The Well: The Epic History of the First Online Community [Hardcover]

Well, it passes that test easily: in its relatively brief length, "The Well" succinctly and sensitively chronicles the odd birth, growing pains, and interpersonal dynamics that make The Well the unique online community that it is.

I'm buying copies for my ex-girlfriend, who complained that I spent too much time at the computer, and for a friend who, years ago, acidly commented, "Why that's amazing, you've gone a whole thirty minutes without mentioning The Well!"

Maybe this book can explain the things I couldn't. Highly recomended for those who want to understand the possiblities of virtual communities.

It's always been difficult for me to describe the Well to my non-Well friends, because there are so few virtual places that even approximate it, and they're even smaller, and practically no one knows what they're like either. "Computer conferencing" is what I say to my friends in business. "On-line community" is what I say to the people I think Might Get It. I also call it "the Peyton Place of cyberspace" and that metaphor (small town where everyone knows everyone else's history of indiscretions FAR TOO WELL) might be the most apt of the three, at least in my own experience.

Like any big amorphous concept, the Well is difficult to write about for a general audience. So Katie chose a story -- with love and friendship and grief and humor and all the other elements that make up a good story -- to carry her narrative. She chose a good one. Of course there are others. But this book (and before it, the WIRED article the book is based upon) comes closer to conveying the essence of the Well than anything else I've ever seen or read.

When the WIRED article was published I gave a copy to my mother, just to help her understand how it was that I had dozens of close friends I had never met. For a reader who wants to understand the astonishing power of true online community, in the light of human nature in all its ornery glory, I can't think of a better introduction.

Hafner also deals with the core issue of community, an issue central to the Well's success, and possibly central to it's eventual - what? - transformation. I was about to say, "dissolution," but an incarnation of some sort of Well lives on at Salon.com. The early Well, the one I knew, was a pioneering online community, before that phrase became today's buzzword meaning little more than a chat room. The online community was the core of a larger, real-life, flesh-and-blood community, in which people truly lived and loved and became sick and got well, and sometimes died.

Everyone who hungers for community - and that means everyone awake to the grief of modern life - should read this book. Most of us understand true community by its absence. My most vivid and unexpected realization about the meaning of community occurred many years ago, when our children were still little. We lived for a time in an Eichler suburb in Mountain View, California. Each house on our block was surrounded by a high fence. After some months of living there, we hadn't met a single neighbor. I was out mowing the lawn one sunny Saturday morning, with no one in sight, and I suddenly understood in a way I never had before that our commercial culture has a vested interest in the destruction of community. Without community, each of us becomes a consuming atom, each with our own lawnmower, each with our own set of tools, each with our own copy of every trinket. In a true community we would be sharing tools and sharing labor. GNP is maximized by eroding community. Our commercial culture has a vested interest in the destruction of community. And conversely, true community subverts this culture.

It's because of this paradoxical dynamic that the Well - to the extent that it *was* a true community - could not retain its character while evolving as a commercial enterprise. This is part of the story.

Read this book. Let it provoke you to examine the role of community in your own life.