When the Net and the Real World Collide
A friend and I were talking tonight about the perils of setting up a Web community to compliment a real-world community. For instance, a community Web site for your church, or for your neighborhood – so a group people that would interact with each other both online and off. Now, Web communities can…
The document discusses the potential pitfalls of creating a web community that complements a real-world community, such as a church or neighborhood. It highlights the risk of misunderstandings and conflicts that can occur in both online and offline interactions, and questions whether these issues could spill over into the real-world interactions.
Generated by Azure AI on June 24, 2024A friend and I were talking tonight about the perils of setting up a Web community to compliment a real-world community. For instance, a community Web site for your church, or for your neighborhood – so a group people that would interact with each other both online and off.
(And by “community,” I mean two-way interaction – a Web site where people can post things themselves: a newsgroup-ish type thing.)
Now, Web communities can go downhill in a hurry. There’s a bigger chance for misunderstandings, and people have a tendency to be bolder and more frank when they’re writing than when they’re talking. Thus, Web communities can fragment when someone pisses someone else off, a flame war starts, feelings get hurt, etc. We’ve all seen it happen, I’m sure.
With a purely Web-based community – like we have here, for instance – there’s not too much at stake. This Web site is the only way most of us “know” each other, and if we all got in a big fight, we could all just fade back into the Net. The Internet, after all, is a big place and we never have to “see” each other again.
But say me and Matt got in a huge, vicious flame war, and it got really ugly. And now say that he and I go to the same church. And our kids are friends. And they go to the same daycare.
What if Fabian and I were assigned the same shift to work the concession stand at the local school fundraiser?
That said, is there a greater danger when your Web community is paralleled by a “real” community? The Web-based interaction is the one more prone to social disaster, and wouldn’t that leak over into the “real” interactions?
Thoughts, anyone? Examples?