The Arachnet Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture __________________________________________________________________ ISSN 1068-5723 July 26, 1994 Volume 2 Issue 3 KAPLAN V2N3 Weavers of Webs: A Portrait of Young Women on the Net Nancy Kaplan and Eva Farrell {1} ABSTRACT Gender imbalances within networking culture have prompted an array of interesting research questions about communication practices -- who speaks and to whom, who sets conversational agendas, who "dominates" a discourse. Such studies have generally confirmed the negative experiences of professional women who participate actively in network culture, but what they have not yet examined is the persistence of women in this apparently hostile culture, nor have they generally asked how those women who participate despite male dominance understand their own activities. This study begins to address those questions -- why women seek electronic spaces, what they articulate as their aims, expectations, and desires, how women make their electronic communication practices meaningful to themselves -- by investigating a small community of adolescent women. The study's population has as yet no professional stake in the activity. Instead the subjects "discovered" electronic communications in relation to leisure time. Their desires, rather than specific institutional pressures, have brought them into networking culture. By examining the subjects' narratives about their activities, we construct a picture of the group's understanding of electronic discourse. What meaning does the electronic discussion have in the lives of the young women who have taken up this activity and how do they understand their participation? What brought them to this activity and what sustains them in it? How do they see themselves and each other in relation to other participants? This study helps us understand women's stake in electronic networks. It also illuminates some generational issues by exploring how a cohort acquainted with electronic technologies from a relatively early age conceptualizes computing tools and their relations to these instruments. INTRODUCTION [1] In some fields, notably rhetoric and composition, women have been early and persistent participants in the professional electronic culture that began emerging in the mid-1980s. Many of the early software developers for writing instruction -- Helen Schwartz, Christine Neuwirth, Nancy Kaplan, and Susan Kirschner -- as well as the founders of the central professional journal on the subject of computers and composition -- Kate Kieffer, Dawn Rodriguez, Cindy Selfe, and Gail Hawisher -- have been women. Still, there is little doubt that women are "underrepresented" in many areas of social and economic life, especially those related to electronic technologies. [2] The figures circulating on various electronic discussion lists show that women are largely absent from computer-related activities: women make up only 20% of the readership of popular computing magazines like PC World_,15% of subscribers to _Wired_, 15-18% of subscribers to the WELL (a surprisingly low figure since many of us _believe_ women are more likely to be engaged in computing when the technology engages the arts in some way), 10% of CompuServe subscribers, 15% of AOL subscribers, 30% of Prodigy subscribers. {2} [3] The paucity of women is noticeable not only in arenas of cultural consumption but also in arenas of knowledge production. In the social studies of technology, gender barely figures in important accounts of technologies and social practices. In the earliest and still one of the most important works on electronic networks (Hiltz & Turoff, 1978; revised 1993), the implications of electronic technologies for women occupies only a single, three-paragraph segment. It concludes: Our own hope is that the potential of this medium for work at home and for making the sex of participants totally inconsequential will mean that it will lead to a reorganization of occupational and household sex roles. However, it may also reinforce current distinctions.... (1993 edition, pp. 438-439) In _The Social Construction of Technological Systems_ (Bijker, Hughes, & Pinch, 1987), gender figures in only two articles: a brief mention in an account of the development of the bicycle (Pinch & Bijker, 1987) and an almost inadvertent focus in an article on the diffusion of home heating and cooking technologies in the United States (Cowan, 1987). This second article, the only one in the collection authored by a woman, proposes to focus on what Cowan calls "the consumption junction" as an important research site in the social studies of technology: it just so happens that the technologies she studies -- devices for heating homes and cooking -- are consumed in domestic settings and are therefore primarily in the domain of women. It is probably no accident that, both in the work of Hiltz and Turoff and in Cowan's study, the accounts of technological change bring women into focus largely in the context of their traditional domestic sphere. [4] Women and gender issues loom somewhat larger when researchers stop constructing an epic tale about sweeping technological impacts on the whole culture and begin to tell a narrower story about specific practices and the groups who engage in them. The gender imbalance so obvious to students of networking culture has prompted an array of interesting research investigating many dimensions of gender's intersection with networking practices, primarily asking questions such as who speaks and to whom, who sets conversational agendas, who "dominates" a discourse. Studies of sociolinguistic behaviors in electronic conversations -- both those carried on through listserv lists and those occurring in "realtime spaces," such as synchronous conferencing software and MUDs/MOOs -- have begun to show that despite the early explorations and sometimes ground-breaking work women have done in computing, women in many rapidly technologizing fields have felt increasingly discouraged by the discursive practices they encounter on the "nets." As many studies have shown, male participants outnumber female and male participation dominates female in most electronic environments, even on such lists as MBU {3} where the participation of women is remarkable for its vigor (Selfe & Meyer, 1991; Herring, Johnson, & DiBenedetto, 1992). These studies serve to confirm anecdotal evidence from professional women who have participated actively in network culture: women frequently feel ignored, silenced, even abused in electronic conversations. [5] Most of the published work on issues surrounding gender and networks emphasizes areas of tension or exclusion (see Turkle & Papert, 1990; Taylor, Kramarae, & Ebben, 1993). Typically, studies of discourse on electronic discussion lists examine numbers of messages, turn-taking, topic-setting, and other markers of status and power to show that women do not necessarily encounter the democratizing space so many pioneers of electronic discourse prophesied. Turkle (1988) speculates