1. I have changed all names throughout this book (except for real names referenced in published works), including those of online spaces, characters, participants, offline institutions (such as universities), and geographical locations. I have changed some identifying data of participants to disguise their identities further. In addition, in a few cases, I have used more than one name to refer to the same participant. Following their own practice, I generally refer to BlueSky participants using character names. I have attempted to retain some of the original tone and essential nature of these names by using similar source material or by using character pseudonyms that participants themselves supplied. Bilerific-Sid, for instance, insisted on that pseudonym, asked that I indicate as much herein, and further opined that the use of pseudonyms was silly. For a further discussion of ethical considerations in changing online pseudonyms, see appendix B.

2. The Hacker's Dictionary defines “flame” as: “1. vi. To post an email message intended to insult and provoke. 2. vi. To speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively uninteresting subject or with a patently ridiculous attitude. 3. vt. Either of senses 1 or 2, directed with hostility at a particular person or people. 4. n. An instance of flaming” (Raymond 1991: 158). A flame war consists of several flames sent back and forth by e-mail, newsgroup posting, or similar means.

3. I owe my understanding of the latter point to Doug Orleans, a programmer and participant on a variety of online forums.

4. See esp. his chapter 4.

5. Personal communication with T. L. Taylor, based on her research with people participating in graphical online forums.

6. Sterling states that “cyberspace is the ‘place’ where a telephone conversation appears to occur” (1993: 1). This comparison between the experience of being on the telephone and being online has proved popular among computer

7. The use of the term “multitasking” to describe the ability to switch rapidly back and forth among several tasks, media, or demands on attention provides an interesting example of the increasing use of metaphors derived from computers to describe human activities. The Hacker's Dictionary states that “multitask” is “often used of humans in the same meaning it has for computers, to describe a person doing several things at once” (Raymond 1991: 250). See also Turkle 1984 for a discussion of people's use of computer terminology to describe human beings.

8. Goffman's chapter 13, “The Frame Analysis of Talk,” is particularly relevant to my discussion here.

9. Benedickt describes cyberspace as “a globally networked, computersustained, computer-accessed, and computer-generated, multidimensional, artificial, or ‘virtual’ reality. In this reality, to which every computer is a window, seen or heard objects are neither physical nor, necessarily, representations of physical objects but are, rather, in form, character and action, made up of data, of pure information” (1991: 122–23). Cyberspace is also sometimes used interchangeably with the term “Internet” (inaccurately, some argue). BlueSky participants abhor the term as silly and unrealistic, in part because of perceived hype surrounding online participation.

10. The Communications Decency Act, passed by the U.S. Senate in 1996, was in part an attempt to restrict the dissemination of sexually explicit content over the Internet. It provoked widespread protest on (and off) the Internet. A good source of information about this legislation, its potential impact, and the various protests and measures against it is the website of the Center for Democracy and Technology, at http://www.cdt.org.

1. One person in the group legally changed her name a few years ago to the name she uses online, eliminating this potential confusion, and possibly indicating the degree of importance to her of her online identity and relationships.

2. Information regarding EFF can be found at http://www.eff.org, where they describe themselves as “a non-profit civil liberties organization working in the public interest to protect privacy, free expression, and access to public resources and information online, as well as to promote responsibility in new media.” John Perry Barlow is among the founders of this organization. His presentation of himself as a plain-spoken, down-to-earth “Montana rancher” has contributed to his popularity as a commentator about online life.

3. “Copperhead” is not, of course, my real character name on BlueSky. Since my name there is unique, it would provide a clue to the BlueSky group's

4. To the extent that participants build objects on muds, muds also supply some programming experience. Object building consists of writing small programs (sometimes quite elaborate), which become part of the mud server and interact with characters and other objects. (See Bruckman 1994 on using muds to teach programming skills.)

5. Some academic institutions bar computer account holders from mudding and other activities classified as “games.”

6. To protect BlueSky's privacy, the screen examples I use in this chapter are composites derived from various different muds.

7. Although I've participated in muds for well over three years, I still do not know even the most basic building commands and have never built my own room or objects. Earlier in mudding history, and on some other current muds, this would probably have decreased my status considerably. Even on BlueSky, being able to build interesting or useful objects gives participants greater status among the group. However, since most participants do not engage in much building activity, my lack of facility did not impair my social position.

8. Role-playing muds sometimes require participants to set several different character parameters, including things such as strength and intelligence. These character aspects derive from similar choices made in the initial stages of offline role-playing games. “Race” in such cases usually refers to distinctions such as “elf,”“human,”“troll,” and the like. However, see Kolko 2000 for a description of a mud in which the operators attempted specifically to address questions of racial identity.

