with them, sometimes quite material and economic costs, sometimes psychic ones (such as the risks of making one’s self "public"); these costs have differential effects on persons. In comparing media, it is important, then, to contrast their distinctive inclusions and exclusions, not to attempt to rank them on a single, simple scale from more to less revealing. Social interactions, as in a purported community, take on particular features because of the media through which they take place.
Overlapping with these questions of media are the forms of communication available to social actors. Dewey was, I think, correct about this: that the kind of community one strives to foster, and the kinds of communication that are encouraged and made possible among its members, are intimately (and dialectically) related issues. As in the case of media, I think that there is a tendency in much social theory to want prescriptively to define and sort different forms of communication, to rank them along some continuum of desirability, rather than to see them as multiple forms, each with characteristic purposes and effects. Dialogue, for example, is often taken as the paragon of social discourse (especially in education): from Socrates to Freire and Habermas, there is a belief that the pursuit of a certain type of interactive discussion and debate makes for the optimal mode of publicly adjudicating common concerns. In the strongest versions of this faith, dialogue is even seen as self-correcting, in the sense that the only legitimate response to breakdowns or conflicts within a dialogue is more of the same. It is, again, a far different starting point of analysis to regard forms of communication, like media (and often in close relation to them), as elements of interaction that reveal and conceal; that frame what is and what is not open to discussion; that encourage certain types of interaction (certain forms of community, if you will) and discourage others; and hence that have effects of inclusion and exclusion that affect different prospective participants differently. These issues, which I cannot review in detail here, include a broad range of factors including the language in which communication happens; the way in which parties to communication are positioned in relation to one another (what Elizabeth Ellsworth calls the "modes of address"); the roles of questioner and answerer (who gets to ask questions, and what sorts of questions); and so on. None of these forms of communication are by nature more universal or more inclusive than others; and each will be experienced by certain people as awkward, alienating, or silencing — and this too will give the community built around them a particular set of boundaries and omissions.
A third set of mediating factors are a variety of social practices that govern the ways in which social participants act toward each other and act together for concerted purposes. Obviously, these factors are closely related to the first two, and they are similarly multiple in kind. I want to focus on one set of such practices here, identity practices, because they are of special relevance to the topic of this chapter. "Identity practices" refers to the many individual and interactive moves that social actors make as a way of forming, expressing, and defending their identities (plural), in response to and in relation to one another. Sometimes these identity practices are relatively personal, private, even internal to people’s thoughts and feelings; sometimes they are collective, public, and negotiated in conscious relation to (and sometimes in opposition to) the practices of others. They are, moreover, frequently dynamic, as people play out changing identities over time; and they are frequently multiple, as people play out more than one dimension of identity, and work out the frictions of conflicted alternative identities that they are endeavoring to maintain at the same time.
Political Conditions of Community
In addition to what I have been calling mediating conditions (media, forms of communication, and social practices), which shape and constrain the possibilities of community, there are in addition those broader political, and historical, conditions that precede and overarch the choices and activities of participants, also shaping and constraining the possibilities of community. I would argue that these political factors are rarely determinative in any simple sense, and that these conditions (like all the others I am exploring here) take on a differing significance depending on persons’ and groups’ responses to them. Nevertheless, they are not simply matters of personal choice, and they are factors that must be responded to, even if the response is one of resistance. In short, community rests upon ascription and sentiments of affiliation; some of these we choose, and some we do not choose. For we are born into certain communities (nation, family, or religion, for example), and while we can act in various ways toward them, even rejecting them, that we must deal with them we do not choose. This is the condition Arendt calls "natality." Not all communities are purely voluntary.
I return here to the contrast between Dewey and Arendt. Both recognized that any public space fundamentally presents actors with the condition of difference, and that a central challenge to forming a democratic public is in dealing constructively with this condition. For Dewey, and progressive liberal theorists since him, difference is conceived primarily as diversity, as a condition with the potential for disagreement and conflict, but also as a condition with the potential for fruitful engagement precisely because of that difference. Indeed, for such theorists, democratic vitality (even down to the very practical level of generating alternative possible solutions to common problems) requires such differences, to insure that the broadest possible range of views is heard and that the broadest possible range of social actions, and their possible consequences, is given consideration — hence the fundamental weight given in liberal societies to such ideals as free speech and tolerance.
For Arendt, difference is also a condition of public spaces, and it also poses a deep challenge to democracy. But it is a different sort of challenge. For Arendt, difference is conceived as plurality, not a range of alternatives that can be simply articulated, compared, judged, negotiated, or combined in some set of social compacts or compromises (so that those who are different become, in certain respects at least, less different over time), but an ongoing condition, in which even compacts and compromises, when they can be achieved, might retain fundamentally different meaning and significance for their participants — and in which many issues of fundamental importance may never be bridgeable at all.