that women fall prey not to computer phobia but to what she calls "computer reticence," a fear of the intimate machine. The research agenda these studies outline stresses the obstacles women may face in their electronic communications practices. The studies tell us a great deal about what keeps women out of electronic discourse and what discourages their full and fulfilling participation. [6] What these studies generally overlook (or fail to take into account), however, is that some women persist despite the barriers to entry and the problems they find. They also generally overlook generational issues that may become increasingly important as a cohort of young women for whom computers have been everyday objects since childhood begins to reach maturity. Focusing predominantly on communications practices in two sites -- among professional women or in school settings, both elementary and secondary -- most studies have yet to take into account the entrance of young women into electronic discourse especially when their participation occurs outside of formal educational settings. In other words, we have been so busy noticing what hinders and repells us that we have failed to ask what draws some of us (but not others). We need to know more about what attracts women to electronic environments and what features of the activities we engage in sustain us in these new spaces. And we need to find out what might account for the presence of some adolescent women, a "next generation" of electronic communicators: how do those adolescents who gravitate to electronic spaces and seem to thrive there come into the subculture and find pleasure, amusement, and interest there? [7] The gender patterns present in subscriber lists and in electronic behaviors may have roots in the gendered divisions of work and play evident (and reinforced?) in the activities of young children. Girls seek cooperative play, while boys prefer competitive play; girls choose dolls, boys weapons and machinery; girls prefer literature, boys math (Gilligan, 1982; see also Turkle & Papert, 1990; Tannen, 1990). As Turkle (1988) astutely notes, "The computer has no inherent gender bias. But the computer culture is not equally neutral" (p. 41). However these "preferences" and associations arise (and there are a number of competing theories), the effects of gendering various arenas are evident by the time children are in the early years of education and are settled habits by the time children reach their teens. Still, there are always some young women willing to test the construction of gendered spaces. It seems fruitful, then, to begin to look at how some young women, especially those who find the "intimate machine" (Turkle, 1982) congenial and useful for their purposes, understand and make sense of their own behaviors as denizens of electronic spaces. PURPOSE OF THE STUDY [8] To begin to address these gaps in our understanding, the authors have undertaken a study of a small community of young women who choose to spend some part of their leisure time participating in the local electronic culture in their town. The study sketches some facets of how these young women use computing, and especially electronic messaging, in their worlds of work (school) and play (home and other venues of social life). As all ethnographic work seeks to do, this study tries to tease out the meanings its subjects construct, to situate their participation in electronic communications within the framework of their lives, to tell the story of how electronic mail and electronic bulletin boards function and fit within the totality of their daily activities and especially within the choices they make about how to spend their leisure time (Van Maanen, 1988). Another goal is to understand how these women see themselves in relation to others, both those using the same or similar bboards and those who do not engage in this activity. The observations we have been able to make preclude answering many of the global questions we might ask: the number of subjects in the study and their atypicality make it impossible to generalize from this ethnography to other settings or groups of adolescents. Nevertheless, this description can provide a glimpse of some useful research questions the scholarly community could begin to address. DESCRIPTION OF THE STUDY'S METHODS [9] Conducted by a scholar of rhetoric (Kaplan) and a participant-observer who is also one of the study's chief informants (Farrell), this study examines some of the electronic communications practices of five young women. The information sources consist of questionnaires, interviews, journal entries, and our observations of messaging behaviors on the electronic bulletin boards the subjects use. Because electronic behaviors depend quite directly on the varieties of technology available to users, we describe the environment of the bboards fairly completely. Yet our main focus remains the activities and choices of the study's subjects. [10] Rather than examining the messages these women send and receive or the distribution of gender in the totality of messages on any one of the bulletin boards these women use, we decided to focus on the ways the young women see themselves in relation to the technologies and activities they choose. Taking a cue from Cowan (1987), we elicited the information for the study from a "consumption junction" represented by the words and perceptions of those who have chosen this activity among the others competing for their time and attention. [11] The study began with the questionnaire, asking for some demographic information as well as some self- descriptions of preferred activities and interests. Those who did not write out their answers were interviewed by Farrell. We also asked the participants to keep a log or journal of their electronic lives for a few weeks, but only one participant managed to do so consistently. Over the course of five months, one other participant -- Farrell herself -- wrote three extensive meditations describing herself and her use of electronic discourse. This study, then, focuses primarily on the two young women who wrote at length, using the other three as a kind of backdrop. WOMEN WHO WEAVE THE WEB: AN ANALYSIS [12] _1. Who "we" are._ The subjects of this study are a fairly homogenous set: all are white and middle class, ranging in age from 15 to 18; they live in a small town in upstate New York. Their town is dominated economically and culturally by a major university. Four subjects have one or more parent connected in some way to the university. All live at home with some family (although three are children of divorced and/or reconstituted nuclear families). All but one have a computer and modem at home. [13] All of the subjects have above average scores on the SATs. All of them will to go to college. All of the women in this study attend an alternative school, that is one where students have considerable say about governance and curriculum and where the educational agenda includes fostering independent thinking and creativity as well as