THE RISE AND FALL OF NETVILLE: THE SAGA OF A CYBERSPACE CONSTRUCTION BOOMTOWN IN THE GREAT DIVIDE John Leslie King Rebecca E. Grinter† Jeanne M. Pickering Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations (CRITO) University of California, Irvine Irvine CA 92717 †Rebecca E. Grinter is supported by a grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of the United Kingdom.INTRODUCTION The challenge of merging technical and social skill bases for the purposes of building effective information technologies has been characterized as the problem of bridging a great divide between technical and social expertise (Star, 1993). But truly new technologies often emerge when technologists and their patrons create a great divide that shelters technical innovation from the status quo.1 Invention best arises within a narrow social context, not across all the social contexts it ultimately affects. Perhaps it could not otherwise survive. Yet when ultimately the technology is offered to the broader social world, the divide must be straddled, exposing the community that gave birth to the technology to normal powerful social forces that can destroy it. This paper tells the story of the homesteading of the unique virtual settlement of Netville2 within which the Internet was born. The pioneers of Netville faced the hardships of a technological frontier but they also exploited a great divide—a zone of freedom and opportunity that allowed them to create something truly new. Netville was a community where deeply ingrained institutional values of intellectual curiosity, informal meritocratic reward structures, and egalitarian presumptions enabled a highly disaggregated and distributed population to work together to create an amazing artifact quite unlike any seen before. Through their labors, the people of Netville created cyberspace3 and a community that was geographically distributed but bound together by a shared interest in a technology that was both the subject and object of their efforts. As glorious as the rise of Netville has proven to be in retrospect, it was largely unnoticed by the world at large during that rise. From the late 1960's through 1990, the 1The principle of institutionalized order, a key feature of this discussion, can be explored in detail in Meyer and Rowan (1977), DiMaggio and Powell (1983, 1991), March and Olsen (1992), and Scott (1992). A detailed discussion of this is provided in King, et. al, (1994). 2Netville is a name we have given the community of developers who worked together to provide the technologies which most people using the network today use. 3William Gibson first coined this term in his book Neuromancer (Gibson, 1984). Faced with trying to describe this space where people meet and talk electronically, a place constructed entirely of electric pulses which does not have any physical existence, he invented the term cyberspace. The book, a science fiction novel, caught the imagination of Netville. Neal Stephenson (1992) in his book Snow Crash has used the term metaverse to describe the same phenomenon.population of Netville grew slowly but steadily in an organic fashion. It drew to itself members of the research and high-technology communities who were willing to learn both the technical procedures and social conventions required for access to and residence in cyberspace. New members of the community found powerful incentives to conform to the social conventions of the earlier settlers, and to a great degree, Netville was a self-governing society with relatively few rules and relatively few rule breakers. This idyllic state began to change around 1990 as the news of Netville and of cyberspace began to spread to new domains—to commercial firms, non-profit organizations, and most importantly, the media. Soon the tides of immigration flooded Netville with new settlers, and with them came powerful new institutional interests that displaced the institutional forces that gave life to Netville. Within a few years, Netville had begun to change and the fall of Netville was underway. Cyberspace would survive, after many paleonymic grafts to reshape its meaning and image to fit the interests of the new institutional forces of commerce and entertainment. Netville, however, was destined for one of two futures: to die the death of many a construction boomtown, leaving empty buildings and the skeletal remains of life; or to be reborn as an entertainment spectacle like Las Vegas, and run by those who appreciate the drawing power of money and flesh. The rise and fall of Netville is a modern morality tale of vision, courage, and skill, and the nearly inevitable subordination of ideals to material progress. Cyberspace would suvive, after many paleonymic grafts to reshape its meaning and image to fit the interests of the new institutional forces of commerce and entertainment. Netville emerges from the analysis that follows as a remarkable vital but fragile entity, capable of producing something that would change the world but unable to protect itself from the consequences of its own success. The story, ultimately, involves the clash of institutional interests and values in which the details of technology are critical for marking the progress of Netville and shaping its effect on the world, but play a remarkably subordinate role in the rise and fall of Netville as a community. In this story, Netville's future remains uncertain. It might die the death of many a construction boomtown, leaving empty buildings and the skeletal remains of life. It could as easily be reborn as an entertainment spectacle like Las Vegas, run by those who appreciate the drawing power of money and flesh. The rise and fall of Netville is a modern morality tale of vision, courage, skill, and the nearly inevitable subordination of ideals to material progress. THE RISE OF NETVILLE 2The question of when Netville began is difficult to answer, in part because the history is cloudy, and in part because the definitions of the key terms have evolved over time.4 As a practical matter, we focus our attention on the Netville era that produced three clear triumphs: demonstration of a robust internetworked system for packet switched communication (the ARPANET), which evolved into the Internet; electronic mail on that network, which allowed asynchronous text communications between all users of the network; and the hypertext-based World Wide Web,