EFFector Online June 22, 1992

 

########## ########## ########## |        Shari Steele on            |

########## ########## ########## |       THE MODEM TAX LEGEND        |

####       ####       ####       |                                   |

########   ########   ########   |       Howard Rheingold on         |

########   ########   ########   |     VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES, 1992     |

####       ####       ####       |      (First of three parts)       |

########## ####       ####       |                                   |

########## ####       ####       | rita@eff.org to wed raoul@eff.org |

=====================================================================|

EFFector Online             June 22, 1992                  Issue 2.11|

         A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation         |

                           ISSN 1062-9424                            |

=====================================================================|

[Note: Because of the length of this essay, this is the first of three

parts, to be published in consecutive editions of EFFector.  Our readers

are asked to take careful note of the author's remarks at the end of

each section.]

                A SLICE OF LIFE IN MY VIRTUAL COMMUNITY

                               (Part One)

                     by Howard Rheingold  June 1992

                          (hlr@well.sf.ca.us)

    I'm a writer, so I spend a lot of time alone in a room with my words

and my thoughts. On occasion, I venture outside to interview people or#

to find information. After work, I reenter the human community, via my

family, my neighborhood, my circle of acquaintances.  But that regime

left me feeling isolated and lonely during the working day, with few

opportunities to expand my circle of friends. For the past seven years,

however, I have participated in a wide-ranging, intellectually

stimulating, professionally rewarding, sometimes painful, and often

intensely emotional ongoing interchange with dozens of new friends,

hundreds of colleagues, thousands of acquaintances.  And I still spend

many of my days in a room, physically isolated. My mind, however, is

linked with a worldwide collection of like-minded (and not so

like-minded) souls: My virtual community.

           Virtual communities emerged from a surprising intersection of

humanity and technology.  When the ubiquity of the world telecomm

network is combined with the information structuring and storing

capabilities of computers, a new communication medium becomes possible.

As we've learned from the history of the telephone, radio, television,

people can adopt new communication media and redesign their way of life

with surprising rapidity. Computers, modems, and communication networks

furnish the technological infrastructure of computer-mediated

communication (CMC); cyberspace is the conceptual space where words and

human relationships, data and wealth and power are manifested by people

using CMC technology; virtual communities are cultural aggregations that

emerge when enough people bump into each other often enough in

cyberspace.

    A virtual community as they exist today is a group of people who may

or may not meet one another face to face, and who exchange words and

ideas through the mediation of computer bulletin boards and networks. In

cyberspace, we chat and argue, engage in intellectual intercourse,

perform acts of commerce, exchange knowledge, share emotional support,

make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, find friends and

lose them, play games and metagames, flirt, create a little high art and

a lot of idle talk. We do everything people do when people get together,

but we do it with words on computer screens, leaving our bodies behind.

Millions of us have already built communities where our identities

commingle and interact electronically, independent of local time or

location. The way a few of us live now might be the way a larger

population will live, decades hence.

    The pioneers are still out there exploring the frontier, the borders

of the domain have yet to be determined, or even the shape of it, or the

best way to find one's way in it. But people are using the technology of

computer-mediated communications CMC technology to do things with each

other that weren't possible before. Human behavior in cyberspace, as we

can observe it and participate in it today, is going to be a crucially

important factor. The ways in which people use CMC always will be rooted

in human needs, not hardware or software.

    If the use of virtual communities turns out to answer a deep and

compelling need in people, and not just snag onto a human foible like

pinball or pac-man, today's small online enclaves may grow into much

larger networks over the next twenty years. The potential for social

change is a side-effect of the trajectory of telecommunications and

computer industries, as it can be forecast for the next ten years.  This

odd social revolution -- communities of people who may never or rarely

meet face to face -- might piggyback on the technologies that the

biggest telecommunication companies already are planning to install over

the next ten years.

    It is possible that the hardware and software of a new global

telecommunications infrastructure, orders of magnitude more powerful

than today's state of the art, now moving from the laboratories to the

market, will expand the reach of this spaceless place throughout the

1990s to a much wider population than today's hackers, technologists,

scholars, students, and enthusiasts. The age of the online pioneers will

end soon, and the cyberspace settlers will come en-masse.  Telecommuters

who might have thought they were just working from home and avoiding one

day of gridlock on the freeway will find themselves drawn into a whole

new society. Students and scientists are already there, artists have

made significant inroads, librarians and educators have their own

pioneers as well, and political activists of all stripes have just begun

to discover the power of plugging a computer into a telephone. When

today's millions become tens and hundreds of millions, perhaps billions,

what kind of place, and what kind of model for human behavior will they

find?

