The Newbie Anthropologist:
Fieldwork

Anti-Matter

It has been claimed that cyberspace subverts five key notions of the characterisation of empirical communities; it is aspatial, asynchronous, acorporal, astigmatic and anonymous. [Smith 1996] Virtual communities are distributed across networks; they do not have a 'place' where they happen. Communication between participants involves a 'lag time' between utterances, though exchanges can be read as if they were synchronous occurrences. Since the interaction is text-based, netiquette Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) files remind participants that "because your interaction with the network is through a computer it is easy to forget that there are people 'out there'." [Moraes 1994] The lack of physical presence leads to the two remaining characteristics of social interaction; there is a relative absence of cues through which 'stigmatic' (Goffman's term) judgments - of race and gender, for example - can be made, and the facility to disguise the origin of the message makes verifications of identity difficult. [Smith 1996] Together, these issues make the analysis of community highly problematic.

This chapter focusses on two of these characteristics; the perceptions of space and time and the consequences. It has been suggested that "close attention to the arrangement of time and space, both in broadcasting and other modern institutions, is something which now promises to unite students of the media with social theorists working in a wide range of disciplines across the human sciences." [Moores 1995: 341] In virtual communities, the researcher finds a synthesis of media and community, one which makes these arrangements all the more critical. The traditional understanding of time and space as separate entities has been gradually eroded in academic disciplines, but this has not been widely recognised by people outside these specialised fields. It is over ninety years since Einstein declared that 'space' is what is measured by rulers and 'time' is what is measured by clocks, but the implications of these seemingly obvious remarks are still poorly understood. The ephemeral technoscape of cyberspace may redefine the experience of both.

Web Space

While 'cyberspace' seems to imply some kind of 'there', the term is somewhat misleading. The digital domain is unlike the perception of space that occurs in the physical world. It allows a kind of perception of the 'space-time continuum' through its subversion of the traditional markers of space and time. Nguyen and Alexander employ the notion of their inseparability in the term 'cyberspacetime' to illustrate how "when we immerse ourselves in cyberspacetime, physical limitations or boundaries disappear." [Nguyen & Alexander 1996: 102] Travel in electronic networks is a near instantaneous linkage with the site one wants to visit. Getting 'to' Usenet is merely a question of executing the appropriate commands to start the newsreading program running. Anyone can access the newsgroups that Usenet supports; there is no limit on public access to these groups once the participant has decided to enter. On Usenet, "people connect because of shared interests, not physical location. Any number can play." [op. cit: 1996: 105]

The Usenet newsgroup rec.juggling provides an example of this phenomenon. Its members use it as a forum to hold discussions and exchange information. The membership is drawn from a number of countries, though the majority of participants are in the United States. Performing jugglers are a highly mobile group, whether travelling with a circus, in smaller companies or individually. Anderson notes that "the ones forging new social spaces - one hesitates to say 'institutions' - are the denizens of the diaspora." [Anderson 1995: 15] Jugglers would seem to be a distributed community of a similar nature to a diaspora. It is an uncommon activity, and even in cities it may not be easy to find other jugglers, whether one is a performer or a hobbyist. As one member of rec.juggling explained:

The problem for me was that I was juggling in a vacuum for a year. I knew no other jugglers. I met no other jugglers. I'd never heard of the IJA. And NY has a *thriving* juggling community. Probably one of the best and most active clubs in the country with an average of 30 members on a regular night. But finding them was not easy. Brian Dube, prop maker extraordinaire, is not listed on the Yellow Pages.

For some people, rec.juggling can be the first contact they have with other jugglers:

Article 869 Re: Juggling, popularity rise?

[Don Lewis, "sky" and others write about having been "solitary" jugglers for a long time]

This seems to turn into a "me too" thread - 'cause I have been a solitary juggler for the last 20 years at least. Only 2 days ago did I learn about rec.juggling. A whole new world opened up.

There are actually other jugglers out there??! People like me who do this for fun??! Wow.