Dewey clearly understood that broader democratic affiliations could not usually be based on the same elements of proximity, homogeneity, and familiarity that characterized local communities (and that they would often be in direct tension with them). But from this latter, Arendtian, perspective, the conditions of proximity, homogeneity, and familiarity are actually incompatible with community within the public sphere. Once one leaves the realm of the private (where the conditions of proximity, homogeneity, and familiarity are more taken for granted, as in relations with immediate family members), any attempt to recreate those values in a public space leads to (what is for Arendt) a distortion of publicness, a third space that she calls the "social." In the social there is an immersion of distinct identity for the sake of belonging, an inappropriate and unhealthy (in her view) transferring of the virtues of the private onto the public sphere, and so a construction of proximity, homogeneity, and familiarity on the basis of a desire for conformity and avoidance of deep conflict in the face of plurality. This social sphere is not the true public sphere, and it retains none of the virtues of public engagement (the possibilities of personal growth and change through encounters with the strange, the difficult, and the challenging). It is a relatively safe space, where "safety" is conceived as the minimization of risk to identity and private affiliations. In this sense the "social" is antithetical to the possibilities of democracy.
Space and Place as Conditions of Community
A central theme in Arendt’s view of public and private spheres is her analysis of the distinctive spaces that characterize and accommodate each mode of interaction: drawing from ancient Greek concepts of the agora, or public square, and the household, or domicile (and arguing, as just noted, for the gradual emergence of a third, social space). Here I want to go beyond this idea that the public and private can be characterized in terms of distinctive (and discrete) spaces, to talk more broadly about how spatial arrangements and spatial practices constitute our very ideas of publicness and privacy. As in the case of previous conditions, these spatial arrangements and spatial practices can be viewed as ways of shaping and constraining the possibilities of community.
The first question here is how a space becomes a place. "Place," and a sense of being in a place, develops from a sense of familiarity and recognizability: one has been here (or in places like it) before. This sense may not be pleasurable: the recognition of danger is also a characteristic of certain places. At the other extreme, a home or homeland is a place where memory, familiarity, and the rhythms of daily life bring a sense of belonging or, for dispersed persons, a nostalgia for return to that place. Hence, place can be a condition for the formation and maintenance of communities (communities of family, neighborhood, or nation). Both public and private spaces are places when persons recognize where they are and know how to act there: the familiarity of the space and the familiarity of the activities characteristic of it create and support one another. We know where we are when we know what we are supposed to do, and vice versa.
People also sometimes transform spaces into places, by acting within and upon them to make them their own (what Norberg-Schulz calls a "lived space"). Mapping is an example of trying to turn a space into a place. Another example is the adaptation of a space to the patterns of daily use (and not only the adaptation of use to space). For example, many college campuses lay out a pattern of sidewalks, designed in advance, to connect various buildings, only to find that the grassy areas in between are often worn down by new paths that the residents of campus actually use in getting from building to building. Apparently (friends tell me), some campuses have learned to follow a different strategy, letting people use the campus for a while, looking to see where the pathways of use are, then laying sidewalks down there. The formation of trails, artifacts of personal use, convenience, and sense-making, is another way in which people make spaces into their own places.
The encompassing term for the transformation of space to place is architecture. It is crucial to see that architecture is not fundamentally about building boxes to keep the rain off one’s head; it is about configuring spaces that both anticipate and direct activity. Residents of an architectural space adapt their activities to fit the space, and adapt the space to fit their activities — the relation is always both ways, and it is in this reciprocal adaptation that a space becomes a place. The "architecture" is not only the initial design or building, but the transformation of it over time; in this sense, people always help build the buildings they occupy, and the buildings are not fully finished until they have been used for a while (in one sense, then, they are never "finished"). In part, of course, this may mean quite literal rebuilding: tearing down walls, moving doors, adding rooms, and so on. But at a more subtle level, it is the pattern of daily choices and activities that reconfigure an architectural design: where people sit, move furniture, try to become comfortable.
Theorizing these dynamics, I think it can be suggested that architecture is a way of anticipating and directing activity along a number of dimensions, including:
• movement/stasis
• interaction/isolation
• publicity/privacy
• visibility/hiddeness
• enclosure/exclusion
Again, however, the dialectical character of architecture should not be viewed in only one way: architecture anticipates and directs these activities, but the pattern of these activities also transforms and reshapes the architecture. Henri Lefebvre calls these "spatial practices," the activities through which spaces are experienced, perceived, and imagined. In living their daily lives, people seek out spaces and reshape them according to the patterns of their needs and desires, though it is also true that these needs and desires are reshaped by the spaces available to them.
It is, then, one step further along this argument to consider architecture as the design of spaces generally: public spaces, private spaces, textual spaces (the layout and size of a newspaper, for example), agricultural spaces, educational spaces (classroom arrangements, for example), and online spaces. The design of such environments shapes, intentionally or inadvertently, the conditions for activity and interaction within them: conditions for the formation and development of communities. The five dimensions listed above can be seen as the polarities along which specific communities develop their character. Communities are manifestations of the places in which they settle (while the places change also to fit the community).
The Conditions of Online Communities
With this framework in mind, it is possible now to turn to a set of specific issues about the ways in which, and the conditions under which, online communities are being formed. There is nothing natural about such communities; they are as "imagined" (and as "real") as any communities are. But they are formed under conditions that shape and constrain the kinds of communities they can become. I will explore these issues under the same three headings as before: mediating conditions, political conditions, and spatial/architectural conditions. Numerous features of the online environment constitute the conditions for community within it; and these conditions (including the condition of globalization, one of its most significant, overarching characteristics) shape and constrain the educational possibilities within and across these communities.
