Patterns of Social Behavior In Computer-Mediated
Communications


Kraettli L. Epperson
Sociology Honors Thesis
Rice University Sociology Department

Abstract
Intensive study using interviews and participant-observation in
many forms of electronic interaction are used as a basis for
symbolic interactionist analysis of social behaviors in computer
networking. Participant-observation activities include e-mail,
newsgroups, listservs, file transfer protocol sites, internet relay
chat, gopher use and administration, "multi-user dungeons,"
webing, other "exotic" networking forms, and participation in
industry. Special attention in analysis is paid to Goffman-style
"interaction rituals" and "interpretive interactionism" as theorized
by Denzin.
Computer networks are quickly proliferating in the United
States as a primary form of communication, while making dramatic
impact in popular culture. The Internet and other computer
networks offer a social environment of a type that we have never
before seen. Both public and private "virtual spaces" are being
constructed and utilized by increasing numbers of people to create a
new frontier most characterized by geographic and temporal
dislocation. At the same time, the unification of media allowed by
technology and the emerging popularity of non-linear information
structures make the form of interaction in this new social
environment a radical departure from past experience.
This study attempts to begin the exploratory sociological
research necessary to understand this new form of social
interaction.



...It then becomes apparent that not only was cultural accumulation
under way well before organic development ceased, but that such
accumulation very likely played an active role in shaping the final stages
of that development. Though it is apparently true enough that the
invention of the airplane led to no visible bodily changes, no alterations of
(innate) mental capacity, this is not necessarily the case for the pebble tool
or the crude chopper, in whose wake seems to have come not only more
erect stature, reduced dentition, and a more thumb-dominated hand, but
the expansion of the human brain to its present size. Because tool
manufacture puts a premium on manual skill and foresight, its
introduction must have acted to shift selection pressures so as to favor the
rapid growth of the forebrain as, in all likelihood, did the advances of
social organization, communication, and moral regulation, which there is
reason to believe all occurred during this period of overlap between
cultural and biological change.
-- Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

All Western scientific models of communications -- like the Shannon-
Weaver model -- are linear, sequential, and logical as a reflection of the
late medieval emphasis on the Greek notion of efficient causality. Modern
scientific theories abstract the figure from the ground. For use in the
electric age, a right-brain model of communication is necessary to
demonstrate the "all-at-onceness" character of information moving at the
speed of light. As voice, print, image, and sensory data proceed
simultaneously, figure and ground are often in apposition rather than in a
sequential relationship. For example, the consciousness of the data-base
user is in two places at once: at the terminal and in the center of the
system.
An artifact pushed far enough tends to reincorporate the user. The
Huns lived on their horses day and night. Technology stresses and
emphasizes some one function of man's senses; at the same time, other
senses are dimmed down or temporarily obsolesced. The process retrieves
man's propensity to worship extensions of himself as a form of divinity.
Carried far enough man thus becomes a creature of his own machine.
-- Marshall McLuhan, The Global Village

'Go for it,' I said, when it was time, but Bobby was already there,
leaning forward to drive the Russian program into its slot with the heel of
his hand. He did it with the tight grace of a kid slamming change into an
arcade game, sure of winning and ready to pull down a string of free
games.
A silver tide of phosphenes boiled across my field of vision as the
matrix began to unfold in my head, a 3-D chessboard, infinite and
perfectly transparent. The Russian program seemed to lurch as we entered
the grid. If anyone else had been jacked into that part of the matrix, he
might have seen a surf of flickering shadow roll out of the little yellow
pyramid that represented our computer. The program was a memetic
weapon, designed to absorb the local color and present itself as a crash-
priority override in whatever context it encountered.
'Congratulations,' I heard Bobby say. 'We just became an Eastern
Seaboard Fission Authority inspection probe...' That meant we were
clearing fiberoptic lines with the cybernetic equivalent of a fire siren, but
in the simulation matrix, we seemed to rush straight for Chrome's data
base. I couldn't see it yet, but I already knew those walls were waiting.
Walls of shadow, walls of ice.
-- William Gibson, Burning Chrome


Preface
This paper is designed to be like no student thesis paper you've
ever read. It is not unique because of the novel subject matter, nor
because I wrote it on a notebook-sized computer with the power of
yesterday's mainframes, nor even because it makes extensive use of
articles and postings obtained electronically using computer
networks. It is unique because the paper itself is integral with the
fabric of the Internet and the Internet's social environment. This
paper was written using a very simple programming language called
HyperText Markup Language  (HTML). The paper is interactive
with the reader. If I mention a sociological phenomenon on the
Internet that has implications for our understanding of this new
social environment, then a button physically appears in the paper
that has been programmed to instantly transport the reader to the
Internet location being analyzed, and allow the reader to experience
the phenomena under discussion. This is an effort to make the
reader understand the transformative power and inherently self-
referential nature of the new media about which the paper is
written.
 In a more traditional preface vein, much has changed in the
year since I began this project. The emergence of networked
communications into the popular market has been astounding. Even
in beginning this project, and in thinking about these issues, I would
not have predicted the sudden and forceful impact that computer
networking has had in popular culture. Hence, this project stands,
most fortunately and by no act of mine, in an even more important
place and at an even more crucial time in social development than I
would ever have predicted. I hope the resulting paper measures up
to these daunting circumstances.

Kraettli L. Epperson
Dec. 10, 1994


Introduction
There is a radical transformation taking place in America. We
are poised on the edge of a breathtaking new social landscape. A
new social frontier has opened that is going to change the way that
we work and play, read and write, think and move. Called,
collectively, the Internet, or, more dramatically, cyberspace, this
new frontier is the collection of all the social environments created
through the connection of computers.
In this new landscape, much of the communication will be
accomplished in ways that have never before been seen. This new
frontier includes not only the creation of new forms of private
communications, like electronic mail, but also virtual common
areas, like "newsgroups," and massive virtual libraries where
"information-commodities" are distributed. It will also include the
creation and use of completely new forms of interaction, like virtual
reality environments and "hypertext," a multi-linear conglomeration
of several linear documents of varying formats and media. All of
these experiences and communication types are explored in this
paper.
Today, there are an estimated 20 million users of the Internet.
The significance of this new social environment to the overall
society is undeniable. As computer networks continue to proliferate
throughout the workplaces, schools, and homes of America, this
new and almost unstudied frontier will change not only the face, but
also the body of what we call communication. It will substantively
transform the meaning we give to the idea of being "in
communication" with another person.
The Internet, in some very real way, is the ultimate tool of the
"human endeavor." It is a tool that enables the conversion of
thought to action in the most direct form that has ever been
available. This conversion is so direct that it merges the previously
separate spheres of thought, word and deed in ways that challenge
not only our current social conventions, political systems, and legal
structures to somehow keep pace, but also disturbs our very self-
concept. When words and phrases suddenly become programs
capable of controlling social access, vital information,
communications and industry, and when a passing thought can be
transmitted to thousands of connected readers in the blink of an
eye, something about human experience has fundamentally
changed. Only through an imaginative and reflexive sociology that
allows humanity to step away from its ultimate tool for a moment
can we begin to realize how the tool has and will shape us as much
as we have fashioned the tool.

The Paper Structure
This paper is organized into three sections, with several
appendices. The first section is made up of the interviewing study
undertaken as a pilot study to the participant-observation project.
The second section is made up of the literature review
underlying the project. This review attempts to survey the diverse
types and current frontiers of research into electronic
communications.
The third section is made up of a discussion of the method and
theory used in the participant-observation project and of the
observations themselves. This section contains the central portion
of the research: an accounting of observations made during a
variety of network experiences over the last 14 months. For this
portion of the paper, these experiences will be artificially divided
into technical "service types" or  "phenomena," although neither of
these words really explains the merger of the two on the Internet.
This section will include a symbolic interactionist analysis of some
symbols and encounters that will become important in the overall
conclusions of the paper, the fourth section.
The fourth section will be a discussion of the symbolic
interactionist analysis made in the first and third sections with the
goal of sketching a rough model of social interaction in network
communications. This section will attempt to evaluate the several
hypothesis and hypothesis hybrids used in approaching this
research, and come to some conclusions about the social reality
being constructed in network communications.


SECTION I: A Preliminary Study Using Selective
Interviews

Introduction
This section attempts to use interviews to explore the new
social frontiers created by networked computer environments.
Called collectively the cybersphere or the Internet, this new frontier
is made up of all the virtual social environments created through the
interconnection of computers that allow people to communicate
with one another.
In order to lay the groundwork for my later research, I first had
to familiarize myself with the typical uses and experiences of
average users. To do this, I interviewed persons who use computer
networks to communicate. I focused both on their academic and
business activities, and on their social and political activities over
networks. I asked them to tell me about what they expect from
computer networks in the future, how they felt that their personal
communication behaviors changed on  the Internet, and about why
they used computer networks. I was interested in what the act of
typing messages to other people, often strangers, in a non-temporal
and non-physical environment does to the form of communication
involved. I was interested in the implications of the virtual
computer communications world for the social world overall.

Operationalization
Operationalization is the process by which the research
instruments are refined to make substantial contributions to
understanding a particular hypothesis. In this case, the hypothesis
was simple and broad: computer telecommunications are having an
effect on the way that individuals who use them cognitively
understand their social environment. This environment is gradually
becoming characterized by an abstraction of communication, a
unification of mediums, and a tendency to involve more non-linear,
non-spatial, and non-temporal understandings of what it means for
two people to be "in communication" with one another. To the end
of demonstrating this theory, an interview schedule was designed to
draw upon both the experience and imaginations of the subjects.
This schedule was designed with seven purposes in mind: a) to
establish a user history of both computers and computer
telecommunications; b) to characterize the user's perception of
other network users; c) to characterize the user's perception of
cyberspace -- either as an abstraction or not; d) to characterize the
user's perception of how their personal communications norms
change when using computers; e) to characterize the social norms
the user perceives when communicating both privately and in semi-
public and public areas of cyberspace; f) to characterize the
personal impact use of electronic communications has had on the
user; and g) to characterize the hopes and fears for future
cyberspace interactions that exist in the user's extrapolative
imagination.
While these were grand and broad-reaching sorts of goals for
the interviews, after the initial two interviews, a schedule of
questions was developed that proved useful.
 This method followed that described by Robert Bellah in
Habits of the Heart: "[W]e sought to bring our preconceptions and
questions into the conversation and to understand the answers we
were receiving not only in terms of the language but also, so far as
we could discover, in the lives of those we were talking with.
Though we did not seek to impose our ideas on those with whom
we talked (as we should be clear from the many articulate voices in
this book, we could not have done that had we tried), we did
attempt to uncover assumptions, to make explicit what the person
we were talking to might rather have left implicit. This interview as
we employed it was active, Socratic." (p. 304)
This was my model for the interview style. While I would not
say that I attempted to disclose things through confrontation, I did
try to keep along a line of questions if it seemed useful, and to ask
for clarifications when subjects made potentially crucial statements.
I tried to get them to explain their underlying assumptions as a way
to help them discuss the things about the Internet that they wouldn't
think or want to say without encouragement.
Furthermore, it was hoped that this method would allow the
interviews to capture some of the language that defines the way
that individuals interact with their social world. It is the use of
language, I believe, that creates the new realities of cyberspace, and
without a feel for this linguistic frontier there is no way to
understand the relationships that structure the new social frontier.

The Experimental Interviews
The initial interview schedule for the two experimental
interviews included the subject's name, age, years of study, majors,
academic and non-academic interests, hobbies, years of use and of
what types of computers, modems and networks, and first
experience with a computer network. After establishing this
background, I asked about their interactions over a computer
network. This usually included initial questions about whether they
use computer networks for study, communication, or other
purposes. If it included significant amounts of e-mail, as all but one
of these interview did, I prompted them to talk about their e-mail
writing style by asking them if they wrote formal letters, short
conversational pieces, or long conversational pieces. In all cases,
the users confirmed that these categories struck them as soundly
within their own experience, and proceeded to describe their own
usage.
These promptings were very gentle and the subjects were not
convinced to accept these categories. I asked about what sort of
people they interacted with over networks, and for
characterizations of those interactions. I asked about why they
thought that e-mail was appealing to some people. I followed this
stage of the interview with questions about what the subjects
expect from their computer network, and what they expect to be
able to use a computer network for in the future. I asked about
whether they had worries or fears about the proliferation of
computer networks. Finally, I asked them to characterize how they
expected computer networks to impact them in the future.
Both the first and second experimental interviews were similar
in style, and seemed to work well for gathering initial information
and impressions.(See Appendix A1 for this initial interview
schedule.)

The Final Interview Schedule
The final schedule of interview questions changed slightly from
the experimental schedule. First, the subjects were not students, and
so the focus on academic usage was changed to business usage.
Secondly, more questions were added to ensure that the subjects
were drawing upon their own experience, relating routine uses and
describing their own visualizations of other users and the network
as a whole.
These questions were designed to elicit information implicitly.
Subjects were not asked whether they thought of the Internet as an
abstract mass of human activity or whether they thought of it as
physical computers connected by wires and sitting in buildings
across America. They were simply asked to "draw a verbal picture
of the Internet." This removed bias in the question towards one
conceptualization or another, and allowed many different aspects of
the subject's conceptualization to be explored that might otherwise
never have emerged. The interview was started with a light-hearted
question asking what would happen if mythical bugs ate all the
computer software necessary for computer telecommunications.
This question helped to establish rapport and to confirm that the
interviewer had rudimentary knowledge of how computer
telecommunications work, so as to set both technically
knowledgeable and non-technical interviewees at ease. (See
Appendix A2 for this final interview schedule.)
The style of these interviews was informal and conversational.
At no time were the subject's statements questioned or
contradicted, while little coaxing was needed to get them to talk.
The interview was open-ended. No time constraint was in place,
and the sessions took place privately in a small breakroom. There
was little chance of being disturbed and the location was frequently
used for informal conversation during lunch breaks.
In all but one case, I had to cut the interview short; the
questions were of interest to the subjects, and raised thoughts that
they wanted to talk about. This is a topic that is of great interest to
the people using networks, and they seem glad to give it some
thought.

Sampling Method
The sampling method was a hybrid cluster/convenience method.
Singleton defines cluster sampling as follows:
"In cluster sampling, the population is broken down into groups
of cases, called clusters, and a sample of clusters is selected at
random." (Social Research, p. 147)
The group selected as a cluster were people who worked at
Wolf Communications company in Houston, Texas, in addition to
the two students in the experimental interviews. Obviously, this
"cluster" was not selected at random. This group was selected
because they all use computer telecommunications in some form or
another in their business, and thus form a natural cluster. The two
students were selected because they use cyberspace in unusual
ways, while the people from Wolf Communications use cyberspace
to make a living and are probably thereby ahead of any social
changes related to cyberspace use. Wolf Communications provides
Lotus Notes services to customers all over the world.
 This was a "convenience" sample because the cluster was not
selected at random. Convenience sampling is an acceptable
scientific method, according to Singleton, "[i]f the research is at an
early stage and generalizability is not an issue..." (p. 153) This
method made sense for a short, initial pilot study. The only
drawback was that in using non-probability sampling, "patterns of
variability cannot be predicted from probability sampling theory"(p.
152) Thus, generalizations about all users cannot be drawn from
this cluster sample, while observations about some aspects of the
fundamental experience of using computer telecommunications
probably can.

Initial Interview Findings: The Prodigy
In order to better lay the groundwork for this paper, I will go
into depth about the first individual I interviewed. Cameron
Etezadi, a 19 year-old sophomore majoring in chemical engineering
and biochemistry, is a very interesting user because, even at his
young age, he had been using computers and networks for a long
time. He wrote his first program in the BASIC programming
language in kindergarten, and had his first computer
telecommunications experience in third grade when he and his
father started using a lunchbox-sized telex machine to call local
bulletin boards. What makes Cameron most interesting, however, is
the depth of the relationships he has formed with other young users
of the Internet. Even though the Internet, as a truly global and
public resource, has been available for less than five years, Cameron
has been using it to communicate over long distances for over six
years; "not that my high school had it, but I got it," meaning that he
sometimes used surreptitious means to access the Internet. In the
process, he met a wide variety of people:
"You make friends on the [bulletin] boards constantly. You'll
make a comment and as long as you can make your point fairly
articulately, no one knows how old you are, especially if you're
using an alias [pseudonym]. I met the guy who built the Behemoth
that way,... Its a lateral bike with $8000 worth of equipment built
into the frame. It's got a Spark station [network server computer]...
I asked him lots of questions... [and] I took a road trip with friends
that I met over the net... We arranged it, got it organized, and met,
all without a phone call, all electronically. We were able to do this
road trip because of the networks. We wanted it to be a really high-
tech trip. This trip got termed 'hacking across America..."
This trip, taken in 1989, is a highlight of Cameron's early
Internet experience. It allowed him to meet several of his Internet
friends from across the country in person, and cement friendships
that had been created initially thorough computer correspondence.
He even met a girlfriend:
"There was this board in Iowa, run by the Iowa Student
Association, where I met an ex-girlfriend, Ann. We started
corresponding, and we first met on that road-trip. The people you
meet - a lot of it is completely random, but you have to have a lot
in common for them to be commenting on what you've said. She
had failed her first drivers test, and I guess I was 16 at the time, and
I made some snide comment and we got started talking that way..."
Cameron loved being a uniquely young user, a prodigy, but that
has changed as he has gotten older. He has become more concerned
about the uses of the Internet, and his own experience has changed:
"It worries me a little that everyone has access, but I don't want
to restrict access, - that would be elitist and goes against
everything I stand for. And the fact that I can do it, the novelty is
starting got go away. Part of its because I'm older, - like people
don't look at the $15,000 heist anymore and not just wonder how I
could have done it, but how I could have done that at 15.
"I'm worried about the explosive grab for resources. The
average moron, the average joe user poses more of a threat [to
fellow Internet users] than hackers, because he doesn't know not to
tie up the network resources at peak times."
Cameron is worried that new users, many of whom, he believes,
have little knowledge of how to share the Internet. He is also
worried about the uses of the Internet by business:
"There's such a wide range of people learning to use it now, or
learning how to 'function' with it is better...  People who don't know
any better pay for stuff that I get free on the Internet.. People used
to run boards for a hobby. It was as a hobbyists for the hobby. Now
its business, and I don't like it."
Still, he is optimistic that the ultimate result will be good, if the
limited resources of the Internet can be distributed:
"I think its good that [the Internet is used for business] as long
as the networks can handle it. I've been able to watch the Internet
grow while I was logged on. They talk about there being 1000
requests for new address names each week, when there used to be
1000 requests each year...
"In the end result, I think I'll see improvement as a user. I don't
have to wait 8 to 6 weeks to get software patches. OS/2 version 2.1
[a disk operating system program] was available as a trial version ...
over the Internet even before it was released on the market."
Finally, then, Cameron sees a new world, that, even as an
experienced user, both frightens and excites him:
"I expect information at my fingertips for the taking. Its sad;
years ago people didn't have to be this way - but its war out there,
and those with the best information will win. People expect it on-
line and society functions as if it is all on-line... I'm starting - me,
of all people - to feel left-behind on the information highway."

