Chapter 1. Computer-Mediated Communication as a Social Medium
1. Assessing the ability of researchers to arrive at a consensual definition of the word community, Hillery provides comments that are less than encouraging: "There is one element [ . . . ] which can be found in all of the concepts, and (if its mention seems obvious) it is specified merely to facilitate a positive delineation of the degree of heterogeneity: all of the definitions deal with people. Beyond this common basis, there is no agreement" (Bell and Newby 1972, 27).
2. A LISTSERV is a brand of list processing software.
3. In the past several years, access to both e-mail and the Internet has been simplified considerably, compared with the unwieldiness of earlier systems.
4. And sometimes the problem crops up at the other end of the link. My own computer connection went "boink," quite inconveniently, during the last week of my study in April 1993. Fortunately I was able to access the list, and the interview volunteers, from the computers of various officemates. This technological glitch provided not only an academic challenge but a social one as well. I took to hanging out in the office late at night, sending notes to various of my research volunteers, and surreptitiously posting lonely sounding messages to the list. Without a working modem connection of my own, I couldn't even lurk! The voices of my virtual friends, as well as my own ethnographic voice, had been involuntarily silenced. Fortunately, the technological problem was remedied within a few days, and I was able to resume my research.
5. In digest format, the subscriber receives one long summary e-mail message from the LISTSERV, usually as an attachment, once a day. In contrast, with a standard subscription, the subscriber receives individual messages as they are posted.
6. The commitment to freedom of speech and the ideological conviction that discourse (discussion and debate) is one way to arrive at collective understanding and/or general truths are cornerstones of democratic philosophy as well as educational philosophy. John Milton, in the Areopagitica (1644), perhaps verbalized it best: "Let [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worst in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing."
7. For example, although I wasn't there, I know who wore the red high-heeled shoes and who danced on the table while wearing a red leather jockstrap at the first Cinema-L Convention.
8. For the most part, issues concerning class-based perceptions of taste related to cinematic art and other cultural forms are raised but not addressed in great detail or resolved in this thesis.
9. Indeed, one of the most profound cultural changes I believe electronic technologies are helping to bring about is a compressed sense of time.
Chapter 2. Literature Review
10. I have more recently seen this perspective described as "Cyberfeminism."
Chapter 3. Typical Messages and Patterns of Interaction
11. Subscribing was simple: I sent an e-mail containing nothing in the subject line and "subscribe Cinema-L" in the body of the message to a LISTSERV located at the American University in Washington, DC, the home of Cinema-L. The LISTSERV then acts as an electronic subscription; messages sent by one member to the list address are distributed by the LISTSERV to all other members. If, for example, I were to send a message to Cinema-L, the message would leave my computer, travel through several connecting links, and proceed on to the American University, where it would be forwarded by the LISTSERV to all members of Cinema-L.
Some days, I receive a message within a few minutes of its being posted. Other days, it takes hours for a message to travel from a poster through the various links and nodes to the members of Cinema-L. The speed of the transmission varies due to a number of external factors, one of which is how many people are using the system at the time; depending on volume, messages sometimes have to wait in line at a particularly busy node to be sent along on their path.
12. This list of routing information is called an RFC (request for comment) header. The RFC header generally contains information documenting the message identification number, date and time of the message's origin, and the connecting links the message traveled through to reach its destination.
Generally, the RFC header also contains a "from" line, following which is the combination of letters and numbers that comprise a sender's e-mail address (my Internet address, for example, is AFC1@CDE.PSU.EDU). AFC1 is my user identification, and the information following the "at" sign tells where my e-mail account is located. For example, "CDE" means that my account originates from Continuing and Distance Education, and "PSU.EDU" means that I am located at Penn State University (an "EDU" ending generally denotes a user located at an educational institution, "GOV" denotes a government location, and "COM" denotes an account serviced by a commercial Internet access provider). In addition to the address of the sender, the "from" line can also contain the user's real name or a made-up name that that person has chosen to appear as his or her "identity." For instance, someone who is a fan of Sharon Stone may subscribe using the following nom de plume instead of his or her name: "Sharon Stone's Slave."
13. A list member may reply to another person's post by generating a new message to the list, in which he or she addresses comments to an individual on the list ("Joe, concerning your comments about The Rapture . . . "), or by hitting the "reply" button while reading another poster's message (most if not all e-mail systems are set up with a "reply" function that allows a user to respond quickly and easily to someone from whom the user has received a message). In the second case, the subject line of a post replying to Joe's message titled "The Rapture" will be "RE: The Rapture" (underlining is tough, if not impossible, in many e-mail systems).
14. All names, including those of on-list posters and those of interview participants, have been changed to protect participant confidentiality.
