Tom Coates is having a debate around the question: is physical presence necessary for community?
In response to those who claim that all forms of computer-mediated communication are less than authentic compared to face to face interaction, Tom says:
"Now obviously there are things that you can do in person that you can't do physically online. It's harder to guage someone's mood, it's harder to have sex with them, it's harder to get intonation or a tone of voice. But it's still communication! And the possibility of community still exists! I mean, there are many circumstances in which certain elements of the experience an interaction can be truncated - if you're on a phone for example and can't see the person concerned, or if they're wearing sunglasses so you can't see their eyes, or if you're actually bloody deaf and are forced to lip-read, for Christ's sake! But none of these things stop the possibilities of communication, and none of them stop people being supportive, helpful, useful, friendly or even forming communities through them. I work on the internet, and often my first experience of people is online. Sometimes my only experience of them is online. And yet we can be friends!"
Hmmm, I just blogged on this in my new (and yet still very generic looking) blog. Here's an excerpt:
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Cyberspace is said to be such a great medium for bringing people together because it renders the constraint of space irrelevant; however, space plays an important role in modulating human interactions. The online communities of the 1980’s and 1990’s were either stand-alone services that you had to dial into with a modem or they were on much more primitive networks that became less reliable the farther information had to travel. Even the far-reaching online communities were in practice limited to regional clusters by the immature Internet, which was then a slower patchwork lattice. The constraints of space were not irrelevant then, but merely relaxed.
If physical constraints helped the online communities of the past behave in a more human manner then it might be natural to assume that physical proximity has an enabling role in the development of social online communities. I’d argue that it’s not the physical proximity itself that makes a difference, but some common qualities that are commonly observed with it. When the members of an online community are physically near each other, the likelihood that they interact regularly increases. They’re more likely to see each other, engage in activities together, or perhaps they were already friends who expanded their friendship into Cyberspace.
Of course people can also have regular interaction without living near each other. Virtual project teams, online gaming clans, and online support groups all have all been known to develop strong community ties from regular interaction without seeing each other face to face. These examples are important to take note of, but for the purpose of bringing online communities into mainstream usage, they’re not likely to have a significant impact in the foreseeable future.