Conclusions about Cameron: A Framework and a Frontier
Cameron is obviously not a typical user. He has been using the
Internet and other forms of computer networking for longer than
most people his age. Additionally, because of its influence early in
his life, his relationships and other parts of his life have been
influenced by his use. He has a particular perspective about the
Internet; he sees himself as an early pioneer on a new frontier, and
has a certain measure of nostalgia for his past history of use. For
Cameron, using computers and the Internet will probably never
again be as exciting as it was when he was a teenager. Still, he sees
his life continuing to benefit from using the Internet for
communications, and as a marketplace for both ideas and products.
Cameron can provide the sociologist not only with a
perspective on the social past of the Internet and other forms of
computer telecommunications, but also some understanding of the
changes it is undergoing. Even more importantly, Cameron's
attitude about the trends can begin to describe the social effects of
computer telecommunications.
Cameron is starting to feel crowded on the Internet. Part of his
social freedom to communicate quickly and in whatever form he
desired has been taken away by increased use of this social space.
His frontier is becoming populated by new colonists who use the
resources too quickly. Cameron has become like the wandering pre-
colonial "trapper" who is now starting to side with the "native"
technicians and defense researchers that designed the system for
themselves. He was the invader at first, but his use was consistent
with the "hobbyist" model that he describes, and so it was tolerated.
He didn't try to set up shop on the Internet; he was just passing
through, "poaching" university and defense contractor resources
occasionally. Now the corporate ranchers have come in full force,
with their herds of business users, and the range is getting fenced. It
is no wonder Cameron feels left behind.
To the sociologist, the entire situation looks like a slowly
brewing conflict. There may come a time when the corporate users
fence out the private hobbyist users entirely in order to more
efficiently use and control their resources and the information
available. At the same time, innovative users like Cameron may find
themselves facing the need to "get" networking access of various
kinds again through surreptitious means as they did in high school.
Cameron's interview gives us the first of three major hypothesis
that will guide further investigation into the Internet. His network
usage gives us a model of the Internet as a new frontier in which
not only the normal transfer of information for research and
business take place, but also a frontier on which both human
intimacy and impassioned conflict are likely to occur in the near
future. This is a frontier hypothesis that will model social
relationships based upon the distribution of scarce resources.

Politics on the Internet
The second of the experimental interviews was with Marty
Makulski, a Rice University sophomore in Political Science. Marty
first started using the Internet and electronic communications for
personal e-mail to friends and family. However, when he decided to
run for Student Association President of Rice University last
February, he turned his basic knowledge of e-mail into a unique
campaign strategy. Marty decided to distribute his campaign
platform and a brief introductory letter to student voters over the
university network, Owlnet:
"When I first got the idea, I talked about putting stuff on the
newsgroups, but I decided to send e-mail. I found out that there are
mailing groups -- that if you just type 'Sid Rich,' it sends it to
everyone in the college, and the same could be done with the
Campus Crusade for Christ with 'Saints.'

Marty decided to use a system that these two organizations had
designed for internal communication to get his political message
out. The university network automatically distributed his e-mail to
over 300 students -- a substantial number on a campus of only 2700
undergraduates, of whom only a small percentage actually vote.
The mechanics of e-mail on most computer systems allows for easy
response to any piece of mail received. In fact, this was one of the
reasons Marty chose e-mail over conventional advertising or a
Usenet newsgroup posting; he asked for suggestions in his letter.
He got them:
"I received varied responses. The [presidential] debate was
Tuesday, [while the election was on Wednesday] and I mailed it on
Friday morning, so by Tuesday I'd gotten all the responses I was
going to get. I got seven from Sid and similar off Saints. They were
six positive and one negative from each and the one from Saints
wasn't really negative, it was just, 'In future, this is not what this is
used for.' The one at Sid responded, 'I can't believe that the
politicos have taken over the net.' He printed out a copy of my
posting and put it up in the elevator lobby in Sid with some
comments. When I went around putting up campaign posters, that
somehow came down."

Marty was very happy with the responses he had received,
despite the criticism, and looked on the strategy from a perspective
that encompassed more than just a novel campaign gimmick:
"What it did, especially with Sid, was that it sparked a lot of
interest in specific topics, not just, 'thanks for sending this to me.' It
was very interactive, not just a political ad. It was a chance to
interact... I was hoping to give people more information about
myself and show them accessibility. Some people said that I should
put an automatic responder - put a 'vacation' on it [which would
send an automatic prepared reply to every response] That's
something that would really get the computer-science geeks off, but
I thought, that's just what a politician would do. I tried to write
individual responses to letters."

Marty's strategy was successful, and some campus political
analysts, including the  Editor-in-Chief of the student newspaper at
the time, felt that his victory had a great deal to do with this
eleventh-hour gambit in a tight race. Rice is a university
environment, and has a relatively high percentage of regular
network users. In a highly networked environment, the net can
swing the vote, and with it, power. As the discussion of the
interviews and of the research project continues, this point should
not be forgotten; communication is a form of power.

Pictures of the Net: The Main Interviews
As a part of these interviews, subjects were asked to draw a
verbal picture of the Internet. I had expected some to present very
abstract images of communications, while others to present more
concrete explanations of how they system physically worked. I
found both types, and some mixes.
Graham Gomeots, a 23-year old University of Houston student
who worked part-time at Wolf Communications doing basic UNIX
programming, was a fairly new user of the Internet. He was the
only person who did not regularly use e-mail. He had a very simple,
user-based image of the Internet. For him, it is made up of other
users:
"I see it abstractly I guess. Lately I've been working on
compiling lists on the different types of  newsgroups on the
Internet. I was really surprise to find out that the Internet is as
broad as it is. I guess I thought the Internet would be plastic pen
guards in pockets. I see people who don't get out into the sun very
often. Now I see what's available on the Internet and its amazing."
Ann Zitterkopf, the 22-year old Vice President of Marketing
and Public Relations at Wolf Communications, had a much more
abstract conception. She represented cyberspace by making
reference to aesthetics and pop culture. Hers was a very eclectic
explanation:
"It seems almost surrealistic, like something out of
Bladerunner. Pretty soon we're going to have flames shooting out
of the tops of buildings, and cars aren't going to go on roads
anymore, they're just going to fly though the sky.
"It does not seem real that you can send a message instantly. Its
not tangible. Its like you went back to the stone age and plopped
down two telephones... It almost seems mystical. In the same way,
its really revolutionized communication. You don't have to fax
somebody, you don't have to type it or send it to a secretary. It
goes against the entire learning process wherein you were first
exposed to things you could touch, and then to things you could
smell and taste, and then there's a computer where there's no
correlation to the other things."
Ann was most fascinated by cyberspace as a sensual perception
that is beyond the ordinary. She found its most fundamental image
to be that of a sensual non-existence that is amazing in and of itself.
Neil Robinson, a 21 year-old who did user-registration and
customer support at Wolf Communications had a less abstract
picture, but presented an interesting image in his description:
"I see squares, boxes on a map of the U.S. and the world, and
these boxes are all connected together. They are not all connected
to each other, but each box is connected to at least one other box.
There's just all kinds of things you can put in the box, and then
other people can grab a copy of it, or look at it. Eventually the
information, whatever's in the box, proliferates... For every one of
those boxes, there are also people in those boxes, and they can have
a point-to-point connection over that line that their box shares with
that other box."
This is an image of the Internet that has to make one shudder at
the same time that its simplicity makes one smile.  People inside
boxes? When information workers become a part of their work,
maybe one begins to conceptualize the Other as the other's
computer interface. A business client become Internet Address
128.45.672.89, a machine sitting in a dusty room in Atlanta
somewhere hooked up to T1 lines into the local cable supplier.

Using E-Mail
As another way to determine how cyberspace users relate to the
new social environment, I asked subjects to tell me some very
tangible things about their e-mail, one of the more prevalent uses of
the Internet. I asked them if they fell into a pattern of long, formal
messages, short, conversational messages, or long conversational
messages. Most agreed that these three patterns made sense, and
proceeded to describe their own style.
Ann, since she did public relations, sent a great deal of e-mail
for business, and had a preferred style that she believes was
predicated by the medium:
"The tone of the business e-mail is much less formal than if
you're sending a business letter. If I'm hanging up the phone and I'm
sending them e-mail, its often concise, 'its great talking to you...
look forward to working with you in the future, call me if you have
any questions.' Then I go to write them the formal business letter.
'Dear Mr. or Mrs. so-and-so, it is a pleasure working with you on
Worldcom. I look forward to working with you in the future.' Its
much less colloquial...
"Business e-mail is usually very concise, unless its about
detailed questions about our system, and in that case I may even
have stock responses ready, and these could be multiple screens
long, and I just paste them in. Its a great system, but its still much
less formal.... One of the things about e-mail is that you can attach
files. These can be pictures, business documents, or even send a
'setup database' [a part of a computer program]... You just type
something and fire it off, and it doesn't have as much weight to the
words that are in it... "
Ann liked to conduct business using e-mail because it is less
formal, but at the same time, this obviously made her a bit
uncomfortable. She seemed worried about how easy it was to write
and send e-mail that did not mean very much. She even described
her own very efficient, but also very mechanical, method by which
she responded to clients questions. The clients were probably
happy, but they were not receiving personal responses.
Ann's personal mail experience was a bit different, although it
shared some important characteristics with her business e-mail:
"For personal mail, I send long, detailed letters.... It tends to be
very descriptive. I use personal e-mail to talk with my college
friends, to talk with my father, to talk with people internationally,
you know, where its very expensive to call or takes a long time to
send a letter. Its very immediate. You know, if you send someone a
hard copy letter and they don't write back for months, that's rude. If
you write someone an e-mail message and they don't write back for
days, you know, they're rude, even if its just a short letter saying 'hi,
thanks for your mail. I'll write more later.' I expect that and I'm a
pretty demanding corespondent even when you're sending hard-
copy letters, but if I stopped working here, I'd go and get an
account, because I like sending people e-mail. I really prefer that to
hard-copy letters.
"And I save all my hard-copy letters, and they're somewhat
organized by person and year, but with e-mail, I have an old-mail
file and I keep all my old in there. I keep about ten megs, and I even
clean out a lot of the professional mail I get, and its mostly personal
mail, but even the conversations that we have in the office, -- Like
Eric Carmichael once re-told the epic Gilgamesh. That was very
funny, over e-mail. It was less formal,... It was almost sarcastic.  It
was a lot more fun."

Ann obviously enjoyed using e-mail, and her reasons were very
simple. She liked the responsiveness, the immediacy, and the ability
to easily save her correspondence. Not everyone she knows,
however, had adjusted to this new technology quite so well:
"That process [of sending e-mail] still baffles my mother. My
father got a copy of Lotus Notes, and we use it to mail back and
forth to each other, and she still can't figure out how to program the
VCR. She will write me a message by e-mail only if my father sets if
up for her, and says, OK, type now, and then presses the send
button for her. Its pretty sad actually."

Neil had similar uses for his e-mail. He used it both for business
and for personal correspondence. He expected to be using it even
more in the future when he went to graduate school. He also had
certain rules in mind when he used e-mail. He felt that one should
always use the 'subject' line provided by most e-mail templates,
among other principles of good correspondence:
 "A clearly defined subject is a must. I despise no-subject
messages. That piece of netiquette I definitely subscribe to. Very
few of my e-mail messages take up more than a page. I like to
quote people back to themselves because they usually sound stupid.
I sign my name at the bottom like a letter, even though my name is
already on the top. I just put my first name, all lower case.
"Personal mail, on the other hand, is very long, I'd say like five-
screens, usually, at least. When I write, I write like a letter, and I'm
kind of a prolific writer. I don't write often, but when I write, I
write long. [before e-mail] I'd write them long letters, but with e-
mail, I'm more likely to write a short letter. I'm more likely to write
if I just heard a joke, or something that's funny. I'm more likely to
just get a little bitch in about my day. Before I wouldn't waste the
time or the postage. Its so much easier to do."
Eric Carmichael, a 22-year old systems analyst who provided
user -support for Wolf Communications clients, sent a very
different sort of e-mail:
"I tend to be formal, but that's just me, I think. I try to keep it
brief [but] ... I find the short versions annoying because I've usually
forgotten the previous correspondence, and so when I'm sending
mail off-site for business reasons, unless its very recent
correspondence, I include a couple of lines of the previous
correspondence so that we all know what we're talking about. For
internal mail within the office, yeah, I'll sometimes fire back a 'no' or
a 'yes,' or that sort of thing.
"Most of the people I correspond with outside the office are
people I've never met, and you go to more lengths to communicate
properly with them because when you are communicating with
people you know, they know you and they'll excuse more things I
think. I guess the key is not meeting, but working with someone for
a long time, and getting to the point that they know you."
Eric tended to use e-mail only for a few personal purposes. He
reluctantly noted that things would only change slightly if he didn't
have e-mail:
"I would have to write actual letters, which I was never very
good at, and since I got an e-mail account that's all I do anymore...
I'll plan my weekend through e-mail, and I'd have to go back to the
phone and leave messages on answering machines and go through
all that kind of stuff. I don't think it would affect me too much, but
then, since I've gotten e-mail, I've come to rely on it. I could live
without it. So, not having e-mail wouldn't' hurt me. If all the
telecommunications software in the world was down, I'm sure there
are businesses that I use that would be effected, but as far as the
telecommunications software that I use directly, it wouldn't effect
me."
Eric hit upon an important subtly here; even if one is isolated
from electronic communications, willfully or not, the rest of society
will continue to use them and function by them, whether this was
the Wolf Communications business transaction, or the re-ordering
of blue knee-socks at Wal-Mart, which is also done through
electronic communications. As electronic communications
proliferate, it is more likely that the individual who has used them
once will find it increasingly harder to leave them behind as a means
of communication.
Marty, being a student, used his e-mail almost exclusively for
personal correspondence:
"It's 99.5% social.... I've used it once for an education paper. I
communicate with people in Israel, people around the Bay in
Michigan, Michigan State, ... and all over campus. I communicate
with my relatives, lots of cousins. The majority of my writings are
conversational, longer; usually I go well over ten lines. But its not
formal. Spelling goes, capitalization goes..."
While society is slowly moving towards an integration with
electronic communications, the Wolf Communications office had
already come very close to a completed process. Ann described
what would happen to the office if their network failed:
"We're constantly sending e-mail. We become dysfunctional,
even though we're just one or two offices down the hall. I've only
been using Lotus Notes for about a year, and I've been spoiled. Its
much easier to send an agenda of ten items, and say 'these are the
things I need you to deal with' than to pick up the phone and say
'here's my list of questions,' or march over there with my list of
questions, and get comments after each one, and have it [e-]mailed
back to me. It would be like not having a telephone to see if a store
is open or to see if your parents are OK, or like not having a car to
go to the grocery store. You're doing business transactions over the
computer."
These descriptions of e-mail exhibit certain common
characteristics. While generalizations to other users are
unwarranted, there are obviously certain trends present. All of these
users like the flexibility of e-mail, the immediacy of response, the
non-temporal type of communication that allows one to send and
receive extended messages without the conscious effort of the other
party. The problem is, of course, that less of one's own conscious
effort is required to send a message. Automatic replies, pre-
prepared replies, and presumably more sophisticated
mechanizations in the future, will further contribute to the
ambivalence related to e-mail. It is both a more efficient, but also a
less personal form of communication in the way that it is currently
used by this cluster. This is probably a very limited effect that has
been exaggerated in these interviews, and reflects self-criticism by
individuals with very high standards of correspondence. Still, this
pattern may hold true to greater and lesser extent for other clusters.

The Electronic Interaction
Throughout the interviews, Ann and other users of e-mail
seemed to share certain conceptions about what e-mail and other
forms of electronic communications are doing to the overall social
environment in which they work and communicate. Ann felt that
certain negative attitudes and patterns were developing in the use of
e-mail:
"People become anti-social. You don't have to worry about
social niceties. You don't have to say please and thank-you. You
don't have to say, 'how are you doing today?' You can just say,
'hey, so-and-so, I was reading this, can you give me any
information?' Whereas if you were calling on the phone, you'd have
to make some small talk. The advantage to that is that its much
more efficient"
"The truth of it is that if you can type on your computer, you
don't have to have social skills, you don't have to have table
manners, you don't have to be able to make polite conversation at a
cocktail party, you don't have to dress well, you don't have to iron
your shirt, you don't even have to wear clean clothes. That really
changes business presentations and the way that meetings are run...
if you're sending them typed copy, it has to be formatted correctly
or if you're meeting them, you can't be really cold, or greasy, or
your hand isn't incredibly sweaty. All of these things, people judge
you on. Right or wrong, they still judge you on them. With e-mail,
you have no idea what the person looks like, you have no idea what
they're wearing. They could be sitting in their chair nude for all you
know."
Ann also believed, however, that new methods are developing
to adapt human communication to the electronic world:
"There's the attitude that you don't have to be polite, but [other
users] have created symbols that stand for emotions. You know,
you could send someone a message saying 'You did a great job
today.' If you said that to someone on the phone, just by voice
inflections, you could either be very sincere or very sarcastic. So, if
you get a note from your boss saying, 'You did a great job today,'
period, you think, 'Well, what does that mean?' Does that mean I
did great, or does that mean that I really blew it?"
Neil's experience tended to agree with Ann's. He stated strongly
that just because one can communicate does not mean that one will,
and that electronic communications can not solve every
communication problem. He described one example where this was
explicitly the case:
"I had this guy call me from Pennsylvania I think, and he started
telling me that he had this Internet provider, and that he was having
a hard time getting through, and he was on his hundredth call,... he
finally decided to go with the Worldcom solution, and finally
decided to pay the extra money that it was going to cost -- he told
me this whole long story, went on for twenty minutes, and asked
me what sort of service we provide, and so I said why don't you
give me your company name, and I said you guys are already on
this [Wolf Communications]  system.
"You know he's just spent twenty minutes bitching about how
he didn't have a good connection and someone else had already
gone with us, so these people have this great communications
solution that other people in the company are interested in, and the
Notes administrator on the other end -- there's no human
connection there. If you've got e-mail connection, there's an
amazing amount of connection, but they never seem to get the guy
in office number one talking to the guy in office number two. I said
'you ought to talk to so-and-so. He got you guys connected,' and he
goes, 'Oh yeah, that guy works for me.'
"I don't know how much that has to do with Internet, but the
solutions are really close and at hand and people still just aren't
talking to one another."
Obviously, according to Neil, networked communications can
not solve every problem, and there must be the human will and
internal organization present before any meaningful communication
is going to occur, no matter what resources are available.

Images of Other Users
Neil described his images of other Internet users very literally.
He was concerned with their age, social interactions, and especially
with the corporate and academic cultures that he saw surrounding
and mediating their uses:
"[They're] young, ever younger I think. I get the feeling that the
real gurus in this business that we work in are 27, 28, and I wonder
what that does for them, like they're at the top of their game right
now, and they're not even half way through their lives, and they
may be on the backside of life... I don't think people really get out
much, because they spend a lot of time working, and they seem to
take breaks from work by doing something else on the computer,
so they end up being at work for a long time, ... You're conversing
with people, talking with people, they just don't have traditional
social lives. Their work lives and their social lives mix.... business
and personal pleasure mix a lot easier."
"Maybe its because they don't have to deal with people face to
face a lot. I think that in e-mail people are sometimes a lot more
articulate than they are in real life. If you're always dealing with a
side of people that is always articulate and intelligent, then you
don't have to get pissed at them as much, don't have to mind
working with them as much. That's another thing. Its more
independent. With e-mail you act on things when you want to. You
don't always have to collaborate. ... The hip thing to do now, the
efficient thing to do, is to e-mail back and forth until you get the
solution... "
Obviously, Neil saw a new style of high-technology culture
developing. He saw it as suited to some people, but also as having
certain inherent problems. He liked the idea of efficient
communications for business, but also saw them as limiting some
forms of behavior. He also seemed to see a sort of compulsion in
those who worked on the outer edge of cyberspace, among the
people who were building cyberspace with their minds and by the
sheer force of their wills. According to Neil, these are computer-
oriented workaholics that represent a very narrow sub-culture.
Eric, on the other hand, saw a much different work environment
being created. He did not see radical change, but instead saw
computer telecommunications only changing a few work
environments:
"I don't really think they'll use it for anything much different. I'd
go out on a limb and say that computers really haven't changed
much of the way that people work. I said that I mostly used
computers for word processing and that's what most people use
computers for. They move information faster than other means.
Spreadsheets are cool, its nice to have databases, but with that sort
of thing, you're really just changing the method to point and click
rather than walking to a file cabinet to look something up...
"[The information is] more detailed, but that's a difference of
degree, not content. Lotus is trying to push the idea that Lotus
Notes really changes the way that people work. They cite studies of
people who use it, in terms of exchange of investment, and they
note that people who re-structure their business practices around it
get the most benefit. It has some of that effect."
At the same time that he limited the likelihood of radical change
from computer telecommunications, he admitted that some aspects
of the work environment did change, but not necessarily in the ways
that were expected or desired by the managers that decided to put
in the network:
"People have done studies indicating that when people interact
face-to-face, men tend to dominate the conversation, but if its stuff
done by e-mail, women tend to play a much fuller part. Studies
claim that groupware tends to flatten organization hierarchies, so
that people who are low down are more likely to speak up about
something."
Eric did not feel inclined to elaborate on these observations
from his own experience, but they were certainly consistent with
other comments made by the subjects. That readily available e-mail
tends to encourage greater amounts of interaction between parties
that desiring interaction seems undeniable, as has been commented
several times. Still, this does not mean that things are always so
simple.
Neil indicated that he sees a more complicated change in the
social structure due to computer telecommunications.
"Things have become less hierarchical, or at least the hierarchies
have been turned upside-down. In this realm, where this is how
business is done, the guy who sits there in front of the terminal all
day, he's kind of the geek of the office, or whatever, but he knows
more about this than anyone else, and he has a sort of power and
ability to teach people, and that puts him in an entirely different
situation. I think that gives him the ability to assert authority. It
becomes a bit more obvious that certain exclusions are taking place.
If someone makes a suggestion and no one responds to it,
everybody else goes, 'hey, how come no one is responding to it?'
and then the administration looks a bit like a jerk. I'm not saying
there isn't still going to be closed, secret societies at the top of
every organization that are going to make decisions without
informing people, I just think that their influence is going to be
decreasing and they're going to have to be even more careful than
they are now about excluding people from the decision-making
process."
Neil saw network communications as a force to democratize
organizations. Knowledge about how networks function in the
hands of those at the bottom of hierarchies has the potential to
transform the nature of the organizational discourse. While he did
not have great hopes for change, he does see it as possible. These
issues are of crucial importance and will be re-addressed in the later
observations.