students' sense of responsibility for their own learning. Nevertheless, as a public school this one must meet the general requirements of the state and the local school board, including math and science requirements as well as computer literacy goals. All took a computer literacy course either in high school or in middle school. [14] Although we suspected that many young women who use computers extensively might also have less math and science aversion than other girls their age, this hypothesis was not in fact supported by the subjects' self- assessments. Some have enjoyed math and science in high school and intend to study these subjects in college while others lean toward the humanities and social sciences. Our two focal cases divide along these disciplinary leanings: "Fish" (a nickname for one of the young women) intends to study science; Farrell prefers literature or perhaps psychology. Fish takes computer classes and writes computer code; Farrell does not and has shown no interest in programming. In fact, she describes herself as math- averse and yet shows an intense interest in computers as communication tools. [15] All of the young women in the study identify some shared interests with each other and with those they "meet" on the bboards. These interests center on leisure activities, including a canon of science fiction and fantasy texts (_Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ and _Star Trek_ were mentioned most frequently) and similar tastes in music (what these young women generally characterized as "alternative" music). Four of the five mentioned that the people they meet on the bboards tend to be politically liberal, but since their town is also generally more liberal than the surrounding towns, this perception is hardly surprising and quite likely to be accurate for the local electronic community. [16] The questionnaire/interview asked the subjects to describe some of their preferred activities and to characterize these preferences in gender terms where appropriate. Not surprisingly, most of these young women characterized some of the activities they enjoy, including bboarding, as male-identified. For example, all said they enjoy some role-playing games -- three of them actively and the other two only occasionally -- though none engage in the most violent type, which Farrell terms "wargaming"; three of the five admit to greater or lesser degrees of interest in math and/or science and characterize these interests as more typical of males they know than of females. Only one, Fish, describes herself as a programmer, though. One of these young women claims to hate math (except for the conceptual parts) but confesses to a fondness for fixing things, like cars. Although the survey did not elicit a great deal of information and we did no comparisons with other young women who are not engaged in electronic communications nor with any young men whether or not they participate in computer culture, these brief descriptions suggest a cohort of young women who are aware of the gendering of typical adolescent activities but who feel comfortable identifying themselves with some activities and preferences they associate with maleness. [17] Although we will treat this feature of the subjects' use of electronic messaging more fully in section 4 below, one other common point of connection among these women deserves mention here: all of these young women were introduced to electronic conversations by one or more friends. Several mentioned the same friend, a young woman whom we will call Jane for the purposes of this study. Jane had also attended the alternative high school but is now in college in California. It is unclear how Jane became involved in bboarding or what her role in spreading this activity among women was, but the personal connection to people (especially other young women no more than a few years older than they) who are already engaged in the local bboard scene seems vital to the story of our subjects' use of the medium. In most cases, members of the subjects' families (fathers, mothers, older siblings) use computers in their work or leisure activities. For example, Farrell's mother has been using computers professionally and at home since Farrell was seven years old. But Farrell began using them in earnest, for herself and her own purposes, only when she was 14 or 15 years old. Even those who mention a family member's computer use connect their own introduction to the bulletin board scene with a specific friend or two. The role modelling a mother might play, then, seems much less potent than the engagement of those within the cohort. [18] In her first musings about this project and the kinds of questions she would like it to explore, Farrell speculated that girls join the subcultures of role- playing games and electronic communications through different avenues and at a different developmental stage than boys do. She believes that boys begin role- playing when they are quite young (six and seven years old, she guesses). One of her good buddies, Neville, had tried to get her involved in role playing when she was about 10 years old, but she was not interested because the pictures on the role playing materials struck her as sexist. Girls, Farrell observes, join this activity (if they ever do) when they are mid- adolescent, fourteen or fifteen, with active social lives including male friends or even boyfriends, who, as Farrell puts it, "induct them." Similarly, she feels that young men who participate in the bboard subculture engage in it in ways she does not, for purposes she does not share: I have noticed that girls tend to be less hard- core [users of computer technologies], usually not being programmers and the like, and not dedicating _all_ their time to the 'boards like some guys do. For most females, it's a hobby, not a lifestyle. I don't know why it is for other people, but for me it's because I have other interests. Farrell's reflections suggest that young women may enter the related subcultures of role-playing games and electronic bboarding because of and by means of their immediate social worlds: chiefly their daily companions at school. Young women, Farrell believes, may join these activities precisely because they see them as an extension of, rather than escape from, those immediate social worlds. Clearly, the presence and strength of this connection needs further exploration. [19] _2. Where we meet electronically._ These young women are participants in a number of local bulletin boards: Memory Alpha, The Color Connection, Total Perspective Vortex, and The Magic Shop are some favorites. These electronic spaces are local in the sense that they do not fully connect to the entire range of utilities and services of the internet. All of these bboards require users to obtain special permission from the bboard's owner/operator to use an internet connection. Most with any sort of connection limit users to an electronic mail gateway so that local users can send email to people who are not based in their town or who for various reasons