Please note that, while I'm quite willing to have folks read this proposal and perhaps even find something in it useful for their own work, I am unwilling to have it (the proposal) mirrored on other sites.
This work is © COPYRIGHT 1991, 1997, Bruce Jones
All uses aside from fair use, as defined for paper texts, by the Bern convention, or displaying on the screen of a web browser, require permission of the author. [*]
Bruce Jones Department of Communication bjones@ucsd.edu University of California, San Diego (619) 534-0417/4410 9500 Gilman Drive FAX (619) 534-7315 La Jolla, Ca. 92093-0503 http://communication.ucsd.edu/bjones/index.html
In the past, whenever a new form of communication technology has been developed, its first application has usually been to accomplish the tasks of the old technology, in a faster or "better" manner. This was as true for print books spreading the word of God and recovering the humanist texts of antiquity (Febvre and Martin, 1976) as it was for Marconi's radio replacing the telegraph (Barnouw, 1982). This is also true for computers, which were first mobilized as super-fast adding machines and not regarded as technology for communications. Sooner or later new technology spawns new forms of social interaction based on the new technology (Marx, 1977:19-26, and in Parsons et. al., 1961:137). In the past ten years we have been witness to many changes in society, based on the proliferation of micro-computers and modem access to larger machines (Horwitz, 1990:pp.40-1, Ross nd.: passim). Being at this particular place in the history of computers affords researchers an opportunity to look at the rise of the new forms of human interaction that are growing up around computers. One growing ground is the Unix computer operating system, its community of users, and the Unix-based information exchange network, usenet. [1]
This is a proposal for ethnographic research into the usenet computer network. Usenet, or "the net" as its participants like to call it, defies easy definition in a few lines. Suffice to say for the moment that it is a computer network of several thousand computers, with more than a quarter of a million participants. Usenet sites are located all over the United States and Canada, Western Europe, Australia, South America and branching into Eastern Europe. [2] Connected through phone lines and running over other networks, usenet is an information exchange that carries electronic mail and information traffic between academic, commercial, government and individual computer sites.
Usenet is almost completely unlike other computer networks. That it is different from the other large networks like Bitnet and the Internet is easily understood; they are not information systems. These networks could be thought of as "common carriers" -- they do not provide anything except file transfers (i.e. electronic mail) and do not have public arenas for discussion. Moreover, as mentioned above, usenet itself runs, or sends its information over the Internet. Usenet's closest competitor in terms of structure might be Fidonet, which provides similar information services and discussion groups but is almost entirely in private hands, running exclusively on micro-computers. [3] Usenet runs more on public machines at commercial and industrial research sites, government agencies and on university and college campus computers. Other computer-based forums for discussion, the computer bulletin board systems (BBS) for instance, are different in that they run on one machine (usually a microcomputer) and the various users call in from outside. Usenet runs on the users' local machine and the files are stored and distributed between machines.
The two most salient points about the net are: (1) that there is no central locus of activity, no one person, place or organization that has ultimate responsibility for the actions or activities of the people who populate usenet and (2) the net exists entirely without the benefit of face-to-face contact between its members. More on these both, below.
The central points I would like to investigate in this work are ideas about community and culture in an electronic world. I want to look at the notion that the usenet network of computers and users constitutes a community and a culture, bounded by its own set of norms and conventions, marked by its own linguistic jargon and sense of humor and accumulating its own folklore. The proposed dissertation would explore the history of the net and use that history as a springboard to an ethnographic discussion of how and to what extent usenet exhibits aspects of culture and community. I think this research offers an opportunity to take a fresh look at the ways in which communication systems work to create and nurture culture and community.
The central focus of the dissertation would be an accounting of the advent and development of usenet as an acephelous organization of people, connected by access to a particular kind of computer (Unix), running specific software (usenet news distribution software and some program for reading the news), over time, from 1979 to the recent present. I am interested in how the net got started, what the early expectations of its users were, how these changed over time due to various forces that shaped the net, what those forces were and are, and how the forces came into being (many were generated by the activities of the net itself). The work would also look at how people use the net, what they think they get out of their interactions, how their uses and desires created some of the forces that shaped the net, and how their uses and desires where reciprocally shaped by the net and by those forces.
This project, although categorized as ethnography, will not follow standard, ethnographic practice. Ethnography is usually used as a research tool where the researcher encounters and studys some culture or subcultural group in situ -- going to live in the community to be studied. The ethnographer establishes hirself in some role in the community, learns the language, if "foreign", or the particular dialect or jargon of the community. S/he "lives" with the people, eating, sleeping, washing etc.; doing what they do, when they do it, with them insofar as possible within the constraints imposed by the ethnographer's role.
While in the field, the researcher engages in many activities -- conducting interviews, listening to and recording the verbal stories and songs, copying written records, photographing ceremonies and daily activities, as s/he participates in and observes those activities. The ethnographer observes the artifacts of the people, asking questions about what they do with those artifacts, how they think about what they are doing and tries to understand the relationship between what they think they are doing and how they really act.
The purpose of all this activity on the part of the ethnographer is to investigate and ultimately come to understand the cultural forms of the community; its structure, the relations of power within the group, the rules of involvement, how people "fit in" to a community, what roles are available and how members of the community take on different roles, how members establish and maintain personal space, how territory is established and maintained and how people think about these activities. Finally, it is about how those thoughts and activities are transmitted from one generation to the next, from existing members to new members.
The research proposed here is different. It is not different in terms of its goals. I am interested in the rules, relations and roles on usenet. This work would be different in terms of its subject. The idea of doing ethnographic research on, in or into usenet poses two methodological problems. First, usenet is not a community where one can go an live in the traditional sense -- there really is no "there" there. Usenet exists only as a set of software tools and programs, and the written communiques of its participants. For the most part, usenet lacks the daily face-to-face (FTF in net jargon) interaction of traditional communities of study. [4] The absence of face-to-face interaction makes the net an interesting place to re-examine traditional notions of community and culture.