Netiquette
Even as social use of cyberspace increases, new social norms
are emerging to help avoid conflicts and to allow everyone to use
the limited resources of the Internet in a  manner that fits with
widely accepted convention.
Ann described one particularly interesting "virtual incident." In
this case, some new netters had inadvertently violated an unspoken
rule of the Usenet newsgroups. "Old-timers" had taken the
opportunity to deride them for the misdeed:
"There's this newsgroup called 'Best of the Internet' that you
can post stuff to. There didn't used to be much traffic there but with
this influx of people from America On-Line, who don't really
understand the rules behind the Internet. [They didn’t know that]
this is a newsgroup reserved for the best of the Internet, and they
just started posting responses, and now there are these camps of
users. There are the hard-core Internet users and then these
flakeheads [America On-Line users], and there's a real rivalry going
on, because the hard-core Internet users were looking down on
these America On-Line people as stupid because they don't know
how to use the Internet, and the America On-Line people were
looking down on the hard-core users, basically calling them
computerheads. If you read the 'Best of the Internet,' some of the
things get very confrontational, very abusive. They're not at all
subtle about calling members of each group stupid. Its the
archetypal stereotypes, the jocks versus the egg-heads."
In addition, some rules are simply traditional, or serve to
distinguish the initiated from the novice. Eric had an early
experience that began his education as to the signs one looks for in
experienced users:
"One of my early mistakes: ... One of the common editors is
called vi, ... and it's incredibly primitive and it has no word-
wrapping capabilities, so that you just sit down and type, and it
keeps going. So what you get is a continuous column of text. ... So
Cory wrote back, 'I don't mind so much, but don't do that in a post
that goes out to the world because people will laugh and send you
mail."
According to Neil, the rules of the Internet are fairly simple and
in the past there were usually few people who violated them.
However, he saw this pattern changing:
"Even though there's no one in charge, there are rules, ... Most
of the time, people get unleashed in small groups. You know, a new
group of college students comes in each year, and its no big deal,
and its recognizable because that college address has been around
for awhile, but this whole 'aol.com' thing lets everyone know that
these people are new, and they make dumb mistakes, and these old-
timers, who've been around on the Internet when nobody knew
about it,... these old UNIX gurus who know all the commands, they
flame these people. Its the group that's new just before that's most
likely to get pissed at everybody, .... You know, its like oldest child
syndrome. As soon as you get that next guy under you, the oldest
child is pretty calm about things, but its the middle kid who gets
upset and picks on the little guy all the time."
Neil saw a interesting pattern in these rivalries, and made a
light-hearted model of what was happening. This interaction pattern
might also be interpreted as being similar to the treatment of
immigrant groups from 19th and early 20th century American
history. The latest arrived immigrant group was most viciously
picked upon by the nearest previous immigrant group that was still
trying to establish its own socioeconomic position. This leads us to
the second crucial hypothesis: the immigrant model. This model will
be examined more closely in the next section.

New Rules and Frontier Justice
The sanctions for violating these rules are various. The most
prevalent one, however, is loss of prestige, and thus business and
access:
"You have to be sensitive to the amount of information that you
send out. Just like how you get junk-mail catalogs that you just
throw away. You have to be careful about doing that consistently
because you can really shoot down your reputation.... I think
everyone tries to keep the amount of information they send out to a
minimum," said Ann.
One's reputation on this new frontier tends to be one's most
valued possession, when little else is owned but one's newsfeed and
one's wit, so threats to it can be very powerful. At the same time,
there is little formal control of the Internet. System administrators
at private and public institutions usually control nothing more than
their local machine. They can lock a user out of his or her account,
but they cannot tell other administrators, or users of other sites
what to do. Usually, due to the sheer mass of the information sifting
through their system every moment of every hour, they cannot even
prevent the offender from using another machine.
The most severe form of chastisement that can be imposed by
one group of users on a user at another site is to deluge his mailbox
with e-mail in hopes that the system's administrator will have to
shut down the offender's mail account. Since most systems have a
common memory area for all incoming e-mail, an individual
offender's account is often sacrificed by the system administrator
for the common good of keeping the site's mail system functioning,
and all mail for the offender is refused. Sometimes, the offender
changes service providers and user-ids to regain access to the net.

Women on the Internet
I discovered that Ann had a very different experience in the
electronic world than her male co-workers. She reported that
cyberspace, an almost exclusively male domain until very recently,
can be a strange place for a woman:
"I get pick-up lines.[from clients]... I used to laugh them off.
Kind of like 'how ya doin' babe' sorts of things, or 'when are you
gonna come up and visit me,' all the way down to 'what are you
wearing today?' These are coming from guys, and the women I
correspond with tend to be more polite and friendly, and they don't
try to pick me up. I've been asked out on dates , people I've never
met, people that I may have spoken to on the phone once, people
that I've just exchanged e-mail with.
"As far as they know, I could be sixty years old, fat, and have
forty grandchildren, but I think they're assuming that I'm young and
I'm female, obviously. They know that I'm decently computer
literate, so, if nothing else, at least they can sit and talk UNIX with
me. I don't know.
"...It happens two or three times a week. At first, I thought this
was really funny, sort of colorful, whatever, and then I thought, this
is really weird. Its not so much that it makes me uncomfortable, but
in my job I travel some, and so I go to these places, and I end up
meeting these people, and you can just put yourself in a precarious
position when you work with these people over e-mail, because you
don't want to set up any expectations for when you arrive... [I have
to be] more reserved, not be as frivolous. [They aren't especially
lonely, but] I think any time you sit and stare at a computer screen
all day long, you're desperate to talk to someone."
Ann noted that she had never heard of the men in the office
being treated in this way over e-mail. She said that even her routine
calls and routine experiences as a worker in the information
industry are different from those of her male co-workers:
"I'm still not even moderately computer literate, as much as the
guys around here are. I can work with Lotus Notes, I can do a tiny
bit of programming, but I'm still pretty much at ground zero. Yet,
because I've been exposed to all this, learning some about how to
set up the system, and how to get onto our network, these people
will call and ask for one of the Erics or Neil for technical support,
and I'll say 'they're not here right now, but can I help you?' and
they'll state their question, and I'll explain how to do it to them, and
they are very surprised that someone who's female can give them
those answers..."
"[The employer] has before apologized to me, and said, I don't
want you to feel discriminated against, I am trying to hire other
women, I just can't find ones that are of the high-caliber I want."
"I don't feel discriminated against. Sometimes I feel jealous,
because these [technical co-workers] get to wear jeans and scamper
around on their knees, and I'm stuck in a business suit, but, again,
I'm more on the public relations side, so maybe if I were taking
computers apart, I'd dress differently."
Ann was not bitter about any of this. She has taken on a rugged
attitude of fierce competition, and seems to have adapted to her
environment. In addition to discussions about the electronic world,
she spent some time talking about women in the corporate world
who use computer telecommunications. She has found most of
them, especially those who work in the technical fields, extremely
"unpolished," but nice to one another and to her. Additionally, she
doesn't feel that she has had to meet a higher standard than other
workers at Wolf, but knows women who have elsewhere. Finally,
she explained that she felt women were often at a disadvantage in
the computer telecommunications business since they often feel that
they must put family and home first, and thus cannot compete as
completely with men, especially in this swift-moving field where
rapid change can occur in a very few months.

Fears for the Future of the Cybersphere
While the potential for the use of computer telecommunications
are great in terms of efficiency, responsiveness, and possibly even
equalization of power in some cases, they are also riddled with
doubts and dangers. The most basic spring from the non-physical
characteristic of the communication involved. According to
Graham, the ability to communicate without the ability to validate
another's identity was the most dangerous part of computer
telecommunications:
 "There's something about non-face-to-face communication - I
think people are less inhibited. I think there's so much you don't
have to worry about. It doesn't matter how old you are. It doesn't
matter what you look like, if you know how to use the computer
you can represent yourself however you want. I think there is a
danger to that -- the ability to misrepresent yourself. Its more
difficult to misrepresent yourself in person,...
"Also I think the Internet is probably going to eventually give
access to certain information that I don't think you should have
access to... I'm not really familiar with the security aspect of the
Internet, but I know that its technology generally tends to move at
a more rapid rate than laws governing that technology..."
Implementation of technology with sufficient reflection is a
fundamental and age-old problem, but is the Internet any different
from previous technologies? Might not its ability to shape our
relationships, and thus our very identities, by taking over
communication functions make it a more troubling technology than
many previous ones? Along these lines, Eric described what he saw
as the most common fear among persons critiquing the use of the
Internet:
"Middle-aged types are worried that we're losing the skills that
really count, spending all of our time interacting with computers
and not with people really, retreating form the world and not
dealing with our problems. Authoritarians are worried about the
anarchy of the Usenet and the fact that there is, in its current form,
no way to regulate it, to punish people for offensive postings... Its
so easy to post under a false username... "
"[They worry about] Escapism, If you can forge mail, then you
can also pass yourself off as someone else, and create an alter-ego
for yourself and live out your fantasies of world domination. But I
guess that's what most people are doing in video games anyway."
While Eric saw the dangers perceived by others, just as he feels
that the Internet and computer telecommunications will only
marginally change the way that people work and communicate, so
too does he feel that society will find ways to deal with these
perceived electronic threats:
"[Y]es, there are dangers, it could take a bad turn. But I think
that society tends to adjust pretty well to this sort of thing, and
incorporates these latest changes pretty well. ... Right now I don't
think it really has done much adjusting since there are people that
have lived their entire lives without ever seeing the Internet, and
they don't have to confront the Internet until the Internet its
something that everyone uses. Right now, we're just developing it
conceptually. I don't think it really demands society's attention right
now."
Still, when the entire society, or even a large sub-section, does
have to confront the cybersphere, with our limited understanding of
this new frontier, there must be fundamental doubts as to whether it
will be able to grapple with these changes as easily and successfully
as Eric and others hope.

The Future of the Internet
Neil had a vision of the Internet that, while highly romantic,
captured some of what makes the Internet different from other
services that we buy:
"I think when the Internet starts getting a business mentality,
people will start having demands on it. It's like when we start seeing
natural resources, like forests, as property that can be bought and
sold. Then we've lost...
"It may have economic value, that's fine, but what it also has is
some kind of aesthetic value. Its a national treasure in a way. The
Internet is some kind of world treasure maybe, that needs to have
some kind of psychic protection around it that isn't related to the
costs of running it or anything like that. And I think the people who
are gong to know that are the longest users, who've seen the human
interaction benefits, the information exchange benefits, and not the
people who are coming on now who are going to have to pay for
the service. They're going to start putting demands on the system."
According to Neil, when the Internet is regulated, bought, sold,
timed, maximized, optimized, there's something more than a simple
service being bartered. According to his vision, the communication
channels that have developed and will develop over the free-flowing
Internet are unique and powerful. They are abstractions that literally
transcend space and time in their ability to bring people together.
Obviously, Neil is not alone in this understanding. The conception
of shareware and freeware distribution systems originated on the
Internet and still has a very strong following there. At the same
time, these aspects are precipitously difficult to protect. Neil's
"psychic protection" is a goal that even he sees as almost out of
reach:
"I don't know that  we've, as humans, found a way to do that. I
don't that we've found  a way to avoid the commodification of
common property. I don't think that we've ever done it. The only
way that we've ever been able to deal with a common property has
been to assign it a kind of value and say that everybody has got to
pay their share of it, and everybody needs to receive their share of
the benefits, and by parceling it up like that you've lost what is good
about the whole as a collective. That's kind of a communist notion I
guess, but sometimes I think its appropriate. I don't know how to
do it."

Conclusions
Returning to the paradigms set up by Bellah, we should take
special note of how the subjects view themselves within the
networked interaction and how they conceptualize their own
individuality. For them, computer networking is not something that
is done alone. While one may be alone when one acts, it is done
with the purpose of communicating with others. Moreover, this
need for connections goes beyond mere philosophizing - these
people genuinely feel that they need, or at least strongly desire, this
form of connection to others. While this feeling is probably over-
emphasized because this cluster uses network communications for a
business, it is an absolute reality that in the new information society,
one succeeds not by what one has or by what one can produce by
oneself, but by what information one can organize and distribute to
others. Inherently, it is not an "I" process; it is a "We" process.
The perception of dichotomies between types of users emerges
as another principle structure. It seems to most succinctly
characterize the current social environment experienced by this
cluster. They spoke consistently about old versus new users,
academic/governmental/hobbyist/non-profit users versus
business/commercial users, technically-oriented users versus no-
technical users, and male versus female users. All of these
dichotomies indicate that the electronic environment of cyberspace
is a very concrete social reality for these users.
A central problem, however, is that there seems to be little
awareness of who is not currently able to use this new environment.
It is difficult to tell from these interviews whether these users know
what a limited world they are tapping into and deriving a portion of
their awareness. As Marty pointed out very briefly after his
interview, there is little Black culture on the Internet. While it is
disturbing that some groups are obviously being left behind and
have little part in the development of the computer networking
world, most troubling is the fact that there is even less awareness
that this is happening here than in other environments. The
electronic world, for better or worse, presents users with the
opportunity to completely isolate themselves from the rest of the
society in ways that no other medium of potentially dominant
"public" social space and mass communications have.
These are just two of numerous new theoretical structures that
arise from a brief look at this new social frontier. Others include an
understanding of what sorts of users exist within this cluster's field
of experience, the general character of norms within the cyberspace
world, and issues of how users effectively navigate social space to
avoid conflict and optimize utility. Every one of these questions is
being addressed by these individuals in their own way, and probably
by every individual who uses the currently scarce medium of
cyberspace. These questions must be addressed by sociologists.
They must be dragged before the public eye, sometimes like dirty
laundry, sometimes to public delight, and confronted. The time has
come to study humankind's steady migration into cyberspace as one
of the most important transitions we will make into the 21st
century.
The rest of this research will attempt to look at these crucial
questions at greater depth through participant-observation. Of
special interest will be the three hypothesis that have been raised by
this research, the frontier, immigrant and subculture models of
social interaction. I will treat these at greater length in the third
section of the paper.

Critical Reflections On the Interviewing Process
There were numerous method-related problems in this
interviewing project. First and foremost, it was not random, and
thus cannot be representative of any general trends in cyberspace
usage. Second, there was no control over who said what. Not every
voice is equally articulate, and in the interviewing method of
research, there is no way to adequately represent those who express
themselves better in other ways. Furthermore, there is never enough
time or space to include everything, so only the most surprising or
"on-topic" voices get included, even though these are the
researcher's arbitrary considerations. This is unavoidable, but
should be kept in mind by the reader.
The most nettlesome problem with this particular study, of
course, is the fact that I know all of these people personally.
Because of this fact, I was not in a position to confront them with
very difficult social questions from the position of a distant and
anonymous academic interviewer. Furthermore, I am sure that my
presence changed the nature of their answers in ways that I cannot
estimate. They have certain images of my personal knowledge and
this causes some things to go un-said, while other things are over-
emphasized. Also, they know the basics of my personal sensibilities,
and probably hedged their words if they feared offending me.
Moreover, even while I tried to make this paper speak with
many voices, to tell a variety of stories, it must remain, for good or
ill, my voice telling other's stories. Whether this occurs because I
chose the questions and recorded the answers, or because I chose
the stories and wrote the paper, there is still a limiting two-
dimensionality to the process. Again, this cannot be avoided, but
should be noted.
Returning finally to the guidance provided by Bellah, even while
there are serious problems with the interviewing methodology as a
system of social research, it still has some advantages that are
unique:
"The active interview is a primary method for social science as
public philosophy, whereas the survey questionnaire, while
generating useful data (which we frequently used in this book),
often remains secondary. Poll data, generated by fixed questions
that do not begin any conversations, give us findings that appear as
a kind of natural fact, even when successive questionnaires reveal
trends over time. This is true even when there are open-ended
questions, for there is still no dialogue between interviewer and
interviewee. Poll data sum up the private opinions of thousands of
respondents. Active interviews create the possibility of public
conversation and argument. When data from such interviews are
well presented, they stimulate the reader to enter the conversation,
to argue with what is being said. Curiously, such interviews
stimulate something that could be called public opinion, opinion
tested in the arena of open discussion. 'Public opinion polling' does
not and might better be called 'private opinion polling." (p. 305)
Even while interview data should not stand alone in social
science's investigation of any new frontier, neither should it be
neglected. Dialogue is the process by which human understanding
emerges from human need and human emotion. Dialogue about our
current imaginative outlook about the Internet will hopefully lead
us to a more studied reflection on its use and future.




APPENDICES To Section I

APPENDIX A1
Experimental Interview Schedule
1) Name
2) How long have you used computer, modems and networks?
What was the first time?
3) How do you use networks? Which ones do you use?
4) Who introduced you to networking? What was you first
experience like?
5) Do you use it for studies, work or hobbies?
6) What type of e-mail do you write; formal letter, long
conversational pieces or short conversational pieces?
7) Do you use it for other things? Gopher programs? What other
programs do you use?
8) What sort of social interaction do you usually engage in over
computer networks?
9) Do you see yourself using it more in the future? If so, why?
10) What of the proliferation of computer networks? What about
business using them?
11) Do you have friends that you communicate with over the
networks?
12) What do you want from your network usage?
13) What do you get out of using electronic communications?
14) Did you have any trepidation when you first started?
15) What do you think about politicians using networks?
16) Age, Years of Study, Majors, Interests, Hobbies

APPENDIX A2
Final Interview Schedule
1) TCP/IP bugs have invaded the U.S. and eaten up all the
computer telecommunications software. When do you first
notice and why?
2) Name, Age, Occupation
3) How many years have you used a computer?
4) What have you used a computer for in that time?
5) What was it like the first time you used a computer?
6) Tell me about your first computer telecommunications
experience.
7) Describe for me a typical e-mail. Is there a difference between
your personal and business e-mail?
8) Describe for me your favorite Usenet Newsgroup.
10) Draw for me a verbal picture of the typical Internet user from
you own experience.
11) Draw a verbal picture of how you  visualize the Internet and
computer telecommunications as a whole for a person who has
never seen a computer.
12) Tell me about your most funny experience involving the
Internet.
13) Tell me about the rules of the Internet.
14) Do you see any dangers in the increased use of computer
telecommunications? Particularly social dangers?
15) If someone has to, who should regulate use of the Internet, and
how?
16) What do you see for the future of computer
telecommunications?

APPENDIX B
Humor and Emergent Norms: Informally Establishing
Netiquette
From: mmccall@emoryu1.cc.emory.edu (Malinda McCall)
Subject: The "Your post sucked" form, redux.