tend to log in to a different bboard. The internet connection serves as access to local newsgroups, but not to the national and international smorgasbord of newsgroups for which the internet is so renowned. [20] Typically, these electronic facilities offer participants a number of different spaces or options for use. The one Farrell uses most often, for example, offers participants a range of discussion topics as well as games and other files users can download. In addition to offering information about the technological underpinnings and a brief history of this bboard, the "sysop" (system operator) invites new users into the activity with this logon message: [O]ver the years and through various incarnations of bulletin board software, [this BBS] has evolved into (more-or-less) a general-interest communications system. Here, one often finds references to things such as Star Trek and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy (of four books) by Douglas Adams, as well as debates and arguments on all topics. There are also online games (Tradewars) and files available, but the heart of this board is the message base. Almost everything is permitted here, unless, of course, it is too weird. Why it's here: It's here for _you_ to express your feelings, insights, comments, remarks, annoyances, high-tech computer information and what ever else may crop up in your life, on a public medium, as well as to read the above as related by others. In short, the Total Perspective. What is expected of you: Nothing too extensive. A couple of messages here and there, a file or two for every five or ten files downloaded, etc. Let people know you're here, and not simply as one of the "Top Ten Downloaders!" The end of this introduction suggests the owner's desire that users of his system "message" more and download less, a preference that no doubt speaks about the most common uses of electronic spaces like this one. [21] All the electronic bboards, including the one detailed above, are owned and operated by men, often by young men in their teens, who have set up computers, modems, and phone lines in their homes. Most of these bboards can support only one user at a time (or at most one user and the sysop). These limits on access constrain users' behaviors while they are connected as well as their choices about when and how often to log on. Most of the bboards our subjects use limit access time for any one user to an hour a day. The competition for access can be stiff at preferred times of the day, too, so at least two of our subjects (Farrell and Fish) often log on at 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning. To do this, of course, they must get up even earlier than the start of the school day would dictate. [22] The mailing facilities provide for both public and private postings so that users can reply to a message on the General Subboard, the name of the most commonly used discussion space on Vortex, either by posting to that list or by sending the mail directly to the author of the original message. Thus, users choose whether to talk publicly or privately each time they write a message. Since all participants use "handles" or pseudonyms for the purposes of sending messages, a certain measure of privacy (or anonymity) _could_ be maintained if users wished, but in fact (as we will discuss later) users of these BBS come to know each other in contexts beyond the virtual spaces of the bboards. Moreover, at least among the subjects of this study, it is the common practice to use the same pseudonym on all the bboards to which one belongs, suggesting that these self-selected names have little to do with participants' desires to conceal identity or to construct multiple electronic roles for themselves. In fact, the handle Fish uses on the bboards -- "Madame Poisson" -- is the origin of the nickname her "face-to- face" friends often use for her. Farrell's standard handle is "Lady Enigma" or "Lady E." [22] _3. What we do and why we do it._ To capture some sense of life in this small electronic world, Kaplan informally sampled the message traffic of Vortex on three occasions and Fish supplied a representative sample of her messages (both ones received and ones written) on Color Connection. These glimpses suggest that the most common conversational dynamic consists of a series of interlocking or intertwined dyadic conversations. Farrell explains that typically she carries on several extended, publicly posted, simultaneous conversations, each with one main interlocutor. Thus, she will be "talking with" one other person on topic A and with a different person on topic B and so on. As strings extend through time, they either peter out or are joined by another person who may take over the role of chief conversational partner. [23] This sort of pairing seems quite different in character than the more general conversational pattern Kaplan has witnessed on email lists serving professional communities, where many participants engage one or two topics of general interest at a time. On MBU, for example, it seems that as topics engaging six or seven participants "run their course," the whole community shifts to new subjects. As the topics shift, some conversants fall silent while new conversants take their place. But only rarely does the forum consist chiefly of two voices trading commentary while countless others read along in silence. The pattern on Vortex and Color Connection, however, might well resemble common patterns on some wider bboards and newsgroups. This structure should be investigated further. [24] The conversations among these young women and their contacts on the bboards often seem, at least to an outsider, driven more by the desire of the participants to keep the conversation going than by their desire to achieve understanding of or consensus about some topic or issue. Often the messages are quite short -- almost like conversational rejoinders. The participants routinely include the message to which they are responding so that if an outsider drops into one of these dyadic threads for a time, the sequence of messages reads rather like a script from a dramatic scene: several conversational "turns" appear in each posting. (It takes a little while, moreover, to become acclimated to the conventions for cueing different speakers in the conversation.) Here, for example, is a short exchange between Fish and one of her partners that occurred in the "public" area of the bboard Fish favors: Message #14387 - Nothing In Particular (Received) Date: 03-22-94 18:15 From: Gangrene To: Madame Poisson Subject: A Sad Day Replies: #14090 <--> #14592 >>>That'll be an awful long time, my friend! TTThat's ok, I have an awfully big nose. Bah-dum dum. ((unenthused clapping, and the hurling of various objects from the peanut gallery) I wrote a really long and witty reply to this, but my modem farted out before I saved it. So use your imagination. __________________________________________________ Message #14898 - Nothing In Particular Date: 03-26-94 15:18 From: Madame Poisson To: Gangrene