At the same time, the non-FTF character of usenet also suggests that it might be necessary to rethink the ways in which traditional ethnographic techniques and methods are brought to bear on a subject. The first half of this paper lays out my proposal for research and attempts to get at some of the ways in which I might deal with the peculiar nature of usenet as a community for study and how I would deal with the additional complexities of observation, posed by the net's non-FTF character.
Second, my position within the group under study is not that of the usual researcher from outside the group, coming to town to see how the natives live. I have been reading the news and participating in the activities of the net off and on again for the past seven years. While my position in the world of the net is somewhat marginal, my participation nevertheless changes the terms and conditions under which I would do my observation. I examine this second aspect of the project more thoroughly in the second half of this paper in the section entitled "The Problems of Observation", below.
Community, Society and the Culture of Usenet
The first part of the dissertation would be an examination of the notion of the term "community" and its counterpart term "society", drawing on the work of Gusfield, Nesbit, Bendix and, perhaps most importantly in one sense, Benedict Anderson. What I would explore in this part of the work would be the argument about "classic" community and then play that definition off against Anderson's claim that it is not the extent to which a group exhibits the characteristics of classic "community" that makes them one, but rather "the style in which [those communities] are imagined" and the extent to which they are "conceived [of] as a deep, horizontal comradeship" (Anderson, 1983:15-6) that is the decisive factor in their definition.
When I first began this project, several people asked me how I could characterize usenet as a "community." They recommended that I read Gusfield and others on the concept. After reading the recommended works and thinking about it I came to the realization that the task of describing the net as a community, and describing the character of usenet's community would be complex. To begin with, there is no way that I can call the net a "community", in the old-fashioned sense of the term. Usenet is too large an entity and the reasons people have for participating on the net appear too diverse for such easy characterization. Usenet is probably best described by the term its participants use to refer to it "the net". It is an interconnected web of electronic links that people use to communicate with each other in a more or less organized fashion. What makes these links important, and amenable to study through the twin concepts of community and culture, is the idea, often expressed on usenet, that the people of the net owe something to each other. While not bound by formal, written agreements, people nevertheless are required by convention to observe certain amenities because they serve the greater common interest of the net. These aspects of voluntary association are the elements of culture and community that bind the people of usenet together.
Usenet also exhibits many other important aspects of community. It is a place where people come, of their own volition and at their own expense, for a wide variety of purposes. Given the structure and organization of the net, it is broken up into smaller newsgroups , I think it could be argued that usenet forms a number of small, electronic communal enclaves, which have links to each other. In much the same way that people in modern societies seek smaller organizations to meet needs not met in the course of their daily existence, so to, I would argue, the various newsgroups on usenet allow people to extend their communicative reach and address needs that are otherwise unmet in their lives.
Getting at how the net deals with those needs, and how those aspects are part of usenet, means having to deal with the central difference between usenet and places where "community" is usually found. That difference is the aforementioned lack of face-to-face interaction. This dissertation would take up the question of how it possible to characterize a form of human communicative interaction a "community" if the regular, day-to-day activities of the community do not include seeing and hearing (in a literal sense) the other members of the organization? Given that I do wish to make such a comparison and characterization, what does this dearth of FTF activity mean for the development and maintenance of the communal aspects of usenet?
Offsetting the investigation into the communal aspects of the net would be some investigation into another complexly related issue -- the fact that the net has no center -- each site is an entity unto itself -- and that people rebel against any attempts to impose control on individual sites. This phenomenon is evidenced in the ways individual users are treated but is much more highly visible at the site level. Individual sites are beholden to their neighbors in very sharply proscribed ways -- a site has the sole responsibility of passing down to its leaf nodes those groups it receives from the site above it in the hierarchy, but nothing more. For example, as manager of Site.B I get all the computer-oriented groups from Site.A down the road but I do not carry any of the recreation groups. I am obliged to pass the computer groups to you at Site.C, but not obliged to act as a conduit for the recreation groups on your behalf. No one site can tell another site which groups it has to carry or how it provides access to its users or to whom it provides access, or when. Sites are also proscribed from charging downstream sites for news.
This sense of autonomy is one of the highly-touted aspects of the net and is usually characterized by members of the net as anarchy. Any examination of a sense of community on usenet would have to explore and offer explanations to questions about the extent to which the net is really anarchic and what there is about the concept that makes it so attractive to so many people on the net. There is an implied tension between the notion of community and that of anarchy. This part of my research would offer a chance to look at and ask questions about how the cultural notion of "free speech" fits in with a sense of cooperation necessary for a community to function. My sense of things says that the concept and freedom implied in the notion of anarchy is important to more than just the users of the net. There are interesting ways in which the concept got worked out in both the evolution of the software of the net and in the development of its stated norms and conventions, ways that contributed to the net's sense of community as well.
Norms and Conventions: Conformity and Deviance on Usenet
As mentioned above, there is no central, "official" usenet organization or governing body. Usenet "is a cooperating community of users with access to the net" (Bellovin and Horton 1985). No one is charged with the responsibility for keeping the peace or disciplining errant members. The net is "policed" largely by public opinion. There are a set of loosely articulated norms that a new member is expected to read and understand. These are maintained online, in one of the newsgroups. Opposed to this, in reality, is the actual behavior of the people on the net. This part of the dissertation work would begin with an examination of general ideas on norms, conformity and deviance in social science literature and then move to a discussion of the disjuncture between the articulated norms of the net and the actual behavior of its participants.