Mediating Conditions of Online Communities
The Internet is, of course, itself a medium; in fact, it comprises numerous media, all operating over the network of wires and computers that constitute it: HTML pages (the World Wide Web); email; file sharing and transfer; listservs or other asynchronous discussion groups; IRC, or real-time "chat"; teleconferencing and videoconferencing; and so on. While each of these media has distinctive characteristics (some are text-based, others allow for voice or video transmission; some are synchronous, others are asynchronous; etc.), there are some general characteristics that typify the online medium generally.
The Internet has both facilitative and inhibitive effects on the formation of communities within it. On the one hand, the Internet has become a medium where collaboration happens and where people can create networks of distributed intelligence. This point is crucial because it means seeing the Internet as more than a repository for, or a means for the dissemination of, "information" (its usual characterization), and more than simply a medium of communication. It is also an environment that instantiates collaboration, in which participants can compose themselves as working groups, and where the identity of a working group as a group takes hold. There are many, many illustrations of this. For example, the pattern of hyperlinks within a topic area often tacitly define a group by the ways in which Web pages link to common sources, including one another, or, alternatively, through the intentional choice by the members of certain interest groups to link all their pages to one another — what are conventionally called "Web rings." Listservs and chat rooms also attract and affiliate like-minded persons in a common conversation, though they are frequent sites of "flame wars" because these sites of association, precisely because of the common concerns of their members, can become sites of high-stakes disagreement. Modern developments of "Intranets," sometimes hermetically sealed off from the rest of the Internet by "firewalls," are designed to foster collaboration and information-sharing within organizations, while keeping these resources away from "outsiders"; these enforced communities are especially strict where matters of commercial interest, so-called "intellectual property," or secrecy are regarded as paramount values.
At the same time the Internet can interfere with the formation of community, in part for the very same reasons already discussed. Some communities are not interested in encountering other perspectives and groups; it is easier to stay off-line entirely and seek other forms of affiliation. Some individuals and groups are put more at risk than others by the dangers of harassment, insult, or unwanted attention. Given the multiple lines of affiliation and community that the Internet makes possible, some communities may tend to "drown out" others. Perhaps most strikingly, the formation of strong online communities can sometimes interfere with the vitality of proximate, face-to-face communities offline. Here as in so many other respects, what the Internet gives with one hand it takes away with another; it is neither an unalloyed good nor an encroaching danger — it continually presents users with inseparable elements of both.
In short, the distinct media that the Internet comprises shape, and are shaped by, groups that use them for their distinctive purposes; it is not just a set of individuals connected to other individuals, but an environment, a space, in which existing groups work and interact with each other, and in which other groups, with no awareness of themselves as groups, come to constitute themselves as such. Newsgroups, operating via Usenet, are an early example of this; Web rings, discussed above, are another. Online environments originally based on the "Dungeons and Dragons" game (MUD’s, MOO’s, MUVE’s, and similar spaces) provide a stage upon which actors, often with fictional or imaginary personae, can explore rooms or mazes and interact with each other. More recently, service providers such as Geocities, Tripod, and now Excite and Yahoo, have begun promoting Web environments literally called "communities" (or sometimes "clubs"), for users with likeminded areas of interest. Geocities is a typical example, offering sites organized as thematic "neighborhoods," usually named for actual place names, which subscribers can join. These communities have codes of appropriate conduct, such as allowable or banned content for Web pages, and administrators who have responsibility for surveying the pages within their community and regulating who can and cannot be part of it. (There is an obvious parallel here with "gated communities," neighborhoods who erect actual barriers to entry, who police and restrict who can enter their area, and who often have strict codes for the appropriate standards of houses, yards, and activities within them.)
The astonishing growth of these sectors of the Internet belies the idea that it is just a communications network; it is a space in which people come together and interact. For many users, these so-called "virtual" environments are more vital, exciting, and important to them than other areas of activity for their lives, as indicated by the amount of time they spend within them. The communities are centrally and intimately tied up with areas of interest and concern (collectors, joke-tellers, sports fans, pet owners, and so on) that are often of fundamental centrality to the sense of self and enjoyment that these participants have in living. They are of special importance to older users, or those in outlying, rural regions, who rely on these media of community to relate to others who they could never encounter otherwise. And, of course, they are the only media through which these sorts of communities can be formed on a truly global scale.
What I am trying to highlight here is that these media are distinctive (and hence so are the communities they help foster): some rely on explicit self-identification, others on imagined personae (often called "avatars"); some are openly accessible to new participants, others are decidedly not; some are highly regulated, restricting what can and cannot be shared or done within them, others more unregulated; and where regulation occurs, some involve strict top-down management, others more consensual, group-communicated norms. The media of online community not only facilitate the formation of communities, but communities of a particular type, composition, and character — and, by implication, they discourage the formation of communities of a different type, composition, and character.
A second set of mediating conditions are the forms of online communication: the use of language, text, voice, graphics, and so on, as the modes through which people relate. Up until recently, of course, the Internet was almost entirely a text-based medium. Now it is becoming more routine to transmit graphics, sound, and video; and increasingly the Internet is being used for direct audio or video conferencing. These forms, in turn, have direct effects on the kinds of verbal interaction they support and encourage (the important differences, for example, between dialogues that are synchronous and those that are asynchronous; or those that involve written text only, as distinct from those that include voice or video transmission). On the horizon are technologies that will allow some degree of tactile contact and interaction. It seems that whenever critics identify a barrier that makes online interaction "not like real interaction," new developments begin to blur that distinction. Rilke identified the five senses (sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste) as representing five levels or degrees of intimacy. Online interaction seems to be steadily moving along that scale.
