Commons or gated community?
A theoretical explication of virtual community and the example of Craigslist
Daniel
Schackman
State University of New York at New Paltz
Abstract
An explication of theoretical concepts of community, virtual community, the commons, and gatekeeping exemplified by Craigslist.org, a virtual community in which gatekeeping is revealed to have considerable salience. Specifically explored are the following questions: Does the openness of virtual communities threaten the principles on which they are based, creating a tragedy of the virtual commons? Do restrictions on free and open access in virtual communities transform them into the cyberspace equivalent of gated communities? Is there a more balanced construct of virtual communities that can fulfill their missions as virtual commons while protecting themselves from the tragedy of the commons?
Many pioneers of the Internet came of age in the era of social liberation and consciousness-raising of the 1960s. Exploring and settling the new terrain of cyberspace, they built intentional communities of free expression, knowledge sharing, and inclusiveness, in the hope of developing a utopian Information Society. Succeeding generations of Web entrepreneurs and organizers have also been inspired by these ideals. Thus, the Web has been colonized by virtual communities such as The WELL, content-sharing spaces such as Napster, knowledge communities such as Wikipedia, and social networking sites such as Facebook.. However, as the Internet has matured, cultural, social, economic, legal, and community influences have also had an impact on the development of these virtual communities and virtual networking spaces. The result: this heretofore-open range is being fenced in. The WELL has been acquired by salon.com and now requires paid membership; Napster was shut down by the American legal system, only to resurface as a co-opted commercial venue; Wikipedia has instituted safeguards to prevent egregiously erroneous and inflammatory entries from becoming permanently published text; and Facebook has introduced more options for users to limit public access to their pages.
One of the most popular virtual communities, Craiglist has as its foundation the pioneering, utopian ideals on the Web, and has attempted to strike a balance between the idealism of free expression and the realities of spamming and scamming. However, the architecture of the portal itself may be unwittingly undermining the principles on which it was founded. A virtual community that is grounded in a number of communities of place, Craigslist is an innovative hybrid of the virtual and the real worlds, and stands at the forefront of community development in the Information Age. Explicating theoretical concepts of community, virtual community, the commons, and gatekeeping, exemplified in practice on Craigslist, reveals the complexity of developing a virtual community as a commons. Specifically explored herein are the following issues:
RQ1: Does the openness of virtual communities threaten the principles on which they are based, creating a tragedy of the virtual commons?
RQ2: Do restrictions on free and open access in virtual communities transform them into the cyberspace equivalent of gated communities?
RQ3: Is there a construct of virtual communities that reflects their missions as virtual commons while acknowledging the steps they take to protect themselves from the tragedy of the commons?
Conceptualizing Community and Virtual Community
In order to contextualize the explication of theories pertaining to virtual communities and the exemplification of Craigslist, an elaboration of the concepts of community and virtual community is presented.
Conceptualization of Community
Community is defined here as an interdependent social network of people with shared interests and goals for the community. Such a community can exist in a specific geographic location where community members live contiguously ¾ a community of place (Pigg and Crank, 2004); or it might be located in a wider geographic space such as a metropolitan area where there is some physical distance between members in their day-to-day lives; or come in occasional events or meetings ¾ a community of interest (Newman, 1981); or lastly, occur as a social network developed in the on-line “virtual” space of the Internet ¾ a virtual community.
Over the past decades in U.S. society, the strength of local communities has been questioned by academicians, policy-makers, and the general public, and responsibility for a perceived decline in “community” assigned to a number of factors: increasing suburbanization; social, economic and geographical mobility; and the breakdown of the nuclear family unit with the dispersion of contiguous extended families. For those who believe that strong, tight-knit communities are one of the major components of a healthy society, there is a call to restore that sense of community across the American geographic and cultural landscape.
Frontier mythology of rugged individualism notwithstanding, throughout American history communities have been a central focus of the landscape, from Native American pueblos, to the first European settlements at St. Augustine, Jamestown, and Plymouth; from bucolic, rural towns to sprawling suburbs to urban areas with a multiplicity of neighborhoods. Alternative communities set apart culturally, and in some cases geographically, from the mainstream have also been a presence through American history, including religious communities of the Amish, utopian hippie communes in the 1960s and 1970s, artist communities, urban ethnic enclaves, and gay and lesbian neighborhoods.
American popular culture has memorably represented the good and bad in our communities: the close-knit small town values of Our Town and It’s A Wonderful Life, and the big city alienation of The Crowd; the simmering moral decay just below the idyllic surface of small town U.S.A. in Peyton Place and Twin Peaks; the post-war suburban paradise of Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best, the rampaging suburban teens in Over the Edge; the patriarchal conspiracy of The Stepford Wives; and the Mean Streets of urban decay and violence where Law and Order attempts to keep those streets safe, to the youthful urban promise of Friends and Sex and the City.
