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Before continuing with the discussion, it would probably be useful, to describe some features of the Internet, even though nowadays the Internet probably needs little introduction. However, it is not that long since the Internet was widely unknown, so it does little harm to briefly go over what everyone may already know.
The Internet can be thought of as a worldwide network of computers which can transmit packets of data between each other. The data, or information, is usually transmitted via cable, phone lines or satellite. Because it forms an interconnected network, the Internet should ideally have no central nodes, or computers, through which all information must pass (in practice there are some nodes in the network which have much larger amounts of such traffic than other nodes, and some countries have tried to ensure that all data must enter and leave their country through the one node). Ideally if any node is not working then the packets will be sent by an alternate route. People, in general, either access the Internet via a place of work which functions as an Internet node, via a local area network (LAN) connected to such a node, or via a commercial Internet Supplier (ISP). Thus the number and type of people who can generally access the Internet, or who can use it for any length of time is limited by availability of connection, as well as by the distribution of competencies such as computer literacy, language literacy, familiarity and so on.
As a way of transmitting information, the Internet can be used for many different purposes and in many different ways. It can be used like a traditional broadcaster transmitting video, sound, text or graphics from a source to an audience (though at the moment the results are not particularly satisfactory in comparison with more traditional broadcasters), it can be used to transmit video, sound, texts or graphics from one person to another (or from one person to a group), or it can be used to store information which can then be retrieved, either by specific people or people in general - the most visible part of this latter function is the World Wide Web, which may be thought of as a vast, unorganised, and largely unsupervised public database.
In this book, our attention focuses largely on the transmission of texts between people. Most text transmission occurs in several different kinds of way. Through email (between individuals or through group Mailing Lists), through newsgroups, through IRC channels, through ICQ, or via MOOs. Chatrooms, another popular form of communication, generally approximate MOOs or IRC channels. Of these methods of communication most attention in this book focuses on transmission of email, though it is useful to have some idea of what is involved in all of these modalities.
Different types of Internet Grouping
It is suggested that the different types of structures of communication in the differing types of Internet group, enable and restrict different types of behaviour. This range of behaviour may well also remain restricted by the values and behaviours people use in offline life.
Mailing Lists.
On a Mailing List each person must subscribe by registering their email address with the computer which holds the software running the list. They will then receive all the mail that is written to that list. The Listowner is the person who is responsible for the list. The listowner is usually also the moderator of the list, though there may be more than one moderator. Moderators are the people who perform the acts of administration and the occasional programming which is necessary to keep the list functioning. They also are able to 'unsubscribe', or remove people from the list, and may declare conditions which people subscribed to the list are supposed to fulfil (such as having particular qualifications, or being a particular gender) - but this latter power is rarely used. On occasions a list may be 'fully moderated', in which case the moderator may have to approve every item of mail which goes out to the list. As a result of these kinds of abilities the moderator can be frequently called upon to solve problems occurring between people on the list, and can be subject to vast quantities of offlist mail, urging them to unsubscribe particular people, or protesting at their decision to unsubscribe people. This ability to arbitrarily remove people from the list, in theory should give the moderator absolute power over the list, but in fact such decisions, if unpopular, can lead to other people leaving the list - thus possibly lowering the mail volume to the extent that the list almost no longer exists - or these kinds of decisions can bring the list to an almost complete halt as people dispute over them. Apart from possibly making people moderators (which involves them in considerable work), the list owner has little power to reward anyone, or to build up a lasting clique which will support them.
In general, status on a list is earned though the posts made to the list, and to some extent by the volume of posts made to the list. If a person makes more posts than other people are prepared to receive, then there can be much protest to the moderator or to the list, urging this person to stop posting so much, or other people can simply leave. As status depends on acceptance, this means that people on the List can often gain more status than the moderator, and thus carry more influence with other list members when arguing with the moderator. It may also mean, because list personnel usually change over time, that people's status can be exceptionally fragile. New people will come in and old drop out, and there will be nothing to mark current statuses other than the posts being made at the time. Therefore, status has to be almost continually re-earned. Furthermore the style, or ambience, of the list is determined by the people who post the most - it is quite common for a very small number of list members to post most of the mails sent to the list. Thus, it can be fairly difficult to maintain the particular list style over any length of time, as even a few people who post a lot can change this apparent style.
Mailing lists usually have a topic which is supposed to guide people's contributions to it. However most lists, unless fully moderated, will wander from the topic. The degree of such wandering varies from list to list - some lists are fairly tolerant and some will berate people for making off topic posts. It can be alleged that a certain level of 'off-topicness' helps to generate a sense of community in the list, but too much may tend to drive away the newcomers that a list will need to sustain itself. If the expected topic is not apparent, the actual mail may require a great deal of list knowledge to decode, and this may be too much for newcomers to find it easy to fit in.