Nevertheless, text remains today the primary medium of online interaction. This category comprises not only the text of individual messages sent back and forth (for example, over email), but also the form of new types of publications (newsletters, articles, and the online version of underground or samizdat publication, "zines"). Here as well, writing and publication become conditions of community: both through the processes of collaboratively writing and composing publications, and through the networks of distribution through which they are shared. It is not new that communities of interest (from professional or academic groups, to political groups, to informal hobbyists) may sponsor newsletters or circulars that serve their members and help attract new members. But it is a new phenomenon when these materials can be continually adapted, revised, and added to in the processes of circulation themselves. The text or publication becomes a medium of actual community-building, and not just a mode of communication within it.
Finally, it is impossible to address these issues without noting the English-centric nature of most online communication. Language too is a mediating condition: as with these other media, it shapes and constraints who can participate in an online community (and who cannot), and how they participate. While there are vast areas of the Internet where people interact in their native languages, structural features, including the nature of HTML code, the software applications through which users access the Internet and conduct searches within it, and the prevalence of advertising, etc., all mean that English-speaking users are privileged to have access to more resources and more avenues for interaction than any other users. Moreover, English is not just a condition of access to a great deal of online resources and interaction; participation in online interaction means that users who are not primarily English speakers will be exposed to this language on a regular basis and have many opportunities to practice it — the Internet becomes a medium for teaching the language and promulgating its spread. Indeed, many non-native speakers of English will find it easier to use English in online contexts, where they can type their comments as deliberately as they need to, can revise what they have written, and can receive feedback on the meaningfulness and efficacy of what they have said. This is a kind of linguistic imperialism; but the irony is that the Internet would not be the Internet, and would not have the enormous potential (as well as the enormous dangers) that it has, without a common, or at least predominant, language within it.
The third set of mediating conditions of community comprise the characteristic practices of online work and interaction, of which there are many. Earlier I focused on the issue of identity practices, and these are clearly a central issue in online communities. There are myriad ways of "being online" (or, for that matter, "online beings"). On the one hand, humans who participate online adopt a variety of strategies of self-representation: some are fairly literal (using their birth names, informative signature files, descriptive return email addresses, and so on, as descriptors to others of who they are); others are highly imaginary (made-up names, fictitious Web pages, avatars that represent them in MUD’s and MOO’s, and so on). It is a mistake, however, to draw the line too sharply between the literal and the imaginary, as if there were nothing performative or imaginary even in ordinary face-to-face interactions, or as if a person is not in some sense "really" representing who they are even when they create an imaginary persona to stand in for them.
On the other hand, once people begin to "be" online, there is an intrinsic sense in which their identity changes precisely because they are using this technology: what they do, what they like and care about, how they spend their time, who they know, and so on, are all changed from that moment on — and when these activities themselves involve online interactions and experiences, there comes an inevitable fusion between the "offline" and "online" dimensions of their being. They become, in Donna Haraway’s famous formulation, "cyborgs."
Online communities influence and are influenced by these multiple personae (especially because persons can be part of many online communities at the same time, as they are members of other communities). In the online environment, even more so than in other environments, one chooses, or not, to disclose aspects of one’s personhood, or to disclose it in particular ways. This process is not entirely open to conscious control (one always reveals more or less than one intends, even in pretending), but to an extent "being online" means the continual selection and filtering of self-information through the portals of available media. Particular communities invite or discourage certain kinds of disclosure and participation; and they utterly ban others. Hence in a very clear sense, here as elsewhere, choosing a community means in part choosing who one is; and changing communities, or exploring new communities, is a process of exploring or experimenting with new selves.
Therefore, it is an oversimplification, I believe, to draw a clear line between online and offline activities, or online and offline identities. The assumption that face-to-face interaction is more honest or direct than online interaction is belied by participants who say that they experience quite the opposite. The idea that a person is more "real" or more themselves when they are acting in one context than in another elides a number of much deeper issues about performativity and the ways in which all social interactions are mediated; and the belief that some communities are "real" and others "virtual" ignores what is "virtual" (imagined) about all communities and what is "real" even about online communities — as real as any community can be. So, when Howard Rheingold writes about "virtual communities,"
People in virtual communities use words on screens to exchange pleasantries and argue, engage in intellectual discourse, conduct commerce, exchange knowledge, share emotional support, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, find friends and lose them, play games, flirt, create a little high art and a lot of idle talk. People in virtual communities do just about everything people do in real life, but we leave our bodies behind.
I take this as an unintended argument for dropping easy distinctions like "real" versus "virtual" community in the first place. I tend to prefer the term actual to blur the real/virtual distinction. Actual communities have specific characteristics that reflect the conditions, here the mediating conditions, under which they are formed and develop. A great deal can be said about these specific characteristics: but distinctions like real/virtual do not carry that analysis very far, and they obscure deeper processes at work.
