What follows is the majority of the proposal for my dissertation, approved by my committee on May 21, 1991. I removed two sections that were an examination of literature on ethnography and methods, since they didn't pertain to usenet or the ethnography. I welcome all comments, corrections or criticism from any corner (keeping in mind that great tradition of the net that says anyone can disregard anything they dislike :-). bjones@ucsd.edu -- An Ethnography of the Usenet Computer Network: Proposal for a PhD Dissertation in Communication Bruce Jones May 6, 1991 In the past, whenever a new form of communication technology has been developed, its first application has usually been to accomplish the tasks of the old technology, in a faster or "better" manner. This was as true for print books spreading the word of God and recovering the humanist texts of antiquity (Febvre and Martin, 1976) as it was for Marconi's radio replacing the telegraph (Barnouw, 1982). This is also true for computers, which were first mobilized as super-fast adding machines and not regarded as technology for communications. Sooner or later new technology spawns new forms of social interaction based on the new technology (Marx, 1977:19-26, and in Parsons et. al., 1961:137). In the past ten years we have been witness to many changes in society, based on the proliferation of micro-computers and modem access to larger machines (Horwitz, 1990:pp.40-1, Ross nd.: passim). Being at this particular place in the history of computers affords researchers an opportunity to look at the rise of the new forms of human interaction that are growing up around computers. One growing ground is the Unix computer operating system, its community of users, and the Unix-based information exchange network, usenet.[1] This is a proposal for ethnographic research into the usenet computer network. Usenet, or "the net" as its participants like to call it, defies easy definition in a few lines. Suffice to say for the moment that it is a computer network of several thousand computers, with more than a quarter of a million participants. Usenet *sites* are located all over the United States and Canada, Western Europe, Australia, South America and branching into Eastern Europe.[2] Connected through phone lines and running over other networks, usenet is an information exchange that carries electronic mail and information traffic between academic, commercial, government and individual computer sites. Usenet is almost completely unlike other computer networks. That it is different from the other large networks like Bitnet and the Internet is easily understood; they are not information systems. These networks could be thought of as "common carriers" -- they do not provide anything except file transfers (i.e. electronic mail) and do not have public arenas for discussion. Moreover, as mentioned above, usenet itself runs, or sends its information over the Internet. Usenet's closest competitor in terms of structure might be Fidonet, which provides similar information services and discussion groups but is almost entirely in private hands, running exclusively on micro- computers.[3] Usenet runs more on public machines at commercial and industrial research sites, government agencies and on university and college campus computers. Other computer-based forums for discussion, the computer bulletin board systems (BBS) for instance, are different in that they run on one machine (usually a microcomputer) and the various users call in from outside. Usenet runs on the users' local machine and the files are stored and distributed between machines. The two most salient points about the net are: (1) that there is no central locus of activity, no one person, place or organization that has ultimate responsibility for the actions or activities of the people who populate usenet and (2) the net exists entirely without the benefit of face-to-face contact between its members. More on these both, below. The central points I would like to investigate in this work are ideas about community and culture in an electronic world. I want to look at the notion that the usenet network of computers and users constitutes a community and a culture, bounded by its own set of norms and conventions, marked by its own linguistic jargon and sense of humor and accumulating its own folklore. The proposed dissertation would explore the history of the net and use that history as a springboard to an ethnographic discussion of how and to what extent usenet exhibits aspects of culture and community. I think this research offers an opportunity to take a fresh look at the ways in which communication systems work to create and nurture culture and community. The central focus of the dissertation would be an accounting of the advent and development of usenet as an acephelous organization of people, connected by access to a particular kind of computer (Unix), running specific software (usenet *news* distribution software and some program for reading the news), over time, from 1979 to the recent present. I am interested in how the net got started, what the early expectations of its users were, how these changed over time due to various forces that shaped the net, what those forces were and are, and how the forces came into being (many were generated by the activities of the net itself). The work would also look at how people use the net, what they think they get out of their interactions, how their uses and desires created some of the forces that shaped the net, and how their uses and desires where reciprocally shaped by the net and by those forces. This project, although categorized as ethnography, will not follow standard, ethnographic practice. Ethnography is usually used as a research tool where the researcher encounters and studys some culture or subcultural group *in situ* -- going to live in the community to be studied. The ethnographer establishes hirself in some role in the community, learns the language, if "foreign", or the particular dialect or jargon of the community. S/he "lives" with the people, eating, sleeping, washing etc.; doing what they do, when they do it, with them insofar as possible within the constraints imposed by the ethnographer's role. While in the field, the researcher engages in many activities -- conducting interviews, listening to and recording the verbal stories and songs, copying written records, photographing ceremonies and daily activities, as s/he participates in and observes those activities. The ethnographer observes the artifacts of the people, asking questions about what they do with those artifacts, how they think about what they are doing and tries to understand the relationship between what they think they are doing and how they really act. The purpose of all this activity on the part of the ethnographer is to investigate and ultimately come to understand the cultural forms of the community; its structure, the relations of power within the group, the rules of involvement, how people "fit in" to a community, what roles are available and how members of the community take on different roles, how members establish and maintain personal space, how territory is established and maintained and how people think about these activities. Finally, it is about how those thoughts and activities are transmitted from one generation to the next, from existing members to new members. The research proposed here is different. It is not different in terms of its goals. I am interested in the rules, relations and roles on usenet. This work would be different in terms of its subject. The idea of doing ethnographic research on, in or into usenet poses two methodological problems. First, usenet is not a community where one can go an live in the traditional sense -- there really is no "there" there. Usenet exists only as a set of software tools and programs, and the written communiques of its participants. For the most part, usenet lacks the daily face-to-face (FTF in net jargon) interaction of traditional communities of study.