Conceptualization of Virtual Community
The Internet, and its applications such as email lists and bulletin boards took root in the 1970s in American research universities. On the prototypical email lists and bulletin boards, a virtual community was formed as researchers working together on projects eventually began using the ‘net’ to discuss other interests, in particular role-playing games and science fiction (Burnett & Marshall, 2003). This opened the door for an inclusive, utopian vision of the Internet to develop (Turner, 2005); a venue beyond the limits of geography and time, where information from the utilitarian to the trivial could be shared by all in an egalitarian space, and a place in which otherwise marginalized people could participate. It was also envisioned as a venue for bringing people with common values together, which might facilitate the development of real world social networks (Castells, 2001). Pioneers such as Howard Rheingold envisioned beneficial social networks, or on-line communities, created and maintained on the Internet (Rheingold, 1993). However, these visions of liberation have been counterbalanced by a more cautious concern about the prospect of the Internet both perpetuating the inequalities of the real world and also lacking the strength of interpersonal ties in communities of place (Proulx & Latzko-Toth, 2005). Moreover, Smith (2002) described six aspects of virtual interaction that differentiate actual and virtual communities: virtual interaction is aspatial, asynchronous, acorporal, has limited bandwidth, astigmatic and anonymous. Considering the seminal virtual community The WELL, he described that it was difficult for the members to define all forms of potential infractions of community standards and the appropriate consequences because there were always new perceived infractions being made by new members that had not yet assimilated into the community.
Origins and Characteristics of Craigslist
One notable virtual community that formed in the 1980s was The WELL. An acronym for Whole Earth ‘Lectronic’ Link, it was founded by the Whole Earth Review as an extension of its idealistic vision of an egalitarian society. In the early 1990s, New Jersey computer programmer Craig Newmark was a member of The WELL (“Craigslist: About: Mission and History,” 2005). Newmark describes himself as a classic nerd in high school, complete with a plastic liner to protect his shirt pockets from leaking pens, with taped-together black glasses, and lacking social skill (Kornblum, 2004). When in 1994, Newmark took a job in San Francisco, he used email to contact new acquaintances, and to provide information about local events and activities. “In 1994…I saw a lot of people helping each other out on the WELL and in so-called news groups. I figured I should do some of that, too, and that it would help me connect with people better” (“On the record: Craig Newmark,” 2004, August 15, p. J1).
Soon, the friends on his list (thus, Craig’s list) were sending emails not only about events, but also jobs and housing. Word-of-mouth helped the list grow, and in 1995, Newmark decided to set up a website to handle the expanded traffic. By then, commercialization of the Internet was underway. Gunkel and Gunkel (1997) compare the colonization of cyberspace to the age of European discovery of the new world, fueled by commercial interest. Newmark however, has attempted to keep his venture from becoming aggressively commercial. Although it has been a for-profit corporation since 1999, Craigslist uses the “.org” domain designation to signify its “service mission and non-corporate culture” (“Craigslist: About: PR: Factsheet,” 2009). As of September, 2010, Craigslist had 30 employees, all of whom worked in San Francisco. Its operating costs are paid for by “Ad fees for jobs in 18 cities, brokered NYC apartments, adult and therapeutic service.” (“Craigslist: About: Factsheet”, 2010)
Today, Craigslist is a World Wide Web portal ¾ defined on Webopedia.com (2006) as a Web site with a wide variety of services and other offerings ¾ that provides community classifieds about community activities and events, housing, jobs, personal connections, sales and bartering of goods and services for over 700 locations in 70 countries, including the U.S. (“Craigslist: About: PR: Factsheet,” 2010). The original local site for San Francisco also serves as the home page of the portal. Discussion forums ¾ pages to post messages with opinions about a variety of topics from movies to gardening to philosophy ¾ are offered simultaneously across all the sites for all Craigslist visitors to participate in from anywhere in the world. The format and style of the Craigslist local sites are constant: very plain, with no frills. All sites use an English-language template, with most postings also in English. Newmark and Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster have expressed interest in translating sites into local languages (Pfanner, 2005), but English remains the portal’s lingua franca.
As of 2010, there were over than 50 million visitors to the sites in the U.S. alone, and over 20 billion page views per month in its sites around the world. The portal was ranked the seventh most visited English-language site on the web. There were at the time over than 50 million new classified ads each month, and over 120 million postings in 100 discussion forum categories (“Craigslist: About: PR: Factsheet,” 2010). It has had the third largest market share among U.S. Web sites featuring classified advertising, after eBay and Monster.com (Yee, 2005). Craigslist itself does not advertise, instead attracting Web users by word-of-mouth (Vargas, 2004). However, they are not completely averse to marketing; A PR firm has worked with Craigslist since 1994 (Gordon, 2004). The portal was estimated to bring in at least $100 million in classified advertising revenue in 2009 (Stone, 2009, June 10).
Recent controversies have brought negative attention to the portal and its operations. In light of incidents involving prostitution via Craigslist, the portal made an agreement in 2008 with 40 state attorneys general to charge $5 or $10 for erotic services ads, the proceeds going to child trafficking and exploitation efforts of law enforcement agencies in those states. (Techweb, 2009, March 6). However, this did not seem to deter such advertising; in fact, the portal was expected to make a $44 million profit on such postings in 2010. In the spring of 2009, the so-called “Craigslist Killer” was arrested in light of evidence that he lured his victims by responding to their ads for personal services on Craigslist (LaRosa & Cramer, 2009). On August 15, 2010, Markoff committed suicide while in prison awaiting trial (LaRosa & Cramer, 2010, August 18). After the headline-grabbing murders, Craigslist eliminated the erotic services section, and in a break from past hands-off policy, monitored each message in a new adult services section (Abelson, 2009. May 14). However, continuing concerns about sex-related crimes that may have resulted from these advertisments, and the bad publicity that the adult services section was bringing to the portal, led to the management shutting down the new section entirely on September 3, 2010. This was portrayed by the portal’s legal representation as a defeat in Craigslist’s effort to cooperate with law enforcement on these issues. In what may have been a parting shot at their critics, the place on the home pages where the section’s link formerly resided were initially replaced with one word: Censored (Miller, 2010, September 15).
