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In any case the reader could be assured that there is generally no experience of a coherent theory of life within this group, or more accurately sequence of groups, of people. There is perhaps much that is shared among the divergences, but it is also clear that this is not always clear to the members, and any description or assertion of what is shared (which of course is something that cannot be avoided, otherwise the language fragments into endless multiplications of assertion) is also a theoretical position. Rather than limit myself and hence the group, to one particular theory it seemed useful to attempt to open the readings through using multiple theories. Naturally these multiple theories share certain biases and implicit and explicit coherences but hopefully their multiplicity shall make multiplicity more explicit, or, to the contrary, perhaps their intersections indicate just one way of being on line. A uniformity of decree would not, I think, display anything about a way of being in the group (or at least not a way of being that I am familiar with - my own experiences were frequently contradictory and I suspect that so were those of others - though perhaps some people saw and felt only one thing and they have been disenfranchised here). Though such a mode of uniformity might display more about what it is to write a thesis, it might give the impression of finish and unity by a more careful suppression rather than by a more apt summing up. Cybermind is still alive, still changing and still carrying at least 200 different theses as to particulars of its functioning, even if these are sometimes related or transformational of one another.
Despite all of this, in this work there are spurts of spurious unity, generated by tales of conflict. I should protest that this is an artifact of my particular mode of functioning, and perhaps something could be made of a psychological interest or bent which supposedly resides within me (even though a glimpse of popular films would show it doesn't simply reside within). Perhaps I could argue that when a group is apparently 'functioning well' there is little to comment upon and quote Tolstoy's famous words about marriage from Anna Karrenina - "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". The likeness of "happy families", or "happy mailing lists" to other such families or mailing lists is relative, not so much a likeness within but one of a lack of dramatic markers, with which to make a narrative or analysis, when observed from without. Perhaps through comparison with other, similar, "happy" groups an analyst might find it easier to describe forms of happiness - the comparison providing the contrast we feel is necessary for readable or insightful narrative. Perhaps one could allege that happiness or good functioning is a matter of how the group deals with conflict. It is hard for me, at least, to imagine that a group which functioned coherently as one, all the time, did not have some secret or ignored unhappiness - like Laing's schizophrenic families.
So, what then are these multiplicity of theories or approaches? In the rough order in which they appear:
!) I am interested in my own experiences, joys and problems of life and how they diverge from others, the questions of how I found out things - making the perhaps unjustified assumption that this, though clearly not a universal experience, would be at least one way of socialising. Unlike the majority of anthropologists it could be argued that I am no more an outsider than most other members of the group. Likewise I am nothing special within the group, I am simply more formal in my presentation of my ethnographising. Again I cannot pretend that I was not there, an invisible, impartial observer - a ghost god in effect - and that my questioning and incompetancies did not have some effect on the group - the approaches described here did not arise in abstraction or detachment, but in passion, bewillderment, anguish and occasional bordom.
@) There is an interest in how the organization of communication might have consequences for a group.
#) There is a recurrent interest in how the possibilities of fantasy might influence social life - it is argued that Fantasy is not only a form of entrapment within images but a mode of interpreting sameness and difference, that 'culture' is a mode of ethnography engaged in by all members of a society to make sense of what doesn't work. Such an approach seems to avoid the twin problems of 'on the one hand' a society of individuals as how members interpret or what they fantasize with are provided by others, and 'on the other foot' the equal strangeness of a overriding symbolic culture determined by structures that never manifest in any particular place or person and blend imperceptibly into other structures despite discontinuities. Social life, in my view, becomes continually creative, even to finding new ways of remaining static.
$) Another interest focuses on the beginnings of a group life and how this might influence continuance - this blends with recurrent interests in death, absence and what I call 'ascence', and the ways that people might decide that they are a group or, to use the term, 'community', or discuss or 'forget' their mutual history.
%) Descriptions of methods of social control continually recur, as this seems to be a primary mode of group cooperation and fantasy, and provides or manifests further opportunities for the temporary development of meshing identities.
^) I am also concerned with the problem of boundaries (or the representation or imagining of boundaries), not only as they are manifested in conflict, integration and separation, but as they manifest in more intimate concerns such as with the use of the body and styles of language.
&) I am further interested in the relationship between an embedding society and the societies manifesting within it both in terms of the relationship or transformation of symbols and the kinds of people who become involved and the kind of tasks or secondary functions (i.e. functions which are not explicit within the formal criteria of the group) which are carried out.
*) Finally I attempt to make comparisons (though aware these comparisons are not between peoples but between theoretical representations of peoples): one chapter is about similarities in structures of exchange between the use of messages on a mailing list and more general patterns of exchange as reported within Melanesia; another chapter attempts to compare behaviour on mailing lists with the behaviours apparently observed in psychotherapeutic groups; another section briefly considers the similarity between mailing lists and groups of alchemists in 17th century England.
If the thesis can be assumed to have certain key words these are undoubtedly imagination, fantasy, alchemy, social control, group formation, group organization, boundary, category (linguistic & symbolic), experience, being and exchange. If there are theorists then Bateson, Malinowki, Bhaktin, Heidegger and Jung, but more importantly are the theorists who have made up the group themselves some of whom have been called Bennett, Cubbison, Everard, Garner, Hoberman, Kezelis, McKinnon, Miller, Mulvale, Wolfe and Sondheim. And of course there are many, many others.