    Today's bedroom electronic bulletin boards, regional computer

conferencing systems, global computer networks offer clues to what might

happen when more powerful enabling technology comes along. The hardware

for amplifying the computing and communication capacity of every home on

the world-grid is in the pipeline, although the ultimate applications

are not yet clear. We'll be able to transfer the Library of Congress

from any point on the globe to any another point in seconds, upload and

download full-motion digital video at will. But is that really what

people are likely to do with all that bandwidth and computing power?

Some of the answers have to come from the behavioral rather than the

technological part of the system. How will people actually use the

desktop supercomputers and multimedia telephones that the engineers tell

us we'll have in the near future.

    One possibility is that people are going to do what people always do

with a new communication technology: use it in ways never intended or

foreseen by its inventors, to turn old social codes inside out and make

new kinds of communities possible. CMC will change us, and change our

culture, the way telephones and televisions and cheap video cameras

changed us -- by altering the way we perceive and communicate.  Virtual

communities transformed my life profoundly, years ago, and continue to

do so.

A Cybernaut's Eye View

    The most important clues to the shape of the future at this point

might not be found in looking more closely at the properties of silicon,

but in paying attention to the ways people need to, fail to, and try to

communicate with one another. Right now, some people are convinced that

spending hours a day in front of a screen, typing on a keyboard,

fulfills in some way our need for a community of peers.  Whether we have

discovered something wonderful or stumbled into something insidiously

unwonderful, or both, the fact that people want to use CMC to meet other

people and experiment with identity are valuable signposts to possible

futures. Human behavior in cyberspace, as we can observe it today on the

nets and in the BBSs, gives rise to important questions about the

effects of communication technology on human values. What kinds of

humans are we becoming in an increasingly computer-mediated world, and

do we have any control over that transformation? How have our

definitions of "human" and "community" been under pressure to change to

fit the specifications of a technology-guided civilization?

    Fortunately, questions about the nature of virtual communities are

not purely theoretical, for there is a readily accessible example of the

phenomenon at hand to study. Millions of people now inhabit the social

spaces that have grown up on the world's computer networks, and this

previously invisible global subculture has been growing at a monstrous

rate recently (e.g., the Internet growing by 25% per month).

    I've lived here myself for seven years; the WELL and the net have

been a regular part of my routine, like gardening on Sunday, for one

sixth of my life thus far. My wife and daughter long ago grew accustomed

to the fact that I sit in front of my computer early in the morning and

late at night, chuckling and cursing, sometimes crying, about something

I am reading on the computer screen. The questions I raise here are not

those of a scientist, or of a polemicist who has found an answer to

something, but as a user -- a nearly obsessive user -- of CMC and a deep

mucker-about in virtual communities. What kind of people are my friends

and I becoming? What does that portend for others?

    If CMC has a potential, it is in the way people in so many parts of

the net fiercely defend the use of the term "community" to describe the

relationships we have built online. But fierceness of belief is not

sufficient evidence that the belief is sound. Is the aura of community

an illusion? The question has not been answered, and is worth asking.

I've seen people hurt by interactions in virtual communities. Is

telecommunication culture capable of becoming something more than what

Scott Peck calls a "pseudo-community," where people lack the genuine

personal commitments to one another that form the bedrock of genuine

community? Or is our notion of "genuine" changing in an age where more

people every day live their lives in increasingly artificial

environments? New technologies tend to change old ways of doing things.

Is the human need for community going to be the next technology

commodity?

    I can attest that I and thousands of other cybernauts know that what

we are looking for, and finding in some surprising ways, is not just

information, but instant access to ongoing relationships with a large

number of other people. Individuals find friends and groups find shared

identities online, through the aggregated networks of relationships and

commitments that make any community possible. But are relationships and

commitments as we know them even possible in a place where identities

are fluid? The physical world, known variously as "IRL" ("In Real

Life"), or "offline," is a place where the identity and position of the

people you communicate with are well known, fixed, and highly visual. In

cyberspace, everybody is in the dark. We can only exchange words with

each other -- no glances or shrugs or ironic smiles. Even the nuances of

voice and intonation are stripped away. On top of the technology-imposed

constraints, we who populate cyberspace deliberately experiment with

fracturing traditional notions of identity by living as multiple

simultaneous personae in different virtual neighborhoods.