The final thing to note about email lists is that there is usually a delay between mails and it is relatively rare, but not impossible, for communication to be synchronus. This makes it easier for messages within a 'thread', or with a common subject heading, to diverge radically from the starting point of the thread, or to branch into separate and unrelated discussions.
Newsgroups
To a user Newsgroups may resemble mailing lists, with the important exception that there is no subscription process involved. Anyone who has newsreader software can read or post to a newsgroup. Posts to a newsgroup are usually kept on the local server for a period of a couple of weeks after which they are deleted. As there is no necessity to remain subscribed the population of newsgroups is often more fluctuating than that of mailing lists, and people may read a newsgroup every couple of weeks, or over a period in which a particular thread interests them, rather than participating continually. However despite this variability and the traditional expectation that newsgroup populations will be higher than those of mailing lists, the newsgroup may still have the appearance of being dominated by a small number of posters - in my experience of the order of a dozen or so people (much the same size as in a mailing list) - who also set the general tone and topic relatedness of discussion, as in a mailing list.
The openness of newsgroups, together with the lack of any individual or group power, or responsibility, to exclude people, means that newsgroups are exceptionally vulnerable to 'flame wars', 'trolling' and 'spamming'. A flame war is the name usually given to the often experienced (on mailing lists as well), extremely vituperative posts exchanged between people in which the intention seems to be to annihilate, or abuse, the other rather than to discuss the issue. Flame wars tend to be contagious, in that other people will often join in and, given the size of the population and the fact that people are rarely connected to each other by any other fact than this set of communications, it is to be expected that a provocative post will provoke at least one person. People may also be rude to flamers in an attempt to get them to cease posting, which can further incite others. The flame war will, because of these kind of factors, tend to expand, and even to set the dominant tone of the list or newsgroup, which may then cause regular members to cease to participate or to leave. Trolling is the name given to deliberate attempts to generate a flame war, usually in order to disrupt a group. And spamming is the name given to posts which are completely irrelevant to the purpose of the group. Historically spam has often consisted of advertising material or chain letters.
At one time, newsgroups were the most visible side of Internet social usage and thus often the areas with which the offline world was the most concerned, and which it most attempted to regulate. Though newsgroups still exist and are still well used, they are perhaps somewhat in decline - many newer Internet users may be completely unaware of their existence, or of how to access them.
Another form of Internet Communication which has much the same structure as a newsgroup is a bulletin board.
MOOs, MUDs & MUSHs
For our analytic purposes these different types of Internet communication vehicle are basically similar, and will be considered under the generic term of MOO. Historically MUDs tend to be more associated with adventure gaming, and MOOs with social interaction, but the technical distinction is probably less important for social analysis than the use difference. MOOs are usually text based artificial worlds which are partitioned into separate 'rooms', and in which members take on character roles. This partitioning means that people who are online at the same time, in different rooms of the MOO, need not interact with each other at all. On mailing lists and newsgroups, it is often difficult to get subgroup communication happening, independently of the observation of other members. Frequently more private communication between mailing list members may occur on a MOO, or in personal email - if the communication is between two people.
MOO rooms frequently have descriptive text attached to them which the user will see every time they enter the room. MOO rooms can be described with a great deal of ingenuity, and there is no reason for them to be described as rooms - they can be described as deserts, lakes or whatever. The description may set the kind of tone expected in the use of the MOO room, but usually have no practical effect. The effects usually vary with the association such kinds of places might have in the offline world. In general people with characters on the MOO can usually get permission to build their own rooms on the MOO. This involves being given an abstract numerical 'location' and then giving it a textual description, and deciding who you wish to allow into the room. You may also, with permission from those people who run the MOO, connect your room to the main architecture, or to the rooms of consenting others - although it is quite common to have rooms which can only be entered by specific command. As a result, the pattern of a MOO's architecture can reflect more the pattern of friendships than the patterns of three dimensional space.
Given that a MOO requires a set of programmers to set it up and to keep it running, there is an inherent status structure to a MOO, and given that the programmer's powers can be gradually allocated, and that they can then also allocate privileges to others, or exclude others, these status structures tend to be much more permanent than those which usually arise on Mailing Lists or Newsgroups. In general these high status people with programming power are usually known as 'Wizards'. Furthermore, because of this structure, behaviour on MOOs becomes much more codified and subject to committee process, and participants, as they have often invested considerable time in their character, its rooms, and its features, are less likely to simply leave the MOO, than they are to attempt to accommodate to a Wizards decree. Some MOOs have attempted to set themselves up as democracies, but in practice they tend either to be run by those who have time and status enough to sit on the committees, or those who have time enough to continually agitate (see Bruckman on Media MOO).