Further dents in the public image of the portal and of Newmark himself may have been made with Wired magazine’s August 2009 issue, with the cover story: “Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess” (Wolf, 2009, August 24). The article depicts Newmark and his CEO Jim Buckmaster as stubbornly resistant to change: “Think of any Web feature that has become popular in the past 10 years: Chances are Craigslist has considered it and rejected it. If you try to build a third-party application designed to make Craigslist work better, the management will almost certainly throw up technical roadblocks to shut you down.” (Wolf, 2009, August 24). The Wired article portrays Newmark as almost pathologically untouched by the impact of Craigslist on society and on the business of traditional and emerging media, as he spends his time diligently handling customer service by answering thousands of emails every year.
In 2004 eBay - also founded as a free community posting site in 1995 and now a massive multi-billion dollar commercial venture - bought a 25% share in Craigslist from one of its founders in a non-hostile action (“Craigblog: Archives,” 2004). eBay itself had already started a division called kijiji.com, a network of community Web sites with classified ads in locations in over 30 countries around the world, all in local languages, now including 186 U.S. locations including some overlap with Craigslist. More recently, the association between eBay and Craigslist has taken a downward turn, as eBay has sued Craigslist for diminishing the value of its investment and thus its control (“EBay sues Craigslist”, 2008, April 23), and Craigslist has sued eBay for improperly using its access to Craigslist information to help it establish the competing kijiji (“Craigslist sues EBay”, 2009, August 28).
Explicating Theories of Community, Virtual Community, The Commons, and Gatekeeping
Turning to the theoretical underpinnings of the concepts of community and virtual community previously described, a consideration of the salience of these theoretical frameworks to the development of virtual communities is discussed. Particular attention is paid to pertinent aspects of Craigslist.
Community
The early twentieth century work of Dewey presents some perspective on the concept of community. Dewey (1927/1998) linked the concepts of community and democracy. Dewey asserted that democracy “is the idea of community life itself” (Dewey, 1927/1998, p. 295). His concept of community described a group of individuals actively working together toward a common good, and all benefiting from the results of those efforts, which catalyzes the community to continue to maintain it. These active forms of association are differentiated from what Dewey described as natural bonds of interconnection, such as between parent and child. When there is an aspiration on the part of individuals to share the labors and fruits of common activity, and when the aspirations are communicated with a common set of language and symbols, there is community.
It is interesting to note that here Dewey was not focused on geographic concepts of community with physical proximity, described later by Pigg and Crank (2004) as “communities of place” (p. 59). His concept of community concentrated on the harnessing of interconnections among people without specifying physical location. Because of this, his concept has some salience for virtual communities as well as real world communities. Of key interest is the notion of shared goals. It is interesting to note that Dewey’s theorizing was in the context of developing a model for communities to coalesce into a “Great Society” of democracy and shared goals (1927/1998), a concept that links to the public policy and social changes in the U.S. in the 1960s as the Internet founders came of age.
In real world communities, social and physical barriers (such as those in gated communities) can be set up to discourage the infiltration of individuals who do not share the goals of the group, or share in the labor. Some on-line communities replicate this with registration procedures, including an agreement to be checked off by the subscriber to adhere to community standards that are defined. Abusers of those standards can be exiled from those communities. However, in open virtual communities such as Craigslist, there are no such requirements to register. Additionally, there are no requirements for a minimum level of contribution, i.e. the shared labor that Dewey discussed. Craigslist users can simply “lurk” on message boards without ever posting anything. This behavior is a bit more difficult to get away with in some virtual communities such as chat rooms in which there is an on-screen list of who is in a particular room, since others in that virtual space may cajole a “lurker” to contribute to the conversation or leave the room.
Dewey’s discussion of communication in communities also presents a challenge for virtual communities. In real world communities, it is very difficult to participate in a group if one doesn’t speak the language, understand the unspoken forms of communication, and comprehend the customs and values that guide interpersonal exchanges in day-to-day life. On the Internet, the non-verbal communication issue has been addressed to some extent through the use of emoticons, icons representing facial expressions. However, as emoticons are not generally accepted in business communication, there is the potential for misunderstanding and a potential for failure to convey underlying meanings. The language issue also has an effect; though programming languages themselves have become standardized for global software developers and web producers, and there remains the potential for the technology to catch up and to facilitate communication among users across linguistic divides through “universal translator” software, as inspired by Star Trek. At this stage of development, English still dominates on the Web (“Internet World Users By Language”, 2009) and in world commerce and communication (Mydans, 2007, October 9), and that linguistic bias can be a barrier to the concept of the Internet as a democratic environment. On Craigslist, all of the local sites are in English, requiring some familiarity if not fluency, as well as access to a keyboard with Latin alphabet capabilities in order to post messages. For example, messages on the local Craigslist sites for Tokyo, Moscow, and Egypt viewed in September, 2010, were almost exclusively in English and the Roman alphabet. This may result in the users on Craigslist being limited to an elite educated class in the non-English speaking cultures in which the portal is a presence with local sites, or by attracting a core enclave of English speaking expatriates living in these international cities.