One of the reasons for my long solitude must be the fact that I am living in Switzerland. People seem to "keep to themselves" more. But having read many of the (600+) postings in the newsgroup I decided to find others like me. I already got in touch with somebody local who offers advanced lessons and I will not walk by another juggler in the street without starting a conversation.

So thanks to you all for the postings. A whole new world has opened up for me. Seems that there *IS* juggling life out there after all!

The subversion of space on Usenet allows people to connect regardless of geography. The latter posting, in referring to rec.juggling as a 'world' confirms Nguyen and Alexander's observation of the linkage of space through shared interests. On Usenet, the geography of public space is determined by values, not by distance. Shared by the nomadic juggling diaspora, "the TAZ is a nomad camp, [and] the Web helps provide the epics, songs, genealogies and legends of the tribe." [Bey 1991: 110]

Net Space

Travelling 'to' CIX is also simply a question of issuing a command, but having done so, one encounters CIX's 'front door'; a login screen. CIX is not a part of the Internet, although it can be reached via the Internet; non-members will encounter login procedures which prevent them gaining access. In Bey's model, CIX is a part of 'the Net' rather than 'the Web', since the exclusion of non-members requires that the system administrators have the power to keep them out. Subscription is the key to the door. A paid up member opens the door by following the logging in procedure, and once this is done the system responds with an update of the participant's account.

Checking your conferences
You have 3 mail message(s) in your in-basket.
You are a member of 25 conference(s).

Inside the system, one finds three types of conference; open, closed and confidential. Open conferences are just that - open to all CIX members; closed conferences require the prospective entrant to request membership from the moderator of the group; while confidential conferences are by invitation only. There is a structuring of the discussion space which is more hierarchical than the open public 'spaces' of Usenet. Some members have found this to affect the demeanour of other members and impair communication:

***** can't help feeling Cix is not exactly suitable as a haven 4
anything (it must b something they put in the power supply round
Cix-towers, makes some Cixen a bit irritable).

Yet CIX has built its reputation on providing conferencing facilities which allow members to communicate without the need to contend with the levels of redundancy which Usenet newsgroups invariably suffer from. This is the double-edged sword of electronic communication; on the one hand it democratises communication, but on the other, that very democratisation creates too much information and discussion to serve purposes of those with specific needs. The 'private space' of CIX together with the powers of the system administrators ensures that any redundancy is the responsibility of the group itself. The system administrator's powers rank alongside those of despots and dictators in their potential for absolute control over the conferencing space; "banishment is a severe punishment, and the threat of it can be an effective form of discipline." [Mitchell 1996: 155] Theirs is not power which can be used indiscriminately, however, since it is in the interests of the facility to allow conference activity to be as free as the participants wish. It is a moderator's job to maintain orderly conduct within a closed conference, by screening membership and contributions. This job has been described as being "like herding cats," [Nguyen & Alexander 1995: 112] since the members values their freedom of expression very highly. The same values of freedom of expression are, as a result, evident at each level in the conference hierarchy, reinforced by the technically identical way in which each conference works. It seems like the self-similarity of a fractal where, at each level of magnification, the same elements are embedded in the details as are embedded in the whole. "So a new logic has emerged. The great power struggles of cyberspace will be over network topology, connectivity and access - not the geographic borders and chunks of territory that have been fought over in the past." [Mitchell 1996: 151] While physical boundaries may have dissolved in cyberspace, they have, at least on CIX, been replaced by ones made with software.

Time

It is not just physical limitations which disappear, but temporal ones too; "the one screen, which previously bound the viewer to a single common time, now becomes a gateway to different time-frames simultaneously, and thus opens the way to a more... expansive experience of time itself." [Tresilian 1995: 265] Email enables messages to be sent at the speed of light across the world, and gets to its destination almost as soon as it has left. As an electronic imprint on a phosphorescent screen, it has an ephemeral quality that some find an advantage;

Date: Wed, 21 Feb 1996 10:49:16 -0500
To: cm-wach@uwe.ac.uk

I'm really into this e-mail business right now since it's so easy. Here I am at work with another opportunity to procrastinate. Plus this is so much more informal than letter writing - I always feel the need to expound in some sort of witty and eloquent way on paper. These electronic messages are so much more transient and somehow disposable. Basically the pressure's off.