Unlike Lists and Newsgroups, communication on MOOs is fairly rapid. Other people will see what you type into the MOO on their screen within a fairly brief period of time. Such conversation is rarely recorded and kept, so that if you are not connected for a particular exchange, then you will miss it. These factors together with the possibilities of privacy, give the MOO much more a sense of intimacy and immediacy than is possessed by Lists or Newsgroups, and people who are establishing an intimate relationship frequently have characters on MOO and interact via that medium.
IRC
IRC or Internet Relay Channel, basically functions like a stripped down MOO. People may use 'nicks' which are names, which may be temporary or sometimes permanent (if there is a program which stores and allocate nicks). There will be a group, or individual 'channel op' whose job it is to keep the channel open (as the channel will close if there are no channel ops using it, and then may be reopened by anyone who then gains channel op privileges), and to remove people if they choose. The channel op's powers are nowhere near as extensive as those of a Wizard, as people who are thrown off can usually re-enter with a new nick, and there are no privileges other than becoming a channel op which can be awarded to supporters. Status may be even more temporary than on lists or newsgroups, because of the potential anonymity and the possibly temporary nature of nicks. It is possible for anyone to start up a channel, and they will become the first channel op for that channel, and may decide who to admit and whether to keep the channel private or not. It is therefore relatively common for people who find each other interesting on a channel to go off into another temporary channel to discuss something.
Gender and Modality
Even by this brief sketch, it appears that the differing mode of Communication on the Internet can have differing implications for the types of social functioning that will result. It will be of some interest to consider whether these effects make certain types of environment more likely to be influenced by gender, or to consider what kinds of gender related problems are likely to arise in which environment. In general mailing lists seem to the most friendly to women, because the mails tend to be displayed to all, and because moderators can exert some pressure to gain some kind of gender equality. It may also be the case that the minority gender can conduct a large amount of correspondence offlist, using the sense of knowing each other which has developed on list. Similarly a moderator can attempt to set up Lists which only accept one gender, with some degree of success. In newsgroups the lack of control as to who reads the group, and the tendency to flame can mean that many women find it difficult to make much of an impact, and the possible anonymity of readers makes harassment quite possible and even probable. It is largely impossible to set up newsgroups which exclude men, and newsgroups which focus on women's issues are often largely swamped by posts from hostile males, or they may even have males as the majority of posters. The situation on MOO and IRC is more complex, but it is often the case that women report being continually approached for netsex, or to prove that they are female. As we shall see it appears that it is on MOOs and IRC, that there is the most expectation that people will present with genders different from their attribution offline.
Other features of Internet Life
Groups and Other Groups
It is rare that an Internet group will act as a group in relation to other groups. Groups rarely co-operate, and groups rarely, but occasionally conflict (usually when one group sets out to disrupt another). People are usually members of many different groups so, even though they may participate in more in one group than another - there are many forms of over-lapping alliance. People may know each other from other groups, so it has been occasionally possible to have, say the members of FutureCulture talk to each other as FutureCulture members on Cybermind, but it is extremely unlikely that people on Future Culture as a whole (or through represetatives) will try to interact with members of Cybermind, or vice versa. In simple terms there are few resources or rewards which one can gain from co-operating with another group, and few resources or rewards to be gained by attacking another group.
The boundaries of Internet groups are not clear - members rarely know exactly who is lurking (or observing the group without participating) in the group, as most members remain largely invisible. This also give the group a degree of felt vagueness, and it is extremely difficult to form sub groups on mailing lists and newsgroups without, in fact, starting new groups. Often discussions which are interesting for some, may be uninteresting to others, and it is hard to maintain the separateness of the people involved, and so some may protest at what is interesting for others, or worse, they may leave quietly. Sometimes groups will break away for these kinds of reasons, and so as not to disrupt the main list. Examples of these breakaway groups on Cybermind include the group which developed to discuss the ideas of group member Antonio Rossin, the breakaway women's list emma, the 'offlist' list formed by one prominent member who left in protest over a debate on the main list, and perhaps formal lists like cyberculture formed by Alan to be less community and more topic oriented than Cybermind. The situation is different on MOOs as the partitioning possible on MOOs allows the formation of subgroups, just as it allows the more intricate formation of status hierarchies and, more importantly for our purposes, it allows the formation of privacy within the group.
