6. Computer-Mediated Relationships
On a pleasant fall afternoon, I drive through a suburban neighborhood in a mediumsized midwestern town. Midcentury houses alternate with newer apartment and condominium complexes. Two of my BlueSky interviewees live in one of these newer complexes, in a large, pleasant set of townhouses, where winding tree-lined paths link four-unit buildings. Faust, a long-term participant on BlueSky, and Aurora, a mudder who participated for many years mainly on muds other than BlueSky, met online, fell in love, and became engaged before ever meeting offline. Married now for several years, neither currently spends much time on muds. But when they were younger, muds provided a forum that allowed them to explore various ways of relating to other people.
During my first year on BlueSky, Faust participated frequently, but since graduating from college and acquiring a programming job at a company with no Internet access, he rarely logs on. Aurora mudded frequently while in college, although mostly not on Corwin and Alisa muds. Now she rarely muds. She says, “Everyone's polite to me when I log on. You know, like, ‘Aurora, w e never see you on here; you should get on more often!’ But, I don't know—it's not really very interesting. I guess my mind moves faster than that.”
Faust, a stocky young white man with blond hair, has lived most of his life near where he grew up. Both of his parents have a Ph.D. and jointly own a consulting business. Faust majored in computer science in college. He avoided muds at first, because he had a friend who “was, I guess, your typical addict,” and Faust was concerned about the amount of time mudding would involve. But curiosity finally led him to try it out. “The idea of interacting with a lot of people at the same time over a network was very appealing to me.”
Faust met Aurora online while both were still in college. Aurora, a petite
These listening abilities and Aurora's online sociability appealed to Faust. Faust describes his reaction to her: “She was the most popular person online. She was extremely friendly, happy all the time, and very social. Mostly [at first] I just got to know her. At one point I have to admit I decided that I wanted to get to know her really well. Which is kind of strange. It sort of took me by surprise. I knew she was from Australia, which made it completely absurd.”
Faust and Aurora's relationship proceeded from mud interactions to other media, including letters, phone calls, and cassette tapes.
FAUST:At one point we were having a phone conversation and something happened and we both admitted our feelings for each other, which completely changed everything. During that time she'd gotten my photo and I'd gotten some footage of her. And things were going on at a very rapid pace at this point. And we decided to get engaged.
LORI:
So you got engaged before you met, before she came out here.
FAUST:
Yeah. Not quite before I knew what she looked like, but [almost].
Faust's comments highlight the importance of physical attraction to romance and the problem this presents for online relationships. Aurora remarks: “I know Faust was surprised when he first met me, because he envisioned this kind of short, fat, Chinese woman.” Faust confirms this version of his premeeting expectations of Aurora: “I did have a mental picture. I knew she worked at Kmart, and she had asthma problems. So what I really imagined was this short, fat, Chinese girl with asthma problems, sucking on an inhaler the whole time.” Faust laughs at his exaggerated and erroneous image of Aurora, which did not match his idea of an attractive woman.
Both Aurora and Faust thus take pains to laugh off their initial attraction,
In fact, despite having been married for several years now—a happy ending to their fairy tale of virtual romance—Aurora doesn't advise others to look for love online. “I think romance found over the Internet is pretty rare. I mean people always ask me and Faust for tips, and we always tell them, ‘Well, don’t do it; it doesn't work. Us, we're just a fluke!'”
Before predation and danger became the popular themes of media stories regarding online encounters, articles frequently described couples who met and fell in love online. Aurora's doubt echoes the tone of these articles, which paint such romances as remarkable. Our ideal of human interaction, especially romantic and sexual interaction, holds that such contact should not be mediated. Thus, stories about online relationships frequently portray computers as unlikely matchmakers.
Few if any reports of online life focus on friendship rather than romance or aggression. But while BlueSky has its share of romances like that of Faust and Aurora, most of the relationships among participants range between acquaintanceship and friendship. Participants point to these friendships as a primary benefit of online participation.
Although an important part of social life, friendships have not been widely studied. Considered primary and passionate in other times and places (Hansen 1992; Faderman 1989), friendships are portrayed by current norms as less passionate, primary, and central to people's lives than relationships with family members and romantic loved ones, and less socially important than political or economic connections. The paucity of studies of offline friendship groups makes it difficult to compare BlueSky's friendships with similar offline relationships. In addition, as the few existing studies of friendship point out, the very term “friendship” is both vague and symbolically charged and may denote many different types of relationship (see Allan 1989; Rubin 1985). Further, people's statements about the importance of particular friendships do not necessarily match their involvement in the relationship. Rubin's (1985) interviewees sometimes
BlueSky participants enjoy connections with others that may weather life changes better than offline friendships do, allowing them continuity in a time when people, especially those in the middle class, are becoming increasingly mobile. But some of the trade-off for this continuity may be the depth or importance of the connection. Similarly, while online friendships sometimes become quickly intimate, that intimacy occurs within the constraints of text-based, online communication. The lack of physical presence can make verbal and emotional intimacy feel easier and less threatening. When participants attempt to expand such relationships into the offline realm, they often encounter discomfort and uncertainty when the rules and expectations for the relationship change.
ONLINE CONNECTIONS
As the metaphor of the pub suggests, BlueSky resembles the types of social settings Oldenburg (1997) describes as “third places.” Neither work nor home, such public and quasi-public spaces provide forums for sociability and interconnection with others. Offline people use such places for sociability and to keep up with neighborhood doings. Such hangouts can also provide economic benefits for accepted regulars and may be integral to daily work and economic activities (Anderson 1978; Liebow 1967; Whyte 1955).
As in the cafes and bars that Oldenburg (1997) describes, topics of conversation on BlueSky include personal events and stories, exchanges of information, political debates, and discussions of news of the day. People sometimes pop in for brief visits to make announcements of life events, such as the birth of children or receipt of academic degrees. Sometimes such announcements appear quasi-officially, as part of the “message of the day” seen upon first entering the mud. Conventionally, the message of the day provides information on technical changes or other mundane mud
MESSAGE OF THE DAY
WELCOME TO BlueSky MUSH. Read +help. Read news. Read help. Read it all! Learn it. Live it. Love it. //Backups are done at 5am every day. The mud will be down for an hour at that time. //ANNOUNCEMENT: Phase 1 of BlueSky Renovation is done! The Dynamic Sky is gone, replaced by conventional building. All references to xcoord, ycoord, and zcoord should be removed. Watch this space for more bulletins. //IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: evariste and Peg are ENGAGED! Congratulate them both!
From October 1996:
MESSAGE OF THE DAY
WELCOME TO BlueSky MUSH. Read +help. Read news. Read help. Read it all! Learn it. Live it. Love it. //Backups are done at 5am every day. The mud will be down for an hour at that time. New command: +where. It's rough, but it works.
THE COUNSELOR IS *IN*
Congrats to evariste for passing the bar and becoming a LEGAL STUDBOY!
And from November 1996:
WHEN MUDDERS SPAWN
Lisa reports that she's expecting, and due July 8. Congratulations to her (oh yeah, and Frodo, who had something to do with it).
Like message boards in physical locations where people congregate, announcements like these can promote group identity and feelings of involvement in one another's lives. They mark important passages, making these individual attainments part of the group's history, lore, and interpersonal connections. BlueSky participants also use the e-mail list medmenham to communicate similar information. Several ex-members of the Surly Gang who no longer mud, or mud only very infrequently, keep in touch solely through the mailing list.
BLUESKY AS A SOCIAL SAFETY NET(WORK)
Participants compare BlueSky to a variety of analogous “real world” spaces, including bars, clubs, and other types of quasi-private social spaces. But unlike these real life analogs, BlueSky has no geographical locale. People connect from all over the United States (mostly from major cities) and in a few cases from other countries.
Some people emphasize the opportunities BlueSky has given them to meet people they might not otherwise have met. In a face-to-face interview, elflord recounted his history of online participation, beginning on bulletin board systems (BBSs) in his home town. Several BlueSky people participated on BBSs prior to their mudding experience, including both of the other wizards, Corwin and Alisa. BBSs offer information, connections, and services similar to those available over the Internet, but participants connect to them directly by modem (rather than through a separate service provider), and they therefore usually attract people from the local area. The ease of holding face-to-face gatherings of these geographically local groups may have influenced many mudders' later expectations that online relationships should include such offline contact. (Currently, many BBSs also connect to the Internet, but in the early to mid-1980s, when these BlueSky mudders began exploring the possibilities of connecting with others through computers, most were isolated, single-computer systems.)
elflord describes the difference that the broader geographical connections of the Internet make to him.