The lack of face-to-face interaction means that social control on usenet takes two forms: software controls and electronic peer pressure. Software controls are the aspects of the news software that attempt to compel usenet members to act in certain, acceptable ways. For instance, there are informal standards for message format (which are made formal by the software that exchanges news) and rules of etiquette for the users. However, the only mechanism to enforce these rules is peer pressure. Anyone who really wants to can get around the software-enforced "standards". Many of these software "features" are technological responses to problems with netters who abused the conventions of the net in the past. Some of these technical solutions affected the individual user -- software "hooks" that prevent sending messages that contain more included text than new text but savvy users merely pad their outgoing articles with either blank lines or lines that take issue with the fact that the software tried to compel them to conform to the standards of the net. [5]
Other technical solutions were brought about by problems like the volume of traffic on the net. With the net growing from three machines to several thousand in little more than ten years, the accompanying increases in volume meant that the initial scheme for separating news into different groups needed to be recast. The solutions to this problem took many forms, the most famous and the one that caused the most uproar has been called "The Great Renaming" -- a complete restructuring of the news transmission software and the way news was sorted into newsgroups. When I joined the net in late 1984 there were essentially two levels of news -- "net", which was the national hierarchy and sdnet, the local hierarchy. [6] Under the "net" umbrella of newsgroups were groups like net.announce for general announcements of importance, net.singles (single's life) net.rec.skiing (self-explanatory?), net.comp.unix, etc. The sdnet hierarchy was broken down in much the same manner. The important characteristic of this formation was that all newsgroups were held to be equally useful and important.
After the "Great Renaming" the "net" hierarchy was broken down into several new categories, without a "top" hierarchy. There were now a number of hierarchies: news (news.announce.important, new.admin), soc (soc.singles, soc.culture.irish), rec (rec.skiing, rec.music.gdead), comp (comp.unix.wizards, comp.os.pc, comp.lang.lisp) and, the most important hierarchy in some senses, the alt hierarchy (alt.flame, alt.sex, alt.tla), to which any site can add a newsgroup. As I would make clearer in the dissertation, this re-hierarchizing of the net was not a simple task. It fundamentally restructured usenet, making the net a more complex and more anarchic place. Part of the proposed dissertation research would be to ask in interviews about the people who made the decision about the renaming and why such a choice was made. The research would then move to judge the relative success of this change.
The other kind of control, "peer pressure", finds new forms in this environment. It is relatively simple to see how this would work. Essentially what happens when someone steps over the line, posting something offensive, or violating one of the norms, is that other members of the net either send electronic mail to the offender (or to his site administrator) or they post a flame to the appropriate newsgroup. The most famous of these cases is a person (ostensibly male) who named her/himself JJ. JJ posted an article in a number of newsgroups, claiming to be a starving student and asking that people send him/her one dollar. The ensuing uproar cost JJ her/his access to the net and it earned the site, Portal (a pay-per-use site) the unenviable reputation of providing access to net.idiots . JJ's case, and other less famous cases like it, provide an opportunity to both ask questions like why was his/her action so offensive to usenet community (Gusfield, 1975:29). These cases also provide an opportunity to look at how the usenet community purges itself of problem members, on the infrequent occasions when it chooses to do so.
This case, and others like it, also provide a place to examine one of the core differences between "community" and "society" -- "contractural" economic relations (Gusfield, 1975:10, Nesbit 1966:47-8, 89, 100). Usenet is a place where everyone pays hir own way and where using the net for advertising is very sharply proscribed. People may advertise used cars or used computer equipment but not new products (except in comp.newprod which is limited to computers) or services. [7] The peculiar set of economic relations of usenet makes it one place where the place of fiscal resources in the formation and maintenance of community can be investigated.
What is not yet clear is the effectiveness of peer-pressure approaches or their effectiveness relative to software solutions to the same problems. Given the controls and norms that do exist, there still seems to be great deal of misbehavior on the net. One aspect of this part of the research would be to ask how and why usenet tolerates the violation of its norms and what effect those violators have on the community at large.
The Description and History of Usenet
As one might suspect the net did not spring forth, fully formed, from the central processing unit of some distant AT&T Unix box. The net developed from three machines and a handful of people to its present, enormous size through the usually-direct and consciously guided actions of it users. The growth was made possible and fueled by rapidly developing technology -- the rise in popularity of the Unix operating system, the ever-expanding PC (personal computer) market, an explosion of networks and networking technology. Usenet is part of a growing world-wide computer community, and the increased intrusion of computers into daily life. The net grew as a result of and in response to the demands of its users, demands for a channel of communication that served aspects of their professional and private lives. An understanding of this history is central to understanding how the culture and community of the net developed. This history is would also be central for the reader's understanding of how the network functions, as I explain in more detail below, in this section.
A history of usenet would also lend itself to an increased understanding the impact of non-FTF interaction on computer-communicative systems. A topic of somewhat wider interest, given the ability of communications technologies to make such communication possible.
In constructing my history I would use interviews with the originators of usenet and the tape archives of the news that exist at several sites around the country. In the "Methods" section below, I present a more thorough discussion of the historical research records available to this project.
The culture of the net and the software that drives usenet took on distinctively different shapes as forces inside and outside the net created demands for new software functions and new forms of organization. Most of the existing histories of usenet trace its development by following the development of the various software packages that comprise its technological backbone. But these histories fall short in that they do not explicate the forces that provoked the changes in the software. My history would attempt to look beyond the technology and show how the net developed as a result of many forces beyond the dreams and desires of a group of programmers. In my descriptive history I would attempt to set the changes in usenet in relation to the socio-cultural, technological and, to a lesser extent economic and political forces that acted upon it, building up the reader's understanding of the current state of usenet by letting them follow its historical development.
This history would also be where I try to acquaint my audience with how the net works. Usenet is a very complex entity, both in terms of its technology and in terms of its "socio-cultural" aspects. The history would serve as a way to draw readers into the culture of the net, by showing them how the various features of usenet developed over time in response to the changing socio-political and economic conditions of usenet and its surrounding environment.
