"Where everybody knows your (screen) name", "Is there a 'space' in cyberspace?", and "Small town gossip goes online"

One of the reasons for my great interest in this class is my personal experience with forums and EMC (an experience that many of my 'irl' friends share).  I haven't been everywhere there is to be online, and I'm certainly not an expert, but I feel I've spent sufficient time in various online haunts to have a basic feeling of what a typical online environment feels like (to whatever extent a 'typical' online environment exists, which is extremely debatable).  Only problem is, it's a feeling, not a thought, and my attempts to put it into words in blog entries, response papers, and Moodle posts have fallen consistently short.  It is a thought Steinkuhler and Williams' article, based on post-positivist research, gets at more accurately and quickly than I would ever be capable of.

Let me preclude this by saying: I don't play MMORPGs.  I've thought about joining one, but my pocketbook has voiced continuous and loud objections to the matter, so these games remain un-downloaded.  I like video games, but I'm very much a casual gamer, into specific series (mostly big-name action-adventure games) and not much else, and I definitely don't play online, whether in a large-scale fantasy MMORPG like World of Warcraft or on an FPS (first person shooter) via XBox Live.  This being stated, the description given by Steinkuhler and Williams of MMORPGs as a type of 'third space', a new non-physical gathering place to form community, where social disparities are leveled, is almost exactly in line with my experience with communities in other online communication channels.  The presence of 'regulars' alongside new members, the overall playful tone of conversation, the feeling of a 'home away from home' online, and the very common formation of bridging social capital with the occasional addition of bonding social capital (especially in long-term, 'committed' online relationships) are all phenomena that sound familiar to me.  In the play-by-post roleplaying forums where I used to hang out, the affordances and limitations of the site(s) were very different from those present in an MMO.  But the experience of those forums as a 'third space' is a point of definite commonality.  In particular, Gaia online (a site for teens which used to be the primary place in which I would role-play) allows for the creation of sub-forums for people with specific interests to come together and hang out, creating social capital with more of a capacity for bonding (considering the common interest which brought them together to the forum in the first place).  I bring this up because these sub-forums were actually called guilds, explicitly invoking the long-term groups that MMO players often bond into.  This is far from to say that most of the communication and social capital formed in these groups was bonding - most of us knew each other well enough to know something about each others' (very disparate) lives, to have familiarity with what nicknames based on our usernames we preferred to go by online, and to be basically concerned about one another's well being: when someone was feeling down we would do our best to cheer them up - but not well enough to offer genuine, close comfort when the chips were down.  Certain of us did have close friendships with each other, both exclusively online and not, but this was not the norm, although many of my fellow guild mates chose to meet in person or exchange contact info including mailing addresses, personal email, and phone.  Yet this never stopped me from feeling these forums were a community, a home away from home, where I could know people and be known without concern for the fact that they were almost all older than I, where I could show the best side of myself and be as witty as I wanted by thinking before I clicked 'publish post.'  It is this phenomenon, I think, that many folks writing about EMC without experiencing it fail to acknowledge.  The fact that I would have turned to my 'irl' friends rather than my guild mates in a crisis does not mean that my guild mates were not important to me, nor that I was not important to them.  In fact, judging by the article about small-town gossip, our tendency towards bridging capital and lack of geographic proximity may have been vital to our function as a community at all!  At home, 'irl' connections and bonding social capital are vital to our lives, but bridging social capital has its place as well, and with the decline of the brick-and-mortar third space, the emergence of the online one is an important step to rebuilding these connections in our lives.

There is one other point from the small-town gossip article that struck me: the story of the woman from Indiana who had killed herself and her three children when her divorce was being discussed in a public forum for the whole town to see.  Hours earlier, she had posted a comment on that selfsame forum that "Now it's time to take the pain away."  This struck me because, had this woman been posting in an online community she felt a part of (whether an MMO, a forum, or some other anonymous online communication channel), this message would have sent out warning flags straight off!  Even if she had posted it in a new thread on an open public forum where no one really knew her at all, rather than on a board where she had bridging social capital with some of the other members there, I am almost certain that this response would have merited some action on the part of other observers.  The more private a message like this, the more unlikely that it will receive attention, as far as my awareness of these online dramas goes.  If you send a private message, or an ask, or make your blog private, or don't tag your post with anything, no one will see, and no one will help.  But I have seen time and time again complete and total strangers on the Internet banding together to help another complete and total stranger when the latter individual has posted a message with even the vaguest threat of suicide.  Calls go out to see if anyone know the individual in question in person, calls go out to see if someone knows their address and can call 911, and hundreds or thousands of responses go out - however brief - begging the individual to think things through, trying to offer comfort, offering helpline numbers, offering anything that they think might help.  Users may be anonymous, with no definitive ties or responsibilities to each other, but they are still human, and most humans, seeing someone in desperate pain in need of help, will try and alleviate that pain whether or not they get something in return.  It's a trend that's easier than ever when all it takes is a two-minute post, and although one of these might mean next to nothing, sometimes, hundreds upon thousands of them do, in fact, make a very important difference.

P.S. I attempted to access the annotated version of the Steinkuhler and Williams article, but neither highlighting nor notes showed up!  I am using Safari, which sometimes doesn't work like other browsers do - could this be contributing or does anyone know another solution I could seek?  (I don't have a problem changing browsers - I have been thinking I ought to switch to Firefox or Google Chrome for a while now.)