In some way these vaguenesses about the membership of a group, express an even more fundamental problem of communicating online, namely that a person's presence in the group is only announced by the presence of their text, and that it is often uncertain as to whether your text has been read by others without them acknowledging you. This kind of uncertain or unresolved presence I have called 'asence'.
Asence
In offline societies it is generally possible to tell whether a person is present or absent. Normally presence and status will be acknowledged by others making, at the least, eye contact or grunts in a person's direction, or by their pointedly ignoring that person. People are generally aware of who is listening to the conversation and their reactions to each other - these listeners and their reactions become part of the conversation itself. On a mailing this is not the case. It is possible for a person to feel present on a list without others being aware of them, as there are no markers of existence other than communication. This can produce a situation in which one person has a deep sense of intimacy with another person, or other people who live out their lives before them, and yet these others have no awareness of this reader at all. In the offline world, the only usual approximation to this, may be a person's relationship to the celebrities of magazine articles. If the person tries to take this felt intimacy to the others they can meet with quite radical and unexpected rejection. This could indeed be one of the contributing factors to online sexual harassment. Offline, a person may become infatuated with some movie star, but it may be difficult to interact with them - online it is not so hard to interact with list visible people.
If you do post to the list then, as email tends to be buried under the influx of new mail, there is little which continues to remind people of your presence. A person who is not posting at this moment, to some extent does not exist. The only way you can know that you exist to others is by the response of others, and yet only a relatively few of the mails to lists receive acknowledgment - even if people like the post. So the writer gets little reinforcement or feedback to most of their communication-presences. If the volume of the list is heavy this apparent lack of response may even be exaggerated by the apparent presence of other people. This may lead to a sense of discouragement or dislocation. Again, this emphasises that acknowledgment is difficult to obtain, and so people who are uncertain about contributing to a group can often find it hard keep contributing (they also may have little idea as to whether their ideas are well received or not). This may possibly be related to gender, and make it harder for women to interact, if they are more used to gauging what they might do by the reaction of others. However it can also prove positive in MOOs and IRC, as male interlocutors have to actually check to make sure the woman is still there, or still reading their text, and may thus engage in unaccustomed dialogue with women - certainly people have reported this result to me.
Asence is also emphasised by the uncertainty about 'audience'. Lists or newsgroups have little in the way of clear boundaries - members have little idea who is actually present - and it is possible that people who you think might be present, are not receiving mail for some reason. They may have left the list for a few days without notification, or be skipping whole chunks of mail if they are busy. Messages to which you might expect a response can go unnoticed. It is even possible that you may be engaged in conflict with someone, or 'risk' a personal remark, and those you would expect to notice do not, and thus your presence seems snubbed or absent, and 'community' seems fragile. In some case you may even discover that people who you do not wish to communicate before are also present and reading you.
Even in standard email exchange, this absence in presence is emphasised by the termination patterns used. Whereas offline communication is terminated by a negotiation of grunts and formal phrases, email conversation is usually terminated abruptly with no certainty whether you have been received or read, and of the nature of your reader's reaction. Online you live with continual suspension of closure.
As a person is only present in their acts, then reputation, status or social identity is something which must be repeatedly 'earned'. New people, perhaps whole new 'generations', may appear on a list in a period of a few months. Non of this new generation are aware of long time list members who are currently not active, even if these 'long time members' are reading the list, are engaged in correspondence with other list members outside the list and feel themselves to be active members of the list. Therefore the new generation may construct a completely different view of the 'community' of a list and its accepted practices (as such practices only exist in the postings currently made), and longer time members may feel continually displaced from the list.
To use an anthropological metaphor social identity in such a situation is like a continual potlatch, new gifts of text must be repeatedly given and in that giving are consumed. Nothing is returned but a short lived respect in which the receiver may be completely uncertain. Not surprisingly some find this tiring.
It may also be the case that flaming stems from asence as without these extreme measures your presence and existence is always drifting away. The easiest way to get acknowledgment is to try and irritate people, particularly people that you do not have any connection to, or for you to attack a post. Given the numbers of such unconnected people on lists and newsgroups there is a high chance that someone will respond. The responses you get clearly demonstrate that you exist and thus reduce asence - even if you eventually get expelled from a list. This reduction in asence is probably far more important in producing flame wars than the usual explanation of ease of expressing aggression.
Another way of reducing asence is to find someone to partner, so that they will respond to you when you are online, or to your list messages. This also clearly indicates that you do exist, and as one response is likely to provoke others, it may also increase one's presence to the list as a whole. These relationships, by their function of reinforcing presence, and usually dyadic, often end up being intimate. p>