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Computer Friendships
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
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