    We reduce and encode our identities as words on a screen, decode and

unpack the identities of others. The way we use these words, the stories

(true and false) we tell about ourselves (or about the identity we want

people to believe us to be) is what determines our identities in

cyberspace. The aggregation of personae, interacting with each other,

determines the nature of the collective culture. Our personae,

constructed from our stories of who we are, use the overt topics of

discussion in a BBS or network for a more fundamental purpose, as means

of interacting with each other. And all this takes place on both public

and private levels, in many-to-many open discussions and one-to-one

private electronic mail, front stage role- playing and backstage

behavior.

    When I'm online, I cruise through my conferences, reading and

replying in topics that I've been following, starting my own topics when

the inspiration or need strikes me. Every few minutes, I get a notice on

my screen that I have incoming mail. I might decide to wait to read the

mail until I'm finished doing something else, or drop from the

conference into the mailer, to see who it is from. At the same time that

I am participating in open discussion in conferences and private

discourse in electronic mail, people I know well use "sends" -- a means

of sending one or two quick sentences to my screen without the

intervention of an electronic mail message. This can be irritating

before you get used to it, since you are either reading or writing

something else when it happens, but eventually it becomes a kind of

rhythm: different degrees of thoughtfulness and formality happen

simultaneously, along with the simultaneous multiple personae. Then

there are public and private conferences that have partially overlapping

memberships. CMC offers tools for facilitating all the various ways

people have discovered to divide and communicate, group and subgroup and

regroup, include and exclude, select and elect.

    When a group of people remain in communication with one another for

extended periods of time, the question of whether it is a community

arises. Virtual communities might be real communities, they might be

pseudocommunities, or they might be something entirely new in the realm

of social contracts, but I believe they are in part a response to the

hunger for community that has followed the disintegration of traditional

communities around the world.

    Social norms and shared mental models have not emerged yet, so

everyone's sense of what kind of place cyberspace is can vary widely,

which makes it hard to tell whether the person you are communicating

with shares the same model of the system within which you are

communicating. Indeed, the online acronym YMMV ("Your Mileage May Vary")

has become shorthand for this kind of indeterminacy of shared context.

For example, I know people who use vicious online verbal combat as a way

of blowing off steam from the pressures of their real life -- "sport

hassling" -- and others who use it voyeuristically, as a text-based form

of real-life soap-opera. To some people, it's a game. And I know people

who feel as passionately committed to our virtual community and the

people in it (or at least some of the people in it) as our nation,

occupation, or neighborhood. Whether we like it or not, the

communitarians and the venters, the builders and the vandals, the

egalitarians and the passive-aggressives, are all in this place

together. The diversity of the communicating population is one of the

defining characteristics of the new medium, one of its chief

attractions, the source of many of its most vexing problems.

    Is the prospect of moving en-masse into cyberspace in the near

future, when the world's communication network undergoes explosive

expansion of bandwidth, a beneficial thing for entire populations to do?

In which ways might the growth of virtual communities promote

alienation? How might virtual communities facilitate conviviality?

Which social structures will dissolve, which political forces will

arise, and which will lose power? These are questions worth asking now,

while there is still time to shape the future of the medium. In the

sense that we are traveling blind into a technology-shaped future that

might be very different from today's culture, direct reports from life

in different corners of the world's online cultures today might furnish

valuable signposts to the territory ahead.

    Since the summer of 1985, I've spent an average of two hours a day,

seven days a week, often when I travel, plugged into the WELL (Whole

Earth 'Lectronic Link) via a computer and a telephone line, exchanging

information and playing with attention, becoming entangled In Real Life,

with a growing network of similarly wired-in strangers I met in

cyberspace. I remember the first time I walked into a room full of

people (IRL) whose faces were completely unknown to me, but who knew

many intimate details of my history, and whose own stories I knew very

well. I had contended with these people, shot the breeze around the

electronic water cooler, shared alliances and formed bonds, fallen off

my chair laughing with them, become livid with anger at these people,

but I had not before seen their faces.

    I found this digital watering hole for information-age hunters and

gatherers the same way most people find such places -- I was lonely,

hungry for intellectual and emotional companionship, although I didn't

know it. While many commuters dream of working at home, telecommuting, I

happen to know what it's like to work that way. I never could stand to

commute or even get out of my pajamas if I didn't want to, so I've

always worked at home. It has its advantages and its disadvantages.

