RE: dissent e-community

D S Hendler (bison who-is-at mail.utexas.edu)
Wed, 14 Jan 1998 14:29:41 -0600

I can't help but think that this topic and the acting ideally/ cynically
are intimately related. My thoughts on both--
Not only is academic success seem to necessitate a
socially dysfuncational temperment (?), but electronic success does as well.
Not that there is a one to one correlation to between success with
computers and social dysfuncationalism, but they are closely related.
It is not for nothing that some users (proudly) proclaim themselves
geeks (a sub-class of nerd; everywhere, hierarchies).
I agree with Fancoise that in some ways people on lists-groups
feel more familiar than people I know IRL (in real life). This is even more
true with chat communities (again, the diminutive; people don't talk, they
chat). What I find very troublesome is that when people meet F2F from
such e-communities, the closeness and familiarity does not carry over.
All of sudden, there is too much bandwidth. I find the same results when
back channel coversations get too long or intense.

I agree with Francoise's point that right now, until we ("we")
create more descripitve terms, analysis of CMCommunities vs.
F2F communities is stuck in oralcy-literacy dichotomies. As for myself,
I wish to toss in my hat against these terms for CMC, as it would, it seems
to me, quickly devolve CMC into a branch of deconstructionism. Rather,
there is a significant oral component to CMC (witness, all the "laughing"
online) which the oral/literate dichotomy cannot explain.

Despite some of my best ludic tendencies, though, I do not see
(precisely) how the world of the internet (and its WWW subclass) are, as
Francoise notes, "ominous"

D S Hendler
University of Texas, Austin

<rant>
</rant>