Digital Mythologies

Thomas Valovic

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9780813597584
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Engineering General
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Surf the web. Ride the information highway. Log on to the future. Corporate ad campaigns like these have become pervasive in the 1990s. You're either online, or you're falling behind the times-at least, that's what the media tells us.

Ever since the 1990s, when the Internet gained widespread popularity, it has been heralded as one of the best things ever to happen to technology and communications. Commentators expected it to revolutionize how we communicate, do business, and educate our children. Conversely, other pundits have vehemently attacked this technology. Naysayers of "cyberlife" emerged with their warnings of how the Net provides an uncensored, round-the-clock venue for pornography, for inaccurate, simplified information, and is rife with opportunities to violate our right to privacy. In Digital Mythologies, Thomas Valovic hopes to raise the level of discussion by giving a full and balanced picture of how the Net affects our lives.

Digital Mythologies, a collection of Valovic's essays, asks hard questions about where computer and communications technology is taking us. Through anecdotes drawn from his experiences as former editor-in-chief of Telecommunications magazine, the author gives readers an insider's peek behind the scenes of the Internet industry. He explores the underlying social and political implications of the Internet and its associated technologies, based on his contention that the cyberspace experience is far more complex than is commonly assumed. Valovic explores these hidden complexities, and points to fascinating connections between the Internet and our contemporary culture.

The Electronic Polity

The more readily we conceive the planet as a single unit and move about it freely on missions of study or work, the more necessary it is to establish such a home base, such an intimate psychological core with visible landmarks and cherished personalities. The world will not become a neighborhood, even if every part of it is bound by instant communication and rapid transportation, if the neighborhood itself as an idea and a social form is allowed to disappear.

—Lewis Mumford

Contemporary observers have documented and analyzed the way mass media . . . have “commoditized” the public sphere, substituting slick public relations for genuine debate and packaging both issues and candidates like other consumer products.

The political significance of [computer networking] lies in its capacity to challenge the existing political hierarchy’s monopoly on powerful communications media, and perhaps thus revitalize citizen-based democracy.

—Howard Rheingold

The right to flame your congressman by E-mail is not likely to improve the quality of democracy.

—Daniel Burstein and David Kline

The political process is moving onto the Internet. Both within the United States and internationally, individuals, interest groups, and even nations are using the Internet to find each other, discuss the issues, and further their political goals.

—Charles Swett

The Complexities of Role and Identity in Cyberspace

Whatever you may have heard or read, the online world is not a WYSIWYG environment—what you see is not necessarily what you get. Cyberspace is teeming with hidden complexities: trapdoors, wormholes, mirages, and illusions. If you start looking for them, however, you probably will not see them—at least not right away. The complexities of the online world—especially those that involve conversations with others—do not become readily apparent until you have spent a lot of time roving its virtual corridors. Although the same could be said for just about any other activity in life, it is surprising how many otherwise well informed people have a tendency to take what transpires in the online environment at face value.

It is important to remember that cyberspace is an experiential phenomenon. Being there is what counts. Participating in discussions, making mistakes, watching others make mistakes, seeing how opinions are formed and challenged, learning the nuances of virtual social environments, watching how communications breakdowns occur, and getting a practical sense of both the advantages and the limitations of various online systems—these are all a part of learning about the way things work in the online environment. There are no ready-made analogies for human interaction in the online environment, not only because it is a new medium but also because it is a place where the ground rules are still being hammered out and the experience itself is still being shaped and invented. To a large extent, in the virtual world we are all making it up as we go along and experimenting with a new means of communication.

The hidden complexities I am alluding to come in many forms and span many situations. In cyberspace, even something as seemingly simple as identity can be fraught with complication. One of my preferred hangouts in cyberspace has been the WELL, an upscale, intellectually oriented conferencing system founded by Stewart Brand and based in California. When I first joined the WELL, I had to decide how I was going to represent myself in the community. Since at the time I was a magazine editor and a journalist who covered online issues and the Internet, the decision was even more complicated—my professional activities had a certain public dimension to them.

Everyone who joins the WELL must, with certain minor exceptions, be identified in what is called a .plan file; one cannot join anonymously. The WELL has traditionally been a UNIX-based system, and the .plan file is simply a UNIX file that lists the subscriber’s full name and certain other basic information, the inclusion of most of which is optional.

When a subscriber posts comments in the various conferences, the software used by the WELL automatically attaches the subscriber’s name to every posting that he or she makes. It also date- and time-stamps the posting in a numbered sequence. Posts appear with a header that includes the topic number, name of the conference, topic name, posting number, name and user ID of the subscriber who made the posting, and date, time, and length of the posting.

Topic 129 [wired]: New Republic Slams Wired!

