Edited by Fay Sudweeks, Margaret McLaughlin and Sheizaf Rafaeli
Sheizaf Rafaeli, School of Business Administration, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Margaret McLaughlin, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California; Fay Sudweeks, Key Centre of Design Computing, University of Sydney
A vast, international web of computer networks, the Internet offers millions of users the opportunity to exchange electronic mail, photographs, and sound clips; search databases for books, CDs, new cars, and term papers, take part in real-time audio- and video-conferencing, and run software on distant computers. In recent years, the fastest growing Internet application is the World Wide Web, which engages users in a rich environment of text, graphics, animation and sounds. The Web integrates most of the Internet tools. With a graphical user interface browser, the most naive computer user is able to "point and click" to retrieve information from around the globe. From a home computer, it is possible to read the New York Times, order chocolates from Belgium, check the weather in Australia and book a flight to Albania. This huge conglomerate of links, hyperlinks and virtual links is not just a technology for linking computers, it is a medium for communication.
The convergence of computer and communication technologies is a social convergence as well. In global neighbourhoods, people congregate and meet in chat rooms and discussion groups, conversing on topics from auto mechanics to zoology. McLaughlin, Smith and Osborne (1995: 91) comment on the social implications of the new medum in their examination of Usenet newsgroups:
The global reach of the Internet not only facilitates communication among members of existing distributed groups and teams, but perhaps more importantly it provides a medium for the formation and cultivation of new relationships through virtually instantaneous access to thousands of potential contacts who have compatible interests and spheres of expertise.
Network users can turn to more than 13,000 newsgroups (Smith, McLaughlin and Osborne, this volume), or electronic bulletin boards, to ask for advice on parenting or to express their opinions about the Communications Decency Act, to argue about Foucault and exchange tips on fly fishing.
Furthermore, new coteries are easily created. Networked groups form virtually and on-the-fly, as common interests prompt. The computer mediated groups crystallize and disband seemingly without traditional deference to time or space differences. How much respect is offered other customary parameters of group communication? Like interpersonal communication, these networks are participatory, their content made up by their audience. Like mass-mediated communication, they involve large audiences. But the networks are neither pure mass nor purely interpersonal; they are a new phenomenon.
The emergence of computer-mediated groups poses a variety of communication issues. What is the ecology of these networks? How much do we know about the content? As with the emergence of any new medium, the question of substitution or complementation arises. And what about broad, macro-social effects of these nets: the sociology of knowledge, the social control of the manufacturing, consumption, ownership, and storage of information? And more specifically, how do the use and content of the new medium fit within the general landscape of all mediated communication? How does the mass-interpersonal-mediated-group process work?
The Net ignites many metaphors.
Turkle (1984, 1995) uses the mirror and the screen. MacKinnon (this volume), refers to Leviathan. Danet (this issue) speaks of a stage. Umberto Eco (1994), in a now famous essay, invokes religious sacred texts as his driving image. Among the analogs and similies others have used are mosaics, television, the newspaper, spider-woven webs, rodent-dug tunnels, college sports-team mascots, the modern metropolis, traditional villages, the town square, democracy, anarchy, toys, serious tools, classroom, museum, marketplace, the telephone network, family, tribe, collection of overheard conversations, cocktail party, mass movement, liberating technology, slavery and substance addiction.
Something must be going on.
In our title, we choose to focus on the juxtaposition of work and play, so typical of all talk. Because this book is about the Net from a communication angle. Because, paradoxically, all the metaphors used by others are appropriate. And because evidence suggests the Net is a new way of merging the seeming opposites of mass and interpersonal, local and global, serious and frivolous, spoken and written, real and "virtual," peril and promise.
In a famous FAQ (frequently-asked-questions file) circulating on the Net, there is an interesting attempt to define Usenet. In this file, Usenet is defined in the negative. It is defined as being "not" 13 different things. Though commonly understood as an organization, protocol, public utility, network, or software package, Chip Saltzenberg (1994) argues Usenet is none of these. In a now famous rebuttal, also circulated as a news.answers FAQ, ample arguments are provided that Usenet is, in fact, all of the things used to define it in the negative.
Worldwide, legislative and judiciary action on defining the net continue to escalate [see, e.g , The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 2, Whole. No. 1 and Whole No. 2]. Issues such as intellectual property, decency, flaming, educational efficiency, utopian feasibility, etc. continue to capture the public's imagination. Over recent years, we've witnessed a public scandal erupting almost predictably every several weeks over one press report or another about the Net. See, for instance, the flury of activity surrounding a cover story in TIME magazine about "cyberporn". This cover story in June of 1995 sparked numerous other stories in almost all news publications during the summer and fall of that year. The following year brought headlines of the debates over ratings, the Clipper chip and "Decency" legislation in the US. Most countries are undergoing a major legislative overhaul in laws relating to communication ownership, oversight, and content regulation. Much of this legislative effort is related to the appearance of computer-mediated communication.
Whatever is going on, is interesting. However, it has so far been represented more in the popular press than in serious scholarly scrutiny.
