Stanford Today Edition: March/April, 1998 Section: Science and Medicine: Emerging from the Electronic Cave WWW: Emerging from the Electronic Cave
Science and Medicine News
Instead of creating isolation, computers help build friendships
By Janet Basu
Consider Zachary,* made to order for isolation by computer. A self-described loner, he asked for a single room when he arrived as a freshman in 1995. His room, like most at Stanford, was wired directly to the university's computer network. Critics of this "plug-per-pillow" arrangement said it would lead students to hide in their electronic caves, avoiding face-to-face interaction, not to mention ruining the chance to develop the proper wrist action for Frisbee. Zachary was poised to be their poster boy.
His dorm, Rinconada House in Wilbur Hall, was the first college dorm in the world with its own web page and one of the first to use "listserv" software that permitted all 96 residents to send and read e-mail messages circulated to the entire group. Zachary soon plugged in to these online discussions and became one of the list's most frequent correspondents.
Isolation city? Au contraire. At meals, other students sought him out to comment about his online musings. People dropped by his room to talk. Over the year, resident fellows Rich and Roni Holeton watched Zachary gradually become gregarious and adopt his dormmates as extended family. "Without his e-mail postings, this might never have happened," Rich Holeton says. "We might never have learned what a thoughtful guy he is."
Holeton (A.B. '75) found a number of surprises that jolt conventional wisdom about computer communication in research he conducted of Rinconada's e-mail discussions for the 1995-96 academic year. Instead of being an "either-or" situation, where time spent on computers takes away from time spent with others, e-mail extended and added to personal conversations, drawing in new members of the community, he found.
"The computers became a tool for building, rather than destroying, social relations," he said.
Residents used the e-mail discussion list, along with meetings, hallway conversations, phone calls and notices posted on the walls, to organize and publicize events, find lost keys, trade jokes and call out players for that quick game of Frisbee. They used this computer grapevine, along with conversations and dorm meetings, to hammer out community issues like how much noise is too much during study hours. They added e-mail to the traditional bull session when they wanted to talk about social and political issues ranging from a grape boycott to date rape. When a dormmate died suddenly, the e-mail list was one of the ways they shared their grief.
Several studies have been made of computer-mediated communication in virtual communities linked by work or common interest, but Holeton said to his knowledge, Rinconada is the first real community to be studied - the first place where e-mail list correspondents live together and see each other day and night.
He analyzed all the messages posted to the Rinconada list for a year, and compared his findings with the results of a survey in which the students rated the usefulness of e-mail as a form of communication.
Except as a means of discussing academics, e-mail was considered by the students to be as useful or more useful than other means of dorm communication. (Holeton's study results - including data, analyses and samples of online discussions on topics from free speech to planning a dorm dance - can be viewed at http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~holeton/wired-pages/wired-main.html).
Holeton is an information resources specialist, teaching language and literature professors new ways to use electronic media in the classroom. He spent 10 years as a Stanford writing instructor; his third anthology for writing classes, Composing Cyberspace, has just been published. In his writing classes, he used computer discussion groups as a way to expand the usual classroom dynamic, where a few gregarious people usually dominate the conversation. He found that online, he could get everyone involved.
Students in a dorm are not subject to a teacher's prodding, however. As he expected, Holeton found that a small core of a dozen students dominated Rinconada's e-mail discussions. But even shy students who seldom posted messages were using the list to keep themselves cued in to the community.
"Most students rated themselves as occasional writers but frequent readers of the list," Holeton says. Those so-called lurkers used the list mostly for housekeeping purposes, that is, to find out about events or ask if anyone had seen a chemistry book left in the lounge. But in dialogues about social and political issues, some of the most thoughtful commentary came from lurkers who clearly felt comfortable jumping into a conversation that they had been following in silence.
Holeton says one thing his study couldn't find out was whether shy students used e-mail to avoid face-to-face conversations. His personal observations showed that for some, like Zachary, e-mail was an icebreaker that helped open up personal contact.
Men traditionally dominate discussions in dorm meetings as well as in the classroom, and Holeton says he was troubled to find that the same dynamic continues online. One woman, Hillary, posted more messages to the list than anyone else, but she and Bertha were the only two in the core group who participated often. Men also dominated the discussions that Holeton labeled "critical dialogue," the sort of social and political debate that an academic setting is designed to promote; women joined in more often in discussions about the dorm community. "Men may participate more because they are more comfortable with the traditional combative debate style of critical dialogue," Holeton says.
When he looked more closely, however, he found some of the most interesting debates were initiated and joined by women. One thread of conversation that went on for several months began when Mona passed on a letter from another college, a cautionary tale about date rape. A thoughtful debate continued among several men about responsibility for consent in sex and for violence against women. Betty was the one to add, "It's fine to analyze all the little points of the law and of ethics on a theoretical level, but it seems to me that the real issue here is . . . about respect and communication."
The particularity of the Rinconada online study is that the participants see each other every day at dinner or in the dormitory hall. Instead of igniting "flame wars" that sometimes turn computer discussion groups into a mess of personal insults, Rinconadans composed thoughtful, reasonable disagreements, often with a phrase like, "I attack your arguments, but not your character."
Says Holeton, "They were a special community, and they knew it. Their intellectual exchange on the e-mail list was enhanced by their feelings for each other, and their friendships and group feeling were enhanced by their written exchanges. At their best, they modeled an intellectual community in a new, fuller sense." ST
*All student names are pseudonyms.