I hope it is clear now what the idea of "conditions of community" does for analysis. In online environments, communities of a remarkable range and vitality are being formed, growing, and developing new ways of using the Internet (and its constantly changing capabilities) to give their own identity as communities new form and significance. At the same time, however, this is not happening on neutral ground or with a blank slate: the conditions of online community tend to drive communities into particular forms or patterns; and though they adapt resources to their own purposes, however flexibly, they are still using resources not of their own design and control. Moreover, the very conditions that have the benefits of facilitating (certain kinds of) communities also, and inevitably, have the effect of ignoring, or even excluding, other actual or prospective communities that never come into existence because they do not have the privileges taken for granted by others. And, finally, there are online communities that are quite consciously exclusive of others, in part defined by their desire to exclude others: as in the "safe" neighborhoods of Geocities where members are reassured that they will not have to encounter dangerous or distasteful "intruders" into their gated community. Later, I will return to these issues in exploring how these conditions shape and constrain the possibilities of educational communities.
Political Conditions of Online Communities
There is a dangerous misconception that because the Internet is a relatively unregulated and decentralized medium it is politically neutral. I think it should be clear from the analysis up until now that there are political and moral dimensions throughout the activities of people working and interacting online: for example, in the ways in which many communities are self-policing, identifying and enforcing explicit and implicit standards about what is and is not permitted among their members. The Internet, because it links together participants from many parts of the world and from many political, value, or religious systems, is being imagined as just another liberal pluralist space. A recent television advertisement proclaimed the Internet as a place where age, gender, race, etc., do not matter. This appears to be true, if you can only tell these things about a person on the Internet if they choose to disclose them. But this appearance obscures important issues: that whether or not people choose to represent their identities, these remain present in the ways that they think, act, and express themselves online (sometimes these qualities may be more apparent to others than the actors think). Moreover, these factors are always present in influencing the question of who is and is not even present in online environments; fundamental questions of access are strongly influenced by location and identity (to pick an obvious instance, people in countries around the world that have only the barest presence on the Internet — they don’t even have electricity). Pretending that nationality, class, gender, or disability do not matter online, when in fact they do, is one more imaginary about the type of "community" that the Internet represents itself to be.
On the contrary, says David Shenk,
Cyberspace is Republican….Cyberspace is not politically neutral. It favors the political ideals of libertarian, free-market Republicans: a highly decentralized, deregulated society with little common discourse and minimal public infrastructure.
Indeed, one might say, it is the very posture of imagining itself to be apolitical that reveals the Internet’s deepest political tendencies.
As noted in previous examples, the same things that make the Internet most appealing and useful also make it dangerous and difficult to cope with. Because the Internet is a broadly inclusive space, it continually brings one up against content, and perspectives, that are silly and pointless at best, repugnant and deeply hurtful at worst. Many families worry about this, especially where their children are concerned. Hence we see more and more attempts to carve out within this untamed frontier safe spaces that reestablish the traditional grounds of community: proximity, homogeneity, and familiarity. I compared this earlier with the rise of gated communities in some neighborhoods. Similarly, many communities insist upon filtering software for computers in schools and libraries, or in homes. Many Web rings and "portals" involve creating archives of resources that have been screened and approved for general access, including children — participants run the risk of encountering "inappropriate" material if they venture outside of that protected space.
And so here we encounter (again) a paradox: because the Internet is a global network, it provides enormous opportunities for "tourism": travel to distant locales, encounters with the new, the strange, and the exciting; sampling cultural products from a variety of traditions. It allows one to jump outside of familiar communities, to explore new communities, and perhaps to become part of them. It contains the virtue of what Arendt called "plurality," taking one outside the realm of the proximate, the homogeneous, the familiar. But one consequence of plurality is the encounter with what is not only incompatible with one’s proximate, homogeneous, and familiar communities, but is actually antithetical to them (sometimes it is what the community itself was formed to avoid). So it becomes like the person who moves to a large city because of the variety of ethnic restaurants, but who never leaves the house to sample them because they afraid of "those people" on the streets.
Finally, there is one important way in which the Internet is becoming truly unbounded, and that is in its capacities as a commercial environment. Because the Internet has the capabilities of near-instantaneous communication and transfer of information, it has become enormously important to global business and financial transactions, and it is increasingly colonized by commercial Web sites, "junk" email, and ubiquitous advertisements. The globalization of the Internet makes it a valuable medium both for the promotion of products, and for their purchase. And this commercialization, in turn, becomes a condition of community as well.
So we see, for example, growing calls for "smart communities," a term used to refer to wiring entire cities together, and into the broader Internet. There are countless uses and benefits that might come from such developments (including educational benefits), but it is clear that the primary purpose behind undertaking such investments is to promote more local and online commerce. To take a parallel, when cities first began creating Web pages to attract visitors and to provide information for their citizens, 80% of them featured business-related resources, far more than any other category (fewer than half featured education-related resources). In fact, the question today is no longer, Will the Internet become a commercialized entity? but, What sorts of economy will it support: profit-making only, or gift economies that promote the open sharing of resources, ideas, and information without regard for commercial gain? These conditions will, in turn, change the sorts of communities that come to exist online and which people will be part of them — including, one might predict, online communities that members will have to pay to join (this is already true for subscribers to some online publications and services, which are communities of sorts).