[4] The absence of face-to-face interaction makes the net an interesting place to re-examine traditional notions of community and culture. At the same time, the non-FTF character of usenet also suggests that it might be necessary to rethink the ways in which traditional ethnographic techniques and methods are brought to bear on a subject. The first half of this paper lays out my proposal for research and attempts to get at some of the ways in which I might deal with the peculiar nature of usenet as a community for study and how I would deal with the additional complexities of observation, posed by the net's non-FTF character. Second, my position within the group under study is not that of the usual researcher from outside the group, coming to town to see how the natives live. I have been reading the news and participating in the activities of the net off and on again for the past seven years. While my position in the world of the net is somewhat marginal, my participation nevertheless changes the terms and conditions under which I would do my observation. I examine this second aspect of the project more thoroughly in the second half of this paper in the section entitled "The Problems of Observation", below. => Community, Society and the Culture of Usenet The first part of the dissertation would be an examination of the notion of the term "community" and its counterpart term "society", drawing on the work of Gusfield, Nesbit, Bendix and, perhaps most importantly in one sense, Benedict Anderson. What I would explore in this part of the work would be the argument about "classic" community and then play that definition off against Anderson's claim that it is not the extent to which a group exhibits the characteristics of classic "community" that makes them one, but rather "the style in which [those communities] are imagined" and the extent to which they are "conceived [of] as a deep, horizontal comradeship" (Anderson, 1983:15-6) that is the decisive factor in their definition. When I first began this project, several people asked me how I could characterize usenet as a "community." They recommended that I read Gusfield and others on the concept. After reading the recommended works and thinking about it I came to the realization that the task of describing the net as a community, and describing the character of usenet's community would be complex. To begin with, there is no way that I can call the net a "community", in the old- fashioned sense of the term. Usenet is too large an entity and the reasons people have for participating on the net appear too diverse for such easy characterization. Usenet is probably best described by the term its participants use to refer to it "the net". It is an interconnected web of electronic links that people use to communicate with each other in a more or less organized fashion. What makes these links important, and amenable to study through the twin concepts of community and culture, is the idea, often expressed on usenet, that the people of the net owe something to each other. While not bound by formal, written agreements, people nevertheless are required by convention to observe certain amenities because they serve the greater common interest of the net. These aspects of voluntary association are the elements of culture and community that bind the people of usenet together. Usenet also exhibits many other important aspects of community. It is a place where people come, of their own volition and at their own expense, for a wide variety of purposes. Given the structure and organization of the net, it is broken up into smaller *newsgroups*, I think it could be argued that usenet forms a number of small, electronic communal enclaves, which have links to each other. In much the same way that people in modern societies seek smaller organizations to meet needs not met in the course of their daily existence, so to, I would argue, the various newsgroups on usenet allow people to extend their communicative reach and address needs that are otherwise unmet in their lives. Getting at how the net deals with those needs, and how those aspects are part of usenet, means having to deal with the central difference between usenet and places where "community" is usually found. That difference is the aforementioned lack of face-to-face interaction. This dissertation would take up the question of how it possible to characterize a form of human communicative interaction a "community" if the regular, day-to-day activities of the community do not include seeing and hearing (in a literal sense) the other members of the organization? Given that I do wish to make such a comparison and characterization, what does this dearth of FTF activity mean for the development and maintenance of the communal aspects of usenet? Offsetting the investigation into the communal aspects of the net would be some investigation into another complexly related issue -- the fact that the net has no center -- each site is an entity unto itself -- and that people rebel against any attempts to impose control on individual sites. This phenomenon is evidenced in the ways individual users are treated but is much more highly visible at the site level. Individual sites are beholden to their neighbors in very sharply proscribed ways -- a site has the sole responsibility of passing down to its *leaf nodes* those groups it receives from the site above it in the hierarchy, but nothing more. For example, as manager of Site.B I get all the computer-oriented groups from Site.A down the road but I do not carry any of the recreation groups. I am obliged to pass the computer groups to you at Site.C, but not obliged to act as a conduit for the recreation groups on your behalf. No one site can tell another site which groups it has to carry or how it provides access to its users or to whom it provides access, or when. Sites are also proscribed from charging downstream sites for news. This sense of autonomy is one of the highly-touted aspects of the net and is usually characterized by members of the net as anarchy. Any examination of a sense of community on usenet would have to