Usenet as a Speech Community
One important marker of both community and of culture is language. Having a separate language or dialect is one way of differentiating one's own community from the rest of the world. On a smaller scale, having a special jargon marks one group from another, in larger societies. Studying the language of the subject group is de rigueur for any ethnographer (Wax, 1980) and learning it serves to place hir in the community (Horwitz, 1986). Usenet is one place where this activity is most important. Given that the net is, to a great extent, only comprised of its electronically transmitted texts, looking at those texts and asking questions about their language and construction should offer both ethnographer and audience a good sense of what marks usenet off from other electronic networks. Not that this takes much marking. There are simply no other computer networks like usenet in existence (with the possible exception of Fidonet, mentioned above).
One thing my preliminary research makes clear is that usenet does have its own vocabulary. This is not just the jargon of computer users but a distinct subset of terms that would only make sense to people with some experience with the net. People familiar with computers in other contexts, and people who use other computer networks, even computer professionals from outside the Unix/usenet world, would find it difficult to understand the jargon of the net.
At the base of this vocabulary is the terminology of the Unix operating system but it is only a base. Most of the vocabulary grew out of the particular organization of the net, the way the software works and the conventions adopted to mark different kinds of discourse. I do not intend to delve deeply into the details of the terminology. That would be a topic for a separate dissertation. Instead, what I have begun to do is to compile a glossary of terms used on the net. This glossary would become an appendix to the dissertation and would serve, along with the descriptive history, as a way of familiarizing my readers with usenet. [8]
At the same time though, I would like to explore the idea that this jargon marks the net as a distinct "speech community". I have the strong sense that usenet's jargon, and an understanding of that vocabulary on the part of individual people, serves to distinguish between members and non-members of the net.
The Humor, Satire and Folklore of Usenet
A lot of things go into the creation and maintenance of community. One of those things is humor. Over the past seven years I accumulated a large collection of jokes and humorous hoaxes perpetrated on usenet. Many of these are famous and have become part of the "folklore" of the net. As part of this work I would like to take a look at this collection and try to establish some sense of what it means to the net to have its own body of humor. Like the notion of "speech community", a separate sense of what is funny is also a marker of community and culture. In her essay on jokes, Mary Douglas discusses the connection between community and humor, specifically jokes, when she notes: In 'community' the personal relations of men and women appear in a special light, They form part of the ongoing process which is only partly organised in the wider social 'structure'. Whereas 'structure' is differentiated and channels authority through the system, in the context of 'community', roles are ambiguous, lacking hierarchy, disorganised. 'Community' in this sense has positive values associated with it; good fellowship, spontaneity, warm contact. ... Laughter and jokes, since they attack classification and hierarchy, are obviously apt symbols for expressing community in this sense of unhierarchised, undifferentiated social relations (Douglas, 1975:104).
It is this connection between jokes (and other forms of humor) and community (and culture) that I would explore in this section of the dissertation.
The ability to make and understand jokes about particular social and cultural situations goes beyond simply knowing when it's appropriate to laugh, and what it's appropriate to laugh at. Knowing what constitutes a joke, and how to make one, are signs of membership in a community or culture because an appreciation of a joke relies on an understanding and appreciation of the underlying social form or situation (Douglas, 1975:94). One cannot joke about people outside the community, except to mark them as different from the community, i.e., ethnic jokes that play on the supposed stupidity of the other.
Like jokes, a sense of what constitutes legitimate satire for the group, some shared understanding about what kinds of commentary on the community are serious and what kinds are supposed to be satirical, is also a marker of membership in a community. Humor and satire serve to delineate who is inside the group from those outside and they serve to mark just how close to the center of a group a particular member really is. To understand the humor of a community is one of the more difficult parts of understanding that community. To be keyed to the satire of a group is to be an insider.
The work on humor would be the final chapter in my dissertation. I would put it last as a test of the success of the work. It seems to me that if an ethnographer is successful then the audience for the ethnography should have at least some sense of why the members of the subject community found certain things humorous.
Methods
What follows is a discussion of the various methods I would use for doing the research for the proposed dissertation. Some of this research is already in progress.
Mailist History
The base for my research into the history of usenet would come from discussions with the relatively small group of people who originated the net in 1979 and who have been behind the software/technological control that has been exerted over the activities of the net since its inception. On usenet this group of people are often referred to as the "net gods".
For about six months I have been running a "mailist" discussing the history of usenet. A "mailist" is a group of people who are interested in a common subject and who discuss the subject via electronic mail. Usually one person acts as the "list maintainer" and archives the traffic for future reference and use. This is my job. Most of the people who have been prime movers on usenet are participants on this mailist.
At the beginning of this electronic discussion, one of the participants drew up a list of what he saw as the important "events" in the history of the net. As the discussion has progressed over time, other people on the list began to fill in details about those events. They argued about the relative importance of those events and proposed other events that they thought were important and missing from the original list. This is an ongoing discussion.
Tape Archive History
Another set of sources of historical information about usenet are the tape archives of the electronic traffic of the net. One institution, the University of Toronto's School of Zoology (utzoo), has been archiving all net traffic on magnetic computer tape since they joined the net in 1981. In addition to the archive at utzoo, there are many other archives of various newsgroups at other institutions around the country. As part of the mailist I have been sent bits and pieces of old traffic and I have learned where many of these archives are located. As part of writing the history of the net I would use these tape archives as a means of investigating what happened at points of change. An example of how this might work would be to talk about "The Great Renaming". Given that usenet has no geographic center, all changes to the net are discussed on the net itself. The renaming of the net took place over a period of about six months (if I remember correctly). For The Renaming, there was a long discussion of the reasons for the changes. After the decision was made to actually reorganize, there was further negotiation about the shape the reorganization would take. All of this discussion could be followed by reading through the tape archives. What might make this history more interesting is the potential for interaction between my historical research in the tape archives and my use of the history mailist. The archive provides a look at what happened in public, the mailist an opportunity to trace the more private, and at times more interesting reasons behind the changes.