Subject: A Sad Day Replies: #14592 <- >>>>That'll be an awful long time, my friend! TTTThat's ok, I have an awfully big nose. Bah-dum dum. (((unenthused clapping, and the hurling of various objects from the peanut gallery) >I wrote a really long and witty reply to this, but my modem farted out before I saved it. So use your imagination. Okay. Wow, that was impressively witty. I am, therefore, impressed. The sociability of this exchange seems its sole reason for being. Even though the conversational partners seem to be engaged in a dialog carried on over several days, or even weeks, the exchange itself has some of the qualities and functions of rapid repartee. A more extensive examination might in fact show that these conversants are engaged in what Tannen (1990) calls "rapport" talk, a style of conversation more common among women than men, rather than "report" talk, a style men tend to favor. [25] Although we cannot judge "Gangrene's" stake in this form of exchange, Fish's journal sheds a little light on her use of this conversational form. Describing herself as a shy person "in real life," she writes that she "feels more comfortable typing out my feelings. My mind doesn't work quite fast enough that I feel comfortable in a normal conversation, but typing messages, I can express myself very well." Fish's account of her behavior and the conversational style she and others employ may well yield additional insights into why some young women like electronic environments: the absence of social cues (appearance, for example) and of immediately perceptible power differentials (gender, age, and so on) create a more comfortable social space, Fish believes, for many people like her. I must say that since I'm shy and perhaps a little 'nerdy,' I feel a kind of kinship with other people who seem like they might be shy and nerdy [a description of at least some of the people Fish encounters on the nets].... So meeting these people often made me feel strangely comfortable, even though I rarely spoke much to them in person. On the bulletin boards, people who are considered misfits can sort of let go [because] on the bulletin boards ... there are no preconceived ideas about who you are. That was the original attraction of the bulletin boards for me, and I think for many others.... It's hard to feel like a 'dork,' or misfit there, somehow. The BBS users of [my town] have even taken back the word 'geek,' the way some women try to take back words like 'babe.' For example, there are now monthly 'GeekFests,' which is often the first place that 'geeks' meet other 'geeks' with whom the only previous contact ... has been in cyberspace. Farrell's reflections echo key elements: "I am odd. The people I meet through the medium of the Net are odd." But Farrell characterizes her netcompanions not as social misfits, but as social, or at least verbal, adepts. Farrell's journals and descriptions of herself and her interactions with others on the network show that she loves the net primarily because she loves the word -- spoken and written. For her, "Net people are people in love with knowledge. In love with information and words. Debaters, jokers, storytellers, discussers, users of the paths insomnia carves, along with solitude, in the wee hours." The sense of the human connection and its value to them emerges strongly from the words of both these young women. The net seems to extend their connectedness to others, to work for them precisely because it connects them to others. [26] In addition to facilitating phatic conversations -- those dialogs intended to maintain connection rather than to convey information -- the bboards serve a range of traditional communicative functions. In her journal, Fish describes seeking help with a programming problem from Color Connection's Sysop, a young man about her age whom she describes as "a good friend of mine and a very experienced programmer." In her picture of the interaction, he wasn't around when she first logged on. She writes, so I hung around waiting for him. I also posted messages addressed to 'All' about that stack overflow error." When the Sysop makes his appearance, Fish says, "We chatted for several hours. We talked for a long time about my computer problems . . . it was funny: when I asked him what a stack overflow error might come from, he said 'Bad programming, mostly,' adding a smilie to let me know he was just kidding. The help is important to her, of course, but the human connection seems just as valued: "as it got late, we started talking about making eight-key or even two-key keyboards. We also discussed my personal life.... Anyway, it was nice to have a person to consult...." [27] The bboards constitute an important social space and an information resource for Fish, but they also facilitate other social arrangements. On one occasion, Farrell wrote to Fish to try to arrange an after-school get-together of a group of friends to form a role-playing game (RPG). Farrell writes (rather than just calling her friend Fish on the telephone) because Fish is in school while Farrell is home sick. (For reasons best known to the participants, this conversation took place in the private format of direct electronic mail. Possibly, the technological arrangement has determined this feature. Fish writes on Color Connection -- a bboard with two nodes so that it can support "chat" or synchronous messaging between two simultaneous users as well as asynchronous mail messages. Farrell writes on Vortex because she can connect to it via a local telephone call while Color Connection is for her a long distance call.) [28] As the exchange between Farrell and Fish makes clear, the communication failed in its purposes because Fish didn't receive the message in a timely fashion: Message #15162 - Internet Mail (Private) (Received) Date: 03-28-94 13:34 From: ladye@xxxx.yyyy.us To: FISH Subject: RPG friday? Replies: -> #15992 Hi, Fishi! It's Afid. I'm just writing in case Wolf doesn't run into you today and for some odd reason you decide to log on before I see you in school tomorrow. Hazel is desperate for a game that she does not GM, so it looks like Wolf may be GMing a present/near future-type campaign on Friday afternoon, before the Illuminati fest at Julius's house. We wanna know if you can and want to play. You could talk to me and/or Wolf to confirm or apologize or whatever, and if you feel like calling Haze, that would be cool. I wish I remembered her number, I realize that I am in a perfect position to call her at the moment, me being home sick and all with very little to do. Maybe I'll try her after I log off, I will try the number that seems to be floating about in my head loosely in connection with her name..... But I babble severely. Okay, bye-bye, and I'm sorry I couldn't show up at Drama today, I tried but it didn't work. Blessed be, Aiofe. Eva (Aiofe) Elizabeth - ladye@xxxx.yyyy.us __________________________________________________ Message #15992 - Internet Mail (Private) Date: 04-04-94 18:54 From: FISH To: ladye@xxxx.yyyy.us Subject: RPG friday? Replies: #15162 <- Aiofe, Well, I got your message a bit late for the purposes intended, but that's okay. I was looking forward to playing, but it was nice enough to be able to lounge around instead of worrying about plans and such. So whenever it happens, it happens, as they say. Should be nice. Anyhow, well, thanks for arranging and all. FISHIE THE WONDERFUL!! --- * Origin: The Color Connection, Ithaca, New York (0:0/0) It seems that the arrangement for the RPG on April 1st did not work out, but in the interim between Farrell's March 28th invitation and Fish's April 4th response, these two women had seen each other several times in school and perhaps in the context of other activities, like the drama group to which they both belong. Moreover, at any point, they could have used more direct communications by telephone in the evening. The other plan, to meet at Julius's house for "an Illuminati fest," did bear fruit, however; the nature and role of this event forms the subject of section 4. [29] _4. Living our lives._ Clearly, electronic mail connections serve a number of functions for these participants, among which is its supplementation of their almost daily contact with each other at school and in other venues. In fact, the degree to which electronic life permeates the daily habits and activities of these women is perhaps the most fascinating, and the most distinguishing, characteristic of the electronic community they have joined. For them, material ("real") life is entirely continuous with virtual life. Nowhere is this continuity more evident than in the monthly gatherings their electronically extended community calls "GeekFests" and in the "Illuminati fest" Farrell arranged in the exchange with Fish quoted above. [30] GeekFests or parties are organized by the Sysop of Color Connection but they include denizens of Vortex, Memory Alpha, and the Magic Shop as well. Such gatherings are possible, of course, only because this cluster of electronic communities occupies a geographic site as well as serving as a nexus of shared interests. Fish describes receiving mail from all over the country -- from friends away at college and her brother in New Jersey -- and Farrell corresponds electronically with her mother in Texas from time to time, but most of their electronic communications circulate locally. The bboards enable these young women to meet new people virtually, but the electronic meeting is usually only a prelude to some face-to-face encounter at one of the monthly fests. Or vice versa: they sometimes meet people who interest them at a GeekFest and then continue the relationship electronically. [31] Many of the people these young women encounter on the local nets are not high school students: they work in local companies (as Gangrene does) or pursue advanced degrees at the university (Armpit studies electrical engineering). In other words, these are people the subjects of our study would be unlikely to meet in any other way. The net allows these young women to cross social boundaries, an adventure they appear both to enjoy immensely and, curiously, to take for granted. But the crossing seems to have to occur both virtually and materially for it to meet the needs of these young women. [32] Throughout her journal, Fish describes GeekFests as a central element of her bboarding. In an early entry (January 22, 1994), she first mentions these regular gatherings as part of her explanation of why she likes bboarding. Two days later, she reports attending one, describing the general scene: There was a GeekFest the other night, which was actually a lot of fun. There were a lot of geekier looking geeks there, which pleased me to no end. One of my friends brought a Newton.... That amused several of us for quite a while, seeing how it interpreted things we wrote. Other big activities were ping-pong, pool, and playing a game called 'Doom.' (Good Lord, but programmers are sick little puppies! This is one of those super-violent games; you go around killing things quite graphically with any of a bunch of weapons; the weapon of choice last night was the chainsaw. There's something called 'God Mode,' in which you can walk through walls and you can't be hurt by anything, so they were playing the adventure 'Knee-Deep in the Gore' (though I can't imagine there's too much difference between the adventures, or at least none of the users of the game would really care) at the 'Ultra-Violent' level in 'God Mode'.... This is what geeks do for fun!:-)) Describing another such gathering, Fish mentions that she was one of only two women who regularly join the "cluster of geeks surrounding the computer.... I may be the only female BBSer in the local cyber-community ... who programs." Fish's awareness of social differences -- gender differences, in particular -- seems to operate in tension with a more compelling sense of social solidarity, a sense of "kinship with other people who seem like they might be shy and nerdy." [33] The safety of the social space partially insulates Fish from a gendered social awkwardness. On one occasion, when she meets Armpit for the first time, she is aware of the kind of gender sensitivity and anxiety familiar to those who cruise MUDs and MOOs. The person I met the other day chatting has the alias 'Armpit.' I realize that as we were chatting, I had the idea he was male before I had any real reason to do so. I suppose part of it was the alias: very few females would pick the alias 'Armpit.' Also, he had some ways of being that seemed more male; for example, he responded to my 'Hello!' message with something like 'Yes, Madame?" Yes, that is part of my alias, but females don't generally respond that way. The conversation seems to turn on a _double entendre_ associating "madame" with "madam," a word Fish takes to mean "a woman who runs a brothel." As she chats with Armpit, Fish talks about the GeekFests, urging Armpit to attend one. The face-to-face meetings these parties afford are, after all, a central feature of the activity for Fish and Farrell and the other subjects of this study. Armpit seems reluctant to show interest in meeting Madame Poisson, though. Finally, he writes Fish that he has to go make dinner for his wife and himself. Fish records this episode in her journal as an instance of confusion: "Of course, he probably did [have to go make dinner], but the inclusion of 'my wife' makes me wonder whether he was worrying about my intentions." In this little drama, the "safe" electronic space can be violated, from Armpit's perspective, by the threatened collapse of the distinction between electronic and material worlds. But for Fish, that collapse seems really to be the point, as a subsequent discussion of "virtual romances" reveals. [34] About two weeks after she records her first meeting with Armpit, Fish writes that she has had some virtual romances of a sort. I was 'asked out' in chat mode at around two thirty 'in the ayem' once, which I found to be quite a silly situation.... I don't suppose it was a proper virtual romance because I did have relatively