Dewey also described that standards and values of communities must be transmitted to new members effectively. For on-line communities, it can be a challenge when people forget the details of the standards they agreed to adhere to when first signing up, or even forget that they are signed up as members even though the community may send a reminder, for instance, once each month. Open web communities such as Craigslist risk that their participants may never read the standards at all, as there is no requirement to read them other than when registering for an account, though they may or may not really read before agreeing to the Terms of Use and instead simply use the community to further their own individual interests or agenda; there is thus ample opportunity for the portal to be used by people who do not know or do not care to know its vision, mission, and community standards.
Also of note is the seminal work of Park in the early decades of the last century. Park (1929/1952) specifically defined community as one with a geographical location. In his thesis on human ecology (1936/1952), he proposed that the interconnectedness of human society has many similarities to that of other species in nature. Park differed somewhat from Dewey’s concept of interconnectedness by employing Darwin’s principle of “competitive co-operation” (Park, 1936/1952, p. 146). In this concept, cooperative activity for the common good is complemented by the limiting of population numbers to a manageable size, and the maintenance of balance among competing forces (Park, 1936/1952). In real world communities, this can be achieved through immigration quotas, strong civic institutions and regulations as counterweights to commercial interests.
In virtual communities, limits can also be set on numbers for community memberships, though that is rarely enforced; or there can be a general limitation on numbers of postings each member can make. The latter is rarely defined; however, when an on-line community member is judged by a moderator to have reached his or her limit, the member can be encouraged, or given an ultimatum, to limit their activity in the community. If these efforts are not successful in encouraging the member to limit their postings, further messages can be blocked. On Craigslist, there is no evidence of any limits on the number of registered members, though the management reserves the right to close accounts of offenders against the Terms of Use. Moreover, membership is not required to post or respond to an ad, though it is suggested for people posting a number of messages (“Craigslist: About: Help: User Accounts”, 2010).
Balancing of competing forces can be more difficult to achieve and maintain in virtual communities. Park asserted, building on his 1929 work considering real world communities, that it is the competition for land for commercial, residential, and transportation use; the distribution of that land’ and the locations of these developments, that help define a community (Park, 1936/1952). Competing forces shape the character and content of virtual communities as well. For example, postings on Craigslist are, as a result of the openness of the posting system, prone to abuse by scammers and spammers that use the valuable “real estate” on the local sites thus making it more time-consuming to find legitimate postings. The housing section also may be the most vulnerable to abuse, as the basic idea of gaining or granting access to one’s residence in order to find a place to live or a roommate, without any vetting of seller or buyer, lessor or lessee, require a considerable degree of trust in other members of one’s community, and of community standards. There is continuing concern among fraud investigators about fake house and apartment rental postings on various Craiglist sites across the U.S., in which the alleged landlord requires easily cashed-in money orders or bank checks to secure a home rental (Keill, October 8, 2009). While this section certainly replicates a similar function of real estate classifieds in print newspapers, the functionality of the Web could conceivably allow for more basic protections (e.g., a clean criminal record, easily retrievable in a search of police databases, as a prerequisite for posting or being allowed to obtain housing via Craigslist).
The portal does offer users the option of using an email encrypter that creates a temporary address for users for each posting that they make, for example: anon-123456789@craigslist.org. Users may also choose to provide their own email addresses without encryption, as well as other contact information such as telephone numbers. A less prominent link in the lower left corner of the Craigslist home pages (2010), among other miscellaneous information links, describes how to “avoid scams & fraud.” The lack of prominent focus on the basic maintenance of the security of community members, though perhaps based in a belief that these are sophisticated, savvy web users, may give a slight edge to those whose nefarious endeavors detract from the well-being of the community. But perhaps the element of trust is more important to the development of community than the occasional infractions caused by such a lack of protection and thus these can be absorbed by the community without causing major damage.
More recently, Putnam & Feldstein (2003) have proposed a revitalization of communities through the development of social capital, in which interdependence among groups of people is developed for the greater good. Dewey’s approach to community has salience here as well, and is even extended to encompass the concept of broader societal benefits from these strong communities (Putnam and Feldstein, 2003). In earlier work, Putnam (2000) put the responsibility for the dissipation of community in American society primarily on television and suburbanization, and he has expressed some ambivalence about the role of the Internet in furthering this decline by facilitating individual users’ retreat into virtual environments and withdrawal from real world communities. He and Feldstein find some hope in web portals such as those of Craigslist. Indeed, Craigslist is an example of a virtual community that seems to be attempting both levels of social capital building, by including individual web sites for many communities of place around the world and thereby fostering local community building; and by opening discussion boards across all of the portal’s local sites so there is a broader non-place based Craigslist community. Moreover, the actual location of each of the discussion contributors does not appear on their posts.
Craig Newmark says that developing a sense of community is a major goal of Craigslist. “If you are a newcomer to a city, you can get basically all you need to create a new life, in one site” (“From tiny newsletter,” 2005). He laments the loss of interconnectedness in communities of place in American society, and hopes that the local Craigslist sites will help to re-establish those social networks (“On the record: Craig Newmark,” 2004, p. J1). The potential was seen most poignantly in the many postings on Craigslist related to Hurricane Katrina in September, 2005; by people looking for missing loved ones and friends and requesting assistance, and by people looking to offer their help. Craigslist spotlighted affected cities in the list of local sites that appears on each local home page.
