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 knowledg