Increasingly, the avenues of access to the Internet, and the communities within it, require travelling through pathways that are commercialized: service providers that are linked with large telecommunications or cable corporations, or — within the Web — through portals that are controlled by private services (such as Excite) and packed with advertisements. These conditions not only shape the possibilities of community, but in significant ways limit it:
The creators’ vision was that the Web would encourage connections among diverse sites and collaboration among distributed communities, not draw a growing mass audience into ever-fewer high-traffic sites....The real conflict is not between commerce and community. It is between the traditional architecture of commerce (hierarchical systems of well-capitalized sources, distributors, and customers) and the traditional architecture of community (networks of one-to-one and few-to-few connections that create a sense of belonging and shared values.
Finally, the commercialization of the Internet also means a blurring between legitimate and illegitimate commercial ventures, especially on a global scale. Already the lack of regulation on the Internet has given impetus to child pornography, betting, bank fraud, counterfeiting, drug trafficking, and black marketeering by mafias all over the world. One of the chief problems in coming to grips with these activities is that, while they are illegal in some places, they are not illegal in others (or, even if illegal, unprosecutable). But when all places are linked together via this medium, the problem of one can become the problem of all. This returns us again to the conditions of online community: some of these will be labeled "criminal communities" by certain authorities, who have little or no jurisdiction over them. Yet by the same token, entirely legitimate and legal communities in other contexts (certain religious communities who use the online medium, for example), will be banned from others. Now, I am not arguing the equivalence of all these different sorts of communities, though in some cases a "mafia" from one standpoint will be someone else’s "business network"; a devout religious community will be someone else’s "fanatics"; gambling activities that are utterly banned by certain communities will be state-sponsored sources of revenue for others. What this shows is not that no moral distinctions can be drawn, but that the Internet is a medium in which few if any overarching moral standards exist, and that the composition of the Internet as an unregulated amalgam of communities, each having their own powerful moral codes, perhaps, may be an ineffective environment for these moral differences to be adjudicated. This makes it all the more ironic that the primary overarching ethos of the Internet seems to be a commercial sensibility which, if it takes hold, will have an even more difficult time in delimiting legitimate from illegitimate business activity.
Space and Place as Conditions of Online Communities
Where are you when you are online? What does it mean to be with others who are also online? Is it possible to have a community "at a distance," and what sort of place can support such a community? In this section, as in the previous two, I want to return to the general ways that space and place are conditions of community, and then reexamine what these mean in understanding the online environment and experience.
The term "cyberspace," which started with William Gibson’s book Neuromancer, has become part of our standard vocabulary for talking about the Internet. But what makes cyberspace a cyberplace? Part of this process is users’ becoming familiar with this environment, learning to recognize some of its features. The standardization of user interfaces, the similar design of Web browsers, the common basic elements of the pages they download, and other features of the online environment allow users with some degree of experience to adapt fairly quickly to new spaces they encounter there. They know their way around. However, these spaces are less amenable to the other main dimension of the space/place relation, namely, being able to customize and adapt spaces to one’s own preferences and habits. The structure and contents of Web sites, the links between resources, and so on, are determined by the authors/designers of these spaces, and are not subject to modification by the casual user (as things stand now). This gives much of the Internet the feeling of wandering through paths and spaces of others’ making, in search of useful and interesting things, but only by assimilating to patterns, connections, and search strategies that fit the existing design and software demands. This makes cyberspace more space-like and less place-like, as it is experienced by many users. There are few ways to leave permanent "trails" that mark the pathways one prefers to follow one’s self.
The architecture of online space, like the architecture of buildings and other spaces, anticipates and directs personal activity along several dimensions, which I introduced earlier: these include movement/stasis; interaction/isolation; publicity/privacy; visibility/hiddeness; and enclosure/exclusion. In my view, these should not be viewed as "metaphorical" notions within cyberspace: movement, visibility, privacy, exclusion, and so on have perfectly literal and direct application to activities and situations online. What is important to see here is the extent to which one’s experiences along these various dimensions is only partly a matter of choice; it is also determined by elements of the design itself, which one does not choose (one can, for example, refuse to accept "cookies" from Web sites visited, but one cannot refuse to have one’s computer recorded by a site as having visited there). The degree to which one can make choices within these dimensions is a central factor in the extent to which this environment takes on the character of a place where one can live, act, and interact with some measure of confidence and security. And, in this respect, as in others, different people will experience these features in drastically different ways.
Here is what is different about being online: In other spaces, or places, the characteristics of the environment are to some extent independent of the means used to represent them; but with the Internet these two levels are utterly intertwined. Paths of movement (for example, hypertext links) are also connections of meaning-making. "Being online" is both a place and a process: Samira Kawash offers an ingenious analysis of this condition in the uses of the "@" sign, for example in email addresses. Although people colloquially now use "@" to abbreviate locations or time ("meet Jo @ café" or "meet Phil @ 2:00"). Kawash argues that the @ of being online (of being @ a particular email address, for example), is a different sort of positioning, one that is not analogical to being "at" other locations; rather, it is distinctively a state of being online and only makes sense in that context:
"On line" is a metaphor denoting a complex network of electrical signals that translate inputs to my keyboard into computer operations in some remote elsewhere. "On line" is thus less a place than it is a mechanism of translation or transportation.