15. Wilson and Arnold list the following characteristics of good oral style (as contrasted with written style), many of which are also common to e-mail communication: greater use of simple sentences and fragments, repetition, interjections, contractions, personal pronouns, familiar words, and figurative language (Wilson and Arnold 1974, 225-226).
Chapter 4. Who Are the Subscribers of Cinema-L: The Interviews
16. On interactive lists, subscribers cannot post and generate conversation; the list merely serves as a distributor of information.
17. One of the questions that this issue raises but does not resolve is whether technology contributes to what Marx and Durkheim would identify as the sense of alienation of the modern worker. The relationship between and among workers that is mediated by technology is complex, and invites additional exploration. For further discussion of alienation, community, and work, see Oldenquist and Rosner (1991). For analysis of work/leisure relationships, see also Salaman (1974).
18. The consent form again presented a logistical dilemma, given that several of my volunteers hailed from countries other than the United States. One such respondent e-mailed me a JPEG (graphic) signature file to avoid incurring the expense of international faxing; another signed the form, scanned it into his computer, and then both e-mailed the form to me as an attachment and placed it on an FTP (file transfer protocol) site where I could "go" to electronically download it. The questionnaire responses, on the other hand, were returned to me quite promptly via e-mail.
19. The numbers total more than 15 because several members reported accessing the list from multiple sites.
20. In LISTSERV format, the messages are sent to the subscriber's "in-box"; in newsgroup format, the subscriber does not actually have to subscribe to the list but instead "goes" to a certain place on the Internet to view the messages.
21. As I noted in Chapter 3, in most e-mail systems, the sender's address is included in the "from" line of the RFC header at the beginning of the message.
22. A collection of "Frequently Asked Questions," or FAQ, can be found at http://www.dundee.ac.uk/~pjclinch/cinema-l/
23. However, near the end of my study, one of my research volunteers pointed out that the more widespread availability of technology may be changing this aspect of the online environment. In particular, users who have access to scanners may be more likely to have a photo or two lying around on their desktops, ready to share with others electronically.
Chapter 5. Flaming and Being Flamed
24. At the same time that we were conducting a heated argument on the list, Sergio and I were trading amusing, quite friendly e-mails "behind the scenes" off-list. There are multiple hidden levels of social interaction that occur outside the "public" domain of the list.
25. However, sometimes a particularly rabid flame war results in negative real-life consequences. In at least one case that I know of, a list argument turned ugly, and resulted in several interchanges that occurred off-list. One subscriber, incensed by another member's comments, contacted the offending subscriber's system operator and attempted (unsuccessfully) to have his opponent's electronic privileges revoked.
26. Interestingly enough, elements of the emoticon system bear strong resemblance to Kendon's social science notation for facial posture and bodily position as described by Knapp (1972, 192-195).
Chapter 6. Who Speaks and Who Is Silent: The Lurkers "Come Out"
27. I am using the word "poster" to reference an individual who sent messages to the list during the course of one day. For example, if Jane sends three messages during the same day, her e-mail notes count as three "messages," but she counts as only one "poster." The number of "posters" indicates the number of individuals who participate in the daily discussion, while the number of "messages" is an indication of the volume of those participants' public dialogue.
Chapter 7. Gender Issues in Cyberspace
28. Social science researchers have noted that in face-to-face discussions, female participants tend to make more direct eye contact than do male participants. This preference may be related to females' desire to temper their responses or to modify their communications based on others' nonverbal cues. If this interpretation is valid, it would make sense that those who are more visually oriented to others' communicative cues would find the list environment especially anxiety-arousing. For more on the topic of gendered nonverbal communication styles, see Exline (1974), Watson (1974), and Aries (1996).
29. Recent reports from the computer world indicate that some companies have begun to recognize that male and female users choose different kinds of software and make use of the same kinds of software in very different ways. In the late 1980s, companies such as Microsoft began to actively seek out women to work in the corporate divisions related to home computers and multimedia. For more information, see Moody (1996).
30. These statistics are from CyberAtlas, which can be found at http://www.cyberatlas.com/ The number and demographic characteristics of Internet users are hotly contested issues. For example, the latest Matrix Information & Directory Services (MIDS) survey reports that the Internet gender distribution is about 63% male and 37% female. These and several other Web demographic resources can be found at http://www.olympus.net/okeefe/Pubnet/ResDem.html
Chapter 9. Conclusions and Implications
31. This individual threatened to send the "Internet police" to my doorstep if I did not immediately revoke all claims regarding his interactions on the list. My response as ethnographer was to apologize profusely and retract my statements: a threatened lawsuit in the interests of ethnographic interrogation thus became additional data for my research. Although I acquiesced, I remain convinced that he was indeed the individual who posted the quotes in question; however, for whatever reason, he did not wish to admit to his electronic behaviors. The quotes attributed to that individual have been removed from this thesis.