Rheingold and Facebook

When you take Facebook and combine it with Rheingold's theories about what makes a virtual community and also compare it to the virtual communities, Facebook wouldn't have all the necessary legs to stand on in order to be classified as a bonafide online community. Below are Rheingold analyses.

Is Facebook a Third Place?
Rheingold makes the allusions to the Third Place as a way to describe a virtual community. He quotes Ray Oldenburg as saying "within these places, conversation is the primary activity and the major vehicle for the display and appreciation of human personality and individuality." (Rheingold, 10).

Facebook doesn't serve as such a space. There's not much "casual conversation" being held there. People don't become members of Facebook in order to find a community to join. They use it to bolster up their First and Second Places. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

Rheingold goes on to say: "Perhaps cyberspace is one of the informal public places where people can rebuild the aspects of community that were lost when malt shop became a mall."

Information Exchange?
"Virtual communities are places where people meet, and they also are tools' the place-like aspects and tool-like aspects only partially overlap." (Rheingold, 45)

While here Rheingold was specifically about tools of knowlegde (getting expertise advice, discussing topics with people who have experience, etc), I think this Rheingold quote also speaks to the nature of Facebook. The power of the information exchange within this web space is unparalleled. I can export all the contact information of my 135 friends to my e-mail account. If I'm away from a computer, I can text message The Facebook site and request pieces of someone's information.


Rethinking VCs
When Rheingold looks back over his analysis of virtual communities, he makes a little more room for such places like Facebook. He quotes a Barry Wellman study that says:

Relationships are rarely maintained through computer-mediated communication alone, but are sustained through a combination of online and offline interactions. Despite the ability of the Internet to serve as a global communication technology, much online activity is between people who live (or work) near each other, often in Netville itself. In Netville, the local network brought neighbors together to socialize, helped them to arrange in-person get-togethers ...

Assessment
So while the Facebook doesn't carry with it the characteristics of what was thought to be a virtual community as defined by Rheingold, a look within his language shows that Facebook isn't just an online directory. It's not The Well, by any means. But there's something priceless there.