I took exception to your (____________) recent post to
(__________).
                                      (name)

(name)

It was (check all that apply):

___ lame.
___ stupid.
___ much longer than any worthwhile thought of which you
may be capable.

Your attention is drawn to the fact that:

___ what you posted/said has been done before.
    (Mark only if above checked)
    ___ Not only that, it was also done better the last time.
___ your post was a pathetic imitation of
______________________.
                                                 (other person)
___ your post contained commercial advertising.
___ your post contained numerous spelling errors.
___ your post contained multiple grammatical errors.
___ YOUR POST CONTAINED EXCESSIVE
CAPITALIZATION AND/OR PUNCTUATION!!!!!
___ your post was an obvious forgery.
    (Mark only if above checked)
    ___ It was done clumsily.
___ you have a lame login name.
___ your machine has a stupid name.
___ you quoted an article/letter in followup and added no new
text.
___ you quoted an article/letter in followup and only added ___
lines
    of text.
___ you quoted an article in followup and only added the line
"Me, too!!!"
___ you flamed someone who has been around far longer than
you.
___ you flamed someone who is far more intelligent and witty
than you.
___ your lines are 80 columns wide or wider.
___ your .sig is longer than four lines.
    (Mark only if above checked)
    ___ And your mailer truncated it.
___ your .sig is ridiculous because (check all that apply):
    ___ you listed ___ snail mail address(es).
        (Mark only if above checked)
        ___ you listed a nine-digit ZIP code.
    ___ you listed ___ phone numbers for people to use in prank
calls.
    ___ you included a stupid disclaimer.
        (Mark only if above also)
         ___ your pathetic attempt at being witty in the disclaimer
failed.
         (Mark only if above also)
             ___ Miserably.
    ___ you included:
        (Mark all that apply)
         ___ a stupid self-quote.
         ___ a stupid quote from a net.nobody.
         ___ a Rush Limbaugh quote.
         ___ a Dan Quayle joke.
         ___ a reference to Beavis & Butthead.
         ___ lame ASCII graphic(s) (Choose all that apply):
             ___ USS Enterprise
             ___ Australia
             ___ The Amiga logo
             ___ Company logo
                 (Mark only if above also)
                 ___ and you stated that you don't speak for your
employer.
             ___ Bicycle
             ___ Bart Simpson

Furthermore:

___ You have greatly misunderstood the purpose of
(____________).
            (name)
___ You have greatly misunderstood the purpose of the net.
___ You are a loser.
___ You must have spent your entire life in a Skinner box to be
this
    clueless.
___ This has been pointed out to you before.
___ It is recommended that you:
    (Mark all that apply)
    ___ stick to FidoNet and come back when you've grown up.
    ___ find a volcano and throw yourself in.
    ___ get a gun and shoot yourself.
    ___ stop reading this group and get a life.
    ___ stop sending email and get a life.

Additional comments:





SECTION II:
A Literature Review of Current Research Frontiers in
Computer-Mediated Communications

Before moving into the sociological observations that make up
the heart of this paper, I have included a brief history of the
Internet, an outline of relevant technologies that make networks
available for social interaction, and a literature review of current
research frontiers relevant to understanding the computer-mediated
communications sociologically. These include communications
studies, mass media studies, and community studies.

A Brief History of Cyberspace
If the Internet is a frontier, it is a frontier with a short and
unfinished history. The primary U.S. "backbone," as the main lines
of the network are called, began as a U.S. military network during
the late 1960s. Originally under the Defense Department's
Advanced Research Projects Agency, these backbones connected
computers in military research projects throughout the country to
provide a network by which researchers could quickly transfer large
amounts of data and electronic messages.
Certain important decisions were made about the structure of
this network that continue to influence the use of the Internet
today. The most important of these was the de-centralization of
control. The network was designed to allow every computer on the
network to be equally able to initiate communication with any
other. This decision was made to ensure that the network would
continue to function even if large portions were destroyed in a
Soviet thermonuclear attack. The theory was that by making each
element independent, no one failure could cripple the entire
network. Multiple redundancies and reconfigurable routing over a
"dumb" network were designed to enable this theory.  The
ARPANet and the nets that have followed it are described as
"dumb" because they take little active part in processing
information or ensuring that information is delivered. Instead, the
software that operates on every individual computer using the
network is responsible for controlling its own transfer and reception
of information with little mediation. The result is a flexible, site-
controlled network that allows for control and upgrades at the user
site, rather than at a centralized site.
As universities and university departments, eventually including
those outside the computer science field, turned to networking over
campus mainframes to provide central computational facilities on a
time-sharing basis, decentralized access to university networks
began to emerge. At the same time, it was only one more step to
connect each of these campus systems to the ARPANet, and
thereby connect the mainframes of many major universities to one
another. Gradually, this occurred throughout the late 70s and
1980s. By 1987, the ARPANet system was under such heavy use
that it suffered the equivalent of an electronic heart attack. There
was too much data on the lines for any of it to continue moving.
These lines were turned off and in their place the National Science
Foundation Net was incarnated, a series of land lines crisscrossing
the country connecting the machines that had been on ARPANet at
28 times the speed. This was to be funded until 1993, but by 1990
these "T-1" lines were already becoming inadequate for the traffic,
and "T-3" lines, another 28 times faster, are now being installed.
The entire structure, the NSF Net and all the machines connected to
it, has been dubbed the Internet, or the Net.
One of the important developments that came out of the early
ARPANet experiment, and the NSFNet that followed it, was the
assumption that every computer would need to engage in "peer-to-
peer" connections with every other computer since the network was
dumb. As a result, the Internet Protocol and Internet Transfer
Packet family of software systems was developed. These systems
have been re-designed for use on almost any computer, and allow
users to take a piece of information and put it into a "packet" which
is compatible with Internet routing and addressing. Because IP
software is so readily available, almost any computer can become
an independently operating site on the Internet. This set of
circumstances is one of the most important for the emerging social
environment of the Internet. Because every site is virtually
independent in his ability to manipulate and transmit information to
other sites, users generally have the freedom to use the Internet in
an enormously wide variety of ways from the personal computer on
their desks. (Krol, The Whole Internet, 1992)
Today, because of this availability of IP/TCP software and the
proliferation of desktop computers with the capabilities of
yesterday's mini-computers, the Internet's reach is too expansive to
calculate. Every network that connects to Internet often connects to
numerous sub-nets within university departments or corporate
servers. Current estimates place the number of accounts near 20
million, but this is a very rough guess. The Internet also connects
commercial networks like Compuserve and Prodigy, as well as
grass-roots bulletin board-based systems, like FidoNet, that allow
hobbyists with personal computers to use some Internet capabilities
from their homes over conventional phone lines.
The speed with which one can transmit information over the
Internet has grown with time. In the mid-1980s, this speed was
about 56,000 bits per second, about two full type written pages per
second. This speed was increased by 20 times with the T-1 upgrade
in 1987, so that approximately 40 typewritten pages can be
transmitted per second. Much higher speeds are expected, and are
probably already available in some areas. Conventional fiber-optic
lines used now by commercial telephone systems transmit data at a
rate of 1.7 gigabits per second per fiber. That means that 25,000
people can have a voice communication over a single fiber
simultaneously using conventional optical transmission methods.
Using a multi-spectral method (transmitting more than one wave-
length of light through these fibers), which will hopefully be
available soon, will increase this capacity by approximately 1000
times. Obviously the transmission rates are staggering. Full motion
video with corresponding audio and data transmission should be
easily attainable. (Lucky, 1991.)
There are several key points for the sociologist to take from this
history. The most important one is an understanding of why control
and administration of the Internet is so dispersed. The Internet was
initially created to link select educational and military institutions,
while these institutions retained control of their own systems. This
is essentially how it continues today and control tends to be
independent by user site. Although the NSF has certain policies
dictating that its portions of the network be used only for
academics and research, as the system has expanded to include
more private and independent networks, the entire network had
functionally suppressed this rule by the early 1990s.
A second key fact is that the capability of our computers to
transmit information are continually improving. The limits to what
will be possible over the Internet have not yet been conceived.
Transmission of our most "multi-sensory" medium yet, video, will
be attainable. That new, wider "sensory" media will be devised to
take advantage of the increasing carrying capacity of the Internet is
not inconceivable. There are still our tactile, olfactory, taste, and
motion senses to be stimulated. The Internet presents the very real
possibility of changing our meaning of "communication" just
through contemplation of its potential capacities. An extreme
example, taken from the Internet newsgroup alt.sex.d, demonstrates
this situation. The company AGC is developing a product called
"Reach Out and Touch Someone," an interactive sex device to be
released onto the market in early 1995.  Its interactions will include
video transmission and physical "connections" at either end that will
somehow allow partners to control each other's stimulation. It is
expected to cost less than $2000. Sexual interactions over the
Internet will soon be a reality. We can only imagine what comes
next.
While most user's experience is mediated by a local machine of
some kind, whether this is a university network connected to the
Internet, or a private provider, users are still able to engage in a
very wide variety of uses without immediate or direct interference.
For the sociologist, this fact is important. Basically, any user can
use the Internet for any activity, although he can count on some
extreme activities not being tolerated by his fellow users or system
administrator for very long. (Krol, The Whole Internet, 1992.)

An Electronic Bestiary: UNIX Beasts of Burden
To understand the current social environment of the Internet,
and to understand its potential, one must take some small grasp of
the tools available. Most of the basic tools emerge out of the
Berkeley or AT&T versions of the UNIX operating system, a
computer operating system that is specially designed to allow many
users to simultaneously use a single computer. Without software
systems like UNIX, there would be no social environment on the
Internet.
The typical user has an "account," accessed by a password on a
common service provider that gives him access to a terminal (or
telephone line for a personal computer modem.) Once the individual
is "logged in" at their terminal, they can type commands that
control a small portion of the computer resources of the service
provider and other machines on the Internet.
The most common commands allow one to "find" other users
(in that one can determine what machine they are using), to send
brief messages to other users, and to send more extended electronic
mail. Commands are available to copy, move or rename files of
information from one place to another. Commands are usually
available to allow users to read Usenet news, a public bulletin
system that is administered by many different machines throughout
the U.S. Commands are also usually available to allow one to
retrieve data files from remote sites, the File Transfer Protocol
commands.
A further, and very important contributor to the kingdom of
contributing technologies is the personal computer. A feisty
contender in a ring with mainframes and mini-computers, the
personal computer has done incredibly well. The reason for this is
simple. The personal computer is exactly that: personal. It allows
one to have free and unconstrained access to computing and user-
end communications resources while fulfilling a cultural need for
ownership that is probably distinctively American.
The final key to understanding the potential of the Internet is
the demise of the mainframe as a necessary element for networked
computing. The rise of the distributed networking and client/server
systems has had a tremendous effect on networking. Using many
small specialized units to perform the variety of tasks necessary to
maintain the network, which were formerly done by the mainframe,
has allowed smaller and smaller organizations to invest decreasing
amounts of money at start-up to create a workable network. While
there are ongoing debates about the nature of this distribution, and
whether mainframe-centric computing is really dead, the key fact is
simple; the debate itself is taking place over a distributed network.
Even those using a mainframe as their router also use their own
individual personal computers, with their own individual computing
power, to access the mainframe. The debate is mostly irrelevant.
The distribution has already occurred and the ability to use
computer telecommunications is now a question of one's resources,
not its availability.

Distributed Networks, Distributed Consciousness
Until fairly recently, in order to access the Internet, a fair
amount of technical knowledge was absolutely necessary. Just
getting into the programs that use the Internet to communicate
required an understanding of UNIX or other operating systems.
Today, that is changing at a rapidly accelerating pace. The reason
for this is fairly simple; our economy is dependent on the flow of
information:
"The percentage of knowledge workers in the American
workforce - those who apply knowledge to create, modify, and
distribute information (managers, administrators, engineers,
lawyers, accountants, loan officers, secretaries, salespeople) - has
been increasing since 1960, or even longer. Knowledge workers
now constitute about 60 percent of the American work force.
Because of their large number, their productivity has a strong effect
on the overall productivity of the society. In other words,
improvements in our standard of living will, in large part, depend
upon knowledge workers' doing what they do more efficiently and
effectively..."(Tennant and Heilmeier, 1991)
Computers are becoming more than just places where certain
types of mathematical, accounting, and word processing activities
take place. Increasingly, they are where we organize our lives,
whether this is getting prices from a retailer, organizing personal
information for later access, completing our taxes, or reading news,
more of these activities than ever are being more thoroughly
mediated by computer telecommunications.
The result has been a demand for more "user-friendly"
interfaces with the Internet and other forms of telecommunications.
The result has been highly specialized hybrid programs that
combine both easy to use, graphic-user interfaces and IP/TCP
capabilities to communicate over the Internet. Programs like
Gopher, Mosaic and platform programs like Lotus Notes are just
the first few iterations of a vast body of tools that will allow easier
access to networked resources.
Additionally, the wider availability of Internet access has led to
the proliferation of programs that allow many users to interact in
somewhat structured common cognitive environments as a form of
entertainment. The multi-user dungeon is the prototypical version
of this program. It allows users to move from virtual room to
virtual room in a text environment in which the actions and speech
of the other players are presented, also as text. Sometimes these
"dungeons" are free-form and simply allow people who have never
met to talk in rooms that may be occupied by others, or may be
private. Other Multi-user dungeons are structured into games with
collective goals and organizing themes from science fiction and
fantasy literature. MUDs are one of the most interesting and most
unstudied parts of the Internet, partially because users are often
discouraged from using them, since they consume network
resources.
Thus, comes the question of interaction. Does the hardware
make the interaction, or does the interaction make the hardware?
And furthermore, what of the meaning?  These questions will have
to be further addressed.

Official Forms of Organization
Initially, traditional Parsonian functionalism seems to offer itself
to the sociologist as a natural way to understand the Internet. It is,
after all, a system, in which certain pieces of hardware, software,
and policies for use allow humans, computers, and information to
adequately work together, right? This model is true of the Internet,
but only at a very basic level. The hardware and software are not
always used for the purpose for which they were designed. People
do unpredictable things, and small groups want to talk about things
that the larger group may not want to talk about. The result is that
a wide variety of informal norms and bodies of collective
knowledge come to bound users of this new social environment
into new sets of commonly held knowledge meaning. Subcultures
emerge, conflicts develop, and difficult-to-predict social
interactions and ongoing relationships develop. The Internet can
direct and transform these interactions and relationships, but it does
not control them.
Despite this general truth, some global policy decisions are
necessary; not every decision can be made individually. For
example, the decision to adopt a new protocol by which computers
will digitally communicate cannot be made by an individual user, as
no one would be able to transmit information to him, and he
wouldn't be able to transmit to anyone else. Such technical
decisions must be made communally. In order to much such
decisions, the Internet has a governing board of directors that are
volunteers who serve on the Internet Architecture Board. The IAB
meets to allocate resources and to approve new rules that solve
problems related to resource allocation, like naming conventions for
Internet sites. Additional detailed policies are investigated at
Internet Engineering Task Force meetings, which anyone can
attend. New rules and standards are usually presented for public
comment before they are approved.
George Gilder, writing on the post-modern economy in Wealth
and Poverty , has said that the lack of control is one of the features
that makes the Internet so popular:
"The Internet is an exciting kind of metaphor for spontaneous
order. It shows that in order to have a very rich fabric of services
you don't need a regimented system of control. When there's a lot
of intelligence at the fringes everywhere, the actual network itself
can be fairly simple. The future is the dumb
network."(Sept/Oct.1993, Wired. p.38.)
While most of the Internet's organizing groups are informal and
voluntary, and, of course, at the university or service-provider level,
have their own conventions, this form of control could eventually
change. The National Telecommunications and Information
Administration, an Executive Branch agency created in 1992, wants
Congress and the FCC to investigate controlling the Internet more
closely. For example, this administration has been asked to look
into hate crimes committed over computer telecommunications
networks. They target, particularly, offensive posts to commercial
networks, and bulletin board systems that feature hate-group
philosophies as a theme. (Boardwatch, June 1993. p.78.) As more
and more people begin to use and rely on the Internet for business
and personal communications, and if the government becomes
involved in building new network facilities, there is the likelihood
that greater federal government involvement could occur. The
dominant form of this involvement, however, whether through
funding or direct legislation, has not yet been made clear.
Moreover, as new networks emerge, new governing conventions
will emerge. More discussion on these variety of conventions will
occur in the observations.
In summary, the sorts of governing organizations that currently
operate on the Internet meet seldom and don't usually make policy
about the content of the Internet, just about ways to make sure it
continues to work. The real policy-making about what composes
appropriate use occurs at individual sites, and is overseen by
individual system administrators.
For the sociologist, the important thing is the realization that
the decision making processes that take place about how to use the
Internet are made by individual users and administrators of
organizational systems. The sociology of the Internet is not
dominated by the maneuvers of large political organizations. It is
about individual interactions and conventions that combine to
create subcultures.

The Internet as Subject of Critical Study:
Current Contributions to Understanding

In some rational attempt to move from least radical to most
radical interpretations of the Internet's social implications, a brief
discussion of current work in studying the computer
telecommunications as a communications medium, then as a mass,
media, and finally as a community will be explored in this section of
the paper.

Study of Computer Telecommunications as a Form of
Communications
One can judge from the amounts of research available that there
is a lot of money to be made in studying computer
telecommunications as a form of communications. Particularly,
much of this research has been focused studies by cognitive
scientists for industry software designers. The aim has been to
design more usable interfaces that better allow the digestion of
information by the human eye and brain. Much of the research in
this field however, for very good reasons, focuses on the human-to-
computer interface, rather than the mediated human-to-human
interface. These studies, while fascinating in what they reveal both
about the juncture of the organic and the cognitive in the human
brain, are of interest to the sociologist only when they are able to
describe how the individual perceives their interactions with others
over the network.
These studies, are mostly useful to the sociologist in helping to
understand the communications at a fundamental level, and have
made some useful social interaction findings with regard to
educational issues, where the focus has been to understand the
effects of computer telecommunication-mediated interactions in
small groups over short periods of time. Obviously, however, these
do not help the sociologist to understand an entire society
interacting with an emerging sub-culture.
Looking then to the useful research on changing media from
cognitive science, researchers have noted patterns in the acceptance
of new forms:
"Today's keyboard-oriented computer conferencing and
electronic mail are just two of several computer media that may
enhance and possibly change the ways in which people
communicate with each other. As yet underdeveloped computer
media, including hypermedia, multi-media documents incorporating
combinations of text, graphics, image, voice, video, and other
presentations formats, voice-into-text concurrent interaction, and
virtual reality (simulated environments in which the user is made to
feel as if the simulation is 'real'), hold the promise of more radical
changes yet to come. It may be that all of these possibilities will be
successful. It is more likely, however, that some will be moderately
successful in niche applications, and that most will fail." (Foulger,
1992.)