significant interaction with him in the 'real world,' but I think it counts anyway. I'm also developing a relationship with someone who I met via the BBS, but I think that, at least in the last year or so, I haven't messaged with him so much and have actually hung out with him in the real world a fair amount, so again, not quite a perfect example. While working out these various distinctions and her own gendered behaviors, Fish ends the entry by noting that she does know some people who have connected romantically through bulletin boards, but that because bboarding in her town organizes itself around two locations -- cyberspace and GeekFests, "there's a healthy dose of reality thrown in by GeekFests, allowing people to meet face-to-face instead of losing themselves in their computer screens." [35] A locus of social exploration extending through both virtual and material experiences, the electronic bulletin board scene in this town can seem like an organizing principle for a host of otherwise disparate leisure activities, including literacy practices apparently quite divorced from the reading and writing these women pursue on the nets. At one all-night party, not technically a GeekFest but populated, as Farrell puts it, by "electronically minded people," Farrell and Fish began reading _The Illuminatus Trilogy_ aloud to each other. Because the two of them "are morning people to a truly disgusting degree, we were sitting on the hostess's couch at seven in the morning, each of us running on about 2 hours of sleep." Farrell casually picked up a copy of the book that had been lying on the floor, read the first page aloud to Fish, and then handed her the book. Fish read the next page aloud to Farrell. And so they continued until others began to awake and decided to watch a movie. [36] The activity resumed at another party some weeks later, this one a birthday party for Fish and for Steve, another friend who is also deeply engaged in local bboarding. Farrell found a copy of the book in Steve's room and she and Fish disappeared into a back room to read. Soon they were joined by another. In this way, they managed to read 130 pages or so, Farrell estimates. Fish's account of this event also links the reading to the culture of geeks with which she identifies: "There were a lot of geeky sorts at that birthday party, which was rather comforting. I ended up reading aloud with a few other people for the entire time, but then, that's the sort of thing I would do." Farrell and Fish have actively created opportunities to continue the reading inadvertently begun at these two other social events. Some of their negotiations about meetings, as we have seen, take place through the bboard system. [37] Farrell typically associates electronic activities with literacy and literary practices. The Web is a reality of constantly shifting virtual truths: Identity, language, talk, programs, even a deadly virus or two, circling through these invisible pathways of the information jungle out there. It is a book forever being written, rewritten, revised and erased; a world that is inside one dimension of text on a screen, and yet does not exist in physical space. Is it any wonder I feel a surge of power through me when I exercise even my pitiful skill? This strange literacy practice -- a throwback to a reading practice not common since the early twentieth century -- connects Farrell, Fish, and Steve to the electronic community because the novel they read belongs to the community's self-selected cultural literacy texts. That is, _The Illuminatus Trilogy_ and _Hitchhiker's Guide_ and _Star Trek_ form a set of common texts and experiences which, though unlikely to show up on Hirsch's list of what every citizen needs to know (see Hirsch, 1987), makes up a portion of the shared interests and values underwriting the connections among these people in the first place. While linking Fish, Steve, and Farrell to the electronic world they frequent, the oral reading takes place in the ordinary material and social world quite typical of adolescents in a small towns everywhere. DIRECTIONS FOR RESEARCH [38] In a recent posting on the Systers electronic list (a list for women computer scientists, systems analysts, and the like), Carolyn Seaman brought an article from the February 27, 1994 edition of the Washington _Post_ to the attention of the list's denizens because the article discussed the question whether it matters that women be well represented in cyberspace. In the bit of the article Seaman quotes, it becomes clear that Paula Span, the author of the _Post_ article, saw a generational issue within the gendered one: True, people of either gender can still live meaningful lives without computers.... I don't think that will be true for my daughter, though, or any of our daughters. They're entering a world in which card catalogue drawers have already vanished from the public library, replaced by terminals and keyboards.... [T]hey can't afford to see computers as toys for boys, to see ignorance as feminine, to wring their hands over the keyboard and worry that they will break something.... The daughters who have let us study their habits are joining the world Span sketches. They seem to be successfully overcoming at least some of the reticence toward the intimate machine that Turkle describes in her research on women learning to program (1988). As this preliminary description of a small community makes clear, however, there is much to study in their practices and much to learn about the attractions of electronic communications for the young women who will be the professional women of the next generation. [39] The young women who participated in this study, sharing bits of their adolescent world with us, are aware that the commmunication practices described in this article set them apart from other young women their age, girls who do not use electronic communications in their leisure time. But our subjects do not see themselves as especially male- identified, either. Instead, they have rearticulated their relations to the technologies, transforming what the wider culture codes as male into a tool they themselves identify with characteristically female traits and capacities. We found not trace, then, of Turkle's "computational reticence," except insofar as these young women do not feel compelled to learn programming or other aspects of computing they may see as irrelevant to their own interests in using the technology. [40] What needs further investigation, then, is what differentiates these girls from others in their cohort, both from other girls who show no interest in using computers and from the young men who tend to dominate computer use in schools and in the leisure spaces we have studied. How have the subjects in this study succeeded in redefining the machine where others have, apparently, failed? To understand this, we would need to explore in fuller detail when young women who take to the networks first begin to do so, and how they become acquainted with networking culture. In particular, it would be