Thus, the sort of place that "online" denotes is not a container, like a room or building or square that people occupy (or can leave), separate from the thing contained. Being online, when one is online, is itself a way of being defined by the place where one is. That being can’t be in any other place. So when one is "@" a particular place (or time) online, this is not the same as being "at" a place (or time) in ordinary life.
And lest one assume that it is different only because, as Howard Rheingold said, earlier, when we go online "we leave our bodies behind," there are good reasons to think that a kinesthetic sense of movement and location persists even when users are moving through online spaces.
Paul Virilio has even gone so far as to challenge the idea that online activity and interaction involve action "at a distance." When a user can, with his or her hand in a data glove or prosthetic manipulator, "reach" or "touch" or "pick up" an object through a robotic arm or sensor; when users can observe remote locations (even other planetary surfaces) through video cameras that bring their perception into spaces they could never reach otherwise; when almost instantaneous communication, including voice and video, can be achieved between persons regardless of their location on the planet, something begins to happen to the very ideas of action, perception, and communication. In one way it makes sense to call them action, perception, and communication at a distance, but aren’t they always "at a distance" (some distance)? In one way it makes sense to say that these examples involve action, perception, and communication that is mediated by something (here, technology), but aren’t they always "mediated" by some processes, filters of interpretation, and social conventions? What does "at a distance" mean as a crucial, ontological difference? Virilio suggests, not very much.
If one accepts this line of argument, then it is only a step further to suggest that the very ideas of identity, materiality, spatiality, and temporality are becoming increasingly interdependent. If I, wearing a data glove, can pick up an object in a far-off location and detect its weight and temperature, where do those sensations occur, when did they occur, to whom did they occur? Am I having the experience, or the glove, or the computer that is tabulating the data and converting it into electrical impulses that my hand interprets as heat, for example? Being online is always a state of being in-between, of being neither (simply) here nor there; mediation is not something that stands between the user and something else to which one is relating (an object, a Web page, or another user) — it is the relation, without which the parties to an online event strictly speaking do not exist.
In fact, Virilio suggests that the term "globalization" be replaced by "virtualization," because globalization depends on a revolution in the speed of travel or transmission across global distances, converging on the speed of the electron itself, or the speed of light. The media of action, perception, and communication collapse the distance/time equation into a point of instantaneity. The danger of the term "virtual" here, however, remains troubling. If the virtual environment is an art museum, have you "really" seen the paintings or not? I visited the Louvre several years ago and had to stand in a crowd to see the Mona Lisa, sheltered in a protective glass case with a surface that reflected back the faces of the people standing in line to see it (and in some cases, to video-tape it). Did I see the real painting? Would I have seen it just as well, or better, through a high-quality graphic that I could have downloaded online? Similarly, is a virtual conversation with someone, mediated by a two-way video link, less "real" than a face-to-face conversation? What if people happen to be more honest in video links than face-to-face — which interaction is more "real" then?
Does the Internet Constitute a Global Educational Community?
There are two sets of answers I want to address to this question, by way of concluding. First, the Internet as a whole cannot be a community; it is too disparate, too diffuse, too inclusive. To call it a "community" would be to stretch the word beyond any useful sense or meaning. It might be better to call the Internet a "meta-community," in both senses in which that prefix is often used: as an overarching congregation of communities, but also as a set of conditions that make communities possible, as a space in which communities happen. This essay has presented an exploration of some of these conditions, and the kinds of communities they make possible; conditions that shape and constrain the possibilities of educational community, as in any other space.
One of the chief conditions of this space is its global character: that it makes worldwide, nearly instantaneous communication and interaction possible; that it has become an almost indispensable medium for commercial and financial transactions; that it brings cultures and societies of enormous variety into immediate contact. The Internet is thus both one of the chief manifestations of globalization, and one of its primary causes. The condition of globalization, furthermore, is one of the things that gives online communities their characteristic qualities, and their characteristic concerns. The scope of who can be part of a community is opened up; but the threat of "intruders" who do not share the community’s values is opened up also. Communities can be formed around the values of diversity and inclusivity; but when they do this they struggle with maintaining the fabric of cohesion that gives them their sense of themselves as communities. Disparate communities can co-exist side-by-side, as in Young’s vision of the modern cityscape; but because the barriers between online groups are always provisional and semi-permeable, incursions across these boundaries (whether intentional or not) will always occur. The Internet is a prime example of what Arendt called the condition of plurality in public spaces; and this is a condition whose possibilities and problems can never be entirely settled or "solved," but that need to be struggled with almost continuously, and in continually new and imaginative ways. For Arendt, it is the necessity of learning to deal with plurality, and to forge meaningful and effective social goods under such conditions, that gives the political endeavor its capacity to educate and re-educate us as citizens. As I have discussed, many individuals, groups, and nations keep seeking ways to mitigate against the condition of plurality, in the Internet as in the other public and private spaces they inhabit (gated communities, government-imposed censorship, etc.). In this, they are resisting the possibilities of educational challenges to their belief and value systems. Ironically, perhaps, it is the very possibilities that a global Internet offers that make such restrictions seem so desperate and self-defeating.
