Detour: American Visions Society online - new African American virtual community internet service envisioned by Gary Puckrein, American Vision magazine publisher, as the biggest database of its kind in the world - http://www.americanvisions.com

American Visions, Feb-March, 1997 by Merlisa Lawrence Corbett

All access roads leading to the information superhighway seem free from color barriers -- with nothing but digits and letters identifying users -- so culture and color should not interfere with cybermobility. But as more and more African Americans arrive in cyberspace, they are quickly discovering that their community on line is just as fragmented as it is off line. They ask the same questions that many of us ask when arriving in a new place: "Where can I find good jazz?" "Where can I find some decent soul food?" "Anybody sell black books, black art around here?" "Where's the black neighborhood?"

In one sense, black on-line opportunities abound, as any decent search engine set to "African American" will attest. But most sites found by this means prove thin gruel, lacking depth of content, technological sophistication and the warmth of real communication.

So where in our brave new worlds do we find Booker T. Washington's actual voice; the 1897 text of the American Negro Academy's constitution; the 1787 correspondence of the Free African Union of Newport, R.I.; 1990 census data disaggregated by race; application sharing via FarSite; data streaming; videoconferencing; real-time chatting; audio broadcasting; whiteboarding; virtual classrooms; a shopping mall stocked with everything from cars to Afrocentric books; a nationwide calendar of black cultural events; a list and detailed description of more than 1,000 black heritage sites in North America; and a genuine communion of souls? Where do those components come together in a shake-the-universe critical mass of content/community/ state-of-the-art technowizardry? What site marries swift and comprehensive interactivity to the single largest one-stop source of information concerning the 400 years of the black experience in the Western Hemisphere? Where do the past, the present and the future merge on line?

To date, only in one place: AVS Online, the American Visions Society's African-American virtual community, http://www.americanvisions.com. The folks who for more than a decade have brought us the glorious-to-look-at American Visions magazine and who for two years have run the Afro-American Culture and Arts Forum on CompuServe, have now acquired the rights to the largest multicultural database in the world. And they've employed cutting-edge on-line technology not only to bring this newly acquired wealth of information to the general public, but also to foster a living, on-line community -- a cybervillage for the 21st century.

"What we're talking about here, as regards databases, is almost the equivalent to having the Library of Congress on line," says Gary Puckrein, the magazine's publisher. Puckrein, who nurtured American Visions from a Smithsonian Institution project 12 years ago to its preeminence as an independent publication about black culture, bases his assertion on the results of the relationship that his company has forged with the Thomson Corporation. Thomson -- a $7 billion Canadian conglomerate -- has in the course of the last decade become a worldwide leader in the information and publishing businesses. It owns more than 100 newspapers in North America and publishes hundreds of professional and educational publications -- including career guides for black students, city directories and census data (both vital to genealogical searches) and numerous law titles -- as well as scores of trade titles, including The Chronology of African-American History and Contemporary Literary Criticism. Beyond that, it holds thousands of nonfiction titles (many of which relate to African Americans) and a vast array of databases with black content.

The more Puckrein learned about Thomson's holdings, the more he realized that he was onto something special. "It just boggles the mind," he says. "Our job is to take this incredible content and get it out to the African-American consumer market."

Puckrein believes that African Americans are ripe for a virtual community: "We have a natural affinity bred out of historic relationships." It's the kind of affinity that allows a brother in Milwaukee who has never been to Valdosta, Ga., gain a sense of the sweet taste of pecan pie or appreciate the aroma of ham hocks drowning in mustard greens. That brother will certainly find a recipe for mustard greens on AVS Online, either in the Cuisine Center or from fellow community members. That same natural affinity applies to the 30-something sister, an investment banker in New York City who has the same problems with alleviating ashy legs in the winter as Aunt Thelma in Norman, Okla. Aunt Thelma has home-grown remedies for her ashy skin, but if the New York investment banker is cyberhip, she will turn to AVS Online's Health Center for her health and beauty tips.

Unlike the CompuServe forum (where American Visions is merely a content provider), AVS Online is the service provider. Puckrein likens AVS Online to a television network, complete with ongoing programs and activities. "We want quality control," he insists. "We need to understand what our members want. ... There's so much noise on the web. It can be overwhelming."