Maintaining Virtual Communities Through Diversity

               In Daily Life in Cyberspace, Howard Rheingold discusses his own personal experiences relating to the growth and success of the WELL virtual community.  In this text, Rheingold emphasizes that WELL is an extremely diverse community, giving the reader examples of assorted users’ biographies, ranging from college students to writers to military captains.  While he acknowledges that a divergent community is inherently prone to conflict, Rheingold also makes a strong case for the value of diversity in terms of gift economies.  With a varied group of individuals comes a greater assortment of knowledge, and the reciprocity of knowledge presentation in a virtual community can lead to both the expansion of one’s personal knowledge base and the development of trusting, altruistic relationships with other users.   I definitely believe that the exchange of information among users strongly contributes to the “simple, corny, all-powerful love” that, according to Rheingold, is what allows a diverse virtual community to survive.

                I have had the good fortune to experience the benefits of diverse online communities in a variety of locations throughout my youth, but the thing has stuck with me the most is my time spent on Zetapets.  In middle school, I joined this small virtual pet website as a means of communicating online with my younger cousin, and I soon became acquainted with a diverse assortment of users, among them a grandmother raising her special needs grandson, a middle-aged gay rights activist, a talented cartoon artist the same age as I was, and a 10-year-old looking for a safe place to talk about friend trouble.  Before long, I was an active participant in their forum conversations, offering advice on topics that I felt knowledgeable about.  I found myself giving training tips to a user with a new puppy, critiquing photographs taken by other budding artists, and eventually even contributing some of my artwork to the site itself.  When I was in need of advice, I would simply post about my issue, and another user would quickly appear to offer their thoughts and support.  Because I had offered my knowledge to members of the community in the past, these same community members were more than happy to help me with minor health issues, coding problems, and other gaps in my own knowledge base.   Over time, this led to the development of trusting, strong relationships between Zetapets users.

                While WELL and Zetapets are obviously quite different in terms of surface goals, I quickly found that the Zetapets community was much more concerned with the exchange of ideas and information than with the virtual pet aspect of the site.  I can easily relate to Rheingold’s experience of getting to know individual users on a deeply personal level, as I have continued to keep in touch with these individuals to this day; several of us communicate regularly on more recent sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.  Much like the users Rheingold encountered on WELL, we continue to offer our varied knowledge to each other, and we continue to receive the knowledge that we’re lacking in return for the help we give others.  I definitely agree that this diversity can cause conflict, and Zetapets has certainly had forum arguments much like any other diverse online community, but ultimately there is a strong sense of trust and respect among users that always leads to a resolution.  At one point, the site had to be shut down due to issues with the owners, and even despite this, the members of the community found each other through a different site and came together to rebuild our site under a different name.  I see my experience with Zetapets as strong support for Rheingold’s assertions.  In order for a diverse virtual community to succeed, information must be exchanged, relationships must be built, and the users involved must have a strong belief in maintaining their community, even in the face of conflict.