Critical Thinking and Socio Technical Methods for Ascertaining Credibility Online
SM: Howard, I would like to start with the deep past of online sociability, online social interaction of the 1980s when you were a member of the Well, the famous bulletin board that pioneered the idea of online community. We all read your book Virtual Community, Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, and we remember vividly the justification you offered for writing the book and for theorizing about virtual communities which was that, at the time, people thought of the idea of getting together with other people online as weird, as nerdy, as disturbing, even as a form of social deviance; that nothing good can come out of it, that it is just an adulteration of social life, a weakening of social ties. Was the fear of online interaction that intense in the 1980s?