One of the neat things about mudding that's even neater than BBSing is the geographic distribution of the people. When I log on, generally I'm in touch with people—at the very least—in Utah, California, and on the East Coast. And this sort of expands my perception. It gives me some awareness of what's going on in these places. And particularly if Bistro is on from the Netherlands or Emily from Australia, there's an outreach that gives me a little bit more of a feel that I'm in touch with distant places.
henri, another long-term participant, concurs:
I think one of the best things about muds is, if you look at the list of people that I know, they're people that I w ould never know. There's no way I would ever have known them. Barbie is one example. She's someplace in Bakersfield that I never would have gone and never will in all likelihood. But I'm glad I've met her.
elflord and henri both talk about the minimization of the importance of geographic distance and their ability to meet people at some remove.
Statements like these concerning the value of such meetings tend to exaggerate the differences between distant people who meet online. Most of the people on BlueSky, for instance, come from relatively similar cultural, class, and race backgrounds. Although henri states that he has never been to Barbie's town and thus would never have met her, nothing about Barbie's identity or life history makes it unlikely that henri could have met someone like her in his own town.
The real advantage of this “spaceless place” becomes apparent when people move. As Corwin points out below, most people started on the Surly Gang muds when they were in college or professional school. Many of them moved after graduation, and others have moved since then for a variety of reasons. Throughout these moves, BlueSky participants can maintain at least one of their social groups without significant disruption.
CORWIN:With the BlueSky crowd I think, almost always at least one point in time since they started muds, they have had a major life change and/or move. Okay. Now, let's take henri as an example. (I'm willing to put motives into henri's head.) henri got his Ph.D. Then, he moves to California where he knows nobody. But he had net access at work, so he stayed on the mud. You know. No jarring discontinuity. That's the great thing.
LORI:
You've got people who start this in college, and there's always going to be some sort of disjuncture after that, but they've made this social connection, and you can keep that, unlike the friends they make in college, sometimes. You keep some of your friends, but you lose touch.
CORWIN:
I think about how few people I know from college, much less high school, or whatever. But while you're making this breach move across the country in the case of many people, you've got this connection still. I think it really softens the impact of that. That was true for me. The first opportunity I had after we moved, I got back online.
henri expressed similar sentiments and confirmed Corwin's description of his move to California: “Over time, your best friends move. [But] it doesn't matter where they move as long as they have net access. I've brought them with me in some sense when I moved to California.”
In addition to being able to maintain relationships with people on BlueSky, participants may find people in their new locale whom they already knowfrom online connections. Lisa describes her experience of moving to a new city: “Actually Mender was the person who [got me to move
Beryl and fnord used BlueSky to help maintain their romantic relationship when fnord moved out of their shared apartment to take a job (which Corwin helped him obtain) in another state, several hundred miles away. Both were much happier when fnord found a new job in his original city and they were able to resume living together. However, BlueSky (along with e-mail) helped them stay in touch without relying on expensive phone calls.
People also make use of their BlueSky contacts when visiting other cities. Corwin describes such a trip: “One of the fascinations to it is that if you go somewhere you may have somebody already there. We took our honeymoon in Boston and knewthat there were mudders there. The whole point was we had people volunteer to take us to see the sights in Boston.” Some have even taken mudder “grand tours,” traveling from city to city throughout the United States, stopping to stay with and visit BlueSky mudders along the way. People use the medmenham e-mail list to let others know their itineraries or to solicit places to stay. elflord posted the following message to the list:
From: elflord
Date: Tue, 9 May 1995 11:22:35 +0000
To: Medmenham@machine.university.edu
Subject: The Great Elflord and Carla Road Trip
Carla and I are in the planning stages of a road trip, nominally from Cheyenne to Charlotte, North Carolina, and back. We would probably be on the road for between two and three weeks, falling between June 15 and July 13.
If you are somewhere along our route (likely to follow I-80 on one leg and I-40 on the other, roughly speaking), and would like to meet up with us, please let me know (including best/worst times) to help our planning!
Offers of crash space would be Most Welcome, as well.
—elflord
elflord also mentioned this trip to me in his interview, counting the ability to make remote contacts as one of the major benefits of mudding:
Having contact with all these people in different places makes it possible to have acquaintances in distant places that we visit. The nominal point of our road trip was to visit Carla's family and friends in North Carolina. But all the way there and all the way back we stayed with and met up with people that I knew. And that would not have been possible. The same sort of thing if we ever do a West Coast tour. I know a lot of people out there, just by virtue of muds. I not only know their names and a little about them, I know the person from having actively spoken with them online.
Work-related trips can also be opportunities to meet other BlueSky participants and may similarly be announced on medmenham.
To: Medmenham@machine.university.edu
Subject: trip to bay area
Date: Tue, 09 May 95 18:25:56-0400
From: allia
i'll be 1.5 hours north of sanfran from may 15 until may 21.
i should be free from that friday night until saturday afternoon.
crash space in town is welcome, but not required. i would like to meet mudders and hang out and stuff. allia
The success of such solicitations for meetings varies depending on people's schedules and also on the status of the person seeking to meet others. allia began mudding on TinyMUD and has thus known several BlueSky participants for many years, but she nowparticipates online only infrequently. Several more regular participants consider her “whiny” or are disturbed by her openness about her sexual practices. Thus only a few people responded to her medmenham posting. By contrast, when Alisa, one of BlueSky's wizards and a highly respected member of the group, similarly visited northern California on a work trip, her spare time was easily filled with meals and gettogethers with other participants.
McKenzie recently moved cross-country. His destination and even his reasons for moving were influenced by his mud participation. McKenzie decided to leave his job to return to graduate school, influenced in part by experiences of mudders currently in graduate school. He also chose his school on the basis of recommendations from other mudders.
You've just recently moved?
MCKENZIE:
Right. And mainly did because of people I'd met on the mud.
LORI:
That brought you out here particularly?
MCKENZIE:
Yeah, to NorthernU. Partly because I found out about NorthernU and found out about projects that are interesting to me, but also just partly because I knew people. I was friends with them. … So, as far as my social life out here, it's been virtually everybody that I know in the real life social situation is someone that I know online. That's just because I …
LORI:
came out here because …
MCKENZIE:
Right. My uncle lives here, so that's the only person I don't know from the net. It's just because I haven't met people. [laughs] I'm assuming I'll [eventually] meet people who are not mudders!
In addition to choosing his destination on the basis of the recommendation of mudders, McKenzie met up with several mudders from both BlueSky and ElseMOO (a mud with some overlapping membership with BlueSky) during his cross-country trip out to his new school.
DISAPPEARANCES AND THE FRAGILITY
OF ONLINE RELATIONSHIPS
Mud relationships can be more easily maintained through various life changes than face-to-face relationships. They can also quickly become intense and intimate. However, they are also vulnerable. Disruptions due to loss of net access or other similar changes can occur suddenly, sometimes leaving friends to wonder forever. As henri says:
You have these friends, but maybe the worst thing is knowing that the last time you see somebody may be the last time you ever see them. There's no guarantee that they're ever coming back. This happened with Barbie last year. She just disappeared. If I hadn't had her snailmail address, we never would have [seen her again]. … I have other friends that I have never seen again. … There's also the sense that if something happens to me, I may never see them again and they'll never know what happened. It's not like my parents will even know how to contact them if they want to tell them, well, he's in the hospital or he's dead.
henri mentioned several people who lost net access and thereby disappeared from the group. In one case, a college student dropped out of school (reputedly for “mudding too much”) and lost his school-provided computer account. In another, a mudder lost his job, losing both work-provided access and the economic wherewithal to attain private access. In these cases, the participants made the effort to log on and let others know what was happening. Others have simply disappeared for reasons unknown. These examples highlight the requisites for online participation. Although the cost of online access may be low, it is not nil. Even people from middleclass backgrounds, like most BlueSky participants, who have multiple connections to computers and computer-related networks, can find their online connections disrupted by offline events.
On BlueSky, people manage some of the uncertainty of online participation by making connections outside the mud. They exchange e-mail addresses and in some cases snail-mail addresses and phone numbers. Some people who live near each other get together regularly or semiregularly face-to-face. But you know only what people tell you. When someone goes offline without notice, there may be no way to find him or her. Because muds are not geographic-based communities, it's easy for someone to disappear, “move” to a different online space, or leave the online world entirely.