Others like myself also have been drawn into the online world because

they shared with me the occupational hazard of the self-employed,

home-based symbolic analyst of the 1990s -- isolation. The kind of

people that Robert Reich, call "symbolic analysts" are natural matches

for online communities: programmers, writers, freelance artists and

designers, independent radio and television producers, editors,

researchers, librarians. People who know what to do with symbols,

abstractions, and representations, but who sometimes find themselves

spending more time with keyboards and screens than human companions.

    I've learned that virtual communities are very much like other

communities in some ways, deceptively so to those who assume that people

who communicate via words on a screen are in some way aberrant in their

communication skills and human needs. And I've learned that virtual

communities are very much not like communities in some other ways,

deceptively so to those who assume that people who communicate via words

on a screen necessarily share the same level of commitment to each other

in real life as more traditional communities.  Communities can emerge

from and exist within computer-linked groups, but that technical linkage

of electronic personae is not sufficient to create a community.

(To be continued in EFFector 2.12, June 24, 1992)

Note: In 1988, _Whole Earth Review_ published my article, "Virtual

Communities." Four years later, I reread it and realized that I had

learned a few things, and that the world I was observing had changed.

So I rewrote it. The original version is available on the WELL as

/uh/72/hlr/virtual_communities88.

Portions of this essay will appear in "Globalizing Networks: Computers

and International Communication," edited by Linda Harasim and Jan Walls

for MIT press. Portions of this will appear in "Virtual Communities," by

Howard Rheingold, Addison-Wesley. Portions of this may find their way

into Whole Earth Review.

This is a world-readable file, and I think these are important issues;

encourage distribution, but I do ask for fair use: Don't remove my name

from my words when you quote or reproduce them, don't change them, and

don't impair my ability to make a living with them.

                                            Howard Rheingold

                                            Editor, Whole Earth Review

                                            27 Gate Five Road

                                            Sausalito, CA 94965

                                            Tel: 415 332 1716

                                            Fax: 415 332 3110

                                            Internet: hlr@well.sf.ca.us

                       -==--==--==-<>-==--==--==-

                   DEMYSTIFYING THE MODEM TAX LEGEND

                   by Shari Steele (ssteele@eff.org)

[The EF RF's Washington Staff Attorney Shari Steele, recently exchanged

letters with Jim Warren on the Infamous Modem Tax Cyberspace Legend That

Refuses to Die.  Her response clears up what seems to be a classic

misunderstanding that permeates the online world. We reprint it here in

the interest of truth, justice, and the American Way.]

Dear Jim,

Mitch forwarded me your message to John Snyder re: modem taxes and FCC

Docket 89-79.  I hope I can help clear this up.

Section 89-79, while problematic for information service providers and

their users, does not propose or institute a modem tax.

I repeat, there is no modem tax proposal before the FCC.  (I sound like

the President . . . read my lips, no new taxes:-)!)

With that said, let me try to explain what 89-79 does say.  

89-79 sets up rules for implementing Open Network Architecture (ONA),

ordered by the FCC in 1987/1990.  Under the structure we have become

used to, enhanced service providers (ESPs) have been exempt from paying

the access fees long distance carriers pay for their lines.  Under the

original ONA order, the BOCs were required to unbundle their services

and provide basic service elements (BSEs) separately and at prices the

ESPs could afford, to encourage the growth of the ESPs. (BSEs are

optional, software-based features that are above and beyond the common

line, local switching and transport elements provided as part of basic

service, such as Automatic Number Identification.)

Since many of the BSEs involved the use of the BOCs' switching networks,

the FCC concluded in its initial ONA order to amend the local switching

rules to permit unbundling.  The FCC also determined that the

then-existing access rules already permitted unbundling and would not be

modified.

However, the FCC gave the ESPs an "interim exemption" from "full access

charge treatment . . . to permit them to avoid service-disrupting 'rate

shock.'  We have refrained from applying full access charges to ESPs out

of concern that the industry has continued to be affected by a number of

significant, potentially disruptive, and rapidly changing

circumstances."

In the recent order regarding 89-79, the FCC decided to keep the

exemption for basic access to the network, but decided to unbundle

access charges for the BSEs. In this way, ESPs "may select from a basic

building block access arrangement, choosing optional additional features

and functions and paying only for what they use."

