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| Virtual Communities: |
| Is the Well Dry? |
| 9 - 18 September | ||
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About Brain Tennis
Brain Tennis Archive
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Are online communities such as The Well, AOL, or Echo edifying spaces for working through conflict and developing greater tolerance? Or are they bogus biospheres for bores and rhetorical blowhards? Ana Marie Cox, the executive editor of Suck, is a skeptic of online communities. She has been a contributor to In These Times and Bad Subjects, as well as Hustler magazine's Barely Legal. Stacy Horn, founder of Echo - a 3,000-member online service based in New York City - believes that people come online to talk with those whose perspectives differ from their own. Horn teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and is author of a forthcoming book about small-town life in cyberspace. |
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![[Ana Marie Cox]](http://web.archive.org/web/20010609110547im_/http://static.wired.com/braintennis/96/37/stuff/cox.blue.gif)
Ana Marie Cox "I think most people's enthusiasm for online communities is both premature and misguided. They are accelerating toward a culture segregated primarily by interest and not proximity, or even experience. Such a culture lacks the vitality of communities based on more haphazard coalitions." The match begins.... ![[go to day 1]](http://web.archive.org/web/20010609110547im_/http://static.wired.com/braintennis/images/bbar00.gif){kind=small} |
![[Stacy Horn]](http://web.archive.org/web/20010609110547im_/http://static.wired.com/braintennis/96/37/stuff/horn.red.gif)
Stacy Horn
"Even on a relatively small place like Echo, we get all kinds. And in order for Echo (or any community) to continue, you learn to live with, to some degree, the imperfection of your fellow members. This tolerance happens by working through a certain level of conflict." |
T H R E A D S : 51 topics.
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