Interviews
There are three groups of people I would interview: the originators of the net (the aforementioned "net gods"), members of the general net public and usenet site administrators. I have already discussed some of my reasons for interviewing the "net gods" and I suspect that there is much more to glean from that process than I can see from this vantage point, things that would become clear after I do some interviews. Fortunately interviewing these people would be relatively easy. Each year there is a nation-wide, week-long Unix conference called "Usenix" and all of the "net gods" normally attend. Between electronic interviews and the opportunity to get FTF at Usenix, it should be possible to generate a good overall understanding of the part played by the net gods in the development of the net.
The second set of interviews would be conducted with members of the general net public. These would be people who are normal users of usenet. As a preliminary way of thinking about this work I conducted about a dozen interviews last summer. I used these interviews as a way of checking my own understanding of the net against the understanding of other "netters" and as a way of creating questions for future interviews and surveys.
My preliminary research shows me that the uses people make of the net are much wider than I might have thought as a user, and it shows me that there are areas of the net that I know precious little about -- particularly the highly technical groups that discuss things like computer operating systems and high-level computer languages. I am not talking about the substantive content of these groups, which I would not expect to understand, so much as I am talking about the ways in which the information from these groups is put to use in the daily lives of their participants. There seems to be two, different kinds of groups -- one kind devoted to highly technical discussions like I list above, and the other devoted more to metaphysical and political issues. While I have not done enough research to support any contentions, I suspect that I would be able to show that the two types of groups could be categorized as those that are techne in nature, where the discussions center around technology and how to use it, and those that are praxical , and the discussions only involve technology insofar as people want to discuss the philosophical implications of its application.
The third group that I would interview would be Unix site administrators. These are the people who are responsible for the machines where the net runs. Depending on the size of the site, they might be the owners of the machine or, as in the case of UCSD, they might be employees. At some sites, managing the news is (or was) a full-time job. At others it is something the site administrator does of hir own free will and on hir own time. In most cases a site administrator is someone for whom dealing with the net is part of hir work (although in many of these cases the fact that they manage the news is not an articulated part of the job description). These people would have insight into the processes of control over individual users and information on the site costs of running the net.
An Electronic Survey Over the Net
Given the size and geographic distribution of usenet the best way to "interview" a large number of people would be to use the net itself to advertise and gather information via an electronic survey. This is one part of the project that I have not worked through to any great extent. I worked up a preliminary survey when I first began my research last summer, but after doing a few FTF interviews I realized that I didn't know enough about how people used the net to create a useful electronic survey instrument. I didn't know what questions to ask. I have a good sense of the activities of a number of groups but they are mostly the groups I labeled the "praxical" ones above. I have very little sense of the organization and use of the techne oriented groups. I would therefore wait until I have done considerably more FTF interviews with general users before I create and send out an electronic request for survey data.
And, just as I would interview site administrators FTF, so to would I create and electronically distribute a survey aimed at them, with special questions of its own. To date I have not talked with any site administrators.
Usenet Statistics
One of the useful aspects of the net is the fact that Brian Reid, one of the "net gods", runs a continual statistical survey of the net. He collects information on how many sites are connected, which newsgroups have the highest traffic, what the virtual map of the net would look like on paper and who the top "posters" (authors of articles) are. Since these statistics are sent over the net each week or so they are available from the tape archives. The statistics would provide me with evidence on the net's size and activities. They would allow me to track the growth of the net over time and to see how various newsgroups developed, in terms of the participation of their members. And, by tracking the parallel development of new technological forms, these statistics might also allow me to talk about the interaction between technology and community, allowing me to see which came first -- cultural chicken or technological egg. The statistics might also be useful for creating survey questions for my survey of site administrators. There is information there about the growth in the amount of net traffic that, coupled with the information on new technological forms, might allow me to ask questions about how the relationship between new technology and the cost of running the net.
Perhaps most interesting, the statistics say something about what the net thinks is useful information about itself. The statistics spawn a number of discussions about the ever-changing shape of usenet, both technical discussions and philosophical discussions about which newsgroups are generating the most traffic and are these newsgroups worth the time and bandwidth they consume.
Fieldwork and Ethics
As I note above, my participation on usenet since 1984 creates a somewhat different observer status for me as a researcher. I suspect that all fieldworkers have to face the question of ambiguity in determining their role in the subject community. A fieldworker's status develops over time, as Horwitz notes: Fieldwork roles are not matters dictated solely, or even largely, by the stance of the fieldworker, but are instead better viewed as interactional matters based on processes of continuing negotiation between the researcher and the researched (Horwitz 1986:410).
The initial difficulty faced by an ethnographer from outside the community is hir acceptance by the subject group. S/he needs to "establish" hirself in some capacity as a legitimate member of the group. Perhaps the group is initially hostile (Horwitz 1986) or perhaps it is initially indifferent (Geertz 1973). But, given the amount of social science fieldwork that has been conducted around the world in the past 75 years or so, it is likely that any subject group will have some previous conception of what the presence of a researcher in the group means and how the researcher should be treated, at least at the outset. The outsider has a place and role definition from which to begin.
For the native ethnographer this problem is turned the other way around. Instead of having to "establish" hirself, the native who takes up an analysis of hir own culture is likely to suddenly find hirself and hir motives being questioned -- what is s/he doing and why, what uses will be made of the material gathered, and is s/he about to turn "traitor" to the group. [9]
What this calls for is simply being open and honest about one's research activities from the outset. This stance is both ethically proper and beneficial -- working covertly can wind up inhibiting or destroying relationships that might otherwise produce useful data (Wax 1980:277). In many ways the net is a very small place. It is a place where anyone may come and go as they please and where anyone is free to make whatever use of the net's resources they like, subject only to the flames of the disgruntled. Given that I am beginning research into a place where I have "lived" for many years, my own position with that community is changing. I have been careful to tell people, both in person and in mail, that I am now a researcher on the net and that their interactions with me might wind up as part of that research.