explore and offer explanations to questions about the extent to which the net is really anarchic and what there is about the concept that makes it so attractive to so many people on the net. There is an implied tension between the notion of community and that of anarchy. This part of my research would offer a chance to look at and ask questions about how the cultural notion of "free speech" fits in with a sense of cooperation necessary for a community to function. My sense of things says that the concept and freedom implied in the notion of anarchy is important to more than just the users of the net. There are interesting ways in which the concept got worked out in both the evolution of the software of the net and in the development of its stated norms and conventions, ways that contributed to the net's sense of community as well. => Norms and Conventions: Conformity and Deviance on Usenet As mentioned above, there is no central, "official" usenet organization or governing body. Usenet "is a cooperating community of users with access to the net" (Bellovin and Horton 1985). No one is charged with the responsibility for keeping the peace or disciplining errant members. The net is "policed" largely by public opinion. There are a set of loosely articulated norms that a new member is expected to read and understand. These are maintained online, in one of the newsgroups. Opposed to this, in reality, is the actual behavior of the people on the net. This part of the dissertation work would begin with an examination of general ideas on norms, conformity and deviance in social science literature and then move to a discussion of the disjuncture between the articulated norms of the net and the actual behavior of its participants. The lack of face-to-face interaction means that social control on usenet takes two forms: software controls and electronic peer pressure. Software controls are the aspects of the news software that attempt to compel usenet members to act in certain, acceptable ways. For instance, there are informal standards for message format (which are made formal by the software that exchanges news) and rules of etiquette for the users. However, the only mechanism to enforce these rules is peer pressure. Anyone who really wants to can get around the software-enforced "standards". Many of these software "features" are technological responses to problems with *netters* who abused the conventions of the net in the past. Some of these technical solutions affected the individual user -- software "hooks" that prevent sending messages that contain more *included text* than new text but savvy users merely pad their outgoing articles with either blank lines or lines that take issue with the fact that the software tried to compel them to conform to the standards of the net.[5] Other technical solutions were brought about by problems like the volume of traffic on the net. With the net growing from three machines to several thousand in little more than ten years, the accompanying increases in volume meant that the initial scheme for separating news into different groups needed to be recast. The solutions to this problem took many forms, the most famous and the one that caused the most uproar has been called "The Great Renaming" -- a complete restructuring of the news transmission software and the way news was sorted into newsgroups. When I joined the net in late 1984 there were essentially two levels of news -- "net", which was the national hierarchy and sdnet, the local hierarchy.[6] Under the "net" umbrella of newsgroups were groups like net.announce for general announcements of importance, net.singles (single's life) net.rec.skiing (self-explanatory?), net.comp.unix, etc. The sdnet hierarchy was broken down in much the same manner. The important characteristic of this formation was that all newsgroups were held to be equally useful and important. After the "Great Renaming" the "net" hierarchy was broken down into several new categories, without a "top" hierarchy. There were now a number of hierarchies: news (news.announce.important, new.admin), soc (soc.singles, soc.culture.irish), rec (rec.skiing, rec.music.gdead), comp (comp.unix.wizards, comp.os.pc, comp.lang.lisp) and, the most important hierarchy in some senses, the alt hierarchy (alt.flame, alt.sex, alt.tla), to which any site can add a newsgroup. As I would make clearer in the dissertation, this re-hierarchizing of the net was not a simple task. It fundamentally restructured usenet, making the net a more complex and more anarchic place. Part of the proposed dissertation research would be to ask in interviews about the people who made the decision about the renaming and why such a choice was made. The research would then move to judge the relative success of this change. The other kind of control, "peer pressure", finds new forms in this environment. It is relatively simple to see how this would work. Essentially what happens when someone steps over the line, posting something offensive, or violating one of the norms, is that other members of the net either send electronic mail to the offender (or to his site administrator) or they post a *flame* to the appropriate newsgroup. The most famous of these cases is a person (ostensibly male) who named her/himself JJ. JJ posted an article in a number of newsgroups, claiming to be a starving student and asking that people send him/her one dollar. The ensuing uproar cost JJ her/his access to the net and it earned the site, Portal (a pay-per-use site) the unenviable reputation of providing access to *net.idiots*. JJ's case, and other less famous cases like it, provide an opportunity to both ask questions like why was his/her action so offensive to usenet community (Gusfield, 1975:29). These cases also provide an opportunity to look at how the usenet community purges itself of problem members, on the infrequent occasions when it chooses to do so. This case, and others like it, also provide a place to examine one of the core differences between "community" and "society" -- "contractural" economic relations (Gusfield, 1975:10, Nesbit 1966:47- 8, 89, 100). Usenet is a place where everyone pays hir own way and where using the net for advertising is very sharply proscribed. People may advertise used cars or used computer equipment but not new products (except in comp.newprod which is limited to computers) or services.