However, as Castells (2001, p. 126) observed, “…people do not build their meaning in local societies, not because they do not have spatial roots, but because they select their relationships on the basis of their affinities.” The transience that Craigslist both addresses and perhaps helps to facilitate creates a paradox; as people pick up and move to a new city, building their lives on Craigslist, they may also understand that if this new place does not meet expectations they can repeat the process again, especially as their most important social relationships are no longer-place based. This understanding may actually cause them to have less commitment to plant roots and make strong efforts to develop broader social networks in a community of place. An aggregate of community members with this perspective might have a negative impact on a community of place, as, per Castells’ concept of “real virtuality” (1996), the “real” communities in which they spend their time are in a virtual environment.
Virtual Community
As communities are a manifestation of society, so virtual communities are a manifestation of the Information Society. Webster (1995) defines the term “Information Society” in five connected ways: the technological aspect, involving the convergence of information and telecommunications; an economic component, in which the availability of information contributes to national economies; the occupational impact, in which the number of jobs that involve information technology surpasses the number of jobs that do not (e.g. service jobs, factory jobs); the spatial effect, linking disparate geographic spaces by telecommunication networks; and the cultural aspect, concerning the amount of information that is readily available.
Castells brings interesting perspective to the development of the Information Society from his earlier work as an urban planning scholar. He has brought that background to his theorizing about cyberspace as a “space of flows” (1996, p. 412) in which human activity and interaction now breaks the boundaries of time zones and geographic distance. Castells described the emerging virtual environment of cyberspace as the “culture of real virtuality,” (1996, p. 372) in which people are not only able to use the Internet to create new personae; but also, combined with the availability of content that they can choose to consume as a reflection of their constructed identities, allows them to experience the world primarily through this perspective rather than through a proscribed real life. The Internet hastens the blurring of fantasy and reality.
That being stated, contradicting popular stereotypes of computer geeks living virtual fantasy lives on-line and not participating in their communities of place or having meaningful human interaction, evidence of greater participation in real world communities by frequent Internet users has been documented (Hampton and Wellman, 2000; Howard, Rainie, and Jones, 2001; Katz, Rice, and Aspden, 2001; in Castells, 2001, pp. 120-122). The Internet, including the World Wide Web, is an emerging mass medium that shifts the dynamic from the passive experience of content consumption to an interactive experience. Internet users can interact with each other all over the world any time of day or night. Those with access to computer hardware and software can also be active creators of content. Thus emanating from this new mass medium is a new “interactive society” (Castells, 1996, p. 358) that facilitates the creation and development of virtual communities.
In addition to facilitating local community building, Craigslist’s mission is “being a collection of communities with similar spirit…” in a broader-based, non-geographically specific concept (“Craigslist: About: Mission and History,” 2005). Craig Newmark has said that part of his goal for Craigslist is to help maintain the early utopian vision of the Internet founders (Taafe, 2004). Others have varied perspectives about the portal. Craigslist has been described with a number of metaphors: as a virtual version of a bulletin board of postings in a local supermarket (Morganella, 2004, p. 7D; cited in Kornblum, 2004, p. 7D) or a posting board in a college community (Fine, 2005, p. S1). Internet pioneer Howard Rheingold compares Craigslist to Rick’s Café in the film “Casablanca” (Rheingold, 2005; cited in Altschul, 2005), echoed in Proulx, & Latzko-Toth’s (2005, p. 49) conceptualization of virtual communities that uses the “metaphor of a desert watering-hole”. Newmark himself compares his creation to a kind of commons (“On the record: Craig Newmark,” 2004, p. J1), a shared public space.
Everard (2000) discussed the power of virtual communities to connect people with common interests across geographic boundaries. He poignantly described the emotional bonding that can develop in these virtual communities, by describing a community in which one of the moderators died weeks after Everard joined it, resulting in an outpouring of support among community members (2000). Everard proposed that a “newly international localism…is finding expression in ‘virtual’ communities” (2000, p. 63), which seems an apt description of the activity on Craigslist.
Nayar (2004) describes the options for the construction of identity in virtual space, which are more limited in real space. This may impact virtual communities in that some of the members might be representing themselves in an idealized way that is not as easily verified as in the real world. So a virtual community may develop on a shaky foundation, especially if members begin to exhibit their less desirable personality traits. If relationships are built on trust, how can a community be built where trust is violated at such a basic level of representation? Another consideration is that on-line, some people actually tend to show particularly undesirable aspects of their personalities, feeling a sense of security in the relative anonymity to express themselves in otherwise socially unacceptable ways. This may impact the development of virtual community as members deal with such disruption; if members become unhappy they can easily leave the virtual community, while leaving is a much more logistically complex choice in a community of place.
Lessig (2001) described the painful episode he and his students experienced when an anonymous intruder into his law class web site at Yale caused great distress to the students, paralyzing the utility of the site as many decided not to expose themselves to the intruder’s tirades; the anxiety and fear that emerged in the face of these attacks was also felt deeply in the real world classroom environment. However, it is worth considering that virtual community members who may be presenting a more idealized version of themselves can be very effective in that environment while playing the role of the avatar that they have created.