It is postulated by Foulger, a cognitive scientist, that a very
wide variety of protomedia can emerge, but that only a few will
succeed. Foulger graphs the uses and audience of each form of
media, and places computer telecommunications in the middle of all
other forms, meaning that it meets all of the needs of the audiences
to "create a middle ground between clusters of media because the
mediators associate with computer media can be manipulated to
highly specific ends." (p.57) In other words, computer
communications can do everything that radio, television, telephones
and fax machines can, and a lot more.
He describes this as being able to give "computer media a
distinctiveness, relative to other media, that probably helps to
account for the rapidly growing success of electronic mail,
computer conferencing, and electronic publishing." (p.63)
The very idea of knowledge and information changes with the
idea of a document changing. Foulger describes hypermedia texts as
completely new sorts of documents that must be addressed in new
cognitive ways:
"It is helpful, in visualizing hypermedia documents, to think of
them as a cave system in which passages diverge and intersect in
several dimensions. Getting from the entrance to the cave to a river
a quarter mile underground may require the use of a series of
passages and chambers, with each passage accessible by only a
limited number of paths. If you are exploring, the cave system will
allow you to stray from the path into interesting side passages. If
you have a goal to achieve and know where you are going, you can
travel quickly through the minimum number of passages." (p.62)
Importantly, he also postulates that this sort of document type,
which is often composed of many documents linked together,
changes ideas of authorship and ownership:
"These structures change the way we view documents in
important ways. They change the whole vocabulary of, and quite
possibly the authoring style associated with, reading and writing.
Letters and books no longer have meaningful page numbers. They
simply have parallel frames that cross-reference each other in much
the same way different books and articles reference each other.
Each frame is, in some sense, a complete mini-document, and the
resulting macro-document can be traversed flexibly according to the
reader's wishes. The effect of these changes should be to make
documents appear more dynamic and to increase their overall
content. The effect should be correspondence and publishing
related media that stretch across the bandwidth dimension in the
direction of film and art." (p. 52)

In making these analysis useful to the sociologist, I would assert
that this description of multi-media documents and simultaneous
conversations will soon, or already do, hold true as models for the
entire Internet, especially when viewed through communication
mediating client programs like Gopher, Mosaic or Netscape. These
are enormously powerful communication tools, but also enormously
confusing and even dangerous. They are dangerous because of the
volume of information they make available, and the little that has
been done to evaluate the origins of this information. Taking a
wrong turn in the tunnels of the Internet could leave one in a bad
part of town, academically or commercially, with bad information
from bad sources.
Looking next to the contributions made to the study of
computer mediated communications in education, we find studies
related to networks designed to get young students to work with
one another on basic writing assignments. In one such network,
students composed single composite documents on the computer by
transferring the document back and forth with students at other
schools, contributing to it at each interval. The result in this
particular experiment was the emergence of powerful social
relationship with the other students:
The boundaries of the computer networked writing
environment, then, can be described metaphorically as a crucible in
which the students come to experience themselves no only as
separate individuals but also as a part of an identifiable group that is
bound together by tasks, group culture, and group image.
Individual concerns and group concerns ebb and flow throughout
the designated life of this kind of writing class. Each student
alternates and adjusts in his or her own particular rhythm between
relating to the computerized writing experience as a solitary activity
and relating to it as a group member. The behaviour of students in
the networked writing classroom, therefore, is guided by both the
personal and the social context in which they find themselves.
(Schipke, 1991)
Even in this least radical interpretation, the influence of the
computer as a mediator in human communications in a strong
influence in transforming not only the content of the
communication, but also the negotiation of self-identity. Just as
Margaret Mead said that the self is created through social
interaction, the network can mold and manipulate not only the
relationships, but also the self-image. Self-identity is especially
defined by social interaction in the computer telecommunications
world for a very simple reasons: one abandons one's body and
belongings when one enters this new social space, and the only
characteristic left is one's ability to interact.

Study of Computer Telecommunications as a Mass Media
Computer telecommunications are particularly interesting from
the perspective of post-modernist mass media theory because they
so thoroughly exemplify the post-modernist elements explored in
other media. According to mass media theorists, the two most
important concerns about the Internet from a mass media
perspective are the way that they allow us to access the mass
media, and the enormous imbalance that is occurring between
nations and groups that have access to these information resources,
versus nations and groups that do not.
Looking first at the general perception of cyberspace by mass
media researchers, we find a general awe of this emerging new
media. Mass media theorists Denis McQuail notes that at the time
of his writing in 1992, he can see them changing the way that
people interact with the mass media:
"While not yet as accountable as 'mass media,' the interactive
electronic media, in various forms, have opened up a very large
potential for quite different kinds of information provision and
exchange, especially the possibility for individual access to a very
large amount and range of electronic media services. The changes
have been summarized in terms of a shift from 'allocutory' media
forms (centre-periphery mass dissemination media) to 'consultative
and 'interactive' types of communication relationship and
information flow."(p. 304)

Furthermore, he argues that  computer-mediated
communications, and the creation of subcultures over the Internet,
fit into a post-modern interpretation of general changes in society,
because computer telecommunications offer immediacy of
response, visually oriented stimuli, transient relationships, and
barrier-less 'virtual presence.' McQuail explains why he criticizes
this form of communication, but also why it is becoming so much
more popular in mass media of all kinds:
"As a sociopolitical philosophy, post-modernism stands
opposed to the traditional notion of fixed and hierarchical cultural
values and beliefs. It is favourable to forms of culture which are
transient, superficial, appealing to senses rather than reason. Post-
modern culture is volatile, illogical, kaleidoscopic, inventive,
hedonistic. It has certainly more affinity with the newer, audio-
visual media than with print media. While post-modernism may be
little more than a fashionable version of liberal and secular thinking,
without deep or coherent philosophical foundations, it does seem to
express some significant features of current social consciousness
and it finds a resonance in the popular mass media, especially
television and music. Like the other changes mentioned, post-
modernization has been greeted with ambivalence and a degree of
scepticism."(1992, p.303)

He notes that there is occurring a "convergence between
different 'modes' of communication, which were once separated by
differences of technology, of purpose and of regulatory
regime"(p.305) and consequently, that a "fragmentation and
functional disaggregation of different organizational activities:
ownership, management, production, editorial, distribution,
research..."(p.305) are occurring. This could be no where better
demonstrated than by looking at the Internet, where ideas of
ownership of information are, at best, weak, and organizational
activities are completed by volunteers, who leave most critical
decisions to market forces. If a service is needed, someone will
design it for themselves or their friends, and maybe try to charge
others to use it.
While McQuail's delineation of the changes to the global
datasphere are well examined, even if he believes that they should
not be occurring. Other mass media researchers worry that one of
the most important and unstudied effects of the explosion of
Internet usage and other computer telecommunications resources in
the United States are that they are making other countries
"economies simply incompatible with the world economy." Cess
Hamelink notes, especially, that the "economically peripheral"
nations own only 4% of the world's computer hardware, and that
this makes them completely unable to trade on many of the markets
that now dominate the world economy.(Hamelink, 1990)
While mass media theorists are embracing the Internet, they
also evidence a greater understanding than other researchers of the
dangers every new medium brings, especially when that medium has
the ability to effect self-image, culture, and economic balances of
power. Their insights and warnings are important to a complete
sociological understanding of the new social frontier.

Computer Telecommunications Studied as a Community
If the Internet is challenging to grasp conceptually as a set of
tools for communication that come together to form an
encompassing social environment, then it is even more of an
imaginative interpretation to conceptualize the formation of
communities in groups of users. Nevertheless this interpretation has
frequently been made and defended.
The key to understanding Internet and other cyberspace
communities is the ongoing transition from continuous to iterated
telecommunications, geographic to non-geographic relationships
and the emergence of computer-mediated interactions as an
ongoing and primary form of communication with the Other
replacing traditional forms.
Gary T. Marx has studied the social uses of the Internet and the
formation of communities as methods of maintaining "human
dignity." He notes that when a new area of social space opens, it is
not just legislation, or official rules that govern its usage, but also
"manners," the informal rules that allow one to communicate in
consistent and non-conflictual ways with others. These manners and
"netiquette" keep most users' behavior in line with accepted uses
through social pressures to conform, and minimize the need for
official sanction, which are especially difficult to exercise over the
Internet's dispersed organizational systems. He also notes some
problems that become particular to the widening cybersphere. One
of these is the increasing problem of conflicts between
egalitarianism and availability with authority and intimacy. When
everyone has an equal voice, who is to be heard? If everyone is
available, how do two individual's achieve intimacy? The
fundamental dyadic human relationships break down in the presence
of multi-audience and multi-directional communications. As Marx
put it, "The technology offers rich possibilities for megaphonic
degradation," allowing individuals to be personally abused in a
public way that is uncommon in other communities. (unpublished
paper, 1993)
One of the most interesting interpretations of a computer
network as a community is in Marc A. Smith's 1993 paper, "Voices
from the WELL: The Logic of the Virtual Commons." As part of a
Master's degree program in the U.C.L.A. department of sociology,
Smith conducted a community study of users of the WELL, a
popular and long-standing bulletin board system in San Francisco.
His results help to initially describe not only the characteristics of
shared experiences, meanings, and concern that indisputably define
the WELL as a community, but also some of the special
characteristics of computer telecommunications that make it a
community different from others.
As a part of his study, he compares the WELL to earlier "virtual
communities" that had some characteristics in common with this
community. He notes that it is like a "committee of
correspondence" of the 18th century, used to form groups to
discuss political and scientific interests across great distances on the
American frontier. Similarly, the WELL brings individuals together
to discuss common interests with others in ongoing relationships.
These interactions usually take place in open or moderated forums
where anyone can post a comment on any subject. At the same
time, Smith notes that there are important differences between the
WELL virtual community and other communities:
"[V]irtual communities are not limited by the speed of man on
horseback or even the steam engine, but are granted near
instantaneous communication by the speed of computers and data
networks.  The increased speed and the unique qualities and powers
of computer network-based communication makes the dynamics of
virtual communities distinct from committees of correspondence.
The differences in the medium of communication have effects on
the kinds of interactions that can take place and how the
interactions that do occur can progress and unfold.  For example,
slow media that introduce long delays into turn-taking reduces the
interactively of an social exchange and can lead to more cautious
(and thus, perhaps, more detailed and exact) messages. Media can
vary in terms of the ambiguity they introduce to the messages
passed through them. Some media provide a certain audience, that
is, the target of a message can be selected without fear of additional
surveillance. If you do not know who might be in the room it makes
sense to watch what you say. Further, some media prevent the
identity of message creators to be known with certainty if at all.
With so much variation in different kinds of media it is not hard to
imagine that their character alters the kinds of messages that are
sent through it, and, by extension, the kinds of social action and
interaction that will develop around it."

Thus, while the virtual community functions in many ways that
are similar to other communities designed to promote interaction,
the dynamics of the medium do influence changes the substantive
content of that interaction. The relationships can be volatile, even as
feelings of connection run deep. Smith does not, however, feel that
the communication is being manipulated by the technology. On the
contrary, he seems to see the process reflexively, as individuals
adapting to a new social environment in unpredictable and
distinctively human ways:
"This is not technological determinism, but rather a solid
materialism: technologies change the fabric of the material world
which in turn changes the social world.  The terrain of interaction in
virtual communities is different in some powerful and subtle ways,
some forms of interaction translate well into a virtual space, others
do not.  In all cases, people are actively drawing upon their
understanding of interaction and improvising in the gaps, some of
which are cavernous."
This study provides important clues as to both why
communities are able to develop, and why they are different social
environments from other those provided by other media. Of
importance to an understanding of the Internet is that the WELL is
just one very small example of a community, and that they can
occur throughout the use of computer telecommunications,
computer-mediated communities are now constantly emerging in
greater numbers as individual users find a social niche in which to
couch daily personal use. Defining and observing these communities
will be a central facet of the observations.

Conclusions From the History and Literature Review
Sociology has spent much of its time talking about reciprocal
social processes, about the reflective and recursive natures of
identity that emerge from social interaction. There is no more
powerful a demonstration of these principles than the ongoing
negotiation of identity that the individual engages in during forays,
and eventual "settlement" into cyberspace.
As a form of communication and as a mass media, cyberspace
has the potential to be  the ultimate form, gradually encompassing
all others and changing our interactions with them, be this mail,
reception of news and entertainment, video, or telephone. At the
same time it is much more.
As we have seen in reviewing these research frontiers, the
Internet is an interactive environment of a type we have never
before seen. This interaction is most characterized by anonymity,
geographic dislocation, and lack of hierarchy, both in
communication and in structure. It contributes to a post-modern
lack of boundaries and lack of "knowability," through its lack of
closure and lack of central control. Negotiating new identities will
become necessary in an evolving gestalt of awareness. Finally then,
communications over the Internet are characterized by three
fundamental transformations. First, cyberspace is gradually
becoming a locus and "generator" of culture, rather than a place for
cultural artifacts to reside. These cultures are specialized to the
Internet environment, consist of numerous subcultures and, as the
form of communications changes, these cultures come to be
expressed in non-transferable languages, specialized to the
computer world where hybrid multi-media communications are
possible. Second, along similar lines, the social use of cyberspace
creates new types of knowledge. This knowledge is characterized
by its non-linear, non-chronological, non-geographic, non-
authoritarian nature, while contributing to a sort of "distributed
consciousness" created through distributed control/authority,
feelings of intense dislocation. One can be in several places as once,
and human experience is fragmented. The third, and final
transformation is the objectification of the Other. By being able to
interact with another's distributed consciousness, be this their e-mail
account, a Usenet newsgroup they have subscribed to, or other
channels, it allows individuals to treat others as non-persons, in that
their presence is essentially unnecessary for communication. This
has ambiguous meanings for society. It allows anyone to have a
voice, but removes value from the voices, disabling traditional
methods of evaluation.
Finally, then one must conclude that little is really known about
the social environment of the Internet. Researchers and critical
thinkers are beginning to attempt to study it, but are only in the
most preliminary stages. It is hoped that by taking previous
research efforts and building on them that this research project can
make a contribution to this new understanding.


SECTION III:
Participant-Observation in Computer-Mediated
Communications

The Sociological Imagination Behind This Section
For any scientist approaching a new phenomena, especially one
undergoing sudden emergence, rapid expansion, and demonstrating
surprising potential, a suitably powerful and flexible methodological
framework based in sound theory must be applied if any viable
results are to be achieved.
In studying astronomy, I have learned that when astronomers
approach a newly discovered and very distant galaxy, they can often
only see parts of the galaxy; the light is too dim, the observation
instrument too imprecise, the object obscured by other bodies. In
order to overcome these problems, astronomers try to observe
elements within the distant galaxy that exhibit rare and distinctive
behaviors, like the eerie pulsings of RR Lyrae or Cepheid variable
stars, that behaviorally correspond to locally known and well-
understood stars. Then, making the assumption that the stars
exhibiting these rare behaviors in the distant galaxy must share a
common structure with the local stars, they become "standard
candles," assumed to be as bright and of the same color as the local
stars. In this way, distance, size, rotational velocity, red-shift, and
thereby, the mass, age and speed of the distant galaxy can be
determined. This observation and association is a clever way of
constructing what cannot be observed from what can be observed.
The process of exploring a new sociological frontier is similar
An approach must be used that is both powerful and flexible.
One of the best of such frameworks is made up of participant-
observation as the method and symbolic interactionism as the
underlying theory. According to Norman K. Denzin, "participant
observation is one the few methods currently available to the
sociologist that is well-suited to an analysis of complex forms of
symbolic interaction." He emphasizes that participant-observation,
as opposed to surveying, historical/biographical methods and other
sampling-based methods, is good for analyzing social systems
undergoing change. He further outlines seven principles to guide
the researcher:
The researcher, as a naturalist, is committed to:

1 Combining a native's symbolic meanings with ongoing
patterns of interaction

2 Adopting the perspective, or 'attitude' of the acting
other and viewing the world from the subject's point of
view, while maintaining a distinction between everyday and
scientific conceptions of reality.

3 Linking the native's symbols and definitions with the
social relationships and groups that provide these
conceptions

4 Recording the behavior settings of interactions

5 Adopting methods that are capable of reflecting
process, change, and stability.

6 Viewing the research act as an instance of symbolic
interaction

7 Using sensitizing concepts, which point to the
construction of interactive, causal explanations of social
processes.

(Denzin, The Research Act, 1974, p.78)

He goes on to detail the process of the naturalistic symbolic
interactiontist:
"Naturalistic behaviorism, the logical method of the
symbolic interactionist, turns on these seven principles, or
directives. This methodological stance demands that the
researcher actively enter the worlds of native peoples so as
to render those worlds understandable from the standpoint
of a theory that is grounded in the behaviors, languages,
definitions, attitudes, and feelings of those studied.
Naturalistic behaviorism attempts to wed the covert, private
features of the social act with its publicly observable
counterparts. It works back and forth between the word and
deed. This version of the research act endeavors to move
beyond pure ethnography to explanatory theory. Naturalistic
behaviorism attempts to enter people's heads, recognizing
that humans engage in 'minded,' self-reflexive behavior.
Humans act in ways which reflect their unfolding and
emergent definitions of themselves and the social situations
they confront. Any research program which purports to be
scientific must confront these features of human group life."
(Denzin, The Research Act, 1978, p. 79)

Thus, of central importance to this study will be an attempt not
only to catalog and implicate social behaviors in the networked
environment, but to also enter the environment wholly, and then
self-reflexively, so as to understand why the behaviors are used
within the society.
Another central analytic model of this paper will be Erving
Goffman's "interaction ritual." This approach treats the social
interaction as a sort of drama with roles and conventions. It
conceptualizes these roles as "faces" that people claim for
themselves as an image to put forward onto the social stage.
(Goffman, Interaction Ritual, 1967, p. 5-9, 41-45) It is also
interesting to apply some of Goffman's concepts of "claims" and
how territories are defined by the individual in the electronic
environment. In particular, Goffman defines and explores a diverse
list of such territories: "personal space," the space every individual
keeps around themselves as a "contour," that must be
"uncontaminated" by others; the "stall," the space used in situations
of spatial scarcity to distribute the scarce resource; the "use space,"
the space an individual can politely be expected to use;  the "turn,"
the temporal resources that belong to an individual in a space of
common and sequential use; the "sheath" the individual's skin and
clothing; the "possessional territory," the personal effects of an
individual; the "information preserve," the knowledge a person
controls about his person in the presence of others; and the
"conversational preserve," the ability of the individual to control
who can summon him for conversation. Goffman especially notes
that one thing links all these concepts of personal space in common;
their "socially determined variability." (Goffman, "The Territories
of the Self," Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order,
1971, p. 28- 41.)
In applying these theories to the electronic environment, special
emphasis will be placed on defining socially reinforced interaction
rituals, and socially reinforced methods of self-expression and
space-establishment around the virtual person using the resources
of the Internet or other networked environment.
Finally, C. Wright Mills, in his classic The Sociological
Imagination, sets a high standard for any sociological study that
purports to be scientific:
No social study that does not come back to the
problems of biography, of history and of their intersections
within a society, has completed its intellectual journey.
Whatever the specific problems of the classic social analysts,
however limited or however broad the features of social
reality they have examined, those who have been
imaginatively aware of the promise of their work have
consistently asked three sorts of questions:
(1) What is the structure of this particular society as a
whole? What are its essential components, and how are they
related to one another? How does it differ from other
varieties of social order? Within it, what is the meaning of
any particular feature for its continuance and for its change?
(2) Where does this society stand in human history?
What are the mechanics by which it is changing? What is its
place within and its meaning for the developments of
humanity as a whole? How does any particular feature we
are examining affect, and how is it affected by, the historical
period in which it moves? And this period -- what are its
essential features? How does is differ from other periods?
What are its characteristic ways of history-making?
(3) What varieties of men and women now prevail in
this society and in this period? And what varieties are
coming to prevail? In what ways are they selected and
formed, liberated and suppressed, made sensitive and
blunted? What kinds of 'human nature' are revealed in the
conduct and character we observe in this society in this
period? And what is the meaning for 'human nature' of each
and every feature of the society we are examining?
(Mills, 1959, The Sociological Imagination, p. 6-7)

These three different perspectives from Denzin, Goffman and
Mills, together, gave this project three main thrusts: defining and
understanding the new symbols of the Internet from the perspective
of a user, understanding how these symbols are used to form
consistent patterns of "interaction rituals," and finally, beginning to
understand how the use of network communications intersects with
the historical development of communications and with the
biographical construction of self.

The Method Used and Some Concerns
In this study, participant-observation was chosen as the
principle research method. Participant-observation offered the
advantages of a long sociological history, strong theoretical
underpinnings, and a unique opportunity to become directly
involved in the new social environment.
My participant-observation consisted of work as an intern with
Wolf Communications Company of Houston Texas, a computer
networking firm specializing in groupware networking. It also
consisted of interactions as a student user of the university
networks Owlnet and RiceInfo, the university wide-area
information server, and on other Rice University networks.
Additional observations were made through Compuserve and
America On-line, commercial networks in popular use. My
internship with Wolf Communications began in October, 1993, as I
was formulating this project, and I date my initial observations to
that time. More specific mention of events, persons and interactions
will be made as services allowing interaction are individually
discussed.
As a part of this methodology, I made the decision not to do a
survey on the Internet or other solicitation of attention from
unknown Internet users. This was for three reasons. First, the
Internet community is generally a hostile place for social research
and is especially hostile towards surveys or e-mail interviews. This
probably springs from a commonly held Internet ideal of almost
complete privacy, and a disdain for any methodology that is not
entirely "representative." Second, the Internet is so flooded with
poorly worded and misspelled surveys made up of biased questions
and of blatantly polemical or mercenary purpose, that I did not
want to add my survey to the heap. Finally, the Internet is a
wonderful place for anonymous participant-observation. This is
because most services and activities are designed for anonymous
access, and allow unobtrusive observation of the group participants.

