[2] Words in boldface are defined in Appendix I.
[3] Having opened up the issue of Fidonet I expect that I should
take a look at it for the dissertation. At this point I haven't been
involved with Fidonet for quite a while, long enough that I am hesitant
to make comments about its organization. The characterization above
reflects my knowledge and experience of that network when I followed it
last (circa 1987).
[4] What normal, fact-to-face interaction there is concerning
usenet, the Unix community's yearly "Usenix" convention and local
meetings between site administrators , are meta-net
discussions. They are discussions about the management of the net,
the news and related computer soft and hardware. They are not the
"real life" of usenet. And, because the net only exists
electronically, the only FTF interaction I would have with members of
the community would take place outside the community and would involve
asking them to describe and reflect on their activities inside the
community. All activities I would be involved in inside the community
would be at the remove of a computer from that community.
[5] Think of new text as a letter to the editor and included text
as text from the article the letter's author is
responding to. The software attempts to prohibit including more text
from the article one is responding to than new text, created in
response.
[6] This from my recollections of that time. It should not be
taken as an actual representation of the state of the net, since I
don't even trust it myself. For the dissertation I would research the
topic more thoroughly and present a "true" picture of the net. What is
said here is only presented as a heuristic for understanding the
changes undertaken with the "Great Renaming".
[7] What is interesting about JJ's case is that it is not
about the economic relations of the net -- s/he violated none.
Hir offense was the violation of norms for posting articles.
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.
[8] The glossary is included here as Appendix I.
[9] In my experience thus far on usenet, these sorts of questions
did not come from all quarters. A few people were curious, some
demanding in their questions, and a few outright paranoid about my
reasons for the work. The queries were not without historical
justification. About a year ago, a reporter from the Houston Chronicle
and a short-time net participant, Joe Abernathy, wrote an article
about one of the newsgroups, alt.sex.pictures, in which he got most of
his facts wrong, made egregious errors about both the culture of the
net and the computer technology of the net. His article created
difficulties for network administrators in many locations.
[10] The discussion about the problems of representation is
essentially a debate between people like Clifford Geertz who wants to
make the argument that Anthropology and its representative form
ethnography are science and people like Trinh T. Minh-Ha who see the
two as potential instruments of colonialism and repression. I'm not
sure how the arguments apply to my own work, given that I have not
tried to actually write up any of my ethnographic data. So, at this
point in my own development I don't want to delve into this argument.
I tried writing about it and found that discussing it in the abstract
sounded pompous and vacuous. I think that once I've done some research
and tried to represent the net community I will have something to say
about the difficulties of representation. In the dissertation I would
explore these issues as they relate to my research and writing.
Perhaps using the discussion of the problems of observation as a
prologue and the discussion of the problems of representation as an
epilogue.
[11] I will enclose the word native in quotes when I use it in
reference to myself. As Michael Schudson point out to me, it may be
that there are no true natives of usenet, with the possible exception
of the originators of the net. I want to bracket off that entire
discussion for the moment. I would return to it in depth in the
dissertation.
[12] Note that I am not talking about one of the largest groups of
people on the net -- college students. Their participation in usenet
is too fleeting (sometimes as short as one quarter) to mark them as
true "netters".