#62 of 218: Tom Valovic (tvacorn) Sun Jan 1 ’95 (19:19) 19 lines

Note that “tvacorn” is my selected user ID and automatically appears in every posting I make.

On the WELL’s system, the header is fundamentally unalterable. However, whether or not my full name appears in the posting is alterable. What I or any other subscriber can do, using a simple command, is alter my full name through the use of a pseudonym. If I had chosen to do this in the case of the posting above, the header would have looked like this:

Topic 129 [wired]: New Republic Slams Wired!

#71 of 218: more icons! (tvacorn) Mon Jan 2 ’95 (19:20) 8 lines

“More icons!” is a playful pseudonym that I might occasionally choose to use. However, using a pseudonym does not render my postings anonymous on the WELL system. Because the WELL, unlike many other systems, has always discouraged anonymity, information about a subscriber’s true identity is always available in the .plan file. Thus, people who read my comment and found themselves wanting to know my identity could access that information simply by reading my .plan file, which is publicly available. But, interestingly, one level of complexity has already been introduced here because many subscribers will not take the time to look up the identities of those who post under a pseudonym. Thus conversations take place between the named and the nameless, and the reliable context of identity is no longer a constant.

Cyberspace is a participatory public or semipublic space that has no formal requirements for participation. Because of this, identity has significant implications with respect to the notion of electronic democracy and various other forms of private and public discourse.

Complexity of role and identity in online environments is determined by a number of factors. An individual’s role in the online world may or may not, for example, be associated with a professional affiliation. For example, as a member of the WELL, I typically subscribed to several conferences including telecommunications, media, and music. When I was in the music conference, I was there strictly for recreational purposes, participating as a private citizen. But when I went into the telecommunications conference, did my relationship to the WELL as a forum for discourse change? If so, how? Because I was editor-in-chief of a magazine that covers telecommunications, should I have conducted myself differently in that conference? Did I have the same amount of freedom as someone who was attending the conference purely as a hobbyist?

Certainly, a subscriber reading my comments would have no easy way of determining whether I was speaking as an expert or as just another passerby. And how should a specific communication be interpreted? Should the critical determinant be the intention of the poster or perhaps the interpretation lent to the post by another subscriber? Thus, simply moving from one conference to another—something that people do repeatedly in a given session on the WELL—affords many possibilities for confusion of role and identity.

Similar questions arise with respect to corporate affiliation. In some cases, if subscribers participate in a work-related newsgroup and their employers pay for the online time, the subscribers might want it understood that their comments should not be construed as representing the interests or opinions of the employers.

Subscribers often deal with this situation by attaching disclaimers to an information trailer (e-mail address, company affiliation, and so forth). A typical disclaimer might read, “My views do not represent those of my company but are solely my own opinions.” But what if the poster does not use a disclaimer? How should others in the conference construe his or her remarks? In the default mode, ambiguities of interpretation are always possible.

More likely than not, most people who frequent cyberspace are probably not staying up nights worrying about such niceties. As a media theorist and editor, I found myself intrigued by the inherent confusion of public and private roles that seemed to be a defining characteristic of the online experience. Besides, the stock-in-trade of editors is clarity of expression, and as I spent more time online, more opportunities seemed to emerge for confusing transactions and muddled interpretation. Furthermore, from strictly a personal standpoint, I preferred a position of clarity to the ambiguity that is always possible in online conferencing, and I worked hard to make sure that my own comments were clear and readily understandable, even though that goal was often at risk. As an editor in a very visible industry known to many participants on the WELL and other places I frequented, I also wanted to safeguard my right to speak as a private citizen.

Unfortunately, there seemed to be no surefire mechanism for accomplishing these goals. Perhaps, as digital culture is fond of pointing out, cyberspace really was the electronic frontier—a place where ambiguity and anarchy were to be savored and enjoyed with the knowledge that the rules would come soon enough. Or perhaps journalists and editors were simply more sensitive to these issues. But if the rules were inevitable, why was digital culture always talking about how there should not be any?

It is no accident that a lot of journalists frequent the WELL. Part of the system’s early marketing strategy under operating managers Cliff Figallo and John Coate was to actively encourage the participation of writers and journalists, on the assumption that they would add to the WELL’s unique and upscale intellectual cachet as well as promote the system via their influence in their spheres of activity. To do this, the WELL gave journalists a limited amount of free access time so that they could test drive the system and then presumably spread the word about its erudite, irreverent, and cosmopolitan ambiance.

Although the strategy has many journalistic complications, it worked. This classic word-of-mouth marketing strategy, along with others implemented by the WELL staff, helped to raise the level of discourse on the conferencing system; and that, in turn, attracted other high-profile subscribers.

