########## ########## ########## | 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 EFF'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 starting 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 For 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 seven 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." -==--==--==-<>-==--==--==- MEMBERSHIP IN THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION If you support our goals and our work, you can show that support by becoming a member now. Members receive our quarterly newsletter, EFFECTOR, our bi-weekly electronic newsletter, EFFector Online (if you have an electronic address that can be reached through the Net), and special releases and other notices on our activities. But because we believe that support should be freely given, you can receive these things even if you do not elect to become a member. Our memberships are $20.00 per year for students, $40.00 per year for regular members. You may, of course, donate more if you wish. 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