[7] The peculiar set of economic relations of usenet makes it one place where the place of fiscal resources in the formation and maintenance of community can be investigated. What is not yet clear is the effectiveness of peer-pressure approaches or their effectiveness relative to software solutions to the same problems. Given the controls and norms that do exist, there still seems to be great deal of misbehavior on the net. One aspect of this part of the research would be to ask how and why usenet tolerates the violation of its norms and what effect those violators have on the community at large. => The Description and History of Usenet As one might suspect the net did not spring forth, fully formed, from the central processing unit of some distant AT&T Unix box. The net developed from three machines and a handful of people to its present, enormous size through the usually-direct and consciously guided actions of it users. The growth was made possible and fueled by rapidly developing technology -- the rise in popularity of the Unix operating system, the ever-expanding PC (personal computer) market, an explosion of networks and networking technology. Usenet is part of a growing world-wide computer community, and the increased intrusion of computers into daily life. The net grew as a result of and in response to the demands of its users, demands for a channel of communication that served aspects of their professional and private lives. An understanding of this history is central to understanding how the culture and community of the net developed. This history is would also be central for the reader's understanding of how the network functions, as I explain in more detail below, in this section. A history of usenet would also lend itself to an increased understanding the impact of non-FTF interaction on computer- communicative systems. A topic of somewhat wider interest, given the ability of communications technologies to make such communication possible. In constructing my history I would use interviews with the originators of usenet and the tape archives of the news that exist at several sites around the country. In the "Methods" section below, I present a more thorough discussion of the historical research records available to this project. The culture of the net and the software that drives usenet took on distinctively different shapes as forces inside and outside the net created demands for new software functions and new forms of organization. Most of the existing histories of usenet trace its development by following the development of the various software packages that comprise its technological backbone. But these histories fall short in that they do not explicate the forces that provoked the changes in the software. My history would attempt to look beyond the technology and show how the net developed as a result of many forces beyond the dreams and desires of a group of programmers. In my descriptive history I would attempt to set the changes in usenet in relation to the socio-cultural, technological and, to a lesser extent economic and political forces that acted upon it, building up the reader's understanding of the current state of usenet by letting them follow its historical development. This history would also be where I try to acquaint my audience with how the net works. Usenet is a very complex entity, both in terms of its technology and in terms of its "socio-cultural" aspects. The history would serve as a way to draw readers into the culture of the net, by showing them how the various features of usenet developed over time in response to the changing socio-political and economic conditions of usenet and its surrounding environment. => Usenet as a Speech Community One important marker of both community and of culture is language. Having a separate language or dialect is one way of differentiating one's own community from the rest of the world. On a smaller scale, having a special jargon marks one group from another, in larger societies. Studying the language of the subject group is *de rigueur* for any ethnographer (Wax, 1980) and learning it serves to place hir in the community (Horwitz, 1986). Usenet is one place where this activity is most important. Given that the net is, to a great extent, only comprised of its electronically transmitted texts, looking at those texts and asking questions about their language and construction should offer both ethnographer and audience a good sense of what marks usenet off from other electronic networks. Not that this takes much marking. There are simply no other computer networks like usenet in existence (with the possible exception of Fidonet, mentioned above). One thing my preliminary research makes clear is that usenet does have its own vocabulary. This is not just the jargon of computer users but a distinct subset of terms that would only make sense to people with some experience with the net. People familiar with computers in other contexts, and people who use other computer networks, even computer professionals from outside the Unix/usenet world, would find it difficult to understand the jargon of the net. At the base of this vocabulary is the terminology of the Unix operating system but it is only a base. Most of the vocabulary grew out of the particular organization of the net, the way the software works and the conventions adopted to mark different kinds of discourse. I do not intend to delve deeply into the details of the terminology. That would be a topic for a separate dissertation. Instead, what I have begun to do is to compile a glossary of terms used on the net. This glossary would become an appendix to the dissertation and would serve, along with the descriptive history, as a way of familiarizing my readers with usenet.[8] At the same time though, I would like to explore the idea that this jargon marks the net as a distinct "speech community". I have the strong sense that usenet's jargon, and an understanding of that vocabulary on the part of individual people, serves to distinguish between members and non-members of the net. => The Humor, Satire and Folklore of Usenet A lot of things go into the creation and maintenance of community. One of those things is humor. Over the past seven years I accumulated a large collection of jokes and humorous hoaxes perpetrated on usenet. Many of these are famous and have become part of the "folklore" of the net. As part of this work I would like to take a look at this collection and try to establish some sense of what it means to the net to have its own body of humor. Like the notion of "speech community", a separate sense of what is funny is also a marker of community and culture. In her essay on jokes, Mary Douglas discusses the connection between community and humor, specifically jokes, when she notes: In 'community' the personal relations of men and women appear in a special light, They form part of the ongoing process which is only partly organised in the wider social 'structure'. Whereas 'structure' is differentiated and channels authority through the system, in the context of 'community', roles are ambiguous, lacking hierarchy, disorganised. 