Exploration

Community and Connection on Plastic.com

Amidst the drivel of the dot-com boom days, any Web site with a chat room or a bulletin board was quick to pass itself off as having a "community." But whether on the Web or in the Real World, it takes something more than an aggregation of people to foster the bonds that constitute genuine community. We see it in our bricks-and-mortar neighborhoods, in our churches or community centers. Likewise, you know it when you see it in a rare gem on-line, on sites like Plastic.com.

Plastic is an on-line community forum for culture and politics. Founded by Steven Johnson of Automatic Media (the parent company for now-defunct e-zines Suck.com and Feed.com), it was designed to use the same collaborative filtering engines as the uber-geek community portal Slashdot. But instead of providing "News for Nerds/Stuff that Matters," Plastic was built on the idea that among the denizens of dot-commers, only a fraction were consumed with the hi-tech-geek-chic; the rest would rather indulge their wry wit at smart portals/e-zines dedicated to the lighter parts of art, entertainment and public policy.

But don’t let the by-gone buzzwords scare you. If you thought portals and e-zines were passé and have faded from the limelight for their failure to make money, you’re right. Automatic Media went under in the summer of 2001, along with tons of other quality (and not-so-quality) dot-coms.

But Automatic Media did what I wish more dot-com good ideas had done: they used the last of their capital to pay in advance for the server space to keep the site alive, and then they cracked open the codes and put the community in the hands of the community members. Despite the fact that Automatic Media has filed for bankruptcy and all its former employees have gone on to something else, Plastic remains a thriving site with unique user counts rising every month.

Plastic is the best source I’ve found for keeping up with the under-reported stories in the news, the hot new trends that are just about to break, and the quirky little currents of counter-culture that can be found on the Web. It’s also been a great source for scoring cool-points with my Web-savvy buddies, since Plastic is the place I go to find links to the weirdest stuff out there. The kind of stuff that ultimately ends up in those e-mail forwards that get sent around relentlessly can often first be found at Plastic. Plastic is the first place I heard about the child-slave industry that is used to grow cocoa beans in Africa, the new urban sport of Soaping, and the AYBABTU and Bert is Evil phenomena.

But the heard-it-here-first, community-generated content on Plastic is not the only thing that makes the site worthwhile, if not unique. Both the members of the Plastic community and also the technology that the site was founded on, give it an edge that’s made me place it high on my list of "IE Favorites."

Like most Web-based communities that have built a following over time, Plastic has sprouted a tight inner circle of hegemons, or the quick-posting names that everybody knows, and lurkers (like me) who rarely post but always read and add anonymous comments to the discussions.

But unlike most Web-based communities (except for Slashdot, which the site was modeled after), Plastic uses a unique piece of code plus social engineering to raise the quality of the comments most readers are exposed to. Registered members of the community are randomly assigned the duty of rating other posters and assigning "karma," or a points-based system of assessing the goodness of posts. The more karma you have, the more likely your comments are to be read by other users, and the more likely you are to be given karma duty in the future.

The net result is that the text threads that constitute the discussion surrounding a particular post about a news item, site, or Web phenomenon are neatly "filtered" so that you don’t have to read the drivel. Intently curious users have the option of changing or lowering their "crap filter," but in my own experience it’s best to leave it where it is.

But the real value I’ve found in being a part of the Plastic community is in the feeling of always being connected to others who are always connected. Somehow it’s a comfort to know that however late I'm tapping away on my keyboard about some arcane subject, I can always find minds who are interested in similar things.

When Plastic community members aren’t busy exchanging sharp-witted jabs about the latest cultural conflict, I have often been touched by the shows of support that can be found in this community, as in so many others. For instance, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, the site became one giant sound-off of members checking in on other members, to make sure all were okay and to help each other deal with the grief of our great national loss.

And in that aggregation of concern, Plastic, like many other American communities, pulled together and became something more. Instead of being just a chat room or a bulletin board, Plastic exemplified the highest virtues of community.

Visit Plastic on the Web at http://www.plastic.com.

Jenni French works as a Web writer in the Seattle area, where she drinks a lot of latte and complains about the rain.