On one occasion, I left the mud for nearly two weeks without notice. Knowledge of my ongoing research project probably made this an even more troubling event for other participants. People assumed that I wouldn't disappear unless something was wrong. henri lived nearby and tried to call me but had written down my phone number incorrectly. Although most likely nobody really thought I was dead, the response I got on return was surprisingly intense, not to mention gratifying.
fnord says “COPPERHEAD ltns”[1]
henri says “COPPERHEAD”
henri says “where you been”
Copperhead says “fnord, henri”
Florin COPPERHEADhenri says “we've been worried”
Copperhead FLORIN
Copperhead!
henri says “and I don't have your new phone #”
Copperhead says “same phone number”
henri got a “boo-WEEE” error
― 150 ―Copperhead is okay
Corwin has arrived.
henri says “CORWIN”
Copperhead says “Corwin”
Corwin says “Copp”
Corwin says “look henri it's Copp”
henri says “I was just commenting on that”
Mender says “SHE AIN'T DEAD”
Copperhead grins unconvincingly
henri says “we were worried”
Copperhead:(
Corwin wasn't worried, Copp is indestructible
henri says “it's been WEEKS”
henri says “well almost 2 weeks”
Copperhead says “it has been awhile; I didn't really realize how long”
Corwin says “we were worried you got a life or something”
Corwin says “THE HORROR”
henri nods at Corwin
Copperhead got less of a life, actually
henri says “work + school?”
Copperhead nods
You whisper “it was nice of you to try to call” to henri.
henri whispers “well that and we were wondering where you went”
Bilerific-Sid says “We thought you were dead CH.”
Copperhead says “rumors of my demise, etc.”
Phillipe says “CHHHHHHHHH”
Phillipe says “yay, we missed you”
The comments that greeted my return make it clear that my absence was discussed. As in other networks of friends, unexplained absences are noted and discussed, with strategies devised to get information about the missing member. In addition, the greetings of others upon return help reinforce ties between the prodigal mudder and the remaining group. My own absence had been motivated by distress and anger regarding the sexism I perceived on BlueSky. But I rarely felt more warmly connected to the people on BlueSky than when I returned and discovered my absence had worried them.
Sometimes people leave the mud not because of specific discomfort but because they come to believe mudding to be a waste of time. Online socializing carries some stigma, and people sometimes worry that they're
All the dinos I know are, for all intents and purposes, “dead.” That is to say creatively “dead.” We all have everybody's schticks memorized and the on-line interaction is basically empty. Other than the occasional good record recommendation and occasionally funny one-liners, nothing new ever seems to happen. If the interesting discourse among people from different backgrounds (that originally attracted me to muds) is still going on, it must be entirely in whisper.
So I don't know. I guess w hat I am saying is that maybe it is time for most of us to hang it up. I am woman enough to admit that my online persona is now hackneyed and non-entertaining, and what's worse is that I no longer have the desire to attempt to remake myself. Believe me I have tried, never with any success. If you make up a new character you will instantly be hounded to reveal who you “really” are or else shunned entirely.
As in the previous chapter, Barbie's assertions here concerning online personae reveal a slightly different take on mudding from the views many BlueSky people express. She talks about her persona as a separate entity that she created and that now bores her. Barbie also connects her inability to get out of her mud-persona rut to the insularity of BlueSky culture. Once you've created an accepted identity within the group, you may feel locked into that presentation of self. Changing one's self-presentation can be difficult when people link their memories of others specifically to the way they “talk” on the mud rather than to physical characteristics. Add to this the facts that new people are not readily accepted and that Barbie distances herself from her online identity, and one can imagine why she may feel constrained.
Barbie's online persona may bore her, but others on BlueSky do not share her self-evaluation. Her wit and flamboyant personality make her a favorite, and people miss her during her occasional self-imposed exiles. In 1996 she announced she was leaving for good (although she later returned), but during late 1994 and early 1995 she disappeared without warning or explanation, provoking periodic speculation concerning her whereabouts and lamentation over her absence. The following conversation occurred after a quote fest during which someone used a Barbie quote, reminding others how long it had been since they'd seen her.
Corwin says “BARBIE COME BACK”
henri says “BARBIE”
Kay shouts into a microphone, “BAAAAAARBIE”
henri thinks she's dead or something
fnord shouts into a microphone, “BARBIE COME HOME”
henri says “she could have at least sent a postcard”
Kay shouts into a microphone, “BARBIE COME HOME STOP ALL IS FORGIVEN STOP”
Corwin says “maybe she moved somewhere with no access”
Corwin says “i mean she barely had access as it was”
Copperhead says “did Barbie move?”
henri says “we don't know, c-head”
henri says “she just stopped logging in, and won't answer my physical mail”
Copperhead ohs
henri says “and nobody has her phone # and she's not listed”
Ulysses says “baaaaaarbie”
Her return provoked a reaction similar to the one I received after my brief absence, although Barbie's was even more effusive because of her high standing in the group and her longer absence.
Jet says “BARBIE”
Jet says “good lord”
Barbie says “Jet”
Jet says “You return from the DEAD”
Corwin has arrived.
henri points at Barbie
elflord says “LOOK IT'S BARBIE”
Corwin says “BAR-FREAKIN-BIE”
Announcement: Corwin shouts “Barbie is HONORARY QUEEN OF ALL SHESURVEYS for today”
Jet says “QUEEN BARBIE”
elflord applauds
Copperhead bows low
henri. o O (I thought she was Queen of the Universe every day)
henri says “Barbie tell us what you've been doing with all your time”
Barbie says “AIEE, I can't read this fast”
henri says “just gag some people, Barbie”
Barbie hard to say
Barbie has been spending her time doing basically nothing … nothing exciting
anyhow …
― 153 ―Rimmer has arrived.
Rimmer says “BARBIE”
Rimmer says “Welcome back.”
Barbie says “Rimmer!”
Ulysses proclaims today Official Prodigal Barbie Day
Barbie's earlier betrayal of expectations regarding offline and online identities, the persistent rumors that offline Barbie is “really” male, her refusal to meet others offline, and her occasional disparaging remarks about the value of her online participation—all would suggest that Barbie ought to be marginalized by the group. Yet instead she holds high status, and many consider her one of their favorite people on BlueSky.
In part, this apparent contradiction relates to the features of BlueSky sociability that participants value. Humor in particular is important to the interrelations of many small interacting groups (Fine 1987b). For boys and men it likely provides a particularly important form of pleasurable interaction, since expressions of affection may violate expectations of masculinity. Several interviewees indicated that they participated on BlueSky primarily for its entertainment and humor value. This forms such an important part of BlueSky that one participant, asked by another to describe BlueSky in a single sentence, asserted that “Wit is King,” and several others present agreed with this characterization.
Barbie enjoys a reputation as a humorous participant and excellent storyteller. Others enjoy her sarcastic depictions of coworkers, frank tales about dating disasters, and sometimes poignant depictions of her family. (In an excerpt in chapter 3, henri says he has eighty Barbie quotes in his quote file, an unusually high measure of perceived wit.) The richness of Barbie's descriptions of her offline life probably compensate somewhat for her unwillingness to allow her online contacts into that life. In addition, her reputed wit and overall online friendliness lead others to ignore the insult implied in that refusal.
Barbie's status on BlueSky also reflects assumptions and understandings about women's experiences both on and offline. Barbie's gender allows participants to interpret her unwillingness to meet online contacts face-to-face as stemming from fears regarding encountering strangers. Barbie herself relied on this rationalization in her explanation to me regarding her unwillingness to be interviewed offline.
Barbie whispers “I have this rule about meeting computer people. I don't do it anymore.”
Copperhead whispers “hmmm, that's interesting. Why is that?”
― 154 ―Barbie whispers “well, after a number of psychopathic people met me in person (one guy showed up at my doorstep from Michigan after only talking to him once on the phone) I just don't do it anymore.”
Whether or not this is Barbie's real reason for not meeting BlueSky people, its plausibility deflects criticism of her reclusiveness.
Awareness of the gender imbalance on BlueSky also makes participants willing to forgive Barbie's lack of adherence to some of BlueSky's norms. Most participants like to think of BlueSky as diverse and tolerant. As a woman who, when she does log on, participates often in conversations, Barbie helps support this view. Barbie's reputation for raunchiness also supports the male participants' view that their style of talk constitutes normal, friendly conversation rather than gender-specific discourse.
Participants may in fact have some investment in not meeting Barbie face-to-face. They know that many people cannot maintain the same level of outspokenness offline as they do online. Barbie may not display offline the aspects of her online presentation of self that others enjoy. In addition, while rumors concerning a possible discrepancy between Barbie's offline and online gender identities probably stem precisely from her unwillingness to meet others, these rumors may also strengthen people's acceptance of her reclusiveness. Many would probably rather take her female gender presentation at face value than have to risk a reconsideration of whether females can indeed fit into BlueSky's culture as well as Barbie does.