'Community' in this sense has positive values associated with it; good fellowship, spontaneity, warm contact. ... Laughter and jokes, since they attack classification and hierarchy, are obviously apt symbols for expressing community in this sense of unhierarchised, undifferentiated social relations (Douglas, 1975:104). It is this connection between jokes (and other forms of humor) and community (and culture) that I would explore in this section of the dissertation. The ability to make and understand jokes about particular social and cultural situations goes beyond simply knowing when it's appropriate to laugh, and what it's appropriate to laugh at. Knowing what constitutes a joke, and how to make one, are signs of membership in a community or culture because an appreciation of a joke relies on an understanding and appreciation of the underlying social form or situation (Douglas, 1975:94). One cannot joke about people outside the community, except to mark them as different from the community, i.e., ethnic jokes that play on the supposed stupidity of the other. Like jokes, a sense of what constitutes legitimate satire for the group, some shared understanding about what kinds of commentary on the community are serious and what kinds are supposed to be satirical, is also a marker of membership in a community. Humor and satire serve to delineate who is inside the group from those outside and they serve to mark just how close to the center of a group a particular member really is. To understand the humor of a community is one of the more difficult parts of understanding that community. To be keyed to the satire of a group is to be an insider. The work on humor would be the final chapter in my dissertation. I would put it last as a test of the success of the work. It seems to me that if an ethnographer is successful then the audience for the ethnography should have at least some sense of why the members of the subject community found certain things humorous. ____________________ Methods What follows is a discussion of the various methods I would use for doing the research for the proposed dissertation. Some of this research is already in progress. => Mailist History The base for my research into the history of usenet would come from discussions with the relatively small group of people who originated the net in 1979 and who have been behind the software/technological control that has been exerted over the activities of the net since its inception. On usenet this group of people are often referred to as the "net gods". For about six months I have been running a "mailist" discussing the history of usenet. A "mailist" is a group of people who are interested in a common subject and who discuss the subject via electronic mail. Usually one person acts as the "list maintainer" and archives the traffic for future reference and use. This is my job. Most of the people who have been prime movers on usenet are participants on this mailist. At the beginning of this electronic discussion, one of the participants drew up a list of what he saw as the important "events" in the history of the net. As the discussion has progressed over time, other people on the list began to fill in details about those events. They argued about the relative importance of those events and proposed other events that they thought were important and missing from the original list. This is an ongoing discussion. => Tape Archive History Another set of sources of historical information about usenet are the tape archives of the electronic traffic of the net. One institution, the University of Toronto's School of Zoology (utzoo), has been archiving all net traffic on magnetic computer tape since they joined the net in 1981. In addition to the archive at utzoo, there are many other archives of various newsgroups at other institutions around the country. As part of the mailist I have been sent bits and pieces of old traffic and I have learned where many of these archives are located. As part of writing the history of the net I would use these tape archives as a means of investigating what happened at points of change. An example of how this might work would be to talk about "The Great Renaming". Given that usenet has no geographic center, all changes to the net are discussed on the net itself. The renaming of the net took place over a period of about six months (if I remember correctly). For The Renaming, there was a long discussion of the reasons for the changes. After the decision was made to actually reorganize, there was further negotiation about the shape the reorganization would take. All of this discussion could be followed by reading through the tape archives. What might make this history more interesting is the potential for interaction between my historical research in the tape archives and my use of the history mailist. The archive provides a look at what happened in public, the mailist an opportunity to trace the more private, and at times more interesting reasons behind the changes. => Interviews There are three groups of people I would interview: the originators of the net (the aforementioned "net gods"), members of the general net public and usenet site administrators. I have already discussed some of my reasons for interviewing the "net gods" and I suspect that there is much more to glean from that process than I can see from this vantage point, things that would become clear after I do some interviews. Fortunately interviewing these people would be relatively easy. Each year there is a nation-wide, week-long Unix conference called "Usenix" and most of the people who originated the net normally attend. Between electronic interviews and the opportunity to get FTF at Usenix, it should be possible to generate a good overall understanding of the part played by these people in the development of usenet. The second set of interviews would be conducted with members of the general net public. These would be people who are normal users of usenet. As a preliminary way of thinking about this work I conducted about a dozen interviews last summer. I used these interviews as a way of checking my own understanding of the net against the understanding of other "netters" and as a way of creating questions for future interviews and surveys. My preliminary research shows me that the uses people make of the net are much wider than I might have thought as a user, and it shows me that there are areas of the net that I know precious little about -- particularly the highly technical groups that discuss things like computer operating systems and high-level computer languages. I am not talking about the substantive content of these groups, which I would not expect to understand, so much as I am talking about the ways in which the information from these groups is put to use in the daily lives of their participants. There seems to be two, different kinds of groups -- one kind devoted to highly technical discussions like I list above, and the other devoted more to metaphysical and political issues. While I have not done enough research to support any contentions, I suspect that I would be able to show that the two types of groups could be categorized as those that are *techne* in nature, where the discussions center around technology and how to use it, and those that are *praxical*, and the discussions only involve technology insofar as people want to discuss the philosophical implications of its application. The third group that I would interview would be Unix site administrators. These are the people who are responsible for the machines where the net runs. Depending on the size of the site, they might be the owners of the machine or, as