As one notes the affinity of common, community, and communication, one might also note the affinity of the polis, politics, and the police. The Internet is a kind of polis, a city-state or cluster of city-states that must continually struggle with their plurality, their frictions in contact with one another, and the limits of their own capacities at self-governability. The politics of the Internet revolve fundamentally around these same elements: struggles over centralizing and decentralizing tendencies (or, in other words, how and whether the Internet can police itself); struggles over the desire to maintain zones of "safety," usually interpreted around the traditional values of community (proximity, homogeneity, and familiarity); and struggles over the kinds of economy that this polis will maintain — gift economies based on sharing non-scarce resources, or economies based on restricting access and charging for services.
These shifting determinations and self-understandings about the Internet and the types of communities that constitute it are already being locked in by how certain structural decisions concerning the Internet are negotiated today: for example, by whether one will only be able to access the Internet through one company’s Web applications; by how much of the Internet will be commercialized and accessible by fee only; by explicit moves of government censorship (or the more tacit form of censorship established by making certain resources scarce and expensive); by decisions about where Internet services will be accessible, and by whom, and at what cost; by technical standards that affect the design, operation, and language requirements of Internet resources; and so on. By and large, it must be noted, most of these decisions are being made with almost no public input; I suspect that even most users of the Internet do not know about them, who is making them, or the consequences at stake.
Such decisions are fraught with educational importance, because educational institutions, at all levels from primary to higher education, are trying to establish themselves as communities in and of the Internet. Choices that have implications for the kinds of communities the Internet will comprise, and how it will privilege some and disadvantage others (inadvertently perhaps, but as a direct consequence of decisions that do not seem to be directly about access or fairness), are being made continually in those educational institutions and outside them. Such activities are neither new nor unique to the online environment itself. But the ways in which imaginaries become real, and the ways in which "virtual" communities become as or more important to users than any other sorts of communities that they have access to, need to be understood as having increased importance as more and more learning opportunities will require access to and participation within the online environment. These issues have to be viewed in terms of their implications for both local and global, both online and face-to-face, both "virtual" and "real" educational communities.
My second set of comments pertain to the multiple kinds of community the Internet can support. A chief feature of the Internet, as a space that I have called a meta-community, is that many communities can co-exist within it. While the conditions of community explored throughout this essay do constrain some of these options (the Internet is not a neutral medium, by any means), they remain to a large extent flexible enough to allow alternative communities, alternative places, to be formed within it. I have suggested the importance of analyzing the specific features of educational communities in architectural terms, considering the ways in which these spaces shape and constrain participants’ experiences along the dimensions of movement/stasis; interaction/isolation; publicity/privacy; visibility/hiddeness; and enclosure/exclusion.
Moreover, in this context as in others people will belong to multiple communities at the same time; the Internet is not unique in this regard, but it does make these possibilities in many respects easier because of the variety of communities that are formed within it, and because of the number of communities formed outside the Internet, which nevertheless maintain some degree of identity and visibility within it. The number and variety of these prospective communities, of course, is also an expression of the Internet’s global character.
These multiple communities will have varying degrees of intensity and centrality to the lives of people who join them online. Alaina Kanfer offers the useful distinction of "thin" and "thick" communities, in terms of the number and variety of associations shared among members within a group. Another useful set of distinctions is offered by Michael Fielding, who differentiates patterns of interaction (not referring to online interactions specifically) as: co-existence, collaboration, collegiality, and community. These four types vary according to the degrees of freedom, task-orientation, equality, and intensity of relation among groups working together. Co-existence is high in freedom, but low in relationship, task-orientation, and equality. Collaboration is high in task-orientation, but low in relationship, freedom, and equality. Collegiality is high in relationship, task-orientation, and equality, but low in freedom. Community is high in relationship, freedom, and equality, but low in task-orientation. So, on this view, many online communities might be (according to Fielding’s categories) better understood as instances of collegiality, or collaboration, than community. But whether one calls these all different kinds of community, or some "community," strictly speaking, and others by some other name, matters little. What is important is to understand that people are drawn together by quite different purposes and are held together by quite different threads. Encompassing terms like "community" can make groups whose inner dynamics and intentions are quite different from one another appear similar from the outside. Furthermore, some communities develop out of choices made by participants to affiliate with one another; others are structured as spaces that others can either join or not (on terms not of their choosing). Educational communities, in particular, more often partake of the latter form, and this has direct effects on who will and will not be able to benefit from them.
It should be clear, also, that distinctions like Kanfer’s and Fielding’s can be very useful in understanding the range of interactions that can support different educational purposes. Thinking that schools or classrooms must be "learning communities," for example, may obscure the significantly different ways in which effective teaching and learning can happen. Interactions like co-existence, collaboration, collegiality, and community may each support quite different, but equally valuable, educational goals. It is especially important to add here that these different forms of interaction may be to varying degrees comfortable or acceptable to prospective participants in these educational opportunities. If categories like "learning community" are understood in too homogeneous a manner, then participants with different learning styles or different appetites for affiliation may be left out of them. Here, once again, the traditional associations of community with proximity, homogeneity, and familiarity can be an impediment to forming actual communities — including online communities, which I believe will become of even greater importance to the educational opportunities of learners of all ages, across all parts of the world.