Bakardjieva’s (2005) study of Internet users in Vancouver, BC considered a series of reasons why people use the Internet, including social isolation, relocation, family and social networks around the world, and finding a community of interest. The heavy focus on socialization in the context of shifting populations in the real world highlights the potential positive impact of virtual communities. Further, she describes two models of Internet use: “‘the consumption model’ and the ‘community model’” (2005, p. 165) to distinguish commercial activities from social and civic uses. This is a good reminder that virtual communities are only one facet of Internet use, that people’s membership in virtual communities may be taking place alongside their consumer interests, which have many opportunities for expression in the classified ads on Craigslist.
Indeed, the strain between commercial and civic forces for dominance of the Internet has been a constant issue. Commercial uses also suggest that when people buy things on the Internet, they are bringing them into their real world environments – anything from a car to a movie to hotel reservations. This further suggests the potential for virtual communities to serve real world interests as well. If people are used to going on-line to purchase products, then they might also be able to get used to going on-line to find out about community activities. Craigslist is in fact a marketplace not only of ideas and community development, but also of items for sale, housing for sale and rent, and potential employment. So a broader interpretation of community development, including these commercial functions, might serve a practical application of virtual community for social capital building in real world communities, as exemplified by Craigslist.
The Commons
With the emergence of Web 2.0 collaborative online communities and social networks, there would seem to be a need for both scholars and practitioners to have a greater shared understanding of some of the core principles of the construct of The Commons. Dietz, et al (2002, P. 18) stated: “The term commons is used in everyday language to refer to a diversity of resources or facilities as well as to property institutions that involve some aspect of joint ownership or access.” They go on to further define the term common-pool resource as “…a valued natural or human-made resource or facility that is available to more than one person and subject to degradation as a result of overuse” (Dietz, et al, 2002, P. 18). This refinement of the concept is a valuable foundation for understanding the research in this field. Moreover, there has been an emerging literature of so-called new commons studies, described by Hess (2000, P. 4) as research about common-pool resources “that are human-made and technologically driven. They can exist at global, regional, and local levels.” In this presentation, Hess (2000, P. 14) asserts that the Internet itself “…is possibly the most complex of the new commons.” Hess (2008) continued her explications of new commons with further categorization, including that of the Knowledge Commons developing as a result of the global dissemination of information over the Internet. Further, van Wendel de Joode, et al (2003) described the structures of open source software development as illustrations of key advantages and challenges for common resource distribution.
Ostrom, who in 2009 received a Nobel Prize in Economics “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons” (Sveriges Riksbank, 2009), defined eight principles of effective commons management for common-pool resource institutions (CPRs), including clear boundaries for groups, locally tailored rules, citizen participation in rule modification, respect for that process by outside authorities, systemization of behavior monitoring by community members, a system of increasing sanctions for each infraction, and conflict resolution that is affordable an accessible by community members (Ostrom, 1990).
More recently, Ostrom and colleagues have considered the issues in sharing common-pool resources as less of a tragedy than as a drama (Dietz, et al, 2002) The cornerstone of the theoretical construct of The Commons is the social dilemma described as the Tragedy of the Commons. In this construct, individual members of a community over-utilize the common resources they share, thus depleting those resources for everyone in the community (Ostrom, 1990). Ostrom and other scholars have developed this theoretical model from the seminal work of Hardin (1968), in which he used the conflicts that arose in sharing medieval grazing commons as illustration of the concept. This concept on the surface seems to have little pertinence to virtual communities, given the bounty of cyberspace; how could it possibly run out? Is not the Internet, according to its pioneers, a commons in and of itself? Certainly, the Internet has many restrictions imposed by international and domestic government regulation, cultural values, and the digital divide that keeps many people outside the gate. In turn, each smaller community in cyberspace faces issues that may impact its continuing well-being or even existence, as related previously in describing the implications of their design, and the impact of infractions and intruders that can be destabilizing forces) or tragicomedy (Hess and Ostrom, 2006). Furthermore, Hess and Ostrom (2006) have edited a volume extending the concept of the commons to the information society, describing efforts to counteract the commoditization and regulation of intellectual property and content sharing with open access, digital archives, and collaborative mechanisms. In a study of a virtual community for Croatian scientists called Connect, Srbljinovic, et al (2008), found that most of Ostrom’s principles were met, however principles about gradual sanctions and ease of conflict resolution were not found. They attributed this discrepancy to a lack of resources for the development of online conflict resolution applications and the small population of this particular community that as such did not have multiple layers in its governance structure. These limitations may not be found in the expansive territory of Craigslist, but the results of this study offer a glimpse of these theoretical models in practice.
The concept of overuse of a commons and the concept of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is applicable in this discussion of Craigslist. It should be noted that Hardin’s (1968) utilization of this model has been challenged by more recent scholarship that offer a more complex construct of the roles of stakeholders, private and public property, and the shifting official governance of common resources (Dietz, et al, 2002). Ostrum (1990) described the Prisoner’s Dilemma game concept developed by Dawes (1973, 1975), in which two players are faced with the choice of cooperating or not cooperating to share resources to achieve a goal (such as freedom from prison). The paradox emerges that they will likely both choose to not cooperate and hope that the other player will cooperate and the first player will thus win, but in actuality they will both lose. Such situations create complexities in developing collective action meant to improve the lot of all participants. Craigslist and other virtual communities face the possibility that some members may decide to follow their own self-interests in their utilization of the community’s resources. If a critical mass of community members decides to do this, the utility of the communities for all members may be irrevocably compromised. For example, if a virtual community is overrun with spammers and scammers, legitimate community members may decide to leave the community, depleting the most valuable resource of all, the members themselves.