What I have come to understand in the reading and research I have done thus far, is that in field research, the consent and participation of the subjects in the project is something that is negotiated at the outset of the interaction and something that is continually renegotiated over time. It begins with the researcher stating hir goals and purposes up front and continues with hir answering questions as the research proceeds. As Wax (among others) notes, "Consent is not contractual, but developmental; it is a process, not a single event" (1980:282).
The Problems of Observation
The introduction to this dissertation would be a discussion of one of two ongoing debates in ethnography -- the debate about the problems of observation. The other, which I not intend to take up in this paper, could be labeled the debate over the problems of representation. [10] The observation debate involves what Geertz has characterized as a split between a scientistic worry about being insufficiently detached and a humanistic one about being insufficiently engaged (1988:15).
The incident that set me off on this topic was a conversation I had with Sharon Traweek during the late Spring of 1990. Our conversation was about how to do ethnography inside one's own culture. One of the points that she reiterated many times was the problem of rendering the subject subculture strange. That conversation has given rise to lots of thought on my part about how I would go about setting up a critical distance between myself and the culture of usenet after being a member on the margins of the net for the past seven years. What follows is an attempt at looking at the problem of estrangement and engagement on the part of a would-be, "native" ethnographer. [11]
The place to begin such a discussion would be to define the difference between "natives" and "outsiders" in ethnographic study. A native would be someone born, raised and educated in the culture they study. An outsider would be someone who came from another culture and who possibly has to learn the language of the people s/he came to study. This issue has been the focus of much debate in ethnography for some time now (Valentine 1984, Abu-Lughod 1986, Geertz 1988, Trinh 1989). This section examines this issue and attempts to add a dimension to the discussion by looking at ethnography as an activity engaged in by someone from the margins of the culture they are examining, who is doing their research in a non-conflict/non-confrontory situation. By margins I do not necessarily mean anyone seriously marginal; i.e. a black person raised in an inner-city neighborhood who is examining the workings of a Wall St. brokerage house. I would take that as an example of an ethnographer from another culture. What I mean is someone who could pass as a member of the culture but, who is not situated at the center of that culture.
Perhaps this could best be explained by example. As a researcher and ethnographer of usenet, I am caught in a curious, in-between place. I am partially a "native" of usenet. My initial exposure to computers came as part of a college class that used Unix computers that I took in the fall of 1984. I began reading the news shortly thereafter, not with the intention of studying usenet but just as anyone else would become a member of the net -- to read the news. And so I remain. At the same time however, I am partially an outsider to the net. Despite my almost constant following the discussions in a number of groups over the past seven years, my standing on the net is pretty much that of a lurker -- someone who reads the news but doesn't respond much and who has little if any part in shaping the interaction or the changing shape of the net of any particular news group. The net is largely the domain of computer professionals, or at least people with significantly more computing (not necessarily computer) experience than I have. [12] So I would describe myself, for the purposes of this project, as a "native" -- although not someone who was raised in the culture in question nor a visitor from the outside but who, through circumstance, is a little of both. Someone who joined the community at some point, not necessarily with the intention of investigating it, like a traditional ethnographer, but rather someone who decided later to make that culture, usenet, the object/subject of an ethnographic investigation.
Given the tendency of ethnographers to come from inside their own cultures these days (Valentine 1984, Traweek 1988) this way of thinking about the position of the ethnographer raises interesting questions about ethnography as a practice. Questions like, if the position of the traditional ethnographer ostensibly gives hir a "privileged" point of view on the subject culture, what point of view does the "native" perspective provide? [13] If the purpose of ethnography is to both render the other less strange and to provide food for thought about the audiences' culture (Marcus and Fischer 1986:passim), how are these purposes served by ethnography from the inside? This perspective also points toward interesting ways of thinking about "participant observation" because many of the assumptions about the dividing line between participation and observation are turned on their heads.
One of the biggest difficulties for the native ethnographer has to do with cultural common sense. Most any informant in any culture is able to tell an ethnographer about the rules, beliefs and philosophical propositions of that culture. This body of social regulation is usually as explicitly understood as are the laws and dictionary definitions of a culture's words. What the researcher finds after spending time in that community, is that there is another body of socio-regulatory ideas and behaviors which "informants cannot easily explain and which they take for granted as self-evident responses to what is and what ought to be" (LeVine 1984:76, cf. also Rabinow, 1977:58) or what might also be called their common sense understanding of the world. It is these ideas, these basic assumptions about the world, that are so difficult for the native ethnographer to see because these assumptions are part and parcel of hir own view of the world.
The ethnographer who comes into a community or culture from the outside world has an advantage over the native in this instance -- the subject culture is "strange" to hir. Sometimes all of it, sometimes only much of it. No matter. This sense of strangeness, of encountering new things, is what sharpens the curiosity of the ethnographer. As s/he seeks to understand what is happening in their subject world, s/he asks questions about things that a native might never think to ask. The native ethnographer must establish some means for making the familiar strange, some way of opening hir eyes so that s/he can see hir own daily experiences in a fresh light.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of work in your own culture is the opportunity to re-examine that culture; in examining your own culture it is possible to find out more about it and about yourself. As Robert LeVine notes: Any American who tries to explain to a foreign visitor why he finds a political cartoon in his daily newspaper funny and effective will find himself engaged in thick description and discover relationships among aspects of American culture he takes for granted but which are not shared with other cultures (1983:73).
Examining aspects of one's own native culture also offers the ethnographer and hir audience the opportunity to re-examine their experience of their own culture. Paul Rabinow discusses his experiences with "informants" and how they both came through the negotiation of meaning about the subject culture to understand it better, his informant no less than himself (Rabinow 1977:38-9).
However, that which offers delights also poses a dilemma for the native ethnographer. How is one to understand which "political cartoons" of the culture under examination should be investigated, which practices should be questioned? If there is no foreigner visitor along to ask questions and to point what needs to be investigated, how is the native ethnographer going to figure it out? One answer to the dilemma, is that in talking to and interviewing members of the culture, those members will inadvertently or consciously provide the help the native ethnographer needs.