Hypothesis
Before embarking on this exploratory study, I formulated a
variety of hypothesis as general models of social behaviors in a
networked environment. Looking back to Section I, the three
essential hypotheses that emerged from the interviewing project will
serve to inform the participant-observation study.
I call the first of these hypothesis the "Frontier Environment,"
with deep bows of respect to C. F. Turner and the entire American
History industry that has given us a society filled with rough and
ready cowboy ideals and a wilderness mentality. This hypothesis
holds that social interaction on the Internet is part of a process of
allocating scarce resources among increasing numbers of arriving
users.
In this hypothesis, the role of the "natives" is played by system
administrators who began the Internet in the 1960s and still
administer its use in many cases on defense and university
mainframes and networks. Early settlers are the researchers and
academics who used the system as it was first designed -  as a small
educational network for military or scientific research. Nomadic
"trappers" who use resources fleetingly, either legitimately or
illegitimately, are played by the young "hackers" and early bulletin
board operators who first began to use the Internet to connect
personal computers in non-institutional settings. They were
sometimes welcomed, sometimes hunted, and occasionally admired
in a back-handed way by the institutional users (i.e. Cameron in
Section I).
The new herd of business and commercial users play the role of
"settlers," newly arrived from the East, who have little respect for
the frontier, its lore, its etiquette or it limitations, and expect it and
everything associated with it to service them as if it where a private
business venture for their benefit. They have arrived with the
advertising flyers still buzzing in their ears "Free resources, open
frontier, plenty for all, new horizons, perfect communications,
digital reliability." What they have discovered, to their
disappointment, is a lawless, foreign place filled with bandits of
various kinds and very little elbow room, except for the technically
adept.
This hypothesis holds that power springs from knowledge of the
Internet and its technical resources, regardless of origin, and that
the allocation of resources will be an ongoing problem until better
conventions are established or until an organized body steps in to
"clean up this cow town."
My second major hypothesis is the "immigrant model." This
model helps us to understand the relationships between and
behaviors of users who have arrived on the Internet at different
times. In some ways it is similar to the frontier model in its
understanding of scarce resources, but it presents a different model
of power. This model imagines the Internet as a place where new
arrivals order themselves  into a hierarchy of status based on how
well they have assimilated themselves with the surrounding
electronic society and culture. Old network administrators, who
helped establish the system, are called "gurus" or "wizards," and are
the most respected inhabitants. Older arrivals know about the
environment, as they had to know a great deal early to even be
involved, and thus are respected by the old administrators. Newer
arrivals are expected to assimilate themselves quickly, to learn the
proper etiquette, and to show the proper respect, or they are
harshly criticized. Knowing one's way around the Internet is not so
much a process of knowing technical facts, as with the Frontier
model, as it is in knowing technical people, and how to ask them
for resources.
In addition, under this model, new immigrants tend to lord it
over the flood of ever newer immigrants, so that the last to arrive
always have the least status, until they become assimilated into the
arcane Internet culture. A variety of signs and symbols, like use of
"signatures" in e-mail, politeness and use of appropriate netiquette,
abbreviations in postings, and general "net-knowledge" serve to
mark one as being successfully assimilated or not, as will be
discussed in detail later.
These two hypothesis assume a third, and final hypothesis,
which is that Internet users subscribe to a sub-culture, that is, a
culture within a culture. Moreover, this third hypothesis, while not
incompatible with the first two, imagines the Internet as a dynamic
and unstructured environment in which new culture is ever
springing, and in which tradition and convention actually have little
or no meaning. Internet users, in fact, find the Internet itself, the
people they communicate with there, and the archives of
information stored there, to be a source of symbols and
relationships that exist outside other forms of American culture.
While it is certainly true that everything on the Internet springs
originally from some other culture, under this hypothesis, users
come away from the Internet with new words and new meanings
for old words, as well as information that is elsewhere present in
our culture but repressed. This hypothesis holds that the Internet is
a source of culture and can be, for some people, a locus for cultural
identity, even a primary reference group, but is one without
stability. The model of power in this hypothesis is not phrased in
terms of technical knowledge or even personal relationships. It is
cultural innovation that creates power, whether by an old or a new
user.
I approached the research with these three basic hypothesis and
modeled by observations around trying to confirm, change, or
dispute these basic models. The initial part of this process in the
case of each interaction type was to establish the meaning of
symbols and types of behaviors most common on the Internet.

The Observations
This section of the paper catalogs some of the behaviors,
symbols and relationships encountered during participant-
observation. It does not, of course, recount everything observed.
Instead, it highlights particularly meaningful patterns of behavior
that promise better understanding in symbolic interactionist terms.
As mentioned previously, this section is artificially divided into
sections based on electronic service types. The reader will often
find overlap in behaviors between interaction types; this is expected
and an important part of finding consistent patterns of behavior.

E-Mail and Signatures: Sheathing the Machine in
Humanity
E-mail is often considered the backbone of electronic
communications, the original form, and the continuing workhorse.
Indeed, popular columnists who have picked up the Internet banner
romanticize e-mail as the savior of the "dying art of
correspondence" and as a way to reconnect our society with its
repressed literary urge; e-mail is imagined as Whitman's new
barbaric yalp. Without plunging too deeply into the technical
aspects of e-mail, it is defined for the purposes of this paper as any
electronic message from one person to another person or to a
group of individually designated persons sent over a computer
network.
Returning briefly to the pilot study for this project several basic
and consistent opinions emerged about the use of e-mail: people
find it convenient both for its immediacy and its flexibility; they tend
to expect quick responses to e-mail; they tend to be less formal in
e-mail, yet also tend to neglect social behaviors to introduce their
topic or express personal concern * they do not engage in small-
talk.
Given this basic understanding of e-mail, the participant-
observer, coming from the opposite end of the investigation, must
now investigate what it is like to actually send and receive e-mail.
We find our first observations on the use of e-mail from the usage
of parts of e-mail. E-mail routed over the Internet, and hence
almost anywhere else, so as to be compatible with the Internet,
includes a heading and a body. This heading usually contains, at a
minimum, a "to" line, a "from" line and a "subject" line. This usage
derives from UNIX antecedents. More elaborate systems, like the
Lotus Notes mail system used by Wolf Communications, also
includes things like the priority with which the mail should be
delivered and automatic confirmation of delivery, if the receiving
mail system supports such features.
Throughout the period of my observation, e-mail was used as a
central form of communication. Within this experience, the types of
e-mail I received were numerous and varied to such an extent that
generalizations are difficult. It is one of the most individualized
forms of communication used in computer networking, next to
electronic publishing, because anything can be included in e-mail
and in almost any form. In my observation, however, one of the
most consistently important parts of e-mail was the signature,
which is called the "sig," by UNIX users or " "tag-line" by Bulletin
Board System users. The primary term, "sig" derives itself from the
".sig" file usually used by UNIX account users to store and
automatically append their "signature" statement to their e-mail.
The sig is important to the sociological observer because it suggests
emerging patterns of status-maintenance and self expression.
Sigs vary a great deal, but, if used, they always appear at the
bottom of e-mail, sometimes replacing the author's name as
signature, sometimes added after the name. Sigs tend to be
consistent over time, so as to mark e-mail as legitimately from the
user who appears to have written it. Some people use a sig packed
with personal titles and positions, including addresses, institutions,
even logos or maps rendered in text. Some use them to quip a witty
line or quote from a favorite book or movie. The most "classical"
sigs simply contain the person's name and pragmatically list all the
places they can be reached. This form is the most common, and one
gets the impression that this is the most respectable. Sigs over four
lines long, and involving text-based art, are less common, and
depending on the content and prestige of the author, may be
considered tacky and unnecessary. Since sigs are often used in
newsgroup postings as well as e-mail, complaints will usually
appear when a sig at the end of a posting  contains these "tacky"
elements.
Interestingly, signatures tend to be more consistently used
among those more closely involved with network administration,
like a valued badge, while those less associated with networks, and
thus probably less familiar with network convention and who use e-
mail less, tend to use signatures less.
As an additional and very functional part of signatures, those
who consider themselves truly "in the know" may include their
"public encryption key" or, more commonly, a notation as to where
this key can be easily and anonymously obtained. This is included
both for practical and safety reasons, but also for prestige reasons.
It is a statement that "I know what I'm doing, I know how to
protect myself, and I'm conscientious about protecting my data.
Encrypt mail for me, but don't mess with me." In order to
understand why I perceive the richness of the public key as symbol,
some basics of key encryption must be understood.
Public/private key encryption is a general description for the
most commonly used encryption schemes. On a very basic level, if a
person wants to transact mail with little risk that it will be read by
any unintended user or administrator, one acquires a piece of
shareware software for their computer which works by encrypting
mail with one key, and decrypting mail with a second key. These
keys are actually complex mathematical formulae, one being a
function used to convert the text string of the message into a
gibberish code, and the other being an analytic "solution" or
reversal to this process, that can instantly reverse this process. The
first function can encrypt, but not decrypt mail. The second
function can decrypt, but cannot encrypt mail.
The key to encrypt messages is distributed freely, hence
"public," so that anyone wanting to send mail to the holder of the
key may encrypt their mail and send it. The decrypting key is held
privately, allowing the holder to decrypt mail without risk of
anyone else reading it. Significantly, the private key is an analytic
solution to the public key, and not a computational method of
decryption. In other words, the decryption takes place without
extended "number-crunching." It is an elegant and exact inverse,
allowing instant decryption.  While the function, and hence the
message, could be decrypted computationally by factoring the
content of the message, and thus reconstructing the original
function used to encrypt it, this process involves so much
computation that the average message cannot justify the use of
resources, usually a mainframe for hours or days. This simple
system defends the average message with a powerful and practical
encryption that has been dubbed Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). While
governments using super computers can decode a message using
this system in a fairly short amount of time, usually hours or days,
most message are safe from other users.
Given this basic scheme for encryption, the inclusion of a public
key in ones sig has several social implications. First, it suggests that
one knows how to use a slightly more advanced program than the
average e-mail user. This can be a source of prestige, telling other
users that the writer is knowledgeable. Second, it obviously
suggests that the e-mail writer actually has frequent correspondence
of such importance and sensitivity that it requires encryption. To
the novice, the implied use of encryption appears mysterious and
exotic. In reality, the use of encryption is actually quite practical if
one is sending any kind of sensitive information at any time, as
system administrators may, intentionally or not, view e-mail on any
system they may be supervising, although there are both laws and,
typically, internal policies controlling the viewing of others' e-mail.
Finally then, returning to the general significance of sigs, and
the variety of things people put into them, they serve as a symbol of
initiation, a display of self-importance, and as an expression of
individuality in a medium that is otherwise generic in visual
presentation. Using Goffman's interaction ritual as a mode of
analysis, several functions of sigs are obviously socially important.
They are the "faces" that individual's put forward onto the social
stage. They help to establish a personal space in every e-mail, even
if the mail is ostensibly for one's employer. Again, returning to the
principle opinions surrounding e-mail from the interviews to
reinforce this point, e-mail is typically terse among frequent users,
but also frequent includes sigs. Thus sigs can been seen as way to
allow personal expression in a more general way above and beyond
the content of the e-mail. They say, "I'm a real person, even though
you can't see me and you've never met me. I watch movies, have a
physical location, and have personal allegiances. Know me by my
sig."
Between the "from" line at the top, and the sig at the bottom, e-
mail is comfortably sheathed in a legitimating mantle of humanity,
indicating that it is from a person, even though it is delivered
through a machine. These patterns will be traced throughout the
rest of the observations.

Newsgroups Behaviors:
Convention and The Creation of a Selective Social Reality
Newsgroups are the public spaces of the Internet, and, in the
form of "discussion groups" or "discussion databases," any
networked computer environment. In a newsgroup, unlike e-mail,
one composes a message and posts it to a virtual "bulletin board"
for all readers connected to the system. Usually these bulletin
boards are divided into subject areas. The Usenet newsgroups, or
"netnews," are commonly carried by systems connected to the
Internet and they number in the thousands. These groups are
divided into hierarchies, with the "alt" or alternative branch
allowing newgroups to be added nearly at a whim by any system
administrator, while the other branches, including the "sci" or
science branch, must undergo administrative approval through the
committees nominally overseen by the National Science
Foundation. In any case, the typical user need not be aware of the
convoluted governing structures of netnews to observe fascinating
social behaviors, as I did in my observations.
The set of behaviors I observed as common and distinctive to
newsgroup reading on the Internet and that I will explore here are
"trolling," "flaming," "spamming," and "lurking." Related to these
behaviors are the use of the terms "thread," "newbies" and "gurus."
Indeed, users of the Internet, especially in the virtual public spaces,
have a distinctive social vocabulary that will be gradually explored
throughout these observations.
First of all, most posts are routine. They are brief, relate to the
topic of the group they are posted in, and usually include enough of
the previous postings to make sense in context. A group of
postings, beginning with a primary posting and followed by
responding commentary through several postings by several people,
is called, collectively, a "thread." A person who posts a message to
groups that are not related to its subject, or who includes excessive
and irrelevant material in any posting, is said to be "spamming" the
Internet. This practice is very strongly discouraged, as it is said to
waste "bandwidth." Bandwidth is a measure of the carrying
capacity of an Internet connection. "Flaming" is the act of posting a
strongly worded complaint about another's previous post, usually
without additional substance. "Trolling" is the act of posting an
inflammatory statement of any kind, with the implied intention of
raising controversy and personal attention.
Returning again to the interaction ritual as a mode of analysis,
each of these behaviors can be seen to perform a very predictable, if
disruptive, social function. Lonely people who post irrelevant racist
remarks in the middle of a philosophical discussion on affirmative
action are typically said to be "trolling" for angry attention. The
polite thing for a mature Internet reader to do after reading a "troll"
is to ignore it. "Newbies," those who are new to Internet culture,
might not recognize an "obvious troll," and might respond with
another strong post, creating a thread that spams the newsgroup.
Instead, newbies are encouraged to "lurk," reading other's posts
without posting themselves, and follow the example of very
knowledgeable users, who are called "gurus." For example, in a
"binaries" exchange newsgroup, in which users exchange computer
programs and data, repeated postings of threats and insults,
particularly directed at a particular individual, are common and
illicit frequent complaints. These complaints illicit further
complaint, creating an ongoing chain, like a propagating wave, that
can take days or weeks to die.
In this extended example, each of these sorts of posts can be
classified into types by examining their social content and social
implications, and form a coherent pattern of newsgroup behavior.
To further explore newsgroup behaviors, I will delineate a well-
known incident that I observed first-hand and have followed both
on the net and in the press. This incident, which has yet to entirely
disappear from attention, occurred in June, 1994, when the Phoenix
immigration law firm of Canter & Siegel posted an advertisement
for their immigration services to 6,000 newsgroups, most of which
had nothing to so with immigration. In this case, the law firm
spammed the Internet so thoroughly and so offensively, that the
outcry was tremendous. Having observed this fascinating incident
first hand from beginning to end, I noticed a variety of reactions.
Some of the most interesting were efforts to remove the firm from
the Internet. This brings us immediately to the informal enforcement
of rules on the Internet and especially in the newsgroups.
The most common method of protest is to flame the offending
poster. This is usually done publicly and with harsh language,
depending on the newsgroup. Less formal groups are likely to
feature very harsh language indeed. "Flame wars" are said to erupt
when two or more users commandeer a newsgroup to fling insults
at each other. On a second level of interaction, angry users may
telephone or e-mail the poster's Internet connection provider
directly to complain, and, depending on the regulations of the
provider, may successfully have the individual's access denied. For
example, an "inappropriate use," stipulation in a user's contract may
allow the provider to deny access to a user for having posted
irrelevant information to inappropriate newsgroups, thus wasting
others' time and resources. In the case of Canter and Siegel,
according to ongoing net lore, they have been forced to change
Internet providers at least twice. These moves were forced by yet
another level of informal enforcement: "mail bombing."
Mail bombing is the ultimate weapon available to an individual
on the Internet to attack another individual, besides directly taking
control of their account through surreptitious technical means.
When a person mail bombs another user, an attempt is made to so
continuously overfill their electronic mail box with complaints and
useless, gibberish e-mail, that they can no longer functionally use it.
Mail bombers typically create small programs to accomplish the
task of continual mailings, sometimes taking the ironic step of filling
the offender's mail box with the offending post. Mail bombing
usually results in overfilling the connection provider's entire "mail
spool," the common holding area for all users' new mail, so that the
provider is forced, simply to protect his other customers, to remove
the offending user's mail box from the machine. Mail bombing is,
technically, an inappropriate use of the Internet according to most
of the hodge-podge of regulations that currently reign. It is,
however, an inappropriate activity hidden behind the appropriate
and routine activity of sending e-mail, and is thus difficult for
system administrators to detect and act on. (See Section II for
detailed discussions of more formal Internet regulation.)
In the case of Canter and Siegel, their Internet provider,
Internet Direct, suffered a system crash when nearly 36,000 replies
inundated their equipment. In another similar case, which I also
observed as a user, another user tried to sell "thigh cream" by
posting to 2,397 newsgroups. The 2 million flames that replied
temporarily shut down that user's service provider, Shadow
Information Services. (Houston Chronicle, May 30, 1994, p.7A)
As we can see from these cases, elaborate conventions,
language to describe these conventions, and effective social
enforcement measures exist in Internet communities that go far
beyond any formal or even necessary governance.
Another fascinating aspect of the newsgroups is the use of
filters or "kill files." Filters are subroutines within news reading
programs that allow the user to designate certain patterns or
conditions under which the program should ignore a particular
news posting. Typically, a filter will be programmed to selectively
ignore postings made by a particular person whom the user dislikes.
Less frequently, messages posted from an entire Internet provider
will be ignored. I became aware of others' filter use primarily when
an irate user publicly announces that someone or a group has just
been added to their "kill file" and that others should also add this
person to their "kill file." I have observed this behavior numerous
times in numerous groups, most specifically aimed against users of
America On-Line. In most cases, this is because users of America
On-Line are stereotyped as being either commercial posters of
advertising or perpetual "newbie" posters who ignore most Internet
etiquette. The irate announcement posting is intended to both serve
as a humiliating flame and as an announcement that this group will
literally no longer exist in the future for the angry reader.
Obviously, this behavior has the ability to create selective realities
for the user. When the newsgroups are the primary social space of
the Internet, the selective representation of that social space means
that a selective social reality has been created. Voices a particular
user does not like are simply "filtered" into electronic oblivion.
This entire set of behaviors and usages suggests two important
sociological concepts that I have not yet addressed: power and
class. In the newsgroups, power tends to spring from one's ability
to argue convincingly in the context of the discussion. This is fairly
simple. Point and counter-point are made. Observers affirm or
deny. The discussion continues. Outside the context of the
discussion, however, power changes. The use of insults is common,
but it is questionable whether this does anything other than lower
the prestige of the offender. If a poster feels he has been personally
wronged by another, he may be simply trying to carry his offender
down with him into a muck of insult and unsubstantiated
accusation. This happens sometimes in "for sale" newsgroups where
a user who feels he has been cheated by another user might post the
user's name as a warning for others. The end result is usually that
both parties are generally ignored and detested.
Finally, there is an issue of class involved here. I have observed
that some newsgroups are consistently filled with postings of poor
grammar and misspellings, while others, especially moderated
groups, are consistently filled with insightful postings. I think that
there is a complex social mechanism acting here.
Newsgroups, as has been demonstrated by several behaviors,
tend to be as much for self-display as for the actual exchange of
information, and certain behaviors are more strongly rewarded or
more strongly criticized, depending on the newsgroup. Moreover,
disruptive behaviors receive reactions in some newsgroups and are
ignored in others. In some newsgroups, the exchange of insults is
an accepted interaction ritual, not because the users pretend that
they like it, but because they will involve themselves in the
exchange. In other groups, insults and disruptive posts are simply
ignored; the interaction ritual is never initiated. Another important
assumption that is being made here, is that the readers of a
particular group are consistent over time, that they form a coherent
population. Evidence of this is rampant, as when posters refer to
the newsgroup's long history, or to years old incidents involving
contemporary posters.
Finally, given these two logical conjectures, the tendency of
some newsgroups to participate in personal arguments and
"flaming" and other groups not to do so, and the assumption that
readers represent a static population over time, we can hypothesize
that newsgroups do, in time, tend towards one behavior pattern or
another, as disgusted users seek out other forums and stimulated
observers sally into the fray. This macrosociological pattern is both
amusing and insightful as to the future of networked
communications. Specifically, networked communications tend to
compartmentalize and dichotomize social behaviors and polarize
opinions. This is an important point that will be re-addressed in the
conclusions.