valuable to know what role other adolescent girls play in inducting new members. By the same token, it is clear that we need to know more fully what roles family members and schools play. Computing in educational settings is most often affiliated with the math and science curriculum, but the young women we have studied suggest that defining computers as tools of communication and connection would draw more girls to them. Further study might reveal that in settings where computers are used as fully in the language arts curriculum as they tend to be in the math and science areas, young women feel more interested in and positive about using computers. [41] Ethnographies focus on the meanings its subjects articulate, and it is important that those meanings arise from the young women and the young men who should become the subjects of future studies. Although such work will always be methodologically challenging, this study shows the importance of situating research on communication practices at the points where those practices arise: in the context and texture of women's lives. The Webs they weave, after all, consist not just of the warp and woof of their electronic messages but of the totality of their lived experiences, combining virtual and material worlds. [42] What is especially suggestive in the words and thoughts of our subjects is the connection between electronic culture and other gendered behaviors, like role- playing games, and the routes young children and then older adolescents find into a whole, linked set of activities. It seems likely, from Farrell's and Fish's thoughts, that neither role-playing games nor electronic practices necessarily serve the same functions for girls as they do for boys. But those differences do not necessarily exclude girls from these activities: as Farrell says about her participation in the net, "I noticed that even as I was inducted into this world, I invoked changes in it.... You create the net in the act of accessing it." Do young men think about, reflect on their net experiences in the same ways? And what do those young women who never make it into cyberspace choose instead? What communications practices serve as their looms for the Webs of their lives? [43] These are the sorts of questions further and more extensive ethnographic work, situated in the convergence of adolescents' worlds of work and play, can help us answer. That it is vital to understand both what keeps women out and what invites them in hardly needs arguing: as Paula Span observed, "Women have to be in [the computer world] because decisions about language and culture and access are being made and we should be involved in making them. Women have to be in it because, although nobody really knows what form all this technology will take, there shouldn't be any clubhouse we're afraid to climb into." WORKS CITED Bijker, W., Hughes, T., & Pinch, T. (1989). _The social construction of technological systems: New directions in the sociology and history of technology_. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Cowan, R. (1987). The consumption junction: A proposal for research strategies in the sociology of technology. In Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (Eds.), _The social construction of technological systems: New directions in the sociology and history of technology_. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 261-280. Gilligan, C. (1982). _In a different voice: Psychological theory and women's development_. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Herring, S., Johnson, D., and DiBenedetto, T. (1992). Participation in electronic discourse in a "feminist" field. Paper presented at the Berkeley Women and Language Conference, April 1992, University of California at Berkeley. Hiltz, R., & Turoff, M. (1993). _The network nation: Human communication via computer_. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Hirsch, E. D. Jr. (1987). _Cultural literacy: What every American needs to know_. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Pinch, T., & Bijker, W. (1987). The social construction of facts and artifacts: Or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other. In Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (Eds.), _The social construction of technological systems: New directions in the sociology and history of technology_. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 17-50. Selfe, C. and Meyer, P. (1991). Testing claims for on- line conferences. _Written Communication_, 8(2), 162- 192. Tannen, D. (1990). _You just don't understand: Women and men in conversation_. New York: Ballantine. Taylor, H. J., Kramarae, C., & Ebben, M. (1993). _Women, information technology, and scholarship_. Urbana: Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois. Turkle, S. (1984). _The second self: Computers and the human spirit_. New York: Simon & Schuster. Turkle, S. (1988). Computational reticence: Why women fear the intimate machine. In Cheris Kramerae (Ed.), _Technolgy and women's voices: Keeping in touch_. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 41-61. Turkle, S. and Papert, S. (1990). Epistemological pluralism: Styles and voices within the computer culture. _Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society_, 16(1), 128-157. Van Maanen, J. (1988). _Tales of the field: On writing ethnography_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. NOTES 1. Nancy Kaplan, Associate Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas, teaches rhetoric and technology. Eva Farrell, a high school senior at the Alternative Community School and principal investigator on this project, will be a first year student at the University of Texas at Austin in September, 1994. She is also Kaplan's daughter. 2. These figures come via a long chain of postings on various email lists: the original posting came from "Bruce Siceloff ," a virtual person whose information came to us through a friend who subscribes to the MIT Media Lab's electronic list. Siceloff's message was reposted there, perhaps from online-news@marketplace.com, one of several virtual locations to which Siceloff originally sent his message on March 10, 1994. 3. MBU or Megabyte University is an unmoderated list for rhetoric and composition specialists interested in electronic technologies for writing and teaching. _____ Articles and Sections of this issue of the _Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture_ may be retrieved via anonymous ftp to byrd.mu.wvnet.edu or via e-mail message addressed to LISTSERV@KENTVM or LISTSERV@KENTVM.KENT.EDU (instructions below) or GOPHER gopher.cic.net Papers may be submitted at anytime by email or send/file to: Ermel Stepp - Editor-in-Chief, _Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture_ M034050@MARSHALL.WVNET.EDU _________________________________ *Copyright Declaration* Copyright of articles published by Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture is held by the author of a given article. 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