Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub "ss1.60"

CHAPTER 5

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

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when they are used by people who consistently portray an online identity similar to their offline presentation of self. Online spaces where participants expect this type of identity enactment cannot be characterized as anonymous, since people generally know quite a bit about each other. In fact, I would argue that as people make more and more connections offline, their online names cease to function even as pseudonyms but instead become more like nicknames used by a particular group of friends and acquaintances, as part of the idioculture of their group (Fine 1987b).

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

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of the mud. Reid (1996) also describes the negative effect that online publication of her research had on one of the muds she studied.

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.