Reviews of

Network and Netplay:
Virtual Groups on the Internet

Edited by
Fay Sudweeks, Margaret McLaughlin and Sheizaf Rafaeli
AAAI/MIT Press
ISBN 0-262-262-69206-6, 320pp, $35.00 (paper)
Available in January 1998 from The MIT Press .
Order book directly from MIT Press or from your local bookstore.
Review by Nicholas Please, University of York, UK in Information, Communication and Society Journal
Technology and Society:
See http://www.techsoc.com/nwknplay.shtml for review.

The Times (UK):
The unique characteristic of the Internet as a medium is its many-to-many interactivity. The Web supports this only crudely, but out in the wilds of the older, text-based Internet - Usenet, Internet Relay Chat, and the role-playing games known as multi-user dungeons or MUDs - public discussion is the stuff of virtual life. This book collates a group of studies on this type of computer-mediated communication; long-time netheads will be gratified by finally having academic support for the daily observations they have made all along.
Wendy Grossman
Choice, Science and Technology: Information and Computer Science section, 36(3).
Most books about the Internet are technical. Despite its ublishers, this book is, for the most part, sociological, rather than technical, in its collection of 14 scholarly articles on how people act and communicate online. Topics include a study of gender differences in usage of how newsgroup posters follow rules, the social construction of rape in virtual reality [sic], modeling typical messages with neural networks, and intelligent agents for guiding children through MUDs (software programs that accept connections from multiple users across a network; originally developed as games). The methodologies expressed span a range from empirical with statistical analysis, through constructive with anecdotal evaluation, to theoretical. Each article cites its own list of references. Most of the articles are clearly written and contain tables or figures. As a whole, the collection offers some useful perspectives on net-based group interaction, and it reflects the various ways in which researchers in several disciplines are trying to understand the emerging new patterns of interactive digital communication. Undergraduates through faculty.
S. L. Tanimoto, University of Washington