electropolos - communication and comunity on irc.txt

1000 HOWTOs for various needs [WINDOWS]

communication, and cross-cultural exchange, to form deep friendships, 
even love-affairs, with people whom they have never met.

Net.romances display computer-mediated relationships at their most 
idyllic. However, disinhibition and increased freedom from social 
norms have another side. Along with increased broad-mindedness and 
intimacy among some users goes increased hostility on the part of 
others. 'Flaming', the expression of anger, insults and hatred, is a 
common phenomenon in all forms of computer-mediated communication, 
and IRC is no exception. Anonymity makes the possibility of social 
punishment for transgression of cultural mores appear to be limited. 
Attracting the anger of other users of the system is a relatively 
unthreatening prospect - although it is possible for users to ignore 
a particular user, all that user need do is change his or her 
nickname to 'start afresh' with the people whom he or she had 
alienated. Protected by terminals and separated by distance, the 
sanction of physical violence is irrelevant, although, as I shall 
discuss later, social sanctions are present and often in a verbal 
form that apes physical violence. The safety of anonymous expression 
of hostilities and obscenities that would otherwise incur social 
sanctions, encourages some people to use IRC as a forum for airing 
their resentment of individuals or groups in a blatantly uninhibited 
manner:

     !Venice! Bashers have taken over +gblf... we could use some
     help...
     !radv*! Comment: -Gay_Bashe:+gblf- FUCK ALL OF BUTT FUCKING, ASS
     LICKING, CHICKEN SHIT  BIOLOGICAL DISIASTERS!(44)
 
Not all uninhibited behaviour on IRC is either so negative or so 
positive. Much of the opportunity for uninhibited behaviour is 
invested by users of IRC in sexual experimentation. The usually 
culturally-enforced boundaries between sexual and platonic 
relationships are challenged in computer-mediated circumstances. 
Norms of etiquette are obscured by the lack of social context cues, 
and the safety given by anonymity and distance allow users to ignore 
otherwise strict codes regarding sexual behaviour. Conversations on 
IRC can be sexually explicit, in blatant disregard for social norms 
regarding the propositioning of strangers:

     *Han* does this compu-sex stuff really happen?
     Lola-> *Han* *smooch*
     *Han* mmmmmmm......hehehe you alonee ; )?
     Lola-> *Han* certianly am! I'm dialling in from home
     *Han* me tooo.....are oyu horny today at all ; )?
     Lola-> *Han* today? it's the middle of the night where I am...
     as for the adjective, well, do what you can ;-)
     *Han* mmmmmm......when did you last get off?(45)

Such behaviour is often referred to as 'net.sleazing'. Perhaps 
because the majority of the users of IRC are in their late teens or 
early twenties, since the Internet primarily serves educational 
institutions and thus students, sexual experimentation is a popular 
Internet game. Adolescents, coming to terms with their sexuality in 
the 'real world', find that the freedom of 'virtual reality' allows 
them to safely engage in sexual experimentation. Ranging from the 
afore-mentioned gender-role switching to flirtation and 'compu-sex', 
IRC provides a medium for the safe expression of a "steady barrage of 
typed testosterone."(46) 

Disinhibition and the lack of sanctions encouraging self-regulation 
lead to extremes of behaviour on IRC. Users express hate, love, 
intimacy and anger, employing the freedom of the electronic medium to 
air views and engage in relationships that would in other 
circumstances be deemed unacceptable in relating to strangers. This 
'freedom' does not imply that IRC is an idyllic environment. Play 
with social conventions can indeed lead to greater positive affect 
between people, as it has between 'Daniel' and 'Lori', and to greater 
personal fulfilment for some users.  It can, however, also create a 
violent chaos in which people feel 'free' to act upon prejudices, 
even hatreds, that might otherwise be socially controlled.

_BEYOND_BOUNDARIES_
Users of IRC treat the medium as a frontier world, a virtual reality 
of virtual freedom, in which participants feel free to act out their 
fantasies, to challenge social norms, and exercise aspects of their 
personality that would under normal interactive circumstances be 
inhibited. The medium itself blocks some of the socially inhibiting 
institutions that users would, under other circumstances, be 
operating within. Social indicators - of social position, of age and 
authority, of personal appearance - are relatively weak in a 
computer-mediated context. They might be inferred, but they are not 
evident. Internet Relay Chat leaves it open to users to create 
virtual replacements for these social cues - as I shall discuss in 
Part Two, IRC interaction involves the creation of replacements and 
substitutes for physical cues, and the construction of social 
hierarchies and positions of authority. That it is possible for users 
of IRC to do this is due to the ways in which the medium deconstructs 
conventional boundaries constraining interaction and conventional 
institutions of interpersonal relationships. It is this freedom from 
convention that allows IRC users to create their own conventions, and 
to become a cohesive community. 

The chance for deconstruction of social boundaries that is offered by 
IRC is essentially postmodern. On its lighter side, computer-mediated 
communication lends itself to irony, pastiche, playfulness and a 
celebration of ephemeral and essentially superficial examples of 
witty bravado. On its more negative side, the disinhibiting effect of 
computer-mediated communication encourages the expression of dissent, 
rebellion, hostility, and anti-social chaos. It involves a stripping 
away of the social coordinates that let the user know where he or she 
is in the cultural network, indeed it encourages this by allowing the 
continual invention of new moves to old language games.(47)  