9. In some cases, they are referred to as gods, although this term is also sometimes reserved for people who own the host computers. On some muds, there are both gods and wizards, neither of whom necessarily own the computer but who are differentiated by levels of access to the program.

10. The Hacker's Dictionary provides the following definition of crash: “1. n. A sudden, usually drastic failure. Most often said of the system, sometimes of magnetic disk drives. … 2. v. To fail suddenly. … Also used transitively to indicate the cause of the crash (usually a person or a program, or both)” (Raymond 1991: 110).

11. This quote comes from the BlueSky help file, accessed while on BlueSky by typing “help.”

12. Because this mud command fills the screen with a list of the people currently logged on, I can use it to remove potentially offensive statements from the screen.

13. “tf” refers to Tinyfugue, a popular mud client.

1. Role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons (from TSR Hobbies) originated in the 1970s (derived in part from earlier war strategy games). Many such games take place in a conceptual universe owing much to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series of fantasy books (Tolkien 1966), in which vaguely medieval human characters coexist with elves, dwarves, orcs, and other mythological creatures. Players take on roles of characters in this universe (fighters, magicians, etc.) and traverse a terrain (such as a dungeon) laid out for them by the dungeon master. The dungeon master plans the play session by developing a locale and populating it with treasures and monsters. Most play occurs through verbal description, with dice rolls to determine the outcomes of various encounters. In early online versions of adventure games for single players, the computer played the role of dungeon master, posing various puzzles for players to solve. (For a more detailed look at the social world of gaming, see Fine 1983.)

2. Most themes relate to science fiction, fantasy, or comic book literature, demonstrating the strong overlap between the science fiction fan community and muds in general. This connection in turn reflects and helps perpetuate particular demographics among mud participants, who are predominantly white and middle class. Even many standard mud commands reflect this alliance with science fiction. For instance, many muds, like BlueSky, include a teleport command, which allows people to “jump” directly to a chosen room rather than follow a “realistic” path through other linked rooms. (On some muds, people object that teleportation violates the experience of the mud as a place, so they require that mud rooms connect to each other in a logical fashion and that participants move through those rooms sequentially. However, in recognition of the possible tediousness of this requirement when many of those rooms are empty, some muds include commands that move the character through the rooms automatically, pausing just long enough to allow the participant to read each room description.)

3. With regard to e-mail and newsgroups, spamming refers to sending unsolicited messages indiscriminately to multiple addresses or lists without regard for the usual purpose or content of those newsgroups or e-mail lists. A few recent media reports have used spam to refer to any unwanted e-mail, but most experienced net participants do not use the term as broadly.

4. In the early months of my research, participants sometimes expressed surprise at my level of participation and joked that I was in danger of “going native.” This reflects participant uncertainty about how ethnographic research is conducted and, to some extent, fears that I would “experiment” on them by doing things solely to observe particular reactions. For further discussion of BlueSky participants' ideas about ethnography and reactions to my research, see appendix B.

5. For instance, I have a T-shirt, produced for the group by henri and Peg, that identifies me as a member of the BlueSky “lomming team.”

6. The term “CowOrker” is a typo for “coworker,” which participants found humorous enough to continue. The derogatory sound of “cow orker” suits the mostly negative talk about coworkers that occurs on BlueSky.

7. One of the most famous muds, LambdaMOO, has been referenced in several articles in both academic and popular media. Among the features most interesting to researchers are LambdaMOO's attempts to set up democratic methods of making decisions about organization and maintenance of the mud as well as problem solving and dispute mediation.

8. This ambiguity has received considerable discussion with regard to several cases of sexual harassment on muds taking the form of “virtual rapes.” In a well-known account of one of these, Dibbell (1993) reports on discussions among LambdaMOO participants concerning whether mud representations of violent sexual assault constitute sexual harassment or would be better characterized as virtual rape.

9. Changes in the administration or ownership of the computer on which a mud runs can force a mud to move to a new site or cease operation. If it is run without permission, a mud may be shut down when the illicit use of computer equipment is discovered. Usenet mud-related newsgroups frequently feature requests from someone with a mud program or an idea for a mud who seeks a site from which to operate it. Most of these solicitations appear to be unsuccessful.

10. As with most logs included herein, I have edited the following excerpts to clarify the interaction and remove other conversations. This incident occurred at a particularly busy time on the mud and has thus been heavily edited. The full log segment from which I selected this excerpt appears in appendix C as an example of an unedited mud log.

11. Many mud commands include the @ symbol before the command.

12. Here, henri uses the lom command for this room.

13. In labeling himself a toady, Itchy plays off both his suggestion to toad Rostopovich and his support of Corwin's position as wizard.