Many subjects reported similar attitudes, reflecting the observation that "in simultaneously bringing back lost arts of chatting and letter writing, the Internet is fusing the oral and the written." [Nguyen & Alexander 1996: 104]

Email correspondences, newsgroups and mailing lists, like speech, are based on the principle of "turn-taking" [Sharrock & Anderson 1986: 71] over time, and one finds constant references to Internet etiquette - 'netiquette' as it is known - which ensures the smooth running of the newsgroup, both in terms of the coherence of the arguments and the avoidance of provocative "other-than-neutral" [op. cit: 72] responses. CIX, for example, has an archive devoted to helping members avoid unnecessary conflict:

learn/faq #30, from jdally, 3374 chars, Jul 11 10:15 95
--------------------------
What is net etiquette, or netiquette (yuk!) ?

Net etiquette is a set of guidelines that have evolved to make it easy for us all to get along and be part of that big old family that is CiX! Or, to put it another way, if you break the rules, people will SHOUT at you! :-)

Yet overcautious use of etiquette can be to the detriment of a group. Communication can suffer from a kind of 'half-life', as the correspondents send thank you notes back and forth, ending up thanking one another for their thanks... and so on. The acronym TIA (Thanks In Advance) is used to prevent the repetition of unnecessary mail of this sort.

Unlike the WWW, which has developed along the lines of publishing (so that a page must be requested by a user), mailing lists retain similarities with broadcast media. Mailing lists provide a way of accessing many-to-many and one-to-many channels of communication; there is only an initial request for subscription to the group, much like selecting a radio frequency or TV station. Posts are then delivered directly to the member's mailbox, "and increasingly, what is 'said' is a variety of mixed discourses and migrating intellectual technologies that mark the world we live in now." [Anderson 1995: 14] DIRECT-L is a forum for the discussion of the intellectual technologies of Lingo programming and multimedia production, and illustrates what Tresilian meant by different 'time-frames'. Members can select how they wish to receive the on-going activity of the group; either 'as it happens' so that contributions appear in the member's mailbox at the time that they were sent, or in 'time-compact' digest form, so that the entire day's correspondence arrives in one large file. In this way each member is exposed to the construction of time which is peculiar to the group. There are significant differences in the perception of group activity through the two means of receiving it.

In 'as it happens' mode, hundreds of messages pour into the member's mailbox every day, giving a strong impression of the hectic activity of the worldwide membership. Each day becomes a struggle to eliminate the messages which are of no interest, and even as one does so, new messages keep arriving from people who work in time zones entirely different from one's own. This can often be a matter of some confusion, but also some humour, as with this interchange over software release dates;

Subject: Re: When is Director 6 going to be released?!?!!!?

At 1:43 PM -0500 4/28/97, Jay & Vera Keown wrote:
>If anyone can provide me with release time (I know no dates are possible right >now) for Director 6, I'd really appreciate it.

You want a time, but no date? Ok.

9:00 AM.

Replies flooded in responding to this statement, most of which were along similar lines to the following;

Subject: Re: When is Director 6 going to be released?!?!!!?

Pacific or Eastern Time? I hate having to get up too early here on the west coast.