in the case of UCSD, they might be employees. At some sites, managing the news is (or was) a full-time job. At others it is something the site administrator does of hir own free will and on hir own time. In most cases a site administrator is someone for whom dealing with the net is part of hir work (although in many of these cases the fact that they manage the news is *not* an articulated part of the job description). These people would have insight into the processes of control over individual users and information on the site costs of running the net. => An Electronic Survey Over the Net Given the size and geographic distribution of usenet the best way to "interview" a large number of people would be to use the net itself to advertise and gather information via an electronic survey. This is one part of the project that I have not worked through to any great extent. I worked up a preliminary survey when I first began my research last summer, but after doing a few FTF interviews I realized that I didn't know enough about how people used the net to create a useful electronic survey instrument. I didn't know what questions to ask. I have a good sense of the activities of a number of groups but they are mostly the groups I labeled the "praxical" ones above. I have very little sense of the organization and use of the techne oriented groups. I would therefore wait until I have done considerably more FTF interviews with general users before I create and send out an electronic request for survey data. And, just as I would interview site administrators FTF, so to would I create and electronically distribute a survey aimed at them, with special questions of its own. To date I have not talked with any site administrators. => Usenet Statistics One of the useful aspects of the net is the fact that Brian Reid runs a continual statistical survey of the net. He collects information on how many sites are connected, which newsgroups have the highest traffic, what the virtual map of the net would look like on paper and who the top "posters" (authors of articles) are. Since these statistics are sent over the net each week or so they are available from the tape archives. The statistics would provide me with evidence on the net's size and activities. They would allow me to track the growth of the net over time and to see how various newsgroups developed, in terms of the participation of their members. And, by tracking the parallel development of new technological forms, these statistics might also allow me to talk about the interaction between technology and community, allowing me to see which came first -- cultural chicken or technological egg. The statistics might also be useful for creating survey questions for my survey of site administrators. There is information there about the growth in the amount of net traffic that, coupled with the information on new technological forms, might allow me to ask questions about how the relationship between new technology and the cost of running the net. Perhaps most interesting, the statistics say something about what the net thinks is useful information about itself. The statistics spawn a number of discussions about the ever-changing shape of usenet, both technical discussions and philosophical discussions about which newsgroups generate the most traffic and the extent to which those newsgroups are worth the resources they consume. ____________________ Conclusion Usenet, as a site for ethnographic research, is interesting because of the ways it is and is not like most communities; it has a clearly articulated set of norms, some defined prerequisites for membership in the group, a linguistic jargon, some folklore, a sense of humor and a historical record. What it lacks are an organizational head or center, regular face-to-face contact, and any kind of dependent economic relations. The latter are not necessary for this kind of community because it is a kind of electronic "imagined community". Therefore, studying it would provide us with a way to think about how community is constituted through imagination, and what sorts of fundamental social elements are prerequisite to constituting community through computers. One related goal of this research is to try to figure out how a particular computer information system was used to create and nurture a community that grew and changed over time, allowing us to make reasoned conjectures about how another group of people might repeat the experience in a different electronic atmosphere. Both thinking more deeply about how to understand "imagined communities", their origins and their purposes, and also trying to see when and how computers help produce such communities could contribute to a better understanding of how the electronic world is being used to foster social change. Computer networks may not be revolutionizing human social relations on a grand scale, but they seem to many users to be adding to the richness and diversity to their social experience, somehow empowering them. What this might mean could perhaps be better understood through this research. ____________________ NOTES [1] One of the peculiarities of the Unix computer operating system, where usenet was developed, is its "case sensitivity". Unlike earlier computer operating systems, Unix is able to distinguish between upper and lower case letters. In fact, it is an important aspect of the system. For some reason, now probably lost in time, usenet was named in all lower case letters. I will follow that convention here, despite the term being a proper noun, except when I use the word to begin a sentence. [2] Words bracketed with * are defined in Appendix I. [3] Having opened up the issue of Fidonet I expect that I should take a look at it for the dissertation. At this point I haven't been involved with Fidonet for quite a while, long enough that I am hesitant to make comments about its organization. The characterization above reflects my knowledge and experience of that network when I followed it last (circa 1987). [4] What normal, fact-to-face interaction there is concerning usenet, the Unix community's yearly "Usenix" convention and local meetings between *site administrators*, are meta-net discussions. They are discussions about the management of the net, the news and related computer soft and hardware. They are not the "real life" of usenet. And, because the net only exists electronically, the only FTF interaction I would have with members of the community would take place outside the community and would involve asking them to describe and reflect on their activities inside the community. All activities I would be involved in inside the community would be at the remove of a computer from that community. [5] Think of new text as a letter to the editor and included text as text from the *article* the letter's author is responding to. The software attempts to prohibit including more text from the article one is responding to than new text, created in response. [6] This from my recollections of that time. It should not be taken as an actual representation