February 10, 2000
ESSAY
E-Communities Build New Ties, but Ties That Bind
By AMITAI ETZIONI
No subject lends itself to a false dichotomy like that of virtual
and real communities. But the two are not opposites, not
exclusionary and not necessarily good for the same things.
For instance, the argument that virtual communities cannot do what
real communities can, a common position, is analogous to the
argument, when Model T cars rolled off assembly lines, that cars
cannot do what horses can: become your friends. Both modes of
transportation, though, get you there, and cars command some
obvious advantages of their own.
The current primitive virtual communities are stronger in several
ways than the real thing: if you are lonely or down, you can go
online any time, find out which of your buddies is around and
visit. (Try to do this at the neighborhood bar on Sunday at 7 a.m.)
If there is a snowstorm or you are sick with the flu, not very
mobile or afraid of the streets, you may not make it to your local
country store or senior center. But you can always log on.
When a car does something you thought only a horse could do, like
inspire affection, for instance, it is surprising.
So it is surprising that several important features of real
communities are beginning to be provided online, albeit in
different ways than offline -- ways that have their own weaknesses
and strengths.
One essential characteristic of communities is that they are
largely self-policing. Real communities minimize the role of the
state, the police and the courts by relying on gossip. You know
which store to avoid and who is likely to repair your roof on time
because of a subtle system that rates and updates reputations
through offline chatter.
Online communities also need to find ways to do this. In auctions,
at least one side ends up taking a risk; it is often the buyer but
occasionally is the seller.
So each party is keen to know the other's reputation.
EBay, the huge auction site (www.ebay.com)
, handles this problem through an ingenious system of rating
reputations. Similar systems are used by Amazon (www.amazon.com)
and Auctions.com (auctions.com), among others.
After auctions or trades, both sellers and buyers are asked to rate
one another. As a result, each participant acquires a score that
reflects the number of positive and negative comments received. All
are posted online.
Recently, I was considering bidding on a political science book by
Harold Laski in an online eBay auction. To check out the seller's
reputation, I looked at her feedback from other sellers and buyers.
She had earned 30 positive comments and had drawn only one
complaint. All the comments were listed; a typical positive comment
was from a seller (whose own score was a high 1,502) who wrote:
"Fast with payment, nice to deal with, AAAAAAA+++++++++." The
negative comment did not impress me. The seller seemed reliable.
Digging further, I found that the eBay screen name and number
appears above every negative or positive comment. Using that
information, I could ascertain a complainer's reputation. The
system seems to work like a charm: Fewer than 1 percent of eBay
auctions involve fraud, said an eBay spokesman, Kevin Purseglove.
There are no comparable statistics for satisfied customers in
offline communities, which may not in fact do as well. Offline
gossip is more nuanced. You would know, for instance, that someone
did not deliver this time because his wife had just discovered that
she has breast cancer, so you would give that person another
chance. But on the other hand, eBay's system encompasses millions
of people, while gossip systems can encompass at most a thousand or
so people.
Virtual communities cannot provide nearly as much subtle and
encompassing knowledge of members as a real community. But they can
include many more people. One's strong suit is depth, the other's
is breadth.
Like reputation, trust is also important both online and off. For
transactions to flow seamlessly, people must trust one another. In
real communities, people's default is to do so. They are taught
from childhood to presume that members of the community are good
people. It is considered inappropriate to distrust any member,
unless there is cause.
Most virtual communities start from the opposite assumption: I do
not know you, other than your online alias, so how can I trust you?
But three developments allow e-trust to flourish. For low-value
transactions (often up to $250) auction communities provide free
insurance that covers any goods or payments that are not delivered.
For larger amounts, i-Escrow (i-escrow.com)
serves as an electronic form of trust for many sites, including
GO.com (www.go.com), GimmeaBid.com (gimmeabid .com) and Mac4Sale
(www.mac4sale.com). After an auction ends, the buyer deposits the
money owed with i-Escrow. The seller is then told to ship the
goods. Once the buyer verifies that the merchandise has been
received, i-Escrow sends the money to the seller.
When quality makes a difference -- such as when buying stamps or
Pokémon cards -- quality can be determined by an appraiser, like
those at the International Society of Appraisers
(www.isa-appraisers.org)
. The seller can then post the information or send appraisal
printouts to interested buyers. Or a buyer using i-Escrow can refer
an item to appraisers before releasing payment. All that may sound
a bit complex, but not for those who live by the mouse. And it does
generate a trustworthy e-system.
Real communities foster intimacy as well as trust, as people get to
know one another and form close, warm bonds. It is often argued
that such closeness cannot be forged in cyberspace because people
cherish their anonymity and hide their true selves behind handles
and false presentations about who they are.
Actually, cyberspace has developed the tools that allow not only
the fostering of intimacy in one-on-one relationships (such as
e-dating) but also among members of groups. It is best to think
about these tools as building blocks. Some virtual communities are
based on only a few, while others accumulate a lot of them.
If a community is to be intimate, I hate to tell you, it must
exclude some people. Real communities keep people out with high
entrance fees (condominiums, golf clubs) and various admission
criteria (e.g., no pets or children allowed). Communities can do
that kind of thing as long as they do not violate laws concerning
racial discrimination and a few other forms of bias. By keeping
membership homogeneous and small -- and if possible, stable --
offline communities foster intimacy.
Numerous virtual communities work in similar ways, although they
are much more upfront about their procedures than real ones.
ECircles (www.ecircles.com)
, for instance, makes it easy for anyone to set up a closed
community. Both Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) and Excite (www.excite.com)
run thousands of clubs. Some are not merely closed but invisible --
they are unlisted. Others post the names of the administrators who
handle requests for admission. And Size is often limited; Excite's
clubs, for example, can have no more than 2,000 members. The newest
wrinkle is that Excite lets groups of up to 10 members have an
audible conversation online, in real time.
Much greater intimacy can be engendered if members of an
e-community voluntarily surrender their anonymity and the community
verifies identities. Some time ago, I joined one of the 80
little-known H-nets run by the National Endowment for the
Humanities. These are closed to the public and consist of groups of
professors specializing in, say, French history and culture or, in
my case, communitarian thinking. Participants must apply to be
included, and many list their real names on the screen. Several
H-nets -- the one for people studying the Hapsburg empire, for
example -- vet these identities.
As a result, you can combine what you already know about Scholar X
from University Y with what you hear from her on H-net. Soon you
feel as though you know one and all, as if you were in some kind of
never-ending face-to-face meeting. You learn that Scholar A, whose
writing you have long admired, is rather slow-witted and that
Scholar B, whom you have always suspected of not knowing what he is
writing about, is rather sociable. Instead of small packets of
personal information of dubious validity, you get a rather broad
and reliable band, which is of great value for creating intimacy,
maybe too much for your taste.
It seems that e-communities can reach the highest levels of
intimacy only if all the building blocks are in place: the number
of participants is kept relatively small, admission is controlled
to foster affinity, and people drop their Internet masks. But even
if one or two of these elements are missing, online communities can
still allow people to build reputations and trust and foster
intimacy, much like offline groups. However, they do so in
different ways and, above all, can reach many more people, day or
night, rain or shine.
Amitai Etzioni is a sociologist at George Washington University.
His most recent book is "The Limits of Privacy" (Basic Books,
1999).
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