Morgan

Electronic communication is synchronous across the world and the activity of the group continues regardless of the time in the place of each member's residence. There appear to be two consequences of this; firstly, one recognises how dependent upon place the perception of time is; people regard 'the time' as being the time where they themselves are, and secondly it situates the group in a 'space' where time is not bound by place, as if it were in outer space where there is no day and no night. Mark Dery calls this phenomenon 'escape velocity', and wrote, "Marshall McLuhan's pronouncement in 1967 that electronic media have spun us into a blurred, breathless "world of allatonceness" where information "pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously," sometimes overwhelming us, is truer than ever." [Dery, M. 1996: 1]

Receiving DIRECT-L as a digest is an even more pronounced form of 'allatonceness' than the continuous chatter of 'as it happens' reception. The entire contents of the previous 24 hours discussion arrives in one huge file, which, as one reads it, give the impression that these discussions happened without the characteristic lag time of email correspondence. The group seems somehow 'elsewhere'; one is only periodically connected to its activity by the daily report. This level of remove from the group seems to require a lesser level of immediate commitment to the group, and yet, paradoxically, it requires a greater level of effort to find that which is of interest. Instead of struggling to edit out the unwanted messages, members find themselves searching the text for the threads in which they are interested. Because there is no difference in the content, members are able to 'unpack' the time-compactness of the means of communication to discern the timelines of the threads which concern them.

Social Drama

Turner noted during fieldwork among the Ndembu that "the whole group might be cloven into two conflicting factions; the quarrelling parties might comprise some but not all of its members; or disputes might be merely interpersonal in character... After a while I began to detect a pattern in these eruptions of conflict" [Turner 1957: 91] He called this the "processional form of social drama." [op. cit. 91] Its phases, which seem to resonate with the concepts of complexity theory, can be seen in a dispute which occurred on the McLuhan List. [see Appendix 2] The crisis erupted without warning, reflecting the sensitive dependence on initial conditions that characterises strange attractors. A member of the list had accessed the membership list and sent a message to all the participants promoting a lecture series on McLuhan and a mailing list they were setting up. This "breach of regular norm-governed social relations" [op. cit: 91] provoked a vitriolic outburst from the 'owners' of the list describing what had been done as not only theft but 'rape'.

Date: Sat, 4 Jan 1997 20:56:08 -0500 (EST)
To: McLuhan-List.Subscribers@astral.magic.ca
Subject: McLuhan-List "Raped" -- Your Name "Stolen"
Sender: owner-mcluhan-list@astral.magic.ca

The argument entered its phase of mounting crisis and became increasingly heated, to the degree that what is known on the Internet as a 'flame war' ensued. It seemed as though there was more at stake here than simply a transgression of 'netiquette'; there seemed to be a collision of two mindsets. The list-owners claimed they were protecting their 'territory', and also the size of their members' email in-boxes. They felt that their authority had been usurped by the sender of the message:

At present the ONLY way you can be sure you are receiving a VALID message from THIS list is :

* return URL states "mclr@astral.magic.ca"; OR
* "astral.magic" in the sending ID; OR
* direct quotes from NELSON THALL in the body of the message

This claim to sole authorship of 'valid' messages is characteristic of 'analogue' communication regimes; "hierarchical and closed, inviting passive consumption." [Tresilian 1995: 270] The 'transgressor', on the other hand, claimed to represent emerging digital cultural values;

I am the digital generation. I know not walls or barriers, privacy or property. We are redefining public space, and an email list is as much a room, as it is for one and all.

Your response was childish and reactionary. You cannot own a list of subscribers, and you cannot control what is posted to it. When a group of people converge in a room you cannot control what they talk about.

The stability of the group had been disrupted and the system remained chaotic for while with a flurry of further messages being posted through the list. "Redressive Mechanisms" [Turner 1957: 91] were employed by both sides; the original message was apologised for, and the list owners became aware of the potential for this to become a fully-fledged flame war when 250Mb of data arrived at the transgressors server. They stated that they wanted to avoid this for their subscribers; "There is a lot of other "stuff" in Mr. Hirsch's message which, in the interest of avoiding a "war of words," we prefer not to delve into too deeply," though there was no attempt to limit the breadth of the schism. This effectively ruled out reintegration, and the upheaval on the mailing list abated in its final phase through recognition of schism. Some members left to join the new list while others stayed; 'bifurcation' seemed to have occurred. The system headed for a new form of stability; an uneasy acceptance of the perpetual motion and unpredictable dynamics of cyberspacetime life.

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