of the state of the net, since I don't even trust it myself. For the dissertation I would research the topic more thoroughly and present a "true" picture of the net. What is said here is only presented as a heuristic for understanding the changes undertaken with the "Great Renaming". [7] What is interesting about JJ's case is that it is *not* about the economic relations of the net -- s/he violated none. Hir offense was the violation of norms for posting articles. [8] The glossary is included here as Appendix I. ____________________ Appendix I A Glossary of Usenet Terms and Expressions :-): The usenet smiley face. Used to mark text that is supposed to be funny, sarcastic or satirical. Implies that the reader should not take the text seriously. *: The "splat". Used in text messages like electronic mail and usenet articles to replace underlining (as in book titles) or to emphasize words. On a computer screen an asterisk is the same height as and size as a capital O. Article: The single texts of a given discussion. Articles fall into two categories: new topics and responses or "followups". Backbone Site: A central organization, usually a university, commercial concern of government agency, that has agreed to collect usenet articles and pass them down the line to leaf nodes, usually free of charge. Bug: A problem or difficulty with a piece of software. A problem to be fixed. Dot: a period used in Unix shell commands and filenames. Unix, like MS-Dos, does not allow blank spaces in filenames. The period (colloquially called the "dot") is used to mark divisions between words. It is also used as the first character in shell-initiation files (those files that the system "reads" as part of the start-up operation when a user logs in). Download: To receive and store files, in this case usenet articles, from another computer. Feed: Usenet service from a backbone site. It means that one site can call another and download usenet news. Flame: To chastise someone or to call them names via either electronic mail or in public on the net. Followup: An article posted in response to someone else's article. It frequently includes text from the article it follows. The software automates this to a certain extent. More often than not a followup is to a followup, and not to the original article. Included text: Lines from one article that the news software places in a file for inclusion in a followup article. These lines are marked with "greater-than" signs at the beginning of each line so that the reader can sort included text from commentary on that text. Kill: To list specific information about a class of articles, specific netters or a particular site in a special file, a "kill file", which gets checked when the readnews software is invoked. When a pattern of information from the kill file matches the proper field in an article, the article is automatically "junked" or discarded and the reader does not see that article. Killing is a way to sort out people and topics that one is either not interested in or finds annoying. Leaf Node: A usenet news site that is at the end of the line as far as news transmission is concerned. A leaf node will not normally feed other sites. Some leaf nodes are PC-size computers with one user. Net.idiot: someone who egregiously or in complete stupidity abuses net protocol. An elected position first held by JJ and currently held by a student at Rutgers University. Netter: What the people who participate on usenet call themselves. News: What the people of usenet call the text of the net. Newsgroup: Any one of 800+ discussion groups on usenet where a more- or-less specific set of topics is under discussion. .newsrc: A .newsrc file is the text file that keeps track of which newsgroups one is "subscribed" to and reads, and in which order. It also tracks the articles, telling the software which was the last article read, and where to begin at the next session. This file also lists which articles have been killed or marked as already read. Signal to noise ratio: The amount of useful information contained in any communicative channel vs. the amount of useless information. In the case of radio reception, where the concept was first applied, "signal" was the stuff the radio broadcaster intended the audience to receive and "noise" was the interference. In the case of usenet, the "signal" is what any given participant considers useful or interesting and "noise" consists of those articles or "signatures" that someone wants to complain about. Signature: A signature is a set of lines that are automatically appended to the end of an article by the news software. A signature is normally found in a users computer account in a file called ".signature". Usenet convention calls for a four-line maximum on signatures. This is an oft-violated convention. Site: Any computer that carries usenet news. Site Administrator: The person at a specific organization who is in charge of usenet news transmission and the related software. Subscribe: To list a newsgroup as active in one's .newsrc file so that the news in that group is presented for reading when the news reading program is invoked. ____________________ BIBLIOGRAPHY Works Referenced for the Proposal Abu-Lughod, Lila. _Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society_, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Adler, Patricia A. and Peter Adler. "The Past and Future of Ethnography" in the _Journal of Contemporary Ethnography_, Vol. 16, No. 1, April 1987. Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications. pp. 4-24. Anderson, Benedict. _Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism_, New York: Verso, 1983. Babcock, Barbara A. "Reflexivity: Definitions and Discriminations" in _Semiotica_, Vol. 30 (1-2). 1980. The Hague: Mouton Pub. pp. 1-14. Barnouw, Erik. _Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television_, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Bellovin, Steve. M. and Mark Horton. "USENET -- A Distributed, Decentralized News System", an Unpublished manuscript, 1985. Bendix, Reinhard. "Tradition and Modernity Reconsidered" in _Comparative Studies on Society and History_, Vol. IX, No. 3, April 1987. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 292-346. Berger, Bennett M. "Utopia and Its Environment" in _Society_, v.25, No. 2. Jan/Feb 1988. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, Inc. pp.37- 41. Boudon, Raymond and Francois Bourricaud. "Conformity and Deviance" in _A Critical Dictionary of Sociology_, Peter Hamilton (trans.), London: Routledge, 1989. Clifford, James. "On Ethnographic Authority" in _Representations_, 1:2, Spring 1983. Berkeley: University California Press, pp. 118-146. Clifford, James. "Introduction: Partial Truths" in _Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography_. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, (eds.). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. pp. 1-26. Douglas, Mary. _Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology_, Boston : Routledge & Paul, 1975. (The chapter on "Jokes" pp. 90-114). Furlong, Lucinda and Trinh T. Minh-ha. "Images of Culture: The Films of Trinh T. Minh-ha" in _The New American Filmmakers Series: Exhibitions of Independent Film and Video_, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1986. Geertz, Clifford. "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture" in _The Interpretation of Cultures_, New York: Basic Books, 1973. pp. 3-32 Geertz, Clifford. "The Uses of Diversity" in _The Tanner Lectures on Human Values_, Sterling M. McMurrin,(ed.), Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, and London: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Geertz, Clifford. "From the Native's Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding" in _Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion_, Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine, (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. pp. 123-136. Geertz, Clifford. _Works and Lives: the Anthropologist as Author_, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Gibbs, Jack P. "Norms" in the _International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences_, Vol. 11, David Sills, (ed.), New York: Macmillan Co. and the Free Press, 1968. pp. 204-213 Gusfield, Joseph R. _Community: a Critical Response_, New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Haraway, Donna. _Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science_, New York: Routledge, 1989. Hebdige, Dick. _Subculture: the Meaning of Style_, London, New York: Routledge, 1988. Horwitz, Robert B. "The First Amendment Meets Some Old Technologies: Broadcasting, Common Carriers, and Free Speech in the 1990s" an Unpublished manuscript, Nov. 1989. Horowitz, Ruth. "Remaining an Outsider" in _Urban Life_, Vol. 14 No. 4, 1986. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications. pp.409-430. Irwin, John. "Reflections on Ethnography" in the _Journal of Contemporary Ethnography_, V. 16, No. 1, April 1987. Newbury Park, CA.: Sage Publications. pp. 41-48. Jackson, Bruce. _Fieldwork_. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. (Especially the chapters: "Introduction" pp. 1-12, "Human Matters: Doing Fieldwork" pp. 13-19, and "Ethics: Being Fair" pp. 259-280). Marx, Karl. "Introduction", in _A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy_, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977. Kundera, Milan. _The Art of the Novel_, New York: Harper and Row, 1988. LeVine, Robert A. "Properties of Culture: An Ethnographic View" in _Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion_, Richard A. Shweder, and Robert A. LeVine. (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. pp. 67-87. Lipsitz, George. _Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture_, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. Marcus, James and Dick Cushman. "Ethnographies as Texts" in the _Annual Review of Anthropology_, Vol. II, 1982. Palo Alto, Calif.: Annual Reviews Inc. pp.25-69 Marcus, George E. and Michael M.J. Fischer. _Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences_, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Meyerhoff, Barbara and Jay Ruby. "Introduction: Reflexivity and Its Relatives" in _A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology_, Jay Ruby, (ed.), Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. pp.1-38. Nisbet, Robert A. _The Sociological Tradition_, New York: Basic Books 1966. (the chapter on "Community" pp.47-106) Norman, Donald. "The Trouble with Unix" in _Datamation_, Nov. 1981. Barrington, Ill.: Technical Publishing Co. pp. 139-150. Norman, Donald. "The Trouble with Networks" in _Datamation_, Jan 1982. Barrington, Ill.: Technical Publishing Co. pp.188-192. Norman, Donald. "The Computer Always Rings Twice" in _Psychology Today_, Oct. 1983. pp. 46-50. pp. 75-81. Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. "Native Anthropologists" in the _American Ethnologist_, Vol. II, No. 3, Aug. 1984. Washington: American Ethnological Society. pp. 584-586 Perlman, Gary. "USENET: Doing Research on the Network", in _UNIX/WORLD_, December 1985. Los Altos, California: Tech Valley Pub. Raymond, Eric (ed.), _The Jargon File, aka "The New Hacker's Dictionary"_, Cambridge: MIT Press, forthcoming (Summer 1991). Ross, Andrew. "Hacking Away at the Counter-Culture", an unpublished manuscript, Princeton University, no date. Parsons, Talcott, Edward Shils, Kaspar D. Naegele, and Jesse R. Pitts, (eds.). _Theories of Society: Foundations of Modern Sociological Theory_, New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961. The chapters: "The Material Forces and the Relations of Production" by Karl Marx, pp.136-8. "Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft" by Ferdinand Tonnies, pp.191-201. Penley, Constance, and Andrew Ross. "Interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha" in _Camera Obscura_, 13-14 (Spring-Summer 1985). Berkeley, California: Camera Obscura Collective. pp. 87-111. Percy, Walker. _Lancelot_, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Platt, Jennifer. "The Development of the 'Participant Observation' Method in Sociology: Origin, Myth and History" in the _Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences_, Vol. 19, 1983. Brandon, Vt.: Clinical Psychology Publishing Co. pp. 379-380. Rabinow, Paul. _Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco_, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Rose, Dan. "Occasions and Forms in Anthropological Experience" in _A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology_, Jay Ruby, (ed.), Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. pp.219-274. Ryan, Jake and Charles Sackrey. _Strangers in Paradise: Academics from the Working Class_, Boston: South End Press, 1984. Spafford, Gene. "u-history.txt", news.announce.newusers newsgroup, USENET. Tedlock, Dennis. "Anthropological Hermeneutics and the Problem of Alphabetic Literacy" in _A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology_, Jay Ruby, (ed.), Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. pp.149-162. Traweek, Sharon. _Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics_, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Trinh T. Minh-Ha. _Reassemblage_, 1982. Trinh T. Minh-ha. _Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism_, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. (Especially "The Story Began Long Ago ..." pp.1,2 and "The Language of Nativism" pp.46-76.) Valentine, Daniel. _Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way_, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Van Maanen, John. _Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography_, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Wax, Murray L. "Paradoxes of 'Consent' to the Practice of Fieldwork" in _Social Problems_, Vol.27, No. 3. Feb. 1980. Buffalo, N.Y.: Society for the Study of Social Problems. pp. 272-283. Zuckerman, Edward. "Must an Author be an Assassin?" in the _Los Angeles Times Book Review_, March 3, 1991. pp. 1 & 9. -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=-