An open, non-moderated, self-policing community such as Craigslist has a particular challenge, as the free exchange of ideas may not always correlate with other ideals and goals of the community. In real world communities, again, violators of community standards can be dealt with in various ways that excises them from the community. The violators can do little to disguise themselves and return. In virtual communities such as Craigslist, spammers and scammers can always come back in other guises. However, some safeguards can be installed.
Gatekeeping
Gatekeeping is a particulary useful theory to employ in the study of virtual commons. According to Shoemaker and Vos (2009, P. 3), “Gatekeepers determine what becomes a person’s social reality, a particular view of the world.” Further, they state in reference to online news consumption that the “…high level of interactivity turns audience members into gatekeepers” (P. 6). In virtual communities, the interactivity of message posting makes the communication process more complex, as message senders become receivers and receivers also act as senders. Even though many virtual communities appear to be relatively open to all who want to participate, the messages themselves remain mediated in many communities, either through moderators or rules enforced by community members themselves. These systems involve choices by the virtual community leaders similar to those of publishers and programmers of traditional media: which messages are allowed to be transmitted to receivers and which postings are not permitted or posted then removed, levels of access to messages, prominence of messages and message categories. The “in” and “out” decision points, or gates (Shoemaker, 1991), in this case may be embedded in the programming code that governs the communities (per Lessig, 1999), or controlled by community members.
It is important to understand, however, that even in “unmediated” communities the founders of the communities are often the true gatekeepers who have created the framework of rules, regulations, and enforcement in which community members act as much as their surrogates as they do as free agents. Community members may feel empowered by this sense of control, and they can choose whether or not to accept the role of mediator and buy into the community standards or not, just as members of communities of place can choose to take part in a local neighborhood watch. They also bring individual perspectives; as Shoemaker (1991) described the limitation of McQuail and Windahl’s (1981, pp. 100-101) version of White’s (1950) gatekeeper model featuring the presciently named ‘Mr. Gates’, “…multiple gatekeepers may each have their own role conceptions or positions in the gathering, shaping, and transmission of news” (Shoemaker, 1991, pp. 10-11).
Shoemaker describes the dichotomy in previous conceptualizations of gatekeeping between those who believed multiple gatekeepers were merely playing a functional role as enforcers of organizational decisions (Gieber, 1956; Westley and MacLean, 1957; Bass, 1969), and those who believed that these gatekeepers were individuals who brought their personal characteristics and values to the task in addition to organizational concerns (White, 1950), in a hierarchical, vertical organizational system (Shoemaker, 1991). In virtual communities on the Web, the organizational structure is perceived as vertical, with community members as equals. The importance of the founders and coders of the community, followed by moderators if the community has them, followed by community members, would suggest a more horizontal organizational structure than might be portrayed by promoters of these communities as relatively pure, egalitarian communities. This is indeed the model that Craigslist has ended up with through its idiosyncratic development, as Wolf (August 24, 2009) so succinctly stated: “…if the Craigslist management style resembles any political system, it is not democracy but rather a low-key popular dictatorship.”Shoemaker recounts, “the process of gatekeeping is the process of creating social reality” (1991, p. 27)—a particularly important concept to consider when analyzing virtual communities that are intentionally set up to provide a portal into a specific version of reality. In this case, the success or failure of the gatekeepers to keep intruders from entering the gates and causing destruction to the community within is at issue. Further, Lessig (2001) argues that regulation on the Internet is embedded in the codes that are developed in the programming itself. Here, the design of a given portal or site is in and of itself a gate, made up of smaller gates at various parts of the sites.
The rigid adherence of Craigslist to a very particular format, and the closely held control of that format by its founders, has seemed to make it difficult for the portal to act with agility and alacrity to guard against intruders. Craigslist seems to operate, perhaps in some slight dissonance with its public service ethos, with a laissez-faire marketplace-of-ideas approach that leaves it open to spammers and scammers. While postings can be flagged by readers as miscategorized, prohibited or spam, it is unclear that these measures can have any hope of stemming the constant flow of these infiltrations that return again and again via different email addresses It remains to be seen whether the experience of users encountering spam and scams, coupled with the increasingly sour public image of Craigslist and the involvement of law enforcement agencies on a number of issues, has a long-term effect on the use of these community Web pages.
Conclusion
The theoretical concepts of community, virtual community, the commons, and gatekeeping, as manifested on Craigslist, describe the intricacies of developing a virtual commons that meets the idealism of Internet trailblazers who founded virtual communities when cyberspace was just beginning to be explored. While it does not seem as if virtual communities such as Craigslist, continuing to thrive and grow around the world, are facing anything like a tragic demise, the paradoxes and complexities that they face indicates that they are to one degree or another straying from their ideals as open commons. Thus, in actuality they are entities that more closely resemble real world gated communities than they do commons. While this may be an acceptable balance to strike, perhaps more acceptance of the existence of these compromises by virtual community founders, leaders, and members might then be incorporated into revised visions that instill their broader social goals while continuing to protect their community members. Perhaps a more appropriate real world metaphor for these virtual communities can be found in the “New urbanism” movement, developing protected communities that include some shared common space, harkening back to traditional town planning. As the development of communities of place turn to this concept rooted in an old paradigm, the theoretical framework of communities in cyberspace might be similarly constructed.