MEETING OFFLINE
Most BlueSky participants do not share Barbie's insistence upon separating online and offline contacts. Although most interactions among BlueSky participants occur online, their relationships extend offline as well in various ways, as we've seen. In some cases, BlueSky participants exchange information that enables them to contact each other through other media. Particularly for people geographically close to each other, this allows for phone calls concerning events of mutual interest or in cases where someone has gone missing from the mud for a period of time, as I did. People have mailed care packages to members of the group who have recently moved, and some participants have regularly exchanged music recordings through the mail.
A small but important portion of BlueSky interactions also occur face-to-face. One feature of the longevity and insularity of the Surly Gang group is that most participants have met each other in person at some
Obtuse BLUESKY DENIZENS MET IN REAL LIFE ROLL CALL
Obtuse Perry, devnull, Captin, allia
David Mender, Sparkle, luke if he counts
fnord too many to list off the top of his head. over 50, he knows, approaching 100
henri too many to list
Copperhead oh gads many many
Obtuse fnord and Beryl, yes
fnord says “just off biglist I've met: Elektra, Pez, Rockefeller, RaveMage, NightBird, evariste, Mu, Bemer, QueenMab, Pyramid, Beryl, symmetry, weasel, Riverrun, Copperhead, dozer, allia, BlackBeauty, Peg, BJ, Gambol, Cleo, McKenzie, Corwin, Sparkle, Mike Adam, henri, Obtuse, Brine, Phillipe, Ulysses, Rostopovich”
Scrounge hsm biglist as a reference
fnord counts, that's 32
RaveMage says “THIRTY SEVEN”
fnord knows there's as many not on that list
fnord says “there used to be 20 mudders just at Dartmouth”
Scrounge Alisa, Corwin, Othello, henri, Perry, Farron, zombie, elflord, Starfish, Dot, Rimmer, Locutus, Stingray Scrounge says “but not fnord”
Phillipe has met like 5 whole people from here not counting the ones who live in New Jersey
David says “You got me beat, Phil”
RaveMage says “twerp dilemma rockefeller mu queenmab chipper beryl weasel riverrun ch susanah locutus fnord devnull dozer allia peg rimmer gambol cleo anguish corwin cauda ME henri madmonk perry”
Because having met many people suggests longevity within the group as well as closer connections with those people, participants notice who has met more and fewer people and acknowledge the status implications.
I asked people about the difference it made to their relationships to have met other people face-to-face. Most of my BlueSky interviewees stated that some people they had never met were nevertheless considered friends. However, meeting face-to-face did make a difference to their relationships.
ATTICUS:People I've met I feel that I'm more willing to put my trust in them.
LORI:
When you meet people, you've got more of a solid base?
ATTICUS:
Right. You know something's actually there. It's more solid. [For instance], there's someone I trust a lot [but haven't met face-to-face] and who I try my best to be very open with. As far as I can tell—and I am pretty good at reading people online, because I've been doing it for awhile—as far as I can tell, she's said things that she wouldn't say if she was trying to [hide herself], but I'm still conscious that I'm not going to know what she's like until I've met her.
Some of this question of trust has to do with people's representation of their identity online. On BlueSky, as previously discussed, participants expect that people will represent themselves in accordance with their offline identity. However, they are aware that in other online spaces, people frequently masquerade, particularly with regard to gender.
In my interview with Mu, one of the earliest BlueSky mudders, we discussed the percentage of women on BlueSky compared with other muds. Mu pointed out that it is hard to get a sense of how many women participate on other muds. But on BlueSky, the longevity of relationships and the offline connections among participants prevent people from hiding their offline identities. As Mu says: “I know everybody by this time. There may be a few exceptions, [but I] have either met them or someone who I've met who I trust has met them.”
Meyrowitz suggests that textual representations always remain in some sense impersonal; however, “after thirty seconds of face-to-face interaction between us (or after seeing me on television), … you would know things about my personal being that you could not discover from reading everything I have ever written” (1985: 99, emphasis in original). BlueSky participants would apparently agree. They privilege information about others gained during face-to-face meetings over information received online.
Several people brought up the issue of trust when asked about the difference face-to-face meetings have made to their relationships. Trust can relate to issues of identity representation, as in Mu's discussion of gender identities. But trust also relates to forms of behavior that cannot occur online. Some people told me stories of meeting other mudders for the first time when these mudders dropped into town and stayed in their homes. In a few cases, people felt taken advantage of when their house guests failed to pay for meals or stole items from their homes. Such incidents made people warier of those they had not yet met face-to-face. This reinforced their belief that you can't really know someone, for bad or good, until you meet them face-to-face.
Another possible explanation for the connection between face-to-face meetings and trust relates again to the features we consider important to identity (at least in U.S. and similar cultures). We rely on several kinds of information to evaluate people. We expect that people have limited control over “given-off,” or expressive, information, and we read such information for clues as to the other person's “true” feelings or personality. On textbased forums such as muds, all information is transmitted through text; thus all information is intentionally presented, what Goffman (1959) terms communicative information. Participants understand that others choose what information they present in this way and could be lying or misleading them. Although emotions and the facial expressions and tones of voice that are connected with them can certainly be controlled or manipulated, we expect that some amount of given-off information is uncontrollable and thus remains to be read by others. To the extent that people rely on “gut feelings” about others based on evaluations of such given-off information, they are unlikely to fully trust someone they have not met face-to-face.
Allen (1996a), in her mud research, states that people she interviewed were interested in gathering information about others' offline identities. On the basis of some of her own meetings with people, she concluded that meeting face-to-face could change the way people feel about each other. I experienced my meetings with interviewees similarly. Sometimes I found myself uncomfortable with a person in a face-to-face meeting—for reasons I couldn't always clearly identify—even though I'd been quite comfortable with that person online. After the face-to-face meeting, I found I could return to our previous level of comfort online. However, I now noticed things I had not noticed previously, and I reinterpreted some aspects of
Most BlueSky regulars indicated that early on in their experience with muds, meeting people surprised them, often in negative ways. But after years of experience with online communication, they said they either learned what kinds of things they could expect to translate from online to offline, or they learned to hold all expectations in abeyance.
BERYL:At first I was really bad at meeting people. I guess I had real expectations or something. But I learned.
LORI:
So what kind of things would happen? Were there people that you liked online and you'd meet them and you wouldn't like them?
BERYL:
Yes. Like Cap turned out … he's not bad online … but he's never mastered being social. So he was a totally different person in real life. In general, though, I've gotten pretty good about it now, in the past few years. You can tell if somebody's rude online, they're going to be rude off. If you genuinely like someone online you're probably going to genuinely like them when you meet them. You have to be careful not to mistake having hung out with someone for years with liking them.
LORI:
So you kind of get more experience with how to read online so you know what's going to translate online and what isn't.
BERYL:
Yeah.
Beryl's comments about Cap illustrate that sociability online doesn't carry the same status as the ability to socialize offline. Other participants mentioned similar discrepancies between online and offline social skills. Some felt that mudding could serve as a sort of training ground for people with inadequate social skills. RaveMage borrows terminology from his professional psychiatric experience:
RAVEMAGE:It's almost like a day hospital for people who have social difficulty. First you interact in a literally faceless and completely defended way with people that if anything upsets you, you just disconnect, no big deal. And you can do it without having to worry about,
LORI:
[So] it's sort of a training [ground].
RAVEMAGE:
Exactly.
LORI:
And then you can use those same skills with other people.
RAVEMAGE:
First you learn to do it on the muds, and then often [when] you try to do it in person, the first time you get a really rude shock. But that's okay because that also is educational, and they learn that and then after that they move [on]. [He mentions two BlueSky participants.] They are just terribly nice people, great to be around, [but] if we hadn't had the chance to talk to them [online] first and realized that, we wouldn't have put up with [them face-to-face].
As RaveMage suggests, some people come across better online than off. Other BlueSky participants also report that face-to-face meetings sometimes negatively affect relationships, especially where gross violations of standard U.S. manners occur. Some people mention factors such as body odor or strange physical mannerisms. Also important are issues of politeness, such as being turned off by someone's tendency to interrupt others' speech. Interrupting a speaker is impossible on muds, since each utterance is discretely typed and entered into the mud program. Also, although some people clearly talk more than others, and some can also type faster than others, monopolizing a conversation can be more difficult online. These kinds of speech habits, which can be offensive in face-to-face encounters, do not arise to the same degree in online communication. Face-to-face interactions can actually disadvantage relationships. Particularly for people who have mannerisms or habits that they find difficult to break despite their offensiveness to others, online interactions can enable better relationships with others than face-to-face interactions.
