And yet today, despite all my years spent marinating in the digital soup, I would be hard pressed to tell you exactly what constitutes an online community. The advent of the Web as a true mass medium and the parallel rise of America Online spelled the beginning of the end for the Net's noisy, lawless frontier towns and the values they embodied. But we've seen time and again that the vast majority of people who make the crossing to the wired world don't want an unfiltered, unregulated community. They want their communities managed and mediated, planned and policed, focused and facilitated. We looked at the Web for summer camp information.
Parents send their children to camp to build self-esteem and social skills and to make friends.
That's what a survey at one of the sites below showed. Getting the kids out of our hair wasn't mentioned.