However, this practice raises a lot of questions. Might not subscribers who happen to be wandering around in a conferencing system want to know that there is a journalist lurking on every virtual street corner? Might they not have the right to know that one of their fellow conference participant might be a journalist? After all, the WELL administration did not require anyone’s .plan file to include information about his or her profession. Including this kind of information was purely voluntary.

Imagine a scenario, then, where a subscriber unknowingly engages in an e-mail conversation with someone who happens to be a newspaper reporter in the subscriber’s hometown. If sensitive subject matter involving an area covered by the reporter was introduced, then to say the least a lot of complications could ensue. But the WELL itself offered no guidance about such matters, nor were many guidelines likely even formulated at that stage of the game.

This scenario raises many questions. Do journalists have an obligation to identify themselves when they are roving around in cyberspace? If so, how can this be reasonably accomplished? If they have no intention of exercising their prerogatives as purveyors of public information, should they somehow make that known? If they do try to make it known, how can they ensure that conference participants will be fully aware of it? After all, surfing the Net while spewing out legalistic disclaimers at every turn of the conversation defeats the purpose and dampens the enjoyment of online participation.

These are just a few isolated examples. In general, conversation and the exchange of information in cyberspace are full of such complications, protocol complexities, and ethical dilemmas, although most participants do not seem to worry too much about them. In my own experience, many of these issues seemed to reach critical mass in the WELL’s media conference, a popular hangout for editors, reporters, and journalists of all stripes. Many of my own thoughts about such matters were forged and formulated by participation in that conference, and I explored some of them in an article I wrote for Media Studies Journal.¹

While working on the article, I garnered the opinions of a number of conference participants, including Time magazine’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt and The New Yorker’s John Seabrook, on the ticklish subject of online media criticism. Among other things, the article explored some of the murky issues associated with role and identity. For example, is the role of journalists online primarily determined by who is paying for their time on the system? If their time is being paid for by their employers, are they then participating in an official capacity? And if so, then what does “official” mean?

Journalists might think they are speaking for themselves, but someone reading their comments might assume the opposite. For example, did Philip Elmer-Dewitt’s comments in his Time cyberporn cover story—which aroused a storm of reaction from other journalists in the WELL’s media conference—reflect his own opinions or were they to be construed as official communications from a member of the magazine’s staff?

Another complicating factor is the nature of the conferences themselves. When I first joined the WELL, I consciously avoided topics that were related to my professional sphere, since I perceived my own presence on the WELL as a matter of personal, not professional, exploration. Over the years, however, conferences like telecommunications, wired, information, and virtual community, conferences that yielded interesting and useful professional content, gradually managed to insinuate themselves onto my automated conference list. But, in general, I found that the online experience created a discernible blurring effect whereby it was not always possible to say that my participation in a conference was either strictly professional or simply the dabbling of a hobbyist or a concerned private citizen. What is interesting here is that the online experience tends to break down the barriers that typically delineate the somewhat artificial partitioning of time into the neat categories of work, play, relaxation, and so forth. Or perhaps it might be a bit more accurate to say that the online environment has a way of homogenizing work and play to the point that separating the two becomes increasingly difficult.

I have used two examples here—the WELL and the field of journalism—to show how ambiguity can thrive in the online environment. However, they are just that—examples. Such ambiguities arise in many other conferencing systems, including Usenet, America Online, Prodigy, and CompuServe. They will in all cases be specific to the individuals involved. A law enforcement officer spending time online may experience one set of complications, a social worker, another. The point is that these ambiguities tend to arise at the intersection of public and private areas of interest, and the virtual world has a propensity for conflating the two in some very interesting ways.

What conclusions might we draw from the dilemmas, ambiguities, and contradictions that the online experience can engender? First of all, it seems clear that the free-form nature of the online environment tends to break down the convenient separations of function and custom that delineate the contours of our personal and professional lives. As will be discussed, this has both positive and negative dimensions. In general, however, online transactions and communication often take place in the absence of meaningful context. I refer to this phenomenon as decontextualization. For example, an online posting, however interesting or valuable, is decontextualized if its source is anonymous. As a part of the decontextualization process, form, content, and source—all essential components of any communications pattern—can be decoupled or scrambled. (And what has been scrambled can, of course, be resequenced!)

Decontextualization is a hallmark not only of the online world but also of our contemporary media. In the online environment, however, the scrambling of a signal is far more pronounced. There is a decidedly chaotic quality to the online world, which is at once its best and worst characteristic. A media theorist like Avital Ronell would likely underscore the positive aspects of decontextualization by pointing out that this “scrambling of the master codes” is necessary and useful. In Ronell’s view, we can see the Net as a tool for stripping away repetitive and reinforcing societal strictures, a tool for liberating exploration of sense and self. Some of these notions are also explored by Sherry Turkle in her book Life on the Screen.

In this context, the Net may be seen as an instrument for social change precisely because of its power to decontextualize and scramble sign and...