It should be obvious (but I'll mention it anyway) that both the ethnographer and hir interlocutors benefit from this process. Just as the native ethnographer comes to understand hir own culture better, so do all interlocutors come to see their own activities and culture in a new light, reciprocally learning more about their own activities in the process. The most challenging and surprising moments that occurred to me during or after the working process were fleeting moments of a plural encounter where something undefinable suddenly happens between the subject filmed and the cinematographer [or ethnographer]. The spectator unexpectedly sees what I see while I rediscover the materials through her or his eye (Trinh in Penley and Ross 1985:95).
If the purpose of ethnography is to offer insight into one's own culture in reading about the other, then reading about one's own should offer more insight. For example, high-energy, particle physicists would no doubt benefit from reading Traweek's Beamtimes and Lifetimes -- especially those in graduate school or at the post-doc level. [14]
There is another aspect to this notion of engagement vs. estrangement. That is the question of just how much of the world view of the another culture an ethnographer actually shares or can share (cf. Ohnuki-Tierney 1984, Geertz 1984, and Trinh 1989 ). For the outside ethnographer, is it possible to "penetrate or be penetrated by" another culture? (Geertz 1988:4) This is one of the central concerns in ethnography today. Is it possible to penetrate another culture? Is it desirable to make the attempt? To what extent? There are no clear answers to these questions, only a set of tensions, out of which grow arguments.
For Geertz, the attempt is both necessary and desirable. In his view the success or failure of an ethnography hangs on the sucess of the attempt and the success of the ethnographer to convince the reader that s/he has to some extent penetrated and been penetrated by the subject culture. For Trinh, precisely the opposite is true. Not only should one not try to penetrate the culture, neither can one be penetrated by that culture (the implicit sexuality of the metaphor is not lost on her either I suspect). Any attempt to do so, or any claims to having done so, are immediately suspect. For Trinh, such claims are claims about "scientificity" (the obvious construction of a non-word is deliberate here) on the part of the ethnographer. For Trinh, ethnography (as in her documentary) should try to "speak nearby":
This is not to say that any serious ethnographer thinks that they have or can become a native of another culture. That is not what the enterprise is all about: One should not think of fieldwork [or ethnography] as an ability to step into or become immersed in alien culture, but rather as a process, exemplified by the learning of a foreign language, in which an outsider may acquire conversational fluency but is never able to erase the accent that reveals an alien upbringing (Wax 1980:274).
Geertz too, notes that "finding one's feet" with the other is "an unnerving business which never more than distantly succeeds" (Geertz, 1973:13).
The issue that fascinates Geertz is the tension between the substative, real world and the task of representing that world in a way that makes sense to an audience. This same tension motivates Trinh, but from a much different perspective. While Geertz wants to frame the task in terms of Western scientific and literary modes of representation, (1988:passim) Trinh wants to toss out the baby and the bathwater -- having given up on the task of cleaning up the act of western ethnographic representation -- and instead, presents in her film and in her writing, a picture of the world akin to that of the returned traveler who remembers bits and pieces, little snapshots of the reality encountered, and tries as best as they are able to reconstruct for their friends some sense of what it was like to walk among those people at that time. It frequently seems as though the objectives of both Trinh and Geertz are really not all that divergent, just their modes of representation. They both seem to seek the same goal -- offering the audience some sense of a distant culture, time and place. Where they differ is that Geertz offers (or, as Trinh might characterize it, forces) an interpretation of the activities -- he is "doing science" -- while Trinh prefers to leave the activity of interpretation, insofar as such an act is possible, to the audience -- she is a raconteur.
The issue of cultural penetration is not solely a debate between Anthropologists. It is a problem for all social scientists who study culture face-to-face: "One of the most critical debates [about ethnography] involves the balance between subjectivity and objectivity, or more generally, between involvement and detachment" (Adler and Adler 1987:7). For the ethnographer from the outside the worry is about how deeply to get involved with one's subjects. For the native ethnographer the concern is precisely the reverse -- how to maintain a critical distance from hir subjects. On one hand the ethnographer needs to be close enough to hir subject(s) to know them. On the other, there needs to be some distance between the two, some space for analytical consideration, some "strangeness" on the part of the subject for the author, so that s/he can see them more clearly.
An ethnographer needs to keep some distance from hir subjects. S/he ostensibly would like to be able to see the subject culture for what it is -- to be able to see the good elements of that culture as well as the detrimental ones. S/he also needs to keep this distance so that s/he can relate the practices of the subject culture to the practices of hir own. To stand too far back is to risk becoming completely disconnected, to get too close is to risk "going native" or succumbing to "'ethnographic bias', glorifying or romanticizing the subject group or people" (Irwin 1987:46). In either case, what is lost is the ability to make worthwhile, interesting, and useful subjective observations about the subject culture, which in turn keeps the reader from using the ethnography to examine hir experience of hir own culture. It is in the disjuncture between self and other, in the juxtaposition of the ethnographer's familiar culture with the strangeness of the culture under study, that the important characteristics of the subject culture become apparent and the usefulness of those characteristics for understanding important aspects of the familiar culture become clear.
