The nature of community and whether or not you can have online communities has exercised the thoughts of many. Are they really communities, or do people just think they are in a community? Are cyber-communities just a sham? And why does this matter anyway? It matters because it affects the way we think about cyberspace, and it matters because calling these cyber-entities 'communities' may change the way we think about what a community could be. Some argue that you cannot call online groups 'communities' because they are disembodied and so the whole rich concept of community is threatened. Some online users claim that they find community in cyberspace, so who has the right to say that they are not in community? And perhaps the debate itself matters because there are many in developed Western societies who no longer feel part of any community and long for it.
Community has always generally been thought of as those people living in a particular geographical space. This means defining a boundary between these people in the community and those who are not. For example, this is the rationale for the political organization of voting in the UK - at least in 1999.
Over the last two decades, the word 'community' has been applied (in an exactly opposite meaning) to particular sections of society - so we speak of the 'gay community' or the 'disabled community'. Partly this is as result of gathering people together for political lobbying and partly it is because people identify more strongly with others with special interests similar to their own if they live in large urban areas where there is more distrust of the stranger.
It is in this second sense that communities exist online, with boundaries maintained on membership and on appropriate behaviour and with representational debate and selection on key issues. People join, meet others, come to know some well and others only by seeing their name appear from time to time in the lists of online communications, argue and reconcile, leave to join another - in fact most of the behaviour associated with other sectarian communities.
So cyberspace is just one of the modern technologies that makes us ask the question: is a community based on geographical nearness now dying? Will cyberspace be another nail in its coffin?
On the contrary, there are examples of the use of online services in the UK, Canada and the USA that facilitate local living. These range from dentists displaying when they have space for appointments, to finding the nearest recycling units and local government information on building proposals. The impact of such modest developments has been described as highly significant because people now feel much more part of the community. It seems that one of the most important features of that is an awareness of what is happening - exactly what would have been communicated through word of mouth when we did meet our neighbours, when we did live in communities.
Clearly a local community should not depend on the availability of IT equipment that many might not be able to afford or be trained to use. But there are also broader issues; for example, the way in which these new techniques may distance people from the decision-making process, turning them into consumers of information, rather than citizens. Such loss of local control appears to be an almost inevitable result of the increasing financial control required locally, and as central government increases its role. The solutions are inevitably political, but individual companies have found that the only way to get through such levels of complexity is to use information technology for access to both information and to people. Thus to care for the needs of the neighbour and the community in this new world requires, we suggest, a political change in how local concerns are handled, with all the relevant information being readily accessible, as it is in the USA, and of course, taking particular care for those without ready access to information via IT.