This "change" in charging access fees sorta slipped by everyone during

the rule making process, because the FCC specifically stated that it was

leaving the access fee exemption intact. And for access to the basic

services (i.e., line, switching, and transport), this is true.  But by

allowing the ESPs to be charged for the BSEs they use, the FCC is, in

effect, setting up usage-sensitive access charges for ESPs, forcing them

to choose between 1) not using the BSEs (and therefore not competing

with the BOCs' own information service offerings), or 2) paying the fees

for the BSEs and, subsequently, passing the fees on to their users.

(Not really much of a choice at all, I'd say.)

The House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance is very upset

with this, and, in a letter dated April 30, 1992, and signed by all 26

members, the subcommittee expressed to FCC Chairman Sikes their

"previously expressed concerns that ONA not become the vehicle for

imposing carrier access charges on enhanced service providers."  They

urged the FCC to ensure that "usage-sensitive access rates at carrier

charge levels" not be "a precondition [for ESPs] to obtaining

federally-tariffed ONA services."  They also mentioned that the decision

in 89-79 is currently under reconsideration at the FCC.

Letter-writing on this issue is a good idea, as long as letter-writers

are very careful to not call this a modem tax; the FCC dismisses such

letters summarily.

                       -==--==--==-<>-==--==--==-

                          NOTES FROM THE MBOX

                        Wedding Bells On the Way

Rita Marie Rouvalis (rita@eff.org) and Ignacio F. Garcia-Otero aka Nico

Garcia (raoul@eff.org) have announced their engagement. A July 1993

wedding is planned.  Rita is associate editor here at EFF and Nico, a

member of the original Bandykins mailing list, is a research engineer at

Mass Eye and Ear Infirmary.  They met on the Net.

                            CFP3 On the Way

The third COMPUTERS, FREEDOM, AND PRIVACY conference is star Mting to

rev up with a call for session and topic proposals in order to shape

the offerings of the conference to be in San Francisco, 9-12 March, 1993.

During the previous two conferences subjects covered were "Electronic

Speech, Press and Assembly", "Public Policy for the 21st Century",

"Access to Government Information", "Who Holds the Keys? (cryptography)",

and a host of other issues concerning privacy and freedom in the age of

information.  If anyone would like to submit a proposal for a session at

CFP3, the format is as follows. Single topics should have at least a

one page position statement describing the presentation, its theme, and

its format. Proposals for panel discussions should also include a list

or proposed participants and the session chair. Proposals should be sent

by email to  cfp93@well.sf.ca.us.  Should you need to send hard-copy 

it may be mailed to 

                    CFP 93 Proposals,

                    2210 Sixth Street

                    Berkeley, CA 94710

iFor information, send email to cfp93@well.sf.ca.us with the word 

"Information" in the subject line.

                           CFP2 On the Radio

The Second CFP lives and can be heard beginning June 23rd on various

stations subscribing to the public radio satellite system. Among the

various programs are Bruce Sterling's chilling and hilarious noon-time

rant "Speaking the Unspeakable", "Computers in the Workplace: Elysium or

Panopticon?", "Free Speech and the Public Telephone Network", and sevein

others.  Since each station on the PRSS decides whether or not to air an

offering interested listeners should contact the program director at

their public radio station to request local broadcast of the Computers,

Freedom, and Privacy Series. KALW in San Francisco Oregon Public

Broadcasting, KPBS in San Diego, WYEP in Pittsburgh, and WUMB in Boston

plan to air the programs. The series was recorded and produced by Bruce

Koball and Gregg McVicar.

                      The USENIX Report

This just in from Chris Davis and Helen Rose, sysadmins at EFF

concerning their recent adventures at USENIX:

     "We spent last week in sunny and warm San Antonio. As is fairly

typical for us, we were more interested in the technical conference,

USENIX, than the warm weather outside. We co-chaired an EFF BOF (Birds

of a Feather session), which filled the room. We sold numerous T-shirts,

and gave out lots of brochures. Many good ideas were brought up at the

EFF BOF, including a brochure, to be published by the EFF, of the "Top

20 questions about legal risks to system operators, administrators, and

owners". After discussing this at this week's staff meeting, we decided

to go ahead with this project.  We will start by gathering questions on

various USENET newsgroups, the EFF CompuServe forum, and the WELL. EFF

Staff Counsel Mike Godwin will answer them as his time permits (he is

preparing for the Massachusetts Bar Exam). So look for a topic starting

soon asking for suggestions of questions in each of these forums."

                       -==--==--==-<>-==--==--==-

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