This brings me to my final point. The "place" of the native ethnographer in the world. There is a danger inherent in any kind of cultural observation, regardless of the origins of the observer: that of the place of the self in hir own culture. As Levi-Strauss notes: The ethnographer, while in no wise abdicating his own humanity, strives to know and estimate his fellowman from a lofty and distant point of vantage: only thus can he abstract them from the contingencies particular to this or that civilization. The conditions of his life and work cut him off from his own group for long periods together; and he himself acquires a kind of chronic uprootedness from the sheer brutality of the environmental changes to which he is exposed. Never can he feel himself 'at home' anywhere: he will always he, psychologically speaking, an amputated man (in Geertz 1988:36)
This sense of being cut off from one's own culture is perhaps most pronounced for the native ethnographer. Although the native ethnographer is not trying to examine hir own culture from a omniscient point of view, the culture s/he examines, being partially hir own, leaves hir in the position of being critical of hir own existence in new ways. When this new critical vision is coupled with the sense of already being an outsider to a certain extent, the native runs the risk of questioning everything, leaving hir with no ground in which to stand and act. While one of the big problems for the outsider-ethnographer might be "finding his feet" with the other (Geertz 1973:13) the difficulty for the native is that s/he might lose hir feet with hir own. As Ruby notes: Reflexivity generates heightened awareness and vertigo, the creative intensity of a possibility that loosens us from habit and custom and turns us back to contemplate ourselves just as we may be beginning to realize that we have no clear idea of what we are doing. The experience may be exhilarating or frightening or both, but it is generally irreversible. We can never return to our former easy terms with a world that carried on quite well without our administrations. We may find ourselves like Humpty-Dumpty, shattered wrecks unable to recapture a smooth, seamless innocence, or like the paralyzed centipede who never walked again once he was asked to consider the difficulty in manipulating all those legs (Ruby 1982:2).
The unexamined life may not be worth living but the over examined one can drive you nuts. The difficulty for the native ethnographer is to square the new, critical view of the world with hir picture of hir own future in that world.
Conclusion
Usenet, as a site for ethnographic research, is interesting because of the ways it is and is not like most communities; it has a clearly articulated set of norms, some defined prerequisites for membership in the group, a linguistic jargon, some folklore, a sense of humor and a historical record. What it lacks are an organizational head or center, regular face-to-face contact, and any kind of dependent economic relations. The latter are not necessary for this king of community because it is a kind of electronic "imagined community". Therefore, studying it would provide us with a way to think about how community is constituted through imagination, and what sorts of fundamental social elements are prerequisite to constituting community through computers.
One related goal of this research is to try to figure out how a particular computer information system was used to create and nurture a community that grew and changed over time, allowing us to make reasoned conjectures about how another group of people might repeat the experience in a different electronic atmosphere.
Both thinking more deeply about how to understand "imagined communities", their origins and their purposes, and also trying to see when and how computers help produce such communities could contribute to a better understanding of how the electronic world is being used to foster social change. Computer networks may not be revolutionizing human social relations on a grand scale, but they seem to many users to be adding to the richness and diversity to their social experience, somehow empowering them. What this might mean could perhaps be better understood through this research.
A Glossary of Usenet Terms and Expressions
:-) : The usenet smiley face. Used to mark text that is supposed to be funny, sarcastic or satirical. Implies that the reader should not take the text seriously.
* : The "splat". Used in text messages like electronic mail and usenet articles to replace underlining (as in book titles) or to emphasize words. On a computer screen an asterisk is the same height as and size as a capital O.
Article : The single texts of a given discussion. Articles fall into two categories: new topics and responses or "followups".
Backbone Site : A central organization, usually a university, commercial concern of government agency, that has agreed to collect usenet articles and pass them down the line to leaf nodes, usually free of charge.
Bug : A problem or difficulty with a piece of software. A problem to be fixed.
Dot : a period used in Unix shell commands and filenames. Unix, like MS-Dos, does not allow blank spaces in filenames. The period (colloquially called the "dot") is used to mark divisions between words. It is also used as the first character in shell-initiation files (those files that the system "reads" as part of the start-up operation when a user logs in).
Download : To receive and store files, in this case usenet articles, from another computer.
Feed : Usenet service from a backbone site. It means that one site can call another and download usenet news.
Flame : To chastise someone or to call them names via either electronic mail or in public on the net.
Followup : An article posted in response to someone else's article. It frequently includes text from the article it follows. The software automates this to a certain extent. More often than not a followup is to a followup, and not to the original article.
Included text : Lines from one article that the news software places in a file for inclusion in a followup article. These lines are marked with "greater-than" signs at the beginning of each line so that the reader can sort included text from commentary on that text.
Kill : To list specific information about a class of articles, specific netters or a particular site in a special file, a "kill file", which gets checked when the readnews software is invoked. When a pattern of information from the kill file matches the proper field in an article, the article is automatically "junked" or discarded and the reader does not see that article. Killing is a way to sort out people and topics that one is either not interested in or finds annoying.
Leaf Node : A usenet news site that is at the end of the line as far as news transmission is concerned. A leaf node will not normally feed other sites. Some leaf nodes are PC-size computers with one user.
Net.idiot : someone who egregiously or in complete stupidity abuses net protocol. An elected position first held by JJ and currently held by a student at Rutgers University.
Netter : What the people who participate on usenet call themselves.
News : What the people of usenet call the text of the net.
Newsgroup : Any one of 800+ discussion groups on usenet where a more-or-less specific set of topics is under discussion.
.newsrc : A .newsrc file is the text file that keeps track of which newsgroups one is "subscribed" to and reads, and in which order. It also tracks the articles, telling the software which was the last article read, and where to begin at the next session. This file also lists which articles have been killed or marked as already read.
Signal to noise ratio : The amount of useful information contained in any communicative channel vs. the amount of useless information. In the case of radio reception, where the concept was first applied, "signal" was the stuff the radio broadcaster intended the audience to receive and "noise" was the interference. In the case of usenet, the "signal" is what any given participant considers useful or interesting and "noise" consists of those articles or "signatures" that someone wants to complain about.
Signature : A signature is a set of lines that are automatically appended to the end of an article by the news software. A signature is normally found in a users computer account in a file called ".signature". Usenet convention calls for a four-line maximum on signatures. This is an oft-violated convention.
Site : Any computer that carries usenet news.
Site Administrator : The person at a specific organization who is in charge of usenet news transmission and the related software.
Subscribe : To list a newsgroup as active in one's .newsrc file so that the news in that group is presented for reading when the news reading program is invoked.
Works Referenced for the Proposal
This page last updated on: Nov 10 14:18