Symbolic Systems Forum - Fred Turner,Communication Department, "Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: Revisiting the WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community"

Fred Turner,Communication Department, "Where the Counterculture

Met the New Economy: Revisiting the WELL and the Origins of Virtual

Community"

ABSTRACT:

Over the last ten years, scholars have largely ascribed the rise of virtual community to the widespread adoption of computer networking technologies. This paper examines the history of the system on which the term "virtual community" was first used, the Whole Earth Lectronic Link (or WELL), and shows that as both an idea and a social formation, virtual community in fact emerged at the intersection of three forces: the appearance of public computer networks, the persistence of countercultural social ideals from the 1960s, and a shift toward networked forms of economic activity. In the process, the paper brings together analytical frameworks from organizational sociology, American cultural history, and science and technology studies in order to illuminate the complex ways in which technological, social and cultural forms co-evolve.

BIOGRAPHY:

Fred Turner is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author of Counterculture Into Cyberculture: How Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Network Transformed the Politics of Information (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press) and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory (Anchor Books, 1996; 2nd ed. University of Minnesota Press, 2001).