FROM SPACELESS PLACE TO FACE-TO-FACE:
RELATIONSHIPS IN TRANSITION
While most BlueSky relationships are conducted online, some geographically close participants also enjoy offline relationships. Some people have
The transition from a solely online relationship to an active offline one can be uncomfortable. The most acute difficulties between online and offline social presence arise in romantic relationships. Online romances can engender strong hopes and expectations, freighting the eventual offline meetings with anxiety. Many also find issues of physical presence and compatibility more problematic in romantic or potentially sexual relationships that move offline.
Peg has had two romantic relationships with other BlueSky participants, each of which began online. Atticus moved across the country primarily to change his relationship with Peg from an online to a face-to-face romantic relationship. The relationship with Atticus ended after about a year.
evariste also moved across the country after becoming romantically involved with Peg online, although he insists that his move was motivated primarily by the desire to attend a good law school near where Peg lived. He characterized as foolish and even pathetic the willingness to make such a move solely for romantic reasons (as he knew Atticus had done). Peg and evariste eventually married and have been married for several years.
Peg talked about the difficulty involved in shifting the relationships from online to offline and about how the things she learned from meeting Atticus helped her to handle her first meeting better with evariste.
PEG:When I met Atticus the first time, it was a big shock, because we had very high expectations for how it was going to go, because we were already very enamored of each other from letter writing and from talking on the phone and from being online.
LORI:
So letters and phone calls?
PEG:
Yeah. Oh yeah. And then when I met him it was very hard to put the online person and the person in the same room with me together. It took … he stayed with me for a week. … He came out with a whole bunch of people. I was very overwhelmed, because not only was I meeting Atticus for the first time, but a whole bunch of people: fnord, Rockefeller, Calvin, RaveMage. I met a lot of people that weekend. It was very disconcerting. To contrast, when I met Jim [evariste], we had talked on the phone the same, we had done letters the same, we had sent pictures; I hadn't sent him a videotape, but I had thought of it. When I went to see Jim, we looked at each other for a
LORI:
Because you had the voice before, so this was sort of a little more presence, [then] a little more presence?
PEG:
Right. And we kind of oozed into it. Very slowly. Then later we looked at each other more, and we did a lot [of things together]. I was more comfortable with the way it happened with Jim, but I know a lot of people that it's happened the way it happened with Atticus. I've got the two different experiences. I got used to Atticus, and then we looked at each other all the time, so it wasn't like it ruined our relationship. But it was … he was one of the first people, whereas by the time I met Jim, I was much more used to meeting people online.
In the early stages of romantic attraction, people often idealize the object of their affection. This is especially easy to do when you can't see the other person. Thus, looking for the first time at someone to whom you consider yourself attracted can be threatening, both to the relationship itself and to the participants' views of how realistic they've been about each other. Peg illustrates this in her emphasis on the great difficulty of looking at people previously met only in mediated encounters.
These experiences tend to reinforce the expectation that face-to-face communications give a greater sense of presence. Berger and Luckmann state that “the most important experience of others takes place in the face-to-face situation, which is the prototypical case of social interaction. All other cases are derivations of it” (1966: 28). Similarly, Schutz discussed the “We-relationship,” in which two (or more) participants share the same space and time and “are aware of each other and sympathetically participate in each other's lives” (1967: 163–64). He emphasizes the greater level of information that is available through a variety of senses to each of the participants about the other in a face-to-face setting. “As I watch his face and his gestures and listen to the tone of his voice, I become aware of much more than what he is deliberately trying to communicate to me” (169). Online interactions can sometimes provide this sense of shared presence,
This intensity means that even when people want ideally to deemphasize the importance of looks, the first face-to-face meeting with someone they considered attractive online can be a shock. Beryl became romantically involved with Cap online. But when she met him face-to-face, she did not find him attractive. “Ew, he was so gross! When we met in person, I discovered I had no desire at all for him. But it took a little bit of convincing him.” The effect of previously unperceived given-off information can be particularly intense in a romantic relationship, especially in cases where bodily responses to and arousal for the other person have already been evoked through online discourse.
Meeting people face-to-face with whom you've had only an online friendship can also be uncomfortable. For one thing, people often say things online that they would feel uncomfortable saying face-to-face. RaveMage finds this a negative feature of online interactions, because the tendency of people to reveal very personal details of their lives sometimes reminds him too much of his professional psychiatric activities.
LORI:It almost sounds like it's possible to have very strong friendships with people online, but it's always sort of a maybe until you've met them.
RAVEMAGE:
Yes, it is.
LORI:
And then that cements it or doesn't.
RAVEMAGE:
Sometimes they can be pretty decent friendships, and then the problem is that I notice people are a lot more willing to talk about some things on the muds than they are other places. … When people are talking about certain things, “it's too much like work. You're telling me too much about a problem that is too specific to my profession.”
RaveMage uses BlueSky in part as an escape from his relatively sober and responsible offline life. Although he does sometimes give limited advice and assistance to online friends (particularly on general medical topics not connected specifically to his psychiatric practice), he finds online commu-nication's facilitation of personal revelation distressing.
henri, on the other hand, finds it advantageous to discuss topics online that could provoke discomfort offline.
HENRI:One thing I find easy to do on muds is to talk about virtually any topic that's bothering me. I don't know how much
LORI:
Is that just because you don't see facial expressions? You get reactions, but it's not quite that visceral?
HENRI:
I think maybe it's partially that, but what occurs to me is the syndrome of people being able to talk to total strangers. These people [aren't quite] strangers, but there's that element, because you don't know what I look like, or if you've only met me once or twice, you're not going to show up at my house. … [It's] safe because you're never going to go down and meet any of these people. You don't know anybody they know. You don't know their coworkers, you don't know their family, or anything. That's part of the stranger-confession thing. It's also one way that people can be totally anonymous. You're not going to mention something to her mother that she doesn't want her mother to know. I mean this has happened too, but it's the exception.
henri's suggestion that these people will never meet each other contradicts the actual experiences of BlueSky participants, who do in fact meet each other. It is true that most BlueSky mudders have met neither henri's parents nor his coworkers. (He did introduce one coworker to the mud, and some BlueSky participants have met that coworker offline as well.) However, they know where he works and know enough about him that they could probably even locate his parents. Concern about this level of exposure of his offline life in fact fueled much of henri's anger at shorthop when shorthop wrote about the BlueSky group in a popular net guide using their real mud names.
henri's emphasis on anonymity and the experience of strangerlike relationships, which seemingly contradicts the reality of the routine revelation of personal and identifying information among BlueSky participants, highlights two important considerations. The first concerns the qualities of online relationships, which often appear to combine degrees of both intimacy and aloofness. BlueSky friendships suggest the extent to which online relationships can combine a willingness to reveal very personal information quickly with an acceptance of the casualness and contingency of online connections.
The second important consideration highlighted by henri's remarks concerns research into the nature of online relationships. If a researcher were merely to interview henri without actively participating on BlueSky,
While BlueSky relationships are far from anonymous, the tendency of people such as henri to emphasize their anonymity suggests that the connections fostered by online interaction, even over many years, may never feel as deep or as close as those enabled by face-to-face contact. This accords with Virnoche's (1997) analysis of the Internet as a “strange making technology,” which can introduce distance even into offline relationships experienced as quite close.
This distance, although it may impart a feeling of anonymity even to close and long-term relationships, can facilitate certain types of disclosure. Because of this, as several participants explained to me, online relationships sometimes quickly become verbally intimate, making the transition to an offline friendship particularly difficult. Toni, a relative newcomer to BlueSky, recently changed careers and moved from the South to a large East Coast city where several other BlueSky participants live. As was true for McKenzie, these mudder contacts helped her during a potentially difficult transition. However, Toni had not yet met her BlueSky contacts in the new city face-to-face. She explained that she had previously allowed her online relationship with Jonathan to become very personal, in part because she didn't expect to meet him in person. This complicated the already difficult circumstances of a cross-country move and first meetings with online friends.
TONI:Jonathan and I just, you know, we were kind of always around and kind of always [talked] together and talked about important stuff and unimportant stuff and just kind of [hung out]. So when I met him, it was really really weird. He and I both moved here almost the same day, and we were both staying at Kay's house. So I get here with two cats, and I haven't so much as sat behind the wheel of anything in four or five years, and I've got this fourteen-foot truck, and I've just driven it through snow and ice and fog. You name it—if it sucks to drive through it, I was doing it. So Jonathan's at Kay's house already, and here's this person that …
LORI:
And you're completely exhausted …
TONI:
Yeah, I'm freaked out. I've got two freaked out cats, you
So it was just so overwhelming for me. It was the first time that I met somebody under those circumstances … that I'd known him really well online. I never thought I'd actually meet him in person, and so we were pretty free with each other. [laughs] Here, it was so overwhelming that I [left and] went with Kay to NorthernU. Well, of course, immediately I logged in and start talking with Jonathan. But I just … I couldn't just meet him and sit there and talk to him. It was too much.
