One piece of counter-evidence is the repeated story of online communities.
In the early days of the Internet there was Usenet (OK, so it started separate, never mind), a global community, or collection of communities, using text-based message broadcast. It was a nice, self-policing community where obnoxious behaviour was frowned upon, and frowning was generally enough. Every September a new cohort of university students discovered this wonderful resource, and sometimes took a while to learn the social norms, but peer pressure generally worked.
Then in the 90s the Internet started to become popular. AOL started distributing free CDs that let you access Usenet. Lots more people arrived on Usenet, resulting in the "Eternal September" when the social norms broke down and everything became chaos. Spam and flame wars drowned out serious conversation. Some of the communities within Usenet were able to continue because they were small enough to maintain their own internal cohesion, but increasingly these became exceptions.
I stopped using Usenet for discussion some time around 2000. There simply wasn't any point. Even the cohesive communities were abandoning it for private email lists and web sites.
In the early days of the Internet there was Usenet (OK, so it started separate, never mind), a global community, or collection of communities, using text-based message broadcast. It was a nice, self-policing community where obnoxious behaviour was frowned upon, and frowning was generally enough. Every September a new cohort of university students discovered this wonderful resource, and sometimes took a while to learn the social norms, but peer pressure generally worked.
Then in the 90s the Internet started to become popular. AOL started distributing free CDs that let you access Usenet. Lots more people arrived on Usenet, resulting in the "Eternal September" when the social norms broke down and everything became chaos. Spam and flame wars drowned out serious conversation. Some of the communities within Usenet were able to continue because they were small enough to maintain their own internal cohesion, but increasingly these became exceptions.
I stopped using Usenet for discussion some time around 2000. There simply wasn't any point. Even the cohesive communities were abandoning it for private email lists and web sites.