Listservs: Tenuous Temporal Links
This discussion on Listservs is very short because listservs are
so similar to newsgroups that most of the behaviors are the same.
They are included, however, because much can be learned by
comparing them to newsgroups. While newsgroups are commonly
carried centrally by networked computer systems for all users to
access, listservs are simply programs that automatically forward
either any mail they receive for the group, or a coherent
publication, like a journal, to every person who has signed up with
a personal e-mail address. They tend to serve highly specialized
topics that cannot be justified as universal newsgroups, but that
serve too large a number of people to be easily managed by
personal  e-mail.
In my observation of both moderated and unmoderated
listservs, and both professionally specialized and non-professional
listservs, the behaviors exhibited were similar to newsgroups. In
unmoderated listservs, new users were likely to make blunders, like
sending out personal requests for more information to the listserv
program, and thus having the request forwarded to everyone on the
list. Similarly, moderated listservs tended to be run like electronic
journals or to be transmitted in the form of daily or weekly
summaries. Little socializing occurs through listservs since they
tend to be more periodic and regulated than newsgroups. Listservs
do not appear to have a constant local presence, while newsgroups
are stored in a database on a local machine and  appear continuous,
and thus separate their readers by less perceived temporal distance.
While the local machine storing a newsgroup takes some time to
accumulate every response from every connected machine in the
world, it appears continuous to an observer, because it is always
present. A listserv appears more spread through time, even though
it may actually update faster than a newsgroup. We can conclude
from this comparison that the interaction ritual involved is strongly
influenced by the medium, as is the perception of social reality and
temporal distance.

MUDS: Virtual Social Reality
Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs, are one of the most important
parts of these observations for the simple reason that they compose
one the most fascinating social interactions that exist on the
Internet. MUDs are an attempt to completely supplant the
perceived social reality of the individuals involved with an artificial
and, in many cases, fantastic alternative reality.
A MUD is a program running on a machine that is accessible
through a networked computer. This program is a sophisticated,
object-oriented environment that creates itself around the user
through the presentation of textual or visual representations. Some
day these representations may extend to tactile or other sensory
stimulations. The MUD allows a number of users to simultaneously
experience the same environment, and further, to interact with one
another in that environment.
Usually, a MUD involves first logging onto the appropriate
machine, found through newsgroup postings or through a friend.
Logging on involves giving a name, sometimes one's real name,
sometimes an alias name, and a password to be used in future log-
ons.
Next, the user is usually introduced to the MUD environment
with messages from the MUD designer and maybe an introductory
lesson on using the MUD. Then, the user begins using commands
to move from one virtual room to another in the MUD,
encountering aspects of the MUD itself in objects and descriptions,
and encountering other users, who describe themselves to the user.
The user usually has the opportunity to manipulate the objects he
encounters with commands, and to affect varying levels of
interaction with the other users. In some cases this interaction can
include destroying another user's virtual representation and
removing the user from the machine.
For my observations, I registered as a player on the Farside
MUD through the Internet. I must readily state that it was the most
enjoyable portion of this observation project. For a month, I
became Korman the Wanderer, a virtual human warrior-druid that
others saw as a tall, bearded young man carrying primitive survival
equipment. I crafted this virtual representation using tools that
allowed me to distribute a limited number of points among physical
attributes, a common system in role-playing games. My goal, as
presented by the designers and operators of the MUD in their
introduction, was to accumulate game points and gain "levels," a
number that represents achievement in game terms. Game points
are gained by overcoming obstacles and destroying evil creatures in
the game.
For an hour or so a day, I wandered the City of Midguaard and
the plains, mountains and forests surrounding it. I fought ogre and
troll gangs in the Ganglands on White Dragon Avenue. I killed the
Fire Drake in the crypts beneath the Executioner's Block in Fate's
Corner, but was killed by wererats, repeatedly. This was a
competitive and cooperative exercise, in which subtle negotiations
were required. In the MUD, an individual wants to face challenges
in a "group" established electronically, so that ones movements are
tied to other players who can lend strength at critical times in
virtual combat. A leader is established for a group, and all members
electronically set their character in the game to automatically follow
the movements and actions of the leader, but may leave at any time.
Obviously, a leader does not want followers who will leave in the
middle of a difficult fight. Battles are initiated with the expectation
that the group will be fully present, and with the hope that the
collective strength of the group will overcome the creature being
attacked.
The designers and maintainers of MUD are typically called
Wizards. This status represents a mix of game achievement and
real-world achievement, meaning that the individual has the power
to manipulate the actual machine running the MUD, and thus has
absolute power over any portion of the MUD itself. Below
Wizards, who actually program the MUD on a daily basis to keep it
dynamic, are Heroes. Heroes are players who have achieved, in
game terms, status through accomplishment, but who do not,
necessarily, manipulate the externality of the MUD itself.
On the Farside MUD, the grouping process was coordinated by
Wizards and Heroes, who tried to convince more experienced and
more advanced players to aid younger, less experienced players. At
this point, for sociological discussion, obvious interaction rituals
become paramount. Altruistic helping and self-interested contracts
made between Wizards and lesser players mix to create a social
environment in which less experienced players are grouped with
more experienced players to accomplish "quests." For example, a
Wizard, upon noticing that I had arrived in his virtual kingdom,
asked a slightly more advanced player to equip and aid me. In
exchange, the Wizard promised to provide the advanced player with
an item of great power in the game. The player agreed, and we set
off together, the player helping me, and reminding me to tell the
Wizard how much he had helped.
The implication, both from discussion in the MUD and from
newsgroup postings, is that Wizards, (MUD operators) gain
personal prestige among all operators by gaining attention for their
MUD, and by the number of users and popularity of their MUD.
Thus, the Wizard, when contracting with the player to help me, was
attempting to ensure my continued participation and enjoyment of
his creation. While he was giving up some power to the player, in
that he was allowing the player to more easily overcome obstacles
with the new item, he was gaining a new potential player in me, as
well as obvious enjoyment from the negotiation process, which I
also to observed.
A MUD usually includes "channels" for discussion that allow
one to talk to other players, either individually or as a group. Thus
all the time that one is playing the game, messages from other
players are flashing across the screen. MUDs are filled with social
rituals. In the one I observed, and in two other game-oriented
MUDs, the ritual of congratulating another member publicly when
that member achieved a level in ranking was obligatory. It took
only a session before I found myself actively participating in these
rituals; I felt the virtual eyes of other players on my when I did not,
although I was never publicly or privately asked to participate. To
not participate would have been like joining the tribe and refusing
to dance around the fire when it was my turn to congratulate the
tribe's returning hunters. So I found myself shouting "Congrats
Blawkhawk!" and similar statements.
To ease and organize a user's interactions with a MUD, there
are many "client" programs to receive the information from the
MUD. Rather than simply displaying this continuous flood of
information sequentially on your screen, the client organizes your
screen into areas with different sorts of information on different
portions of your screen, so that the user can find information more
quickly. In fact, client programs often have features that allow one
to program one's character to automatically say certain things to
other players when conditions are met. For example, one might
program one's client to say "Hello" whenever a new player joins the
game, or when a certain known player joins the game.
Another ritual one might program was the congratulatory
statement upon achievement of a level. Congratulations in MUDing
often involve more than a simple word. To add emphasis, non-
grammatical structures like ">>>>" are routinely
transmitted. Some of these phrases are elaborate enough that when
levels are being achieved regularly by the other players on-line, one
would not expect already busy and in some cases irritable players to
take time from a "life-threatening" battle to type a congratulatory.
From this premise, I began to notice that several of the more
established players transmitted exactly the same statement each
time, despite its elaborateness, and without pause, as soon as a
player announced a level achievement. My suspicion is that these
statements were either coded to transmit when the word "level"
was used, a common single-word announcement, or that they were
sent with a single "hot-key." Thus a busy player could fulfill his
social responsibilities to the commonality with the stroke of a single
key, while still reserving his awareness for the game battle or
negotiation at hand.
Other types of MUDs I have observed included one called
"New Orleans," which was a party-oriented "chat" MUD. It was
designed for individuals to isolate themselves in virtual rooms, and
talk on any topic, but usually oriented towards mutual sexual
titillation. There exist, in fact, a great many programs to maintain
MUD environments, and a great many people customizing and
running these programs on their machines. Some MUDS are role-
playing oriented, chat oriented, or combat oriented. Some are
intended as educational environments and are maintained by
universities.
Finally, the use of names in MUDing is an elaborate social
behavior. On the Farside MUD, one chooses a false name or alias
upon registering to play, and one's real name is never used. Players
are told not to register two players under different names, but there
is little to prevent this. While character names in the game are not
used to designate a family or cultural origin, as they are in real life,
they do play significant social roles.
On the Farside MUD, a single command allows one to view the
name of every other player currently logged on. Names were
typically used, in this setting, as personal declarations. In other
words, if my name was "Korman," I might decide one evening to
append to the end of the name, "just finished his last paper before
X-Mas" or similar news of personal moment, so that I become
"Korman just finished his last paper before X-Mas." While personal
discussions were infrequent, and most of the time I knew little
about the other players, small amounts of personal information
could be accumulated over time within the confines of the game by
observing how names changed from day to day.
Regulation of names, on some MUDs, is very strict. On another
MUD I observed, players were told that they must choose a name
that fits into the mythical/medieval setting of the game, or their
registration would be erased from the game. Thus, the name was
used as a way to complete the fantasy world the designers had
created, so that not only did the world appeared as a mythical
medieval forestland, but the players appeared as appropriate
characters within that setting.
Personal discussions relating to the world beyond the MUD
were infrequent, but did occur. One of the most interesting
observations I made on the Farside MUD was of a conversation
between players about gender. One player asked everyone how he
could tell whether another player, with a female anglo name, was
actually female. Some players responded that it did not matter if she
was female, while others responded that there was no way for him
to tell. The player in question said simply, "You can't." Another
player answered, "I know she's female. I can tell just from the way
she talks." Most of the players had male names, and, probably, most
were male. Also, the player in question probably was female, as she
was a Wizard, and seemed connected to another Wizard with a
male name. The implication is that they were co-workers at the site
where the MUD machine was kept, or were husband and wife
maintainers in their home or place of business. In the end, however,
I could not know with any certainty, even after this conversation
and after a nearly universal declaration of gender, who was actually
male and who was female.
The idea of role-playing is that one can become, temporarily at
least, what one is not, and the Farside MUD designers created a
world in which anyone could become anything they desired, while
logged-in. In fact, MUD lore, as taken from MUD related-
documents, like the Internet "MUD Frequently Answered
Questions," suggests that some ingenious and ingenuous
programmers register self-contained programs as players, which
then participate in the MUD as if there were humans. This is reality
stretched very thin, and maintained almost entirely through social
ritual, to the point that ritual can replace reality almost entirely. In
some way, of course, this is what MUDing is; electronic social
ritual and virtual social relationships taking the place of reality.

FTP, Gopher, WAIS and The Web: New Interfaces, Same
Environment
The World Wide Web, Gopher and Wide Area Information
Servers, (WAIS), are forms of archive or service interface. I
clumsily group these three together here because they all serve the
same purpose: making the user interface with networked
information services easier to use and more attractive in
appearance. Only the Web begins to offer truly new services.
Gopher and its older cousin WAIS, tend to provide easy ways to
access electronic libraries, newsgroups, specialized archives, and
perform searches through menus. They are, surprisingly, non-social
environments in themselves.
The Web, on the other hand, a standard used to publish both
textual and graphical information in an attractive manner over the
Internet and to provide some forms of interactive access, promises
to cause greater change. While the Web is no more inherently social
than the other forms of interface, it does fundamentally change the
usage of networked communications in that it provides both viable
electronic-publishing in a flexible and low-cost format and it
provides easy-to-use interactive documents that will make it
possible for anyone to perform the most complicated network
communications using a mouse and a few key-strokes. The Web
promises to change our meaning of communication because it hides
the workings of the net behind colorful graphics, and allows users
to concentrate on the communication or publication. Furthermore,
it allows the creation of documents that reside in more than one
physical location on the Internet. A document may be composed of
portions taken from an archive or resource anywhere on the net. As
a result, the organization of knowledge may change entirely, just as
the academic work product was described as changing earlier.
Cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural, cross-spatial, cross-temporal
methods of organizing knowledge may become common. In my
observation, it has not yet happened on an appreciable scale, but
that is changing, day by day.

Technology and Teaching
Observations for this project were not limited to electronic
interactions, but also included direct observation of external social
processes that influence the networking environment. One of these
observations included observation and discussion with individuals
involved in Rice University's Technology and Teaching Self-Study
Committee. This observation provided insight into the decision-
making processes regarding university networking resources. The
committee looked at the future of networking in higher education
for several months by considering internal needs, potential for
growth, and by comparing the university's network with other
universities'. My participant observation included attending this
committee's open meetings, and private meetings with the chairman
of the committee, Dr. Fredrick B. Rudolph, Executive Director of
the Institute of Biosciences and Biochemistry at Rice.
During my observations, several prominent themes emerged
which have implications for the social environment of networking.
The most important topic of discussion for this committee was
how to pursue electronic publishing at Rice. The primary concerns
were about how to finance development of hypertext networked
projects, when such a project under the direction of Professor of
History Dr. Albert Van Helden, had required a year of work, and
two assistants. Approaching the project as a new form of "academic
work product," yielded, quite aptly, comparisons between the
project and the writing of a text book. The ability to exchange such
projects with other universities, in order to mutually enhance the
teaching of some subject, was suggested as a way to limit
development costs while still attempting to allow every department
to be involved in electronic publishing and to teach classes
involving networked resources.
Professors and administrators also expressed concern about any
attempt at "replacing" the professor with a computer. They noted
that while networked communications may be of great benefit to
larger universities where resources like specialized books and
experts are already spread thin, and community colleges where
resources are scarce, they were not sure that they should be used in
the same way at small private universities.
In my observations of this decision-making process, the
discussions were surprisingly open and informal. Everyone present
spoke up and there were a variety of views presented. Students,
however, were not represented, unless I count my own voice.
Dr. Rudolph noted in private conversation that the presence of
the "original" professor at a private university must remain to justify
the tuition to the students who attend.  The sociological and
economic question must be, then, will it be enough? What will
happen when, as Dr. Rudolph wryly suggested, we put the Rice
English Department's Dr. Dennis Huston's Shakespeare lectures on
an interactive CD-ROM and ship them to every university in the
U.S., so that Shakespeare in the U.S. becomes Dr. Huston? What is
the role of the professor, and how does a professor stay involved
with students in the university, when the university can not afford
to hire the professor away  from the CD-ROM publisher and
students think all they need is the CD-ROM?
While the committee felt that the presence of the professor will
always be enough of a draw to maintain the private university, and
that teaching will never be replaced by interactive computer
communications, there is no question that the teaching environment
is changing through computer networking, and rapidly.
This Rice committee is not alone in thinking and worrying about
the future of the academic environment in the face of technological
advance. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education
quoted the Carnegie Mellon University Computer planning
committee as advocating bold steps that will place that university
"in an undisputed position of leadership in the arena of technology-
enabled higher-education." In the process, the report proposes
establishing a campus or even city-wide wireless network so that
"by 2001 many courses... would be almost completely remote in
space and time." It goes on, "By relaxing the constraints of time
and space, it says, 'new technologies can permit educational settings
to have radically different features from those we have become
accustomed to.' Technology has the promise to heighten
educational productivity not just by increasing the number of
learners, but by enhancing the learning outcome."
The report also claims that, "It may be possible, for example, to
teach the same material in less time by adapting the curriculum to
the level of the individual, rather than pacing for the average." The
report criticizes current efforts and says that, "Educators have been
slow to explore technological advances... Indeed, in many respects,
the process of educating has changed little in the last century."
(Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 26, 1994, p.A26 )
The University of Virginia is pursuing a similar route, and
publicizes its accomplishments with the booklet "The Electronic
Academical Village: Technology in the Classroom at the University
of Virginia." The booklet itself is simply an overview of the
university's networking facilities polished with a marketer's pen, but
it is designed to gain greater recognition of the role of computer
communications in higher education.
Notre Dame has published a booklet of faculty essays on using
technology in teaching called, Changing the Process of Teaching
and Learning (1994). In the essay by sociology professor Lyn
Spillman, "Using Email for Class Writing and Discussion," she
explains how she used email for "work eliciting shared reflection
about the relevance of crucial concepts through shared written
examples, for email summaries of original research projects and
discussions of findings, and for exercises in comprehension of more
challenging reading assignments." She notes that she also
"encouraged more frequent personal communications as students
developed research topics and designs."
While Spillman noted that more students dropped the class than
usual, and that these were disproportionally female students who
dropped after the introduction of email assignments, her overall
experience with the project was successful. She cautions professors
to go slowly and not to overestimate experience, and notes that
some students changed attitude, even if they begin without interest
in e-mail. Finally, she noted that classes need a person to be
available to students for individual help with their e-mail accounts.
Most notably, she said that the project worked best for discussions
between students about their projects.
The periodical Syllabus, focuses especially on the use of
technology in the classroom, and its November/December issue of
1994 featured "Education and the Internet" as its cover story.  This
story focused mostly on the model of an "electronic library" using
FTP, Gopher and WAIS as systems to access information remotely,
and ending, as most such articles do, by discussing the World Wide
Web as the new standard. (Vol 8, no. 3)
In summary, networking is definitely changing the classroom in
higher education, some places much more quickly than others.
While I observed that attitudes are mostly hopeful, cautious voices
are also taken seriously at Rice.

