COMPUTER NETWORKS AS SOCIAL NETWORKS: Collaborative Work, Telework and Virtual Community

When computer networks link people as well as machines, they become social networks. Such computer supported social networks (CSSNs) are becoming important bases of virtual communities, computer supported cooperative work and telework. Computer mediated communication, such as electronic mail and computerized conferencing, is usually text-based and asynchronous. It has limited social presence, and on-line communications are often more uninhibited, creative and blunt than in-person communication. Nevertheless, CSSNs sustain strong, intermediate and weak ties that provide information and social support in both specialized and broadly-based relationships. CSSNs foster virtual communities that are usually partial and narrowly-focused, although some do become encompassing and broadly-based. CSSNs accomplish a wide variety of cooperative work, connecting workers within and between organizations who often are physically dispersed. CSSNs also link teleworkers from their homes or remote work centers to main organizational offices. Although many relationships function off-line as well as on-line, CSSNs have developed their own norms and structures. The nature of the medium both constrains and facilitates social control. They have strong societal implications, fostering situations that combine global connectivity, the fragmentation of solidarities, the de-emphasis of local organizations (in the neighborhood and workplace), and the increased importance of home bases. COMPUTER SUPPORTED SOCIAL NETWORKS When computer networks link people as well as machines, they become social networks, which we call computer supported social networks (CSSNs). Three forms of CSSNs are rapidly developing, each with its own desires and research agendas. Members of virtual community want to link globally with kindred souls for companionship, information and social support from their homes and workstations. White-collar workers want computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), unencumbered by spatial distance, while organizations see benefits in coordinating complex work structures and reducing managerial costs and travel time. Some workers want to telework from their homes, combining employment with domestic chores and Arcadian retreats; management foresees reduced building and real estate costs, and higher productivity. We examine here the extent to which people work and find community on CSSNs. Is it possible to sustain productive or supportive relationships on-line with network members who may never meet in-person? What will the composition and structure of CSSNs be like, with their weaker constraints of distance and time, their easy connectivity and limited social presence? What are the implications of such changes for the societies within which they are proliferating? These questions have captured the public's imagination. Pundits argue about whether we will have computer-supported utopias -"the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire" (Barlow 1995: 40) -and dystopias -"this razzle-dazzle ... disconnects us from each other" (Hightower, quoted in Fox 1995: 12). The popular media is filled with accounts of life in cyberspace (e.g. Cybergal 1995), much like earlier travellers' tales of journeys into exotic unexplored lands. Public discourse is (a) Manichean, seeing CSSNs as either thoroughly good or evil, (b) breathlessly present-oriented, writing as if CSSNs had been invented yesterday and not in the 1970s, (c) parochial, assuming that life on-line has no connection to life off-line, and (d) unscholarly, ignoring research into CSSNs as well as a century's research into the nature of community, work and social organization.