Speaking as a self-described "uncredentialed social scientist" (p. 16), Howard Rheingold provided a "first-person word picture" of the varieties of life to be found on the Net. He points out the importance of examining behavior on the Net. Such study is interesting intellectually. It is important as an exercise in historical documentation, to learn how human-beings, communities and democracies are changing, to forestall vertigo and disruption, and to help cope with the emerging norms and legislation. But, Rheingold says, "all arguments about virtual community values take place in the absence of even roughly quantified systematic observation." (Rheingold, 1984: 64).
These papers attempt to fill this void.
We take neither a technology-centered, nor a social-deterministic perspective. In studying new communication environments there is always the temptation to make causal claims about the effects of a particular tool or protocol. Such claims are often influenced by the marketing rhetoric of those intent on selling new devices. Or they can have roots in an idealistic zeal to oppose the ills of an innovation. We avoid making claims that the Net "does" such and so. Instead of focusing on what the Net "does", the research reported here examines what the Net "is". On the other hand, much of the critical response to technological determinism tilts too sharply in the other direction. Often, this position argues that the real determinants of communication processes are eternal, that all new technologies flow along the same relational lines that have existed earlier, and that innovations are just new manifestations of the familiar. We do not accept this view either. One cannot ignore major new vistas opened by the Net. New topics, audience reach, distribution and size, and the ratios of passive and active participation in conversations have all changed. The notions of "virtual communities" and "virtual communication" are no longer oxymorons.
At first glance, the enormity of the Net, its growth and its audience almost defy study on a normal, scholarly schedule. Furthermore, the Net has been evolving away from conversation, toward demonstration. The recent appearance of the World Wide Web, splashy multimedia uses of the Internet, and the virtual explosion of voice, color, picture and motion seemed to overshadow plain ASCII traffic in ideas and emotions, which are the subject of this volume. But the first glance is, of course, deceiving. The essence of the net remains mostly a medium for conversation (see McLaughlin, 1984). Interactivity is still one of the more exciting qualities of communication made possible by computer-mediated forums (Rafaeli, 1988). Interactivity remains a defining feature for conversations generally, and an especially curious one when the conversations are not held in physical proximity. Newhagen and Rafaeli (1996) discuss how the concepts of interactivity, hypertextuality, packet-switching, and asynchronicity are just as important as the multimedia, demonstration splash that seems to get so much popular attention. The social processes involved in virtual conversation continue to merit center stage. We predict that conversation, the exchange of information, ideas, views and emotion will continue to be the main thrust of communication, even as it becomes more computer-mediated.
Therefore, the important questions remain whether we are civil in using computer-mediated networks (flaming, see papers by Mabry and Witmer, this issue), realistic in our expectations (efficiency, see papers by Voiskounsky and Jones, this issue), virtually social in the same ways we used to be (interactivity, see papers by Berthold et al., Rafaeli and Sudweeks, this issue). How do we use networks, who are "we", and how does the communication context shape a sense of community? Are our genres of talking/writing evolving (see papers by Danet, Smith et al., and Witmer and Katzman, and Voiskounsky, this issue)? And lastly (or perhaps, first), how do we know, how do we study this new phenomenon?
We have collected a set of papers which address the mutual influences between information technology and group formation and development. Employing a variety of perspectives, and drawing on a spectrum of disciplines, the contributors search for a new theoretical middle ground between the traditional treatments of interpersonal and mediated modes of communication.
Taken together, the papers in this volume consciously steer away from the pitfalls of previous work on network mediated communication. Multiple epistemologies and methods and numerous data sets are used, mutually tolerated and considered. The papers include content analysis, survey data, sociolinguistic case studies, and other types of data and analyses. An explicit effort is made to avoid novelty effects. Hawthorne effects of this sort threaten new communication technology studies. Early experimental studies of CMC are obviously loaded with novelty effects because the groups for the most part are formed by the experimenters. The network users we study obviously must have at least a minimal familiarity with the technology in order to be on the net in the first place. Serious study of computer-mediated communication ought, therefore, to make statements about non-ephemeral phenomena that are here to stay.
Specifically, these papers concern the communication process among large groups. Both synchronous and asynchronous groups are represented. The units of analysis encompass non-verbal, verbal, process, and social dimensions. The theories discussed refer to the communication qualities of argumentation, collaboration, and performance, tying these to group properties such as regulation and interactivity.
Many of the papers in this collection are, in fact, a product of ProjectH, a communication process among members of a large group. ProjectH was an electronic collaboration among more than one hundred scholars. Our origins as a virtual group can be traced to our common subscribership to several computer-networked mailing lists, and the subsequent creation of one of our own. Demographically, the ProjectH list consisted of scholars from twenty-one different academic disciplines, and fifteen different countries.
The project was a novel approach to groupwork as the participants had never met, either online or offline. Electronic mail, both public and private, was used for participant recruitment, distribution of information, coordination, formulation of policies, decision making, encouragement and technology transfer. Over a two-year period, we used network-supported group activity, collected data and references, and discussed these to study network-supported group activity.
The project results, the first coded data of a representative sample of group discussions, were initially the intellectual property of the coders. The database contains more than 4000 messages drawn from dozens of discussion groups on the Internet. Some of the papers in this issue are written by the collaborators and are based on the jointly collected database (see Table 2). After a two year mandate, the database is archived and publicly accessible (ftp://www.arch.usyd.edu.au/pub/projectH/dbase).