Lexus/Nexus vs. Guerrilla Networking and AOL: The
Battle Is On
Where do net-users typically find their connection, and what do
the use it to do? On the Internet itself, connections to the Internet
are registered by organization. E-mail addresses and other
functional parts of the Internet use these addresses to help route
information correctly. There is a long history behind these naming
schemes, most of which is now irrelevant, but certain trends hold.
Throughout most of the world, organizational connections go by
names, called "domains," that indicate their geographical location,
like "phillips.uk" for Philips Petroleum of the United Kingdom. In
the United States, where there are a greater number of connections,
names tend to be categorized into commercial, organizational,
educational, military or network connections. These categorizations
are represented by the designations ".com", ".org", ".edu", ".mil"
and ".net", respectively. While the emergence of commercial
providers for the common man and the non-technical business have
begun to sway the balance of users towards those with "com" in
their name, the others still hold strong sway.
In my observation, educational users tend to use the Internet
and network communications for a mix of research information
gathering, sending both academic and personal e-mail, and for
doing technical homework. Organizational users tend to be
associated with non-profit or professionally oriented groups, like
the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, a non-profit group that lobbies
and supplies information about networking privacy and freedom
issues. These connections tend to feature "information
clearinghouses" and to be maintained by more experienced users of
the net. While I know very little about the typical military user,
since they appear not to interact a great deal in the newsgroups,
possibly because it is against organizational policy of some kind,
some military sites do maintain public-access archives and
administrate listserv machines for public use.
The two types of commercial users, the personal and the
business user, must be our next focus of attention, as these two
groups are the ones undergoing change, and are bringing the net
into the popular culture. In my observation, commercial users
associated with business tend to use the Internet for such tasks as e-
mail and information publishing about their products. Sometimes
these uses have included specialized information gathering, such as
receiving stock market quotes or Associated Press news clips.
As a part of the overall commercial change, the entire
information industry appears to be undergoing serious changes that
threaten the large companies, like Lexus/Nexus, that have
monopolized electronic services for business for decades. The
emergence of greater numbers of networks easily accessible over a
now-public Internet have allowed competitors to reach the markets
with ease. Additionally, their use of fast-adapting, low-overhead
"client/server" technology, developed and first widely used in the
late 1980s, has allowed small companies and even individuals to
start an information distributing company in a garage. These small
companies threaten to simply overrun the mainframe-using
behemoths like Compuserve, Prodigy, and AT&T. In my
experience, these smaller companies are able to out-maneuver their
bulky uncles by using newer equipment and specializing into a
single area of service, or a single product. I call this style of
networking "guerrilla networking," and, its tactics are analogous to
that of guerrilla warfare. Markets are seized and held for short
times, until another company comes along or another distribution
technology develops. The technology is cheap and disposable,
easily replaced or upgraded for the next wave of battle. Hit and run
marketing campaigns are pitched forward against opposing
services.
Wolf Communications is just such a company. It serves a highly
specialized clientele using flexible client/server systems that can
literally be upgraded overnight, and have been, to keep up with
rising waves of information and usage. Overhead is kept low by
hiring young workers who are taught everything they need to know
to run the network on the job. In fact, hiring experts would be a
waste of time; the technology changes so quickly that there are
none available. Hiring is a continuous problem. The network
physically exists in the back room of an oil company, which has
been hastily adapted as a general workroom and wired for high-
speed connections.
Another small company is Carthage Today, a company run by
two brothers in Houston. This company provides daily news-
clippings in electronic form for individuals based on a personalized
profile in electronic form. The information is distributed in
cooperation with networks like Wolf's, so that the company itself is
not dependent on the market-base of any one network provider, but
works with several simultaneously, and in several formats. The
promise of new high-speed network standards specifically designed
for business uses and telecommuting, like ISDN, will only increase
the networking options available for small start-up companies,
while allowing everyone access to the larger companies' many
services.
The other type of typical commercial user is a private individual
who has taken up a private account with a commercial provider,
like America On-line or Compuserve, in order to learn more, send
private e-mail, or communicate from a home-office. These users,
expectedly, tend to be stereotyped as the perpetual "newbies" of the
net, at least as much for their lack of affiliation as for their actual
ignorance. Their use tends to be mainly of their own connection
provider's services and is usually isolated from the Internet at large.
This is and will continue to change, however, as more users demand
more flexible connections with the Internet and especially use of
World Wide Web browsers.
The entire discussion of "who uses the Internet" must be
tempered with realistic figures. A recent Harris Poll carried out in
April of 1994 indicated that only 34% of individuals polled say they
have ever heard, read, or seen anything about the "Information
Superhighway." Most were men from the Western United States.
Those who had heard of it tended to be better educated and used
computer more in their daily lives. Most of them thought that the
"Information Superhighway" was for business, even though
business use of networked communications is, in reality, still
infantile. Most who had heard of it think as a good idea. (The
Harris Poll 1994 #29)
Thus, strong cautions should be placed around any
consideration of the networking industry. While the networked
environment does certainly represent a very important social
environment with symbols and interactions that are beginning to
affect our popular culture, and the Harris Poll figures on popular
awareness must certainly be considered well out of date just a few
months later, the networked environment is not yet a place where
most American expect to find themselves on a regular basis, or even
very soon. It is still the province of well-educated, high-income
males who were using computers for business or research before
the coming of the "Information Superhighway."
In final comment about commercial users, the current unspoken
conflict seems to be between private service providers, like America
On-Line and Compuserve, with their closed, proprietary systems,
and the Web on the Internet, with its open, publicly oriented
systems. I find it fascinating that magazines like Time and
Newsweek decide to build their electronic newsstands on the tiny
islands of America On-Line, while the ocean of the Web laps at
their doorstep. Basically, this is a statement about how little
confidence these companies have in their own technical staff's being
able to effectively create an electronic newsstand that is simply
Newsweek's; instead, it must be Newsweek at AOL. Thus, when the
Web becomes the world standard, as it may have already,  these
companies will be left far behind. They will literally have to start
over.
Conclusions: Macrosociological Theories
An enormous amount of information has been presented in this
paper, and an enormous number of observed behaviors cataloged
and analyzed * and these are just a few of the more interesting
behaviors, to say nothing of more routine, but nonetheless
interesting interactions. The final task at hand then, is to return to
the original hypothesis that guided these observations, and attempt
to make some coherent macrosociological sense of this wide range
of microsociological patterns and behaviors. To use Mills' terms, it
is time to find the intersection between biography and history and
complete the inquiry's journey.

A Structural Analysis
Up to this point, I have taken a purely interactionist approach to
the Internet, with brief asides dedicated to a historical approach in
the history and literature review, and a biographical approach in the
interviewing study. It might be appropriate at this point, to achieve
a better macrological understanding, to consider a structuralist
approach to the Internet, enlightened by the data collected so far.
First, the advent of client/server technology, in which one can
access vast amounts of information from small clusters of
specialized "server" units, using a personal computer with
specialized "client" software, has had several effects. Rather than
wiping away the strictly hierarchical authority structure of the
earlier mainframe/terminal model of access, it has softened but
entrenched a new form of top-down authority. Internet access is for
the masses, as long as those masses use a mediator, usually called
an Internet Service Provider and his server computer.
Simply by playing upon the names of the machines and the
structures of their relationships, social implications emerge. The
"server" machine, server company and server system administrator
are Christ-like in this system, giving of themselves to serve out the
electronic Word to a crisis-ridden post-modern information
economy of Faustian business and academic dead-lines. In this
mode, the server is both bridge by which one approaches the Great
Beyond, that is the Internet, and also the master, able to control or
deny access. In the use of client/server technology, the server
stands as the central cathedral of the Internet Church. There are one
or more servers to an information village, depending on how many
ways people want access to the wonders of the Beyond, and the
clients branch from these servers like cottages from the town
square.
"Firewall" servers, systems that are the security screens between
internal networks and outside networks, add another element to the
structure. The firewalls that protect your local information village
suggest just how dangerous the Great Beyond really is, and that
while the Internet is worth reaching, an ultimate and worthy goal,
the supplicant user absolutely must submit to a mediator, who
protects him from the full flaming glory/terror that is the Outside.
The use of the word "client" for the user at the other end,
Romanesque and somehow quaint, ambiguously suggests both the
subservient, lesser nature of the user, but also the formal,
commercial relationship between the client and the server. This
relationship of both supplication and integrity with the whole is
emphasized in e-mail, where the individual becomes
mark.smith@bain_consulting.sprint.com. The "@" is a superficial
demarcation of the individual. Mark does not actually exist in the
electronic world. Only mark.smith@bain_consulting.sprint.com
exists, just as, in the medieval world, he might have been called,
Mark the Smith, Brother of the Order of Bain, at Sprint-on-the-
Ocean. He is nothing without membership in his information village,
from which he derives his identity and worth on the Net.
Surrendering this analysis to the iconography of the net for a
moment, and looking to technical IP technology texts, we see that
these themes are not played with a light hand. The Internet, or I-
Net is typically depicted in the educational diagrams of such books
as a great hovering cloud above the server and suckling clients. It is
imagined, always, as unknown and unobservable. Using IP
technology, reaching out with packets of information into that great
unknown cloud, even on the technical level, is imagined as an act of
faith. It is blind submission to the floating cloud/pillar of fire which
has been summoned by arcane rituals and sacred knowledge.
In the text-book icons, and in the software that network
engineers sometimes employ to depict systems for each other, and
especially for business proposals intended for "laymen," the server
is depicted as a black box and tower-like, a powerful, radiative
presence that mediates between the mysterious cloud and the
mundane user. The network engineer's world is that of the server,
so we should not be surprised that he presents his object of focus as
the Pontiff, a bridge to the Beyond, or maybe the Brahma, radiating
the Oversoul to the faithful. These "new-breed" servers are always
described in the manufacturer's promotional literature as
"intelligent," "fast," and "powerful." Even the brand names of these
machines reflect their conceptual import. The "Shiva Netmodem"
name suggests both lightening speed and divinity. The "Prosignia"
and "Prolinia" server lines from Compaq suggest the regal,
omnipotent nature of these machines, like Proconsuls of the Empire
or Questors of the Circus Maximus. The show must go on and the
Beyond must be delivered to the client.
Finally, not only are these Servers pan-radiative, but they are
also pan-optical, able to watch every client at once, to monitor
every transaction. This creates a certain social/moral tension along
the following lines:
Access of the Client                    vs.     Security of the
Server
Privacy of the Client                   vs.     Accepted
usage of the Server
Freedom of the Client                   vs.     Indictment of
the Server for violence
        or pornography
Moral Independence of the Client                vs.     Infection of
the Server with viruses
        or "Crashing" the Server

Obviously, this approach has some striking sociological
implications. The user is being acted on as much as he is acting.
Steve Woolgar, a Reader in Sociology at West London University,
calls this process of changing the user, and the merger of subject
and object between user and system, "configuring the user." (p. 58,
1991). The question of "boundedness" and what the "machine" as
entity is capable of are greatly stretched by client/server technology.
These machines dictate relationships at least as much as any
previous technology, and probably much more so. A new teleology,
a chain of sacred being, is established by these services, and as our
economy, government and eventually the communications and
locus of culture shift towards these media, so will our self-image
and society. As was hinted at in the introduction to this paper,
something about human experience is fundamentally changing.
The foregoing analysis, while very different and much more
speculative than previous approaches, is both informed by the
interviews and observations, and is further illuminating of the
hypothesis under analysis.

Corralling Hypothesis
Finally, let us re-address the hypothesis that started this inquiry.
In evaluating the "frontier model," we note that, more often than
not, the needs of the culture have begun to displace the needs of the
technology. While resource management will continue to be a
necessity on the Net, just as humanity must eat, the more important
question will, from here forward be, what and how will humanity
eat, and how will we use the Net? The answers to these questions
come from culture, not from the technology, not from any
knowledge of technology, and not from any necessity of its
function. While there are still settlers coming in, and there are still
conflicts over resources, the management of resources will not be a
central organizing principle, in and of itself. This is especially true
with the advent of independently powerful client computers and
software, so that every new user brings some portion of wood to
the common fire. This frontier model then gives way to evaluation
of the "immigrant model" as a hypothesis to understand the overall
social environment.
Given that the immigrant model has as its central organizing
principle the stratification of users by cultural assimilation, the
behavior patterns and the meanings of these patterns that have been
cataloged in this study have certainly supported this model. Indeed,
users tend to stratify themselves according to knowledge and use of
netiquette. The one problem with the model however, and it is a
fundamental one, is that Net culture is not static. In fact, it changes
so quickly that what was unacceptable last night may be the social
practice tonight. The law firm of Canter and Siegel, after posting
their ad and being removed from their Internet provider, returned to
found the company Cybersell, which now specializes in selling
products and services over the Internet. While the immigrant model
is highly insightful with regard to understanding many
microsociological interactions in individual forums on the Internet,
it does not yield an overarching theory.
Finally, then, we are left to evaluate the "Internet as culture
generator" hypothesis. This hypothesis imagines the Internet as
fundamentally post-modern, where theories of order are less useful
than theories of change and theories of disorder. Indeed, it is in this
hypothesis that we finally see a glimmer of hope for an overall
theory.
Let us begin to approach this glimmer by re-evaluating some of
our earlier conclusions. First of all, there are distinctive patterns of
social behavior observed on the Internet. These patterns seem to  be
influenced by the medium in which they exist, and are particularly
subject to temporal and spatial dislocation. Second, these patterns
of behavior do not exist without important and structuring social
meanings. Third, these social meanings are self-referential and self-
perpetuating. The hypothesis that hopes to explain this social
environment must be evaluated in light of these conclusions.
In what ways is this hypothesis adequate, and in what ways is it
lacking? First, this paper has repeatedly cataloged the distinctive
patterns of behavior that can be observed on the Internet. Further,
meanings have been explored that relate to these behaviors using
Goffman's model of the interaction ritual. For example, in an
environment in which there is little real personal space save a few
megabytes of memory in an account, an amazing number of ways
emerge to allow one to express ones' self and establish a "sheath" of
humanity around what would otherwise be mechanistic activity.
Just as Goffman talks about people using a variety of behaviors and
conventions to create interaction rituals that make the social world
run smoothly, so too does the Internet have its own social rituals.
Understanding these behaviors in a symbolic way indicates that not
only are there a variety of ways to establish space, but that the
methods used may tell others about one's knowledge of the net, and
thus about one's position as a user. Technical knowledge,
persuasiveness, altruistic helping, use of sigs to express personality,
and other behaviors serve as examples of "face work" used in the
drama of interaction to tell others something about the self within
the context of the new culture.
These patterns of face work have evolved into a system of
common meaning so that knowledge, wit, expressions of
personality, and altruistic cooperation are universally recognized as
ways to elevate personal status, while flaming can be used as a way
to control unconventional behaviors, or even to gain attention, in
exchange for status. Also, knowledge is exchanged for prestige by
"gurus" who help supplicant users. A pattern of generally
integrative rules emerge, as well as patterns around the breaking of
these rules. In the tradition of Mill and Rousseau, a sort of natural
"rule-utilitarianism" can be observed to emerge out of the "jungle"
of the Net, with display as an important part of the rule function.
Informal rules emerge, which lead, over repeated iterations, to the
greater good of the social commonality and the opportunity for
personal display. These rules may be broken, but the society has
established methods to deal with the breaking rules. Things are not
this simple, of course, but let us accept this basic premise for now.
Second, we note that these patterns of behavior are made up of
symbols, and have a social meaning. They are not simply functional.
The use of sigs, the conscious decision to violate informal
expectations, the following of roles in a MUD, are all behaviors
which have no meaning on the Internet, not even a technical,
functional meaning, without the social structure. Just as man's
cultural resources quickly made his relative lack of biological
resources as a species irrelevant, so too has the culture of the
Internet begun to supersede the importance of its technological
body. Now, culture, ideas, vision, and a willingness to create or to
destroy, rule the net. It is no longer a small feudal establishment
where static baronies or "domains" rule; registering a domain takes
a few weeks, and virtually anyone with a little money can do it.
Instead, it is a common virtual reality, a newly emerging publicly
accessible social space.
But, of course, things are not as simple as these two
observations might lead us to believe and the cultural generation
hypothesis cannot explain everything. As we have seen, this is a
society in transformation, a society in which the rules are
continuously changing. Confusion and ambiguity result. The ability
to automatically filter received information threatens the coherence
of the culture, so that two individuals can be in the same social
environment, but never interact, never see the other, in fact, live in
different social realities. A general fragmentation continually
threatens as a possible end result. The use of kill files in the
common social space and the mix of peer-to-peer and hierarchical
authority models means that the final organizational structure could
be made up of a variety of small publics, rather than one large
public. As a result, the culture of the Internet is not coherent, nor is
it gaining in coherence. On the contrary, rather than a dominant
culture emerging, as would be a typical human social pattern,
consciousness is fragmenting. New users can, in fact, effectively
create their own culture; they may not have any choice if they are
ignored.
Finally then, to complicate rather than to illuminate the
"subcultural hypothesis", the net is losing coherence, and causing
loss of coherence throughout the datasphere, rather than generating
a Gramchian hegemony. This is post-modern society manifest. In
the words of Lyotard, "What is new in all of this is that the old
poles of attraction represented by nation-states, parties, professions,
institutions, and historical tradition are losing their attraction. And
it does not look as though they will be replaced, at least not on their
former scale." (p. 15, 1993)
Taking Lyotard's assertion one step further, even as society
undergoes the post-modernizing loss of polarization, the de-
polarization of the Net * and because of the Net * is even
greater. The problem is one of demagnetizing all the cultural poles,
and the subsequent fragmentation of consciousness. To illustrate
this process, I postulate "edgespace." Edgespace is the post-modern
environment of social space on the Internet. The Internet, by its
very nature, is continually on the outer, radical fringe of the
creation of culture. It is absorbing culture, and then regenerating it
anew, transformed, virtualized, and immersing us in it. And it does
so in defiance of every other medium. The edgespace is the first
instance of mimetic dissemination that defies any media other than
itself, and is thus inherently, continuously self-referential. It takes
culture, communications, identity, and re-emits them transformed,
so that it is incompatible with any reality other than its own. While
some, like Baudrillard, would argue that television, and America as
TV Land, caused just such a de-polarization/fragmentation in mid-
century, I would argue that we have not seen even the first-wave
yet.
Edgespace is the space where new culture is being continually
created and then disseminated at the speed of light on a fiberoptic
cable. Edgespace is the Internet's continual process of history-
making and history-losing.
 The behaviors this paper has cataloged could only occur in
edgespace because they are both self-referential and self-
perpetuating, yet incoherent. The Internet as a whole is like the
wave-front of a newsgroup flame war, only on a larger scale,
because its symbols have no meaning outside the social
environment in which they were created, yet are absorbing the
culture around themselves and re-emitting it. Net culture is self-
perpetuating because it transforms whatever it comes into contact
with. Every form of personal communication has been transformed
when it has come into contact with the net, to the extent that some
forms, like MUDs, exist only on the Net * and could exist only on
the Net. Networked communications are fundamentally and
irrevocably transformative. Every observation I have made of
individuals using them have indicated that just as the coming of the
networks has changed the structure of the information industry, so
too has the substance of culture and the meaning of
communications changed for each user. Looking to the selective
interview study, interviewees expressly noted that once they had
used e-mail intensively, they felt they could never go back, and that
it had changed their form of communications entirely.
Looking again to Lyotard to help understand the large-scale
implications of this change, he says, "It is reasonable to suppose
that the proliferation of information-processing machines is having,
and will continue to have, as much of an effect on the circulation of
learning as did advancements in human circulation (transportation
systems) and later, in the circulation of sounds and visual images
(the media).
"The nature of knowledge cannot survive unchanged within this
context of general transformation. It can fit into the new channels,
and become operational, only if learning is translated into quantities
of information. We can predict that anything in the constituted body
of knowledge that is not translatable in this way will be abandoned
and that the direction of new research will be dictated by the
possibility of its eventual results being translatable into computer
language. The 'producers' and users of knowledge must now, and
will have to, possess the means of translating into these languages
whatever they want to invent or learn. Research on translating
machines is already well advanced. Along with the hegemony of
computers comes a certain logic, and therefore a certain set of
prescriptions determining which statements are accepted as
'knowledge' statements." (p. 4, 1993)
I can foresee the "post-Internet study" phase in sociology. Just
as networked social environments are currently being studied as one
of the greatest social transformations of our time, there will come a
time when no one studies networked environments. No one will
study networked environments because all environments will be
networked, and to study society will be to study a networked
environment.
Finally, the most important observation that must be taken away
from this paper is that on the Internet, and hence throughout the
emerging post-modern datasphere, there is no effort to synchronize
responses or to synchronize meanings. Accepting the
transformative power of the Internet, and the incorporation of
society into Net culture, one question remains. Given the
fragmentary tendencies of Internet communications, and the rapid
evolutionary, even revolutionary nature of social norms and
expectations on the Net, how long can culture survive as a high
modern coherency? How soon will the use of the Internet, in
addition to other influences, entirely transform us into a
compartmentalized, multi-realitied society? These are questions this
research can foresee, but cannot answer.




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  The bulk of a revised version of the literature review submitted as the first
 part of this project has
become section two. It is suggested that this section be read first if the basi
c history and use of computer
networks are unfamiliar. It will prove redundant with the other sections of thi
s paper at times, but is an
important part of the overall project. Section one is the revised version of th
e paper "Network
Communication, the New Social Frontier: A Study Using Selective Interviews," wh
ich was completed as a
part of another project, and was intended as a pilot study for this project.
 Please note that I am also employed at this time by Wolf Communications Compan
y. This company
provides Lotus Notes services to customers all over the world. I did not, howev
er, use the computer
systems extensively at the time of the interviews. As I was making no evaluatio
n of this company, nor of
these people, and they had the opportunity to present their own perceptions in
interview, I feel that my
employment has not significantly biased this study. The only real effect that i
t might have had was to
make them more willing to cooperate in the study.