Toni echoes henri's analysis of online communication as similar to “stranger interaction.” As with Peg and evariste's slow physical acclimation to each other, Toni's flight back to online communication helped her ease the transition from a fully online relationship with Jonathan to one which now includes relatively frequent offline meetings, because they currently live in the same city and share many of the same friends.
The discomfort people feel when making the transition from an online to an offline relationship suggests that although online relationships may not feel as close as offline relationships, they inspire the kinds of disclosure usually reserved for closer relationships. Some of the ability to disclose may stem not just from physical distance (including the absence of physical communication cues) but also from a certain kind of disinterest. Online friendships often carry fewer expectations and responsibilities than offline relationships. As henri says, “One of the things that happens in real life that stresses friendships is people imposing themselves on you in some way. … It's much easier to pick and choose who and when you interact with on muds.”
henri points out that offline relationships often require greater responsibility and interdependence than relationships conducted solely online. Many of the kinds of things friends do for each other offline cannot occur in primarily online relationships. Favors such as babysitting or housesitting, helping people move, and so forth contribute to the depth of offline relationships. However, when such activities are not reciprocated or the reciprocity is perceived as unbalanced, people can feel imposed upon. As henri points out, this can stress friendships. Thus online relationships often do not have the opportunity to deepen through these forms of mutual support, but they also escape the potential friction that interdependence can generate.
Online, people can also easily forget the exact composition of the group with whom they are conversing. That group may be much larger than a face-to-face conversing group could be. For instance, there may be twenty or more active people in the Falcon at any one time, all of whom may be part of the same conversation. Not only would such a large group conversation be difficult offline (my experience facilitating student discussion groups of this size convinces me of this!), it is unlikely that all members of that twenty-person group would feel equally friendly toward each other. When conversing online, the size and composition of the group are less obvious. This led henri to point out to me that on muds, it's “easy to forget you're not among friends.” It can be easy to reveal things you would otherwise say only to friends.
The limited nature of online communication can sometimes also facilitate friendships that might not have formed in an offline setting. henri describes this phenomenon as well:
I think it's very easy to misinterpret what people say or interpret it in a way that [they didn't intend]. Which I think leads to a lot of [BlueSky's] group cohesiveness. If you really understood, there'd be a lot more friction in our group. People will say something, and you can choose to take it as sarcastic or deadpan or serious or whatever. You don't see people [on BlueSky] saying, “What do you mean by that?” a lot. They laugh or whatever.
By the same thing, it's hard to convince somebody you really don't like them and don't like anything about them and don't want to have anything to do with them.
The good side of that is you can say things that maybe you'd regret later and say, “Oh I didn't mean that.” [The other person has] the choice of being mortally offended or just taking it as a joke.
Online interactions can make some forms of relationship repair and facesaving work easier. The inaccessibility of facial expressions, tone of voice, and other aspects that add nuance to communication gives people greater latitude in their interpretations of others' intent. This, combined with a desire to remain part of the group, can lead people to ignore slights. For instance, in my field notes from June 2, 1994, I wrote: “I find it *much* easier [online] to ignore the sexism and other things that are obnoxious. When Larry was telling me about his class and being friendly and low key, I could almost forget what a pain in the ass he can be sometimes.” This ability to let things go has contributed significantly to my ability to stay online in an environment that I sometimes find hostile. It also has implications for the continuation of social norms online. As henri suggests,
Researchers of computer-mediated communication have tied the lack of cues available in online communication to increased aggressiveness. Specifically, some have suggested that the phenomenon of flaming stems from disinhibition related to this lack of cues (Kiesler, Siegal, and McGuire 1984; Kiesler et al. 1985; cf. Cherny 1999; Lea et al. 1992). However, the ability to misinterpret or reinterpret communications because of lack of cues such as tone of voice can also enhance rather than threaten social connections. In addition, in both friendly and romantic mediated relationships, fantasizing features of the other person and fitting him or her to an ideal is easier than it would be with the greater number of social cues available in face-to-face situations. As henri points out, this can smooth over social conflicts and contribute to group cohesiveness.
MASCULINITIES AND FRIENDSHIP
BlueSky participants' efforts toward group cohesiveness involve not just interpersonal relationships but also group and individual identity work. Acts of forging and maintaining bonds with others involve assertions of our own identity as well as recognition of the identities of our friends. On BlueSky, the predominance of men means that the friendships formed there relate specifically to masculine identities. BlueSky participants relate to each other in ways that importantly recognize, reinforce, or reconstruct their identities as men.
Both popular anecdotes and scholarly work reveal conflicting information about men's friendships. Rubin, for instance, comments that current descriptions of men's friendships are likely to include “laments about men's problems with intimacy and vulnerability, about the impoverishment of their relationships with each other” (1985: 60). Similarly, Reid and Fine found that their male interviewees were “willing to discuss intimate topics but [were] prevented from doing so by the behavior of their
While BlueSky interactions clearly reinforce some stereotypical expectations about group relationships among men involving, as they do, horseplay, friendly insults, and derogatory remarks about women, these interactions also provide evidence of mutual support and intimacy. In the following example, several participants give Mender emotional support and advice about asking someone out on a date. The group quoted below includes both male (Roger Pollack, bodkin, Mender) and female (Ronald Ann and myself as Copperhead) participants, but conversations like this also occur among all-male or mostly-male groups on BlueSky.
Mender says “speaking of which maybe I should call the blind date babe”Copperhead says “do it Mender.”
Mender says “should I ask if she wants to go to dinner or start with something smaller”
Copperhead says “start smaller”
Mender says “with what, lunch?:)”
Ronald Ann says “how about lunch”
Mender could ask if she wants to go to lunch next week
Copperhead says “coffee or drink sounds good. Give a choice.”
Ronald Ann says “drink sounds too scary”
Copperhead says “I don't like first dates where people eat. coffee would be okay though.”
Roger Pollack says “adopt the salesman approach: only give her 2 choices, neither of which is ‘no’; would you like to go for coffee, or would a drink be better?”
Roger Pollack says “okay maybe not”
Ronald Ann says “if someone asked me out for a drink I'd think ‘Hmm, he wants to get me drunk’”
Copperhead nods @ RA
bodkin says “Well I think food is a good way to start, unlike Ron”
Ronald Ann thinks food is good
bodkin says “when you don't have anything to say, you can always chew”
Mender says “I like the lunch idea”
― 169 ―Copperhead says “yeah, but I wouldn't digest well if I was nervous (which I would be).”
Mender says “of course that means it won't happen until next week”
Roger Pollack STOP PROCRASTINATING
Mender's shyness and timidity were well-known, and Mender employed this knowledge to poke fun at himself, often in ways so formulaic that they became his online “shtick.” Yet other BlueSky males also spoke of offline personal relationships in similarly vulnerable and open ways.
While some of the participants' willingness to risk disclosure of very personal information to each other may stem from the distancing effects of online textual connection, the scholarly record provides very little evidence concerning offline male friendships with which to compare BlueSky's norms. In particular, studies of offline men's friendships are limited in that they consist solely of interviews with men about their friendships, not direct studies of the interactions. Interview respondents, familiar with societal expectations and stereotypes about masculinity, may interpret their experiences in light of those expectations. Walker points out that “when men and women discuss friendship they emphasize the behavior that corresponds to their cultural notions of what men and women are like” (1994: 246–47), but their descriptions of particular friendships show more variation and less conformity to stereotypes. BlueSky's conversations thus may not differ much from those occurring in similar face-to-face groups.
Comparison with one of the very few ethnographic works depicting participant-observation of a group of male friends proves instructive in this regard. In Slim's Table, Mitchell Duneier (1992) studied a group of working-class black men who hung out at a local restaurant. Their quasipublic meeting place thus resembled BlueSky except for its existence in physical space and the group's face-to-face meetings. But the men themselves differed so much from those on BlueSky—older, working-class black men as opposed to young, mostly white, mostly middle-class men—that the reported similarity of their conversations startles.
Duneier reports that “a willingness to disclose personal weaknesses is not unique to Slim. Most of the black men here opened up in some significant way. This is most evident in discussions about personal life, when rather than viewing themselves as lovers and exploiters, men often commiserate as victims” (40). The friends Duneier describes thus sound remarkably similar to the BlueSky men discussing heterosexual relationships in chapter 4, especially considering Duneier's assertion that “such
We have too few studies like Slim's Table to allow us to draw significant conclusions about men's behavior in groups or about self-disclosure in men's friendships. But the very different social circumstances and life histories of Duneier's group compared with those of the BlueSky group, in conjunction with the similarities in the two group's discussions, suggest that some types of vulnerability may be more commonly expressed among men than popular anecdotes indicate.
