A tip of the hat for tech & culture writer Joanne McNeil for mentioning this book in her excellent Lurking.
Cyberville is the story of New York City’s 1990s “online salon,” Echo. Stacy Horn founded Echo and authored this book. However, the book features clips of lengthy discussions from Echo and its Echoids, so in effect the book is collectively authored. As are all online communities. That’s really what this book is about – the co-creation of online communities. While it was written in 1998, it’s very relevant for understanding what happens when we go online together. As the cover indicates, it’s also a fun relic of our online past. If you’re a Gen Xer or an elder millennial, you’ll cherish that part.
The book briefly talks about what it was like to start up an internet business in the 1990s in one’s own NYC apartment, but it’s mostly about Echo and how Echoids interact. They faced the same online problems we face now – what about pervs? What about neo-Nazis and other hate speech purveyors? What about cliques? What about romances gone right and/or wrong? What if words are misinterpreted?
However, what’s unique about Echo, in my opinion, was that the users were all in one geographic area. They regularly met up in real life for drinks, music, rec-league sports, etc. When you interact regularly with real people, there’s a different kind of trust and connection. That can happen online, as well, but it takes longer in my opinion. What separates an actual community like Echo from Twitter or Reddit is the trust and the bond. The knowing. I think that’s why Twitter often feels like a cesspool whereas smaller and more closed online communities can feel more nourishing. Social expectations and norms apply more with real relationships.
Towards the end of the book, a self-deprecating Horn presages the dominance of communication and the importance of the Cyberville reality we live in now:
Where is cyberspace going…Any idiot can tell you that in the future we’ll have what we have now only more MORE MORE. A big mother of a broadcast and interaction on demand hybrid of everything they can stuff on whatever bandwidth we have at the time…What is important and new about the Internet is connecting your viewers (or your customers) to each other – not you. This is how you create community. Everything we put on it will look a little different, but what’s underneath it will be the same. The Internet is a recreation of what we already have and who we already are. I was asked recently if the Net is going to bring us together or distance us. That depends on us. Does NYC bring people together? Does any place bring people together?
I think she got a lot right. What she may have gotten wrong is the neutrality of the medium. Monetization of interactions and clicks set us up for collective failure in our online interactions. But other ways of interacting are possible, and I think CBR and Pajiba have shown this to be true in 2022.
It’s worth noting that this book was published by WarnerBooks, a Time Warner company. Another online community, America Online merged with Time Warner in 2000, and then unmerged with it in 2009. But then AT&T bought Time Warner in 2018. I don’t know if Horn would’ve predicted that in its own way her book would’ve outlasted all of those giant competitors and conglomerates, only to be owned by a phone company. I know that’s not exactly how those things work, but still. And Echo itself? Still going. At least, it was in 2017.
Suggested companions to Cyberville:
- Halt & Catch Fire (tv)
- Lurking by Joanne McNeil
- Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
- Net Smart by Howard Rheingold
- Where Wizards Stay up Late by Katie Hafner
- Microserfs by Douglas Coupland
