Communicating Community
Authors: McCormack Paul 
Published: October 2020

"A 'community' is a set of persons involved in stable patterns of
communication. Communities vary widely in the range of their interactions,
the capacity of their networks, and the links between information and
material exchange. A community is developed by actions which increase their
range, capacity, or integration.

-- S. J. Mandelbaum."

"Critical to the rhetoric surrounding the information highway is the promise
of a renewed sense of community and, in many instances, new types and
formations of communities." -- Steven G. Jones.

So what's new? Once upon a time, in 1680 to be exact, it was the postal
system. In that year a merchant called Dockwra set up a 'penny post' in
London, quickly establishing over four hundred receiving offices and seven
sorting offices. In parts of central London this service provided up to
twelve deliveries daily. Similar services were subsequently established in a
variety of provincial towns throughout England. A century and a half later an
insightful schoolmaster called Rowland Hill saw a huge potential for growth,
arguing that the, by now well established, local penny posts be expanded to
include all inland postal transit: his rationale being that the existence of
such a cheap service would precipitate an upsurge in personal correspondence.
This increased volume, sensibly handled of course, would so reduce the unit
cost as to make it profitable to carry a letter all the way from Glasgow to
London for the princely sum of one penny. In 1840 the penny post was indeed
expanded to incorporate all such inland post; the benefits of providing such
a cheap and efficient communication infrastructure lying in its potential to
enhance society by facilitating stability and unity -- by making society
into a community. Of course it shouldn't be forgotten that in order to avail
oneself of this service it was necessary that one have 'access' to certain
'tools': literacy and a spare penny being not least among them.
In nineteenth century England one demographic that most certainly had access
to the tools which would allow them to make full use of the new
communication network was the upper class. Many of those who could
reasonably be said to have fitted this description lived within a couple of
miles of Hyde Park Corner in London. The outstanding frequency of the postal
service available to this relatively small group meant that it was
theoretically possible for one of their number to mail a message, receive a
reply, reply to the reply, and so on . . . all in the course of a single
day. If we accept Mandelbaum's criterion for the development of communities,
then, this availability of a cheap, regular, and easy to use mailing network
must have gone some way towards the development of a sense of community
amongst those who had access to the communications 'technology' of the day.
In 1957 there was something new in the skies: a U.S.S.R.-launched satellite
called Sputnik. One of the American responses to what they perceived as
their sudden disadvantage in the space race was the setting up of the
Advanced Research and Planning Association, ARPA. This was an intervention
which ultimately led to the development of the global communications
infrastructure that we know today as the Internet. Prior to this rush of
ARPA-funded research into new forms of, and uses for computing technology,
computers were unwieldy monsters; owning one meant needing an inconveniently
large building to carry it around in (apologies to Douglas Adams). The new
young programmers and engineers who developed such human-machine-interface
facilitators as keyboards, screens, and graphics, quickly decided that what
they wanted to do most of all with their newly networked machines was to
communicate with each other -- computers, it seems, came to be conceived of
as communication tools almost as soon as they stopped being card-punching,
number-crunching megacephalic giants, amenable only to an esoteric bunch of
Fortran-wielding lab-coats.
So, within a few years the demystification of computers had gotten under way
regardless. As Howard Rheingold puts it, "changes in the way computers were
designed and used led to the expansion of the computer-using population from
a priesthood in the 1950s, to an elite in the 1960s, to a subculture in the
1970s, and to a significant, still growing part of the population in the
1990s" (67-68). Electronic mail quickly became, and remains, one of the most
common uses to which networked computers are put. Initially this "e-mail"
followed the post office model, with single messages being sent from one
individual to another within a group. But the opportunities that the medium
afforded for the quick, easy, cheap and instantaneous dissemination of
information to large numbers of individuals, were soon recognised. Out of
this new mode of communication grew concepts and practices such as
electronic bulletin boards, newsgroups and, ultimately, the burgeoning
network-within-a-network known as Usenet.
Today, then, what's new is that messages may be sent, replied to, the replies
replied to . . . and so on, all in the course of a day; only the individuals
engaged in this feverish activity don't have to be geographically proximate;
indeed, they can be situated on opposite sides of the globe while it all
takes place. The same message can be sent to many people without the need to
undergo the strain of endlessly repeating your elegant copperplate (or, for
that matter, spending a lot of pennies). Indeed the message can just be put
into the public domain, read it who may. Of course, it shouldn't be
forgotten that to engage in such untrammelled interaction with one's fellow
travellers requires that one have 'access' to certain 'tools'. I have
access; if you've read this far, then I guess you have too (one of those
tools, by the way, is the time to spare).

References

"Post Office." Chamber's Encyclopaedia. Vol. 2. Rev. ed. 1966.
Jones, Steven G., ed. Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communications and
Community. Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage, 1995.
Mandelbaum, S. J. "Too Clever By Far: Communications and Community
Development." Communication 7 (1983): 103-14.
Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Finding Connection in a
Computerised World. London: Minerva, 1994.

Citation reference for this article
MLA style:

Paul Mc Cormack. "Communicating Community: Past and Present." M/C: A Journal
of Media and Culture 1.1 (1998). [your date of access]
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/comp.php>.
Chicago style:

Paul Mc Cormack, "Communicating Community: Past and Present," M/C: A Journal
of Media and Culture 1, no. 1 (1998),
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/comp.php> ([your date of access]).
APA style:

Paul Mc Cormack. (1998) Communicating community: past and present. M/C: A
Journal of Media and Culture 1(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/comp.php> ([your date of access]).