CONSTRUCTING GENDERED IDENTITIES THROUGH TALK
Conversations among friends reflect and reinforce gendered identities. Talk specifically about gender demonstrates particularly clearly the connections among gender, identity, and friendship. In addition to interpreting such cues as dress and mannerisms, people read gender identities through expressed beliefs about gender. Talk about gender can thus connect friends through acknowledgment of shared understandings or create rifts when differences are discovered.
In the following excerpt from an exceptional day on BlueSky, a disagreement among several participants revolves around these issues. In this conversation, BlueSky participants strengthen and sever alliances, opine on the nature of men and women, and puzzle over their relationships with each other. It took place over several hours (and the aftermath continued for several days). Because of the complexities of these issues, I have included a substantial portion of the dialogue, interspersed with my own commentary.
At the beginning of the conversation, Obtuse, a frequent participant with a moderate to low social standing in the group, poses a question about women to the group. Unlike Mender's question about a personal issue, Obtuse's question concerns third parties not known to the group, from which he wishes to generalize about gender relations. For this reason, his query does not meet with as sympathetic a response as Mender's did. Several people respond without necessarily answering Obtuse's question or even agreeing with the assumptions on which the question was predicated.
Obtuse wondersif anyone wantsto take a stab at explaining (to me, a male) a mysterious aspect of feminine psychology.
― 171 ―Obtuse says “I have an old friend who married a 16-year-old girl approximately three years ago. Just recently she left him and moved in with a guy who is known to beat up on his girlfriends. So my question is a) why would she DO that? and b) why do women in general seem to be attracted to men that treat them like dirt?”
Bilerific-Sid says “A) imaginary relationships with real life. b) they don't.”
Obtuse is afraid he doesn't understand BS's answer to a). “Do you mean that she is confusing fantasy relationships with real life?”
Bilerific-Sid says “No, I mean that there is a reality out there that we allexperience, but we interpret the experience through a huge bunch of conceptual errors, nonsensical rules and silly assumptions.”
Obtuse says “OK, try this one: why would it appear to guys like me who tried to be nice to women that they could care less about me and run around with jerks?”
Bilerific-Sid says “Maybe you're a jerk but can't bring yourself to say it.”
Obtuse says “could be, that or nobody convinced me of it at the time”
Bilerific-Sid says “Maybe you subconsciously eliminate women who aren't with jerks from your sample.”
Corwin says “because it's easier to derive ‘women are all insane’ from ‘a woman dumped me’ than getting a grip”
Bilerific-Sid says “Man, there's an oprah book title in that somewhere.”
Obtuse says “so that explains why she's threatening to sue her husband for abuse when she's living with this woman-beater?”
Bilerific-Sid says “yes.”
Obtuse's initial question depends on an understanding of men and women as substantially different. He holds that women do something (move in with jerks) that he (as a male) cannot understand. However, most of his audience is also male and, within the terms of his own question, would theoretically know no more than he. Furthermore, he is one of the few married men present. Obtuse's audience and his status as a person who lives with a member of the supposedly mysterious gender suggest that his inquiry serves more to open a “gripe session” than as a serious request for information. Such conversations constitute both identity work and group bonding. Complaining about others “not like us” serves to reinforce the identity of those present (in this case, men and a few women deemed savvy enough not to be included in the “women in general” referred to in Obtuse's question). This kind of group identity work can also foster feelings of warmth and belonging, thereby reinforcing friendships within the group.
Unfortunately for Obtuse, those present failed to pick up on his theme, rejecting the identity premises around which another group of guys might bond. This conversation thus contrasts with the one among Stomp, BJ, and Ulysses discussed in chapter 4. In that conversation, three men bonded together through a common understanding of men and women and their own identities as rejected, nonjerk males. Here, Obtuse puts forth a similar interpretation of “feminine psychology,” which is summarily rejected by the other men present. They even imply that his own issues about rejection may underlie his assumptions, although both Corwin and Bilerific-Sid know that Obtuse is married.
Obtuse continues to puzzle over the issue, drawing others into the conversation. Meanwhile PAL, a very active but not very well-liked participant, arrives and joins in after consulting the magic recording device to see what has been said so far.
PAL has arrived.
Levi says “An important consideration is whether or not this new guy beats her.”
PAL. o O (would his beating her be considered good or bad by her?)
Obtuse says “maybe she considers NOT being beaten abuse”
Farron peers at Obtuse
Farron says “Possible, but unlikely.”
Obtuse would peer at allia if she were here
Bilerific-Sid says “Whoops, and there they go, flying from vulgar objectivism to extreme relativism in three short sentences.”
Obtuse, and now PAL also, continue to present women as so outlandishly unfathomable that they might actually enjoy and seek abuse. Obtuse also references connections between gender identity and sexuality, as indicated by his reference to allia. BlueSky participants know allia to be interested in sadomasochism, and therefore he assumes that she would understand Obtuse's implication that women might be seeking beatings as a form of sexual pleasure. Bilerific-Sid, however, rejects this connection between abuse and sadomasochistic sexual practices.
In the next segment, PAL and Obtuse continue to press the point, and participants begin to align themselves on two sides of the argument.
PAL says “I don't think it's so much that any woman wants to be *injured*, as it is that many women are attracted to men who “overpower” them …”
Obtuse nodsto PAL. “Could we perhapslearn something from canine behavior—‘powerful’ men appear as the alpha-male?”
― 173 ―Bilerific-Sid says “Oh, that's epiphenomenal horse shit, Obtuse.”
Corwin says “Obtuse and PAL, I am forced to inform you that I wouldn't pay 10 cents for your dime-store psychology”
Bilerific-Sid stands next to Corwin, crosses his arms and nods solemnly.
Obtuse says “would you pay 5 cents for my nickle-store psychology?”
fnord says “face it, Obtuse, you're not even going to get a penny for your thoughts”
Corwin will pay you 5 doubloonsto stop trying to apply your bogustheoriesto people
PAL says“I'll pay you 10 doubloonsto tell me accurately which of my theories is bogus.:-)”
Bilerific-Sid says “Women enjoy men who ‘overpower’ them.”
PAL says “*SOME* women do, they've told me so in exactly those words.”
Corwin says “some shoes are brown.”
Corwin says “shoes are brown.”
Corwin says “See any improper logic leap?”
PAL says “I didn't make a universal statement, I made an existential one. Learn some logic ya smeg.”
Bilerific-Sid scrolls back, “many women like men that ‘overpower’ them.”
Obtuse and PAL indicate agreement with each other, as Bilerific-Sid and Corwin do. Bilerific-Sid even pantomimes a physical alliance with Corwin, suggesting an image of the two of them as a physical barrier, arms crossed against what they perceive as Obtuse and PAL's illogic. As the conversation continues, logic becomes an important focus. Corwin and Bilerific-Sid express their disagreement and distaste in the terms of formal logic, thus distancing themselves from the more emotional and personal facets of the confrontation. PAL initially accepts the challenge on those terms and suggests instead that Corwin's logic is faulty. Bilerific-Sid's “scrolling back” indicates that he is reviewing the recorded log of the conversation for PAL's exact words, highlighting one difference between this online textual argument and similar discussions offline. The existence of a record prevents participants from denying something they said or subtly altering the terms of the argument, as people sometimes attempt to do offline.
In the next segment, Corwin continues to speak in terms of logic, but now in a specifically personal rather than an abstract way. He criticizes PAL and PAL's relationships rather than just the logic of his statements.
Corwin says “from ‘some women PAL knows tell him goofy stories about how they want dominating men’ we can derive one thing, and one thing only: some
― 174 ―women PAL knows tell him goofy stories about how they want dominating men”Corwin says “and possibly the corollary that PAL believes things women tell him about the nature of women and is therefore nuts, but I digress”
Bilerific-Sid says “No you didn't say every single woman that ever lived, but your statement was pretty cut and dried.”
PAL says “By the time *you* dried it, it was jerky.”
Bilerific-Sid says “Write that yourself, or is Joey Bishop helping you out, PAL.”
Corwin and Bilerific-Sid may undertake their critique of Obtuse and PAL's logic partly to allowPAL and Obtuse to distance themselves similarly from their potentially socially damaging statements. Their strategy attempts to construct the conversation as a debate or contest rather than as an argument or disagreement. This turn from the personal to the (supposedly) abstract fits with standard expectations of hegemonic masculinity, and the format of a logical debate conforms particularly well to ideas of desirable masculine identity among these college-educated males who pride themselves on intelligence and wit. However, PAL rejects their strategy, returning the conversation to a more personal level:
PAL says “Well Corwin, you can learn from other people's experiences, or you can learn from your own. I can see you prefer the latter.”
