MR. RHEINGOLD'S NEIGHBORHOOD

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

The only online community I ever felt a part of was alt.tasteless, a Usenet forum dedicated to wretchedly sick humor. Mind you, I was never an active, rec.pets.cats-baiting member, just a lurker who enjoyed dropping by from time to time to see what the lads were up to. I soon tired of it, though. While I appreciate in theory the idea of people the world over communicating through their computers, it turns out that few of them have anything interesting to say. The good stuff is communicated in private.

Still, the buzzword in cyberspace these days is community. Every Website must incorporate a place for people to chat--your newspaper, your favorite vodka, even the John (Entertainment Tonight) Tesh home page, whose virtual commons is called Tesh-Talk. Never mind that what passes for community online is mostly people typing cranky messages at each other. Community is the bankable truth of the moment.

Howard Rheingold, author, gardener and painter of his own shoes (moons, planets, stars, etc.), may be the wellhead of this social spirit. Certainly his site, Electric Minds www.minds.com) which opened last week, is the quintessence of online community. "The idea is that we will lead the transformation of the Web into a social Web," Rheingold says. Electric Minds is one-stop shopping for netniks who just like to commune--especially about the impact of technology on life. A "virtual community center" provides pointers to every online klatsch in cyberspace, from The Club for First Wives to alt.shoes.lesbians. If you can't find community here, you belong in a cave, I guess.

To its credit, Electric Minds tries hard. The place is seeded with voluble moderators who are paid to keep conversations lively. It uses nifty software that makes the chores of chat (editing, spell-checking, posting, filtering out bozos) easy. And it's free--subsidized by advertisers who know that folks tend to spend more time in bars and clubs than they do nose-deep in the Yellow Pages.

Rheingold, who has been online since there was a line to go on, has learned from other people's mistakes. He says he watched in growing dismay as the World Wide Web was put to what he views as precisely the wrong use: old-fashioned, top-down publishing. "I had a strong feeling early on that this ought to evolve into a communications medium," he says.

His epiphany came a decade ago, when as a free-lance writer he stumbled into the Well, cyberspace's oldest and best-known hole-in-the-wall. For whatever reasons, online communication tends to be a dissent amplifier. You say something half in jest; the bad half gets picked up and further inflamed. The next thing you know, war has erupted, and people end up not talking for a year. Rheingold took it on himself to parachute in and reconnect disembodied souls.

He went on to write a book, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Addison Wesley; 1993), about his experiences. Like many who write about the future, he persuaded himself that he could make his dream come true. I wish him luck, but prefer to keep lurking. If you need me, I'll be reading the tabloids and talking Tesh at the vodka bar.

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