Altschul, S. (Reporter). (2005, September 18). Sunday Morning [news broadcast]). New York: CBS News.
Bakardjieva, M. (2005). Internet society: The Internet in everyday life. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc.
Bazely, M. (2005, March 4). Craigslist founder has a hands-on style. San Jose Mercury News.
Burnett, R., & Marshall, P.D. (2003). Web theory: An introduction. London: Routledge.
Castells, M. (2001). The Internet galaxy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Castells, M. (1996) The rise of the network society, the information age: Economy, society and culture, vol. I. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Craigblog: Craig from Craigslist allows himself to pontificate. Retrieved from http://www.cnewmark.com/archives/000265.html.
Craigslist fact sheet. (2010). Retrieved from http://www.Craigslist.org/about/pr/factsheet.html.
Craigslist: What we’re about. (2010) Retrieved from http://www.craigslist.org/about/mission.and.history.html.
Dewey, J. (1998). Search for the great community. In Hickman, L.A. and Alexander, T.M. (Eds.), The essential Dewey, Vol. 1: Pragmatism, education, democracy (pp. 293-307). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (Reprinted from The public and its problems, by J. Dewey, 1927, Swallow Press).
Everard, J. (2000). Virtual states: the Internet and the boundaries of the nation-state. London: Routledge.
Fine, J. (2005, April 18). Free for all: Newspapers aren’t dead yet-but Web sites like Craigslist certainly pose a threat to the future of the paid model. Advertising Age Special Report: Newspapers, S1.
From tiny newsletter to top Web site (August 4, 2005). CNN.com. Retrieved October 30, 2006 from LexisNexis database.
Gordon, A. (2004, August 30). Craigslist enlists Best PR to boost media outreach. PR Week, 5.
Gunkel, D.J. & Gunkel, A.H. (1997). Virtual geographies: The new worlds of cyberspace. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 14,123 – 137.
Kornblum, J. Web board Craigslist makes a name for itself. USA Today, p. 7D.
Lessig, L. (1999). Code and other laws of cyberspace. New York: Basic Books.
Miller, C.C. (September 15, 2010). Craigslist says it has shut its section for sex ads. The New York Times. Retrieved fromhttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/business/16craigslist.html?scp=2&sq=Craigslist&st=cse.
Nayar, P.K. (2004). Virtual worlds: culture and politics in the age of cybertechnology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc.
Newman, O. (1981). Community of interest. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.
On the record: Craig Newmark. (2004, August 15). San Francisco Chronicle, p. J1.
Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. New York : Cambridge University Press.
Park, R.E. (1952). Human ecology. In Human communities: the city and human ecology (pp. 145-158). Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. (Reprinted from the American Journal of Sociology XLII, 1-15, July,1936.)
Park, R.E. (1952). Sociology, community and society. In Human communities: the city and human ecology (pp. 178 – 209). Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. (Reprinted from Research in the social sciences, pp. 3 – 49, by W. Gee, Ed., 1929, New York: MacMillan Co.)
Pfanner, E. (2005, January 17). Craigslist circles the globe with online classifieds, one city at a time. The New York Times. P. C3.
Pigg, K.E., and Crank, L.D. (2004). Community social capital: The potential and promise of information and communications technologies. The Journal of Community Informatics, 1(1), 58-73.
Proulx, S., & Latzko-Toth, G. (2005). Mapping the virtual in social sciences: On the category of “virtual community.” Journal of Community Informatics, 2(1). 42-52.
Putnam, R.D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Putnam, R.D. & Feldstein, L.M. (2003). Better together: Restoring the American community. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Rheingold, H. (1993). Virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
Saltzman, J., & Cramer, M. (August 18, 2010). Markoff stabbed, suffocated himself. Boston Globe. Retreived from http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/08/18/markoff_stabbed_suffocated_himself/?p1=News_links.
Shoemaker, P. (1991). Communication Concepts 3: Gatekeeping. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Communications.
Stross, R. (2005, June 5). What eBay could learn from Craigslist. The New York Times. Section 3 p. 3.
Taafe, C. (2004, September 28). Cult Web site hits Dublin. Business & Finance.
Turner, F. (2005). Where the counterculture met the new economy: The WELL and the origins of virtual community. Technology and Culture, 46(3), 485-512.
U.S. Census Bureau, June 29, 2001. U.S. adults postponing marriage, Census Bureau reports. Retrieved fromhttp://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/population/000436.html.
Vargas, J.A. (2004, October 24). He’s always being hit on: Craig of Craigslist makes networking work. The Washington Post. P. D01.
Webster, F. (1995) Theories of the information society. London: Routledge.
What is a Web portal? A word definition from the Webopedia computer dictionary. Retrieved fromhttp://www.Webopedia.com/TERM/W/Web_portal.html.
Yee, A. (2005, January 19). ‘We make it up as we go along’: Online Business: Amy Yee meets the two unlikely leaders of Craigslist, a homespun Internet phenomenon. Financial Times, p. 9.