14. Ironically, many early muds, and some that still exist, have as their main gathering place a room described as a town square. Discussions of LambdaMOO's Living Room, which used to be the first “hangout” room encountered on LambdaMOO, have similarly suggested that, rather than a private person's living room (its textual description), the room more closely resembles a town square. However, these descriptions are misleading in that they promote an expectation of the right of free speech. The policies of various private online service providers, such as GEnie and AOL, limiting types of acceptable speech amply demonstrate this. Several years ago, AOL attempted to censor the word “breast” in its chat areas and on topical message boards. This policy had to be dropped when members of various groups, including recipe exchange groups and a women's breast cancer support group, complained that they were no longer able to discuss their topics of interest.

1. As discussed in chapter 2, gender choices on BlueSky include neuter and plural, and participants use the gender setting mainly for joke purposes or ignore it entirely. Other muds include more gender choices. Many MOOs (a type of mud server: Mud, Object Oriented) offer ten different choices, including several that attempt to bypass gender-specific pronouns through invented pronouns (at least one set of which is borrowed from Marge Piercy's 1983 novel Woman on the Edge of Time). Clearly these gender designations attempt to play with gender possibilities online, and some people no doubt use them to disrupt gender assumptions. The success or failure of these disruptive strategies would be an interesting topic for future study.

2. Ullman (1995) describes a hierarchy of types of programming, in which programmers who work on “user-friendly” application software have lower status than programmers who work on programs understandable only by machines or other programmers (1995: see p. 135). henri works on this latter type of program.

3. The concept of “male answer syndrome” appeared in a 1986 issue of a relatively obscure comic strip called “Eyebeam,” written by Sam Hurt and read by several BlueSky participants in their youth. Hurt saw the term used in a 1983 column by David Stansbury in the Texas magazine Third Coast.

4. The “Nerdity Test” is available on the World Wide Web at, among other places, http://165.91.72.200/nerd-backwards.html.

5. “hsm” is a deliberate typo for “hms,” which is a coined verb form for “says hmm.” Mender's use of “hsm” with “says” would actually be considered incorrect, because it would be interpreted to read: “Mender says ‘says hmm.’” The usual usage would be “Mender hsm,” which BlueSky participants would interpret as “Mender says hmm.”

6. I have gleaned information concerning participants' sexual identities from their own statements about their identities and sexual practices and from more general conversations concerning romantic and sexual relationships. Given the acceptance on BlueSky of a wide range of sexual identities and sexual practices (or at least discussion of sexual practices), and given also that the group culture encourages self-disclosure, I believe these figures accurately represent participants' own understanding of their sexual identities.

7. “Slamp” is an abbreviation for the term “slampiece,” used on BlueSky (mainly by BJ) to refer to sexual partners.

8. Since pose commands are generally written in third person, participants have far more occasion to use third-person pronouns in reference to themselves than they would in face-to-face encounters.

1. Although the distinction rarely appears in reports of online research, online names that differ from offline names should be designated as pseudonyms

2. My thanks to Brad Elmore for providing me with this succinct definition.

3. Julia, perhaps the most famous mud robot, has been entered into a contest for artificial intelligence programs, as a few other mud robots have. See http://www.vperson.com/mlm/julia.html for a description and discussion by Michael Mauldin, Julia's creator.

4. henri wrote this second verse (beginning with “Julia, Julia, she's our spy”).

5. One mud known to BlueSky participants functions as a social “backstage” area for participants from several different role-playing muds. People gather there to discuss plot developments, plan dramatic strategies, and converse socially, often while simultaneously role-playing their fictional characters on the role-playing muds.

6. The message in this last line was visible only to me.

7. Meyrowitz points out that the people most likely to watch “special interest” television programs are not people with those special interests but rather people who watch a lot of television (1985: 84, citing Goodhart, Ehrenberg, and Collins 1975).

8. Accounts of this incident can be found at: http://infoweb.internetx.net/ axcess/Issue5/UsenetWars/holy.wars.html, http://www.cs.ruu.nl/wais/html/ na-dir/bigfoot/part2.html, http://www.phys.uts.edu.au/len/tasteless.html, and, from a slightly different point of view, in Brail 1996.

9. I accessed Quittner's article at http://www.phys.uts.au/len/tasteless.html.

10. See Stone 1995 for a similar account of disruptive invasive behaviors of newcomers destroying an existing online social space. In her example, the invaders were also young males.

11. I had just discovered the group, and I too was driven off.

12. Gag commands on muds prevent only the targeted (or offended) person from seeing text from his or her harasser. Other participants can still see the harassment and may interpret the target's ongoing nonresponse as acquiescence or agreement. Additionally, if other participants continue to converse with the gagged participant, the person using the gag command sees a choppedup, partial conversation.