Corwin says “God help me if I start learning things by gross unwarranted generalization.”
PAL says “FUCK OFF *I* DIDN'T OVERGENERALIZE *YOU* DID ASSHOLE!”
Copperhead blinks
Captin blinx
pez says “wow”
mu says “however PAL you *are* guilty of over capitalization”
Obtuse says “are we sure? maybe his capslock key just got stuck for a moment”
Calvin says “Someone did something over … I'm just not quite sure it was generalization.”
pez says “well I'm convinced! it was that controlling male thing that convinced me!”
PAL waits for capital punishment.
Bilerific-Sid sentences PAL to exile.
Bilerific-Sid pulls a large lever, and a trapdoor opens right underneath PAL!
PAL SHOOTs out into the sky!
PAL has left.
PAL's sudden explosion into all-caps and profanity startles all present, drawing reactions from several participants who had remained silent through most of the conversation. PAL clearly expects Corwin to exercise the wizard's prerogative of character disconnection or termination, but instead, Bilerific-Sid resorts to the less severe and more traditional rebuke, lomming PAL.
While PAL is out of the room, the others discuss him. In keeping with his own personalization of the issues, they continue to connect his position on gender relations to his own gender and sexual identity.
Corwin says “have to say I admire his debate methods, though”
pez says “I think he just wanted to be spanked by a dominating woman”
Corwin laughs at pez
Bilerific-Sid wonders if PAL was counting all those times where women approached him and said, “Oh, you're so big and strong! take me!”
henri LAUGHS at BS
pez and Bilerific-Sid suggest opposing interpretations of PAL's sexual activities, with pez relying on standard sexual lore that men dominant in other areas of life like to be dominated sexually and Bilerific-Sid suggesting instead that PAL's stance stems from an overly literal and naive belief in statements uttered by potential sexual partners. The ironic and sarcastic tone of the group's comments reflect their understanding that PAL's reaction was excessive.
In most cases, after a disagreement like this, the lommed person would return to the room, lom the other person in retaliation, and the conversation would be defused, lapsing into horseplay or being supplanted by other conversations. More rarely, the argument might continue, or one of the participants might log off to show disgust. But in this case, when PAL returns, he announces his intention of leaving the group permanently.
PAL has arrived.
PAL says “Alright, how does one un-join this cesspool?”
henri says “‘quit’
”PAL says “No, I mean permanently.”
henri says “quit and don't login again?”
PAL says “I wish to erase all traces of my existence here. Am I being unclear or what?”
Corwin says “this is nostalgic. it's been years since I've had to tell someone that I have no intention of assisting a tantrum.”
PAL says “I've already @destroyed everything I own except me.”
― 176 ―Corwin says “so rename yourself. repassword yourself. do whatever.”fnord says “@password yourpassword = 8yhg9oiuejhg89sug8y9swe8we4t. li9er5”
PAL says “Ah, screw it”
PAL goes home.
PAL has left.
Over the years, the frequency with which people have made dramatic “I'm never coming back” exits has inspired the term “mud suicide” to refer to people who accompany their departures (not always as permanent as apparently intended) with melodramatic denunciations of mudding or of the particular group. Mud suicides also usually destroy all objects they have created on the mud, as PAL indicates he did, and sometimes change their password to an impossible-to-remember string of garbage so that they will not be tempted to return, as fnord suggests PAL do. However, mud suicides happen very rarely on BlueSky.
The extremity of PAL's reaction causes confusion and some consternation among the other participants. Most consider PAL's personality abrasive (a significant judgment, given the overall level of obnoxiousness tolerated on BlueSky). Some, especially Corwin, still have concerns about PAL's mental state and about their own potential complicity in his virtual “demise.”
Corwin says “he wasn't, IMO[3], being ridiculed much to speak of”
Corwin says “either he will get over it and log back on later, or he will not, but I don't know that I could do much about it”
Jet says “is PAL committing suicide or something”
henri says “mud suicide”
henri says “he dest'd all his stuff and logged out after trying to get toaded”
Corwin says “he wanted me to @dest[4] him, but I refused, as always”
Obtuse says “he tried but Corwin wouldn't play Kevorkian”
Corwin alway shates this part, where he sitsaround and figuresout whether or he accidentally said something he should've known better than to say
henri says “regardless of what you said, it wasn't even ad hominem it was just an argument”
henri says “it's like tapping the back bumper of a Pinto and having it explode” Locutus has arrived.
henri says “Locutus you missed the major Pal freak out”
Locutus says “really? what did he do this time”
henri says “he dest'd all his stuff and vowed never to return”
― 177 ―Locutus says “yess no more PAL”
henri HOWLS
henri says “don't try to conceal your feelings”
Locutus says “Xena, quote PAL”
Xena says “I once heard PAL say ‘I wish to erase all traces of my existence here. Am I being unclear or what?’”
henri says “erase all trace of his existence? TOO LATE BUDDY YOU'RE IN CH'S THESIS NOW”
Many, like Locutus, did not like PAL and were happy to see him leave. Yet any departure, especially a rancorous one, disturbs the harmony of the group and reminds people of the fragility of online relationships. Most continued to evaluate PAL's reaction as unreasonable and to reassure Corwin that he was not at fault for PAL's blowup. However, the length of the discussion, which continued off and on for the next several days, indicates the concern that such an extreme action generates. The rehashings and evaluations of the event helped people repair the breach in the group and reassure themselves of the group's continuation.
As participants puzzled over the issues, they also continued to discuss the original gender issues, reiterating their own disagreement with PAL's position and attributing that position to PAL's own identity flaws.
henri says “could someone coherently explain what that was about, I'm unable to pick it out of scrollback”
elflord says “ohe[5] is gone”
henri says “yes but why”
Corwin says “because I said his conclusion was a bogus over-generalization, I guess, henri”
Bilerific-Sid says “Because we didn't buy his pop-fascist psychology about women wanting to de dominated by men.”
Copperhead says “I don't think it's explainable on this end”
Copperhead says “because I've certainly seen him get in as heated an argument”
Tempest says “wow, i missed PAL losing it. too bad.”
Obtuse offers to email Tempest what happened
Tempest says “yes please”
Tempest looks at the log of PAL going nutso … ahhh, the Why women Like Jerks discussion again
Corwin says “PAL put forth that many women want someone to knock them around, and backed this up by saying some women he knew told him that they want a dominating male”
― 178 ―Corwin says “we said ‘get real’”
henri says “I think PAL got offended because he pictures himself as one of the guys who obliges”
Corwin nods at henri
Corwin says “perhaps; although, again, I am loathe to assume”
Tempest says “women like jerks because jerks are interesting or seem to be interesting”
Jet says “women hate me: I must not be a jerk!”
Corwin says “I fall back on my original thesis: ‘women only like jerks’ follows directly from ‘a woman didn’t like me' ‘a woman liked someone I think is a jerk’ ‘I don’t think I am a jerk' ‘women like jerks’”
Tempest recognizes the entire theme as a common one on BlueSky. However, while his comment seems dismissive, he also seems to agree somewhat with PAL when he later provides the first real answer to Obtuse's original question, saying, “Women like jerks because jerks are interesting or seem to be interesting.” The others continue to suggest that PAL believes women like jerks simply because this enables him to translate his rejection by women as proof that he is not a jerk.
Yet this interpretation of PAL's motives does not fit with known facts about PAL's life. In previous conversations, PAL was not shy to remind them that he lived with and shared sexual relationships with two women simultaneously. Whether or not they envied him this, most were annoyed at what they perceived as bragging. Although his current apparently successful relationships with women would not preclude previous rejections, his living situation does not resemble that of other BlueSky participants, such as Stomp, BJ, and Ulysses, who also have put forth the “women like jerks” thesis. Therefore, the portrayal of his warped logic presented by Corwin and Jet constitutes less a description of PAL than a rejection of that particular masculine identity.
Corwin, Bilerific-Sid, and Jet represent themselves as being able to handle sexual rejection by women maturely, without assuming that all women are somehow flawed. They reject the identity, earlier suggested by Stomp, BJ, and Ulysses, of nice guys victimized by the inexplicable realities of heterosexual relations and the concomitant view of women as puzzlingly attracted to abusive men. Yet their statements also continue to support aspects of hegemonic masculinity, particularly the version of it practiced on BlueSky. The conversation constructs a male identity that emphasizes logic, intelligence, and the ability to dish out and take verbal criticism. Not only does gender then constitute a “hot topic” that can either threaten or