WELL and The Whole Earth Catalog has already been talked about as the first social networking steps to web 2.0. Although we talked about the politics behind them, we never got into the emotions and what people did with these communities. In Howard Rheingold’s “The virtual community” he talks about how his love for the WELL system created friendships, a place to vent and loads of information.
Rheingold shares with us that he is apart of so many virtual communities like “MicroMUSE, a role-playing fantasy game of the twenty-fourth century,” but he also talks about how he is part of communities where he supports parents with children of cancer. These parents use the WELL system to gain support but also use it to vent to others and show how they are really feeling. Although these people never met before, they are creating strong friendships that help people get through rough times. Rheingold also states that he uses WELL to not only vent, but to express other emotions: anger, sadness, laughter, happiness and more. People get to know his story as well as he gets to know theirs. What I found really interesting about his “friendships” is that when he was invited to a WELL in person party, he had a strange feeling when he was there because he had never met them in person, but knew so much about them.
Another interesting part of these virtual communities is that Rheingold could receive information about anything without having to look in books or ask a professional. His example is when a tic was found on his daughter. Instead of calling a doctor, he looked up on the Internet and the problem was solved right away. This reminded me of today’s modern day Web MD,particularly the symptom checker, which a popular website for Americans to use when they want to find out what is wrong with them fast. The concept of Web MD was made fun of in an episode of Modern Family. Other websites like Wikipedia are also a great rescource to get information fast.
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