13. LambdaMOO, a large and well-known mud, has been written up in several articles about muds, with each article sparking an influx of new people to that mud. LambdaMOO participants periodically discuss possible ways to limit population growth and to improve integration of newbies into the culture

14. In addition, typing skills, once associated with femininity and female jobs, are now also valued and boasted of by computer programmers, a group still predominately male. Several BlueSky participants, male and female, pride themselves on their high typing speeds.

1. “ltns” is an abbreviation commonly used on the Internet, meaning “long time, no see.”

2. All the people I discussed these issues with are sighted. The issues for those with vision impairment might be different; however, even for the visually impaired, face-to-face encounters would provide a greater variety of information sources about the other person than text online affords.

3. “IMO” stands for “in my opinion.”

4. “@dest” refers to the command that destroys objects on the mud. Although a participant controls his or her own character, on a registration mud that character was created by a wizard. In order for PAL to make his “suicide” complete through the destruction of his online character, he needed the assistance of one of BlueSky's wizards.

5. “Ohe” means “oh he.” On BlueSky, when participants begin a sentence with “Oh,” they frequently drop the h and combine the remaining o with the next word. “Oit” for “oh it” and “oiam” for “oh I am” are also common.

1. I obtained these and the following figures about Internet demographics from an online search that I conducted on November 28, 1997. Since conditions of online survey administration may exacerbate self-select and self-report biases, I do not consider these statistics particularly reliable. So far as I know, only the Nielsen study purports to have taken a probability sample. However, the percentages are relatively consistent from report to report and fit expectations based on Internet history and attitudes toward computers in the United States. My aim is to give an idea of the range of responses reported in these studies and to suggest likely patterns of Internet participation. Because different surveys asked their questions differently, my figures in the text are approximations only. Although an earlier search turned up a few studies that looked at race, in this search I was unable to find any statistics on race, ethnicity, or nationality. Following is a partial list of sites I reviewed:

1. See Benedikt 1991; Heim 1993; Rheingold 1991; and Schroeder 1996 for discussions of virtual reality technology, theory, and social ramifications.

2. Readers of prior drafts of these chapters commented that they happily read long interview excerpts and felt these provided a good feel for the interviewees. However, they could not follow and were bored by long log excerpts. Increasing my interpretive comments and analysis assuaged some of the confusion and boredom, but some of these problems stem from the nature of mud logs. I kept log excerpts as short as possible, editing out comments from other ongoing conversations as well as comments that do not significantly contribute to the dialogue. (For an example of an unedited log, see appendix C.)

3. The ASA Code of Ethics can be obtained at http://www.asanet.org/ ecoderev.htm.

4. Several participants also provided me with a variety of technical assistance. During an upgrade of her login object, Beryl willingly accepted my requests for particular types of information to be gathered by the object and helped me better learn its use. Faust also wrote a program that allowed me to gather statistics about characters on GammaMOO, another mud he frequented in addition to BlueSky. My thanks also to BJ, elflord, and fnord, who supplied me with useful programs or similar assistance. Numerous other BlueSky participants also helped me with mud commands. Like many other BlueSky participants, I benefited from the ability to log on and ask computer-related questions of anybody present.

5. Participants also had a great deal of fun with the conventional academic nature of my titles and subtitles. Proving the formulaic traits of such titles, henri was able to create a mud object that automatically generated dissertation titles by combining random phrases in standard formats (For instance, the following constitutes the form of my dissertation title, slightly altered in this work: [“ing” verb form] [noun phrase]: [noun], [noun], and [noun]; alternatively, [noun] vs. [noun]: [“ing” verb form] [noun phrase].) Bits and pieces of my own titles were included in the stock of phrases, mixed with miscellaneous academic concepts, ironic versions of postmodernist phrases, vulgar and sexual expressions, and so forth, resulting in humorous and sometimes plausible alternative titles.

6. During a presentation at the American Anthropological Association

7. An additional problem with Allen's strategy stems from the difficulties involved in obtaining “informed consent” when studying groups. While Al-len's interviewees consented to the use of their real online pseudonyms, those interviewees mentioned other mud participants, sometimes revealing very personal information about people not directly involved with the research. Many of those participants did not consent to interviews with Allen and would likely have welcomed the “facile” protection of changed pseudonyms.

8. In a few cases of dealing with sensitive information, I created duplicate pseudonyms for participants, in effect representing a single person as two people. Those pseudonyms successfully hid identities from even the determined sleuthing of Jet and Carets.

1. All names have been changed, as in the text. An edited section of this log appears in chapter 3, in the discussion of wizards.