Users challenge the boundaries between their differing social 
systems, introducing elements of intimacy to meetings with strangers 
and foreigners, overstepping the thresholds of social nicety. There 
is a continual search for ways to present the unpresentable, to bring 
elements technically outside the medium of communication within its 
realm. Whether this continual play with the limits of expression is 
positive or negative, it involves users of the system in a game that 
is essentially postmodern. Engagement with the system involves 
immersion in the specific context of the IRC program. There is no way 
to interact with IRC without being a part of it - it is interaction 
that creates the virtual reality of channels and spaces for 
communication. Immersed in this specific, although not 'local' in any 
geographic sense, context, players of the IRC game are involved in 
turning upside down the taken-for-granted norms of the external 
culture. Emotions and behaviours are taken out of their usual 
contexts and transposed into the electronic context of IRC, where 
they cease to be unproblematic. Faced with the impossibility of 
replicating conventional social boundaries in the IRC environment, 
users of the system search out and experiment with new and 
unconventional ways of relating. It is this "symbolic cultural 
ethos... that reflects the postmodern elements of the computer 
underground and separates it from modernism... by offering an ironic 
response to the primacy of a master technocratic language."(48) The 
users of IRC have created a culture that challenges "the sanctity of 
an established... authority."(49) To paraphrase Jim Thomas and Gordon 
Meyer, speaking on the computer underground of 'hackers', it is this 
style of playful rebellion, irreverent subversion and juxtaposition 
of fantasy with high-tech reality that impels me to interpret IRC as 
a postmodernist culture.(50)



                           **PART TWO:**
                   **CONSTRUCTING COMMUNITIES**

In crude relief, culture can be understood as a set of solutions 
devised by a group of people to meet specific problems posed by 
situations they face in  common... This notion of culture as a 
living, historical product of group problem solving allows an 
approach to cultural study that is applicable to any group, be it a 
society, a neighbourhood, a family, a dance band, or an organization 
and its segments.(51)  

This definition of culture owes much to Geertz's understanding of 
culture as a "system of meanings that give significance to shared 
behaviours which must be interpreted from the perspective of those 
engaged in them."(52) 'Culture' includes not only the systems and 
standards adopted by a group for "perceiving, believing, evaluating 
and acting", but also includes the "rules and symbols of 
interpretation and discourse" utilised by the members of the 
group.(53) Culture, says Geertz, is "a set of control mechanisms - 
plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call 
'programs') - for the governing of behaviour."(54) In this sense the 
users of IRC constitute a culture, a community. They are commonly 
faced with the problems posed by the medium's inherent deconstruction 
of traditional models of social interaction which are based on 
physical proximity. 

The measures which users of the IRC system have devised to meet their 
common problems, posed by the medium's lack of regulating feedback 
and social context cues, its dramaturgical weakness, and the factor 
of anonymity, are the markers of their community, their common 
culture. These measures fall into two distinct categories. Firstly, 
users of IRC have devised systems of symbolism and textual 
significance to ensure that they achieve understanding despite the 
lack of more usual channels of communication. Secondly, a variety of 
social sanctions have arisen amongst the IRC community in order to 
punish users who disobey the rules of etiquette - or 'netiquette' - 
and the integrity of those shared systems of the interpretation.(55)

_SHARED_SIGNIFICANCES_
In traditional forms of communication, as I have already suggested, 
nods, smiles, eye contact, distance, tone of voice and other non-
verbal behaviours give speakers and listeners information they can 
use to regulate, modify and control communication. Separated by at 
least the ethernet cables of local area networks, and quite likely by 
thousands of kilometres, the users of IRC are unable to base 
interaction on these phenomena. This "dramaturgical weakness of 
electronic media" presents a unique problem.(56) Much of our 
understandings of linguistic meaning and social context are derived 
from non-verbal cues. With these unavailable, it remains for users of 
computer-mediated communication to create methods of compensating for 
the lack. As Hiltz and Turoff have reported, computer conferees have 
developed ways of sending computerised screams, hugs and kisses.(57) 
This is apparent on IRC.

Textual substitution for traditionally non-verbal information is a 
highly stylized, even artistic, procedure that is central to the 
construction of an IRC community. Common practice is to simply 
verbalise physical cues, for instance literally typing 'hehehe' when 
traditional methods of communication would call for laughter. IRC 
behaviour takes this to an extreme. It is a recognised convention to 
describe physical actions or reactions, denoted as such by 
presentation between two asterisks:(58) 

     <Wizard> Come, brave Knight! Let me cast a spell of protection
     on you..... Oooops - wrong spell! You don;t mind being green for
     a while- do you???
     <Prince> Lioness: please don't eat him...
     <storm> *shivers from the looks of lioness*
     <Knight> Wizard: Not at all.
     <Bel_letre> *hahahah*
     <Lioness> Very well, your excellency.  *looks frustrated*
     <Prince> *falls down laughing*.
     <Knight> Wizard: as long as I can protect thou ass, I'd be utter
     grateful! :-)
     <Bel_letre> *Plays a merry melody*
     <storm> *walks over to lioness and pats her paw*
     <Wizard> *Dispells the spells cast on Knight!*
     <Wizard> Knight: Your back to normal!!!
     <Prince> *brings a pallete of meat for Lioness*
     <Lioness> *licks Storm*
     <storm> *Looking up* Thank You for not eating me!(59)

The above extract from a log of an IRC session, involving an online 
fantasy role-playing game, shows a concentration of verbalised 
physical actions and reactions. This density of virtually physical 
cues is somewhat abnormal, but it amply demonstrates the extent to 
which users of the IRC system feel it important to create a physical 
context within which their peers can interpret their behaviour. 
Verbal statements by themselves give little indication of the 
emotional state of the speaker, and without physical expression to 
decode the specific context of statements, it is easy to misinterpret 
their intent: 

     *Whopper* just kidding...not trying to be offensive
     <Fireship-> *Whopper* didn't assume that you were...(60)