21: SELECTED QUOTES

Barlow, J.P. (1995).

"...a lot is still missing from the communities of cyberspace," including "the prana" or "breath and spirit," the physical aspects of face-to-face interaction, cultural diversity, "an absence of alternatives and a sense of genuine adversity, generally shared," and "the bond of joint suffering."

Colomb, G.G. & Simutis, J.A. (1996).

"One claim often made for CMC is that its new mechanics of discussion give voice to students silenced in traditional classrooms" (e.g., Batson 1988, Cooper & Selfe 1990).

Gabriel, T. (1996).

"Across the country, computer networks are cinching even tighter the already inward-looking communities typical of campuses, transforming the social and academic life of today's students."

 

"Some scholars say 'plug per pillow' campuses are undermining the ideal of a residential college as a melting pot where people from different social and regional backgrounds meet."

 

"Prof. James Banning, an environmental psychologist at Colorado State University who surveyed some 100 university housing officers last year, remarked: 'Universities are saying: "Oh, my God, they're in their rooms. How can we ever build a sense of community in this building if they don't come out?"'"

 

Dartmouth student using campus "Blitzmail" "complained that it encouraged on-line electronic bantering while inhibiting meaningful communication."

Grunwald, M. (1995).

"A vulgar e-mail message listing the 'Top 75 reasons why women (bitches) should not have freedom of speech' is creating an electronic furor on the Internet. For not only does the list include reasons like, "No. 38. If she can't speak, she can't cry rape," it also includes the names of the four Cornell University freshmen who wrote it."

 

"The self-styled 'four-players of Cornell' ... expressed 'deep remorse' for their 'stupid actions.' They said they circulated the list as a joke among friends, never intending to offend anyone.... The apology has fallen flat online; the list is pretty nasty stuff.... In an interview with the Cornell Daily Sun, the authors said they have received hundreds of flames, including death threats. They also face university sanctions ...."

Hafner, K. (1997).

"[Stewart Brand] sensed that the most interesting possibility to arise from knitting electronic dialog into the fabric of everyday life would lie not in championing either the virtual or the human-contact model but rather in finding the place where they overlapped" (104).

 

Hall, K. (1996).

"Conversation dominance" of men. "The majority of linguistic studies on gender differentiation in computer-mediated communication have paralleled the results of early feminist studies on face-to-face conversation in mixed-sex groups" and "Similar gender differences have been noted by CMC researchers in a variety of disciplines."

 

Harris, L.D. & Wambeam, C.A. (1996).

"The more we view writing (and thinking) as a social, dialogic process, the more we will structure our classes to promote such dialogue among the students."

 

"Linking students 'from different historical and cultural situations,' as Bizzell [1982] put it, can lead to dialogue between disparate groups of people. Such a dialogue allows students to consider and perhaps accept others' viewpoints. Often this ability to see beyond one's initial reaction is central to successful communication; it is also central to complexity of thought."

 

"Students can become aware of the effect of their writing upon a community, understanding more fully teachers' claims that writing can be a powerful act -- a way to influence others' views and promote social change."

 

"Instead of creating distance between people (as those who are uncomfortable with computers sometimes complain), computer mediation bridges great distances, allowing students to confront the diversity of views present in this world."

 

Herring, S.C. (1996b).

"My results suggest that both women and men participate in discussions on electronic mailing lists to exchange opinions, beliefs, understandings, and judgments in social interaction with other human beings, with the pure exchange of information taking second place" (104).

 

Kollock, P. & Smith, M. (1996).

"Among the actions that are usually considered an inappropriate use of bandwidth are: posting extremely long articles, reproducing long sections of text from a previous post rather than summarizing or excerpting only the relevant passages, including long signatures full of comments and diagrams at the end of a post...."

 

"Whatever the goal of the newsgroup, its success depends on the active and ongoing contributions of those who choose to participate in it.... If the goal of the newsgroup is to discuss a current event or social issue..., participants need to contribute to the discussion and encourage its development. Once again there is the temptation to free-ride: asking questions but not answering them; gathering information but not distributing it; or reading ongoing discussions without contributing to them (termed lurking)."

 

Korenman, J. & Wyatt, N. (1996).

"We find a remarkable consistency of regular participation by a small group of persons, who apparently serve as the 'core' of the discussion. This small core of regular posters contributes four times as often as the rest of the membership, who average one to two messages per month. Regular contributors to other e-mail discussions often exceed this average: Herring (1993) reports that the regular posters on LINGUIST post eight times as often as the remainder of the membership. Nonetheless, the pattern of a small core of regular participants corresponds closely to the behavior of participants in face-to-face interaction (see, e.g., Hare, Borgatta, and Bales 1965).

 

"... We note that men are represented among the consistent contributors [i.e. 'core'] in 1992 (1 of 8, or 12%) in almost exact proportion to their presence as subscribers. In this respect, their participation seems to diverge from the common pattern of male domination of communication interactions reported in previous studies...."

 

"Metacommunication is talk about talk. By looking at the ways in which participants discuss what is or is not appropriate on WMST-L, we can get an idea of what they think the norms are or should be. One way of identifying norms are [sic] to look at the metacommunication we generally label 'apologies' and 'complaints.'.... In written communication these messages constitute noise in the channel that interrupts discourse and irritates some readers" (238-239).

 

"WMST-L [the Women's Studies List] provides a safe place for the participants to discuss common interests and for them to receive encouragement and support from one another."

 

Noble, J. (1996).

"E-mail and Internet use have become 'almost ubiquitous on college campuses, and it's happened in just the last three or four years,' said John Dinkel, associate provost for computing and information services at Texas A&M University."

 

"Nearly a third of all college students have their own computer, according to a survey of about 3,500 colleges and universities by CCA Consulting, a higher education consulting firm in Wellesley, Mass."

 

"'Nobody has really gotten to the heart of how all this is used on campuses, I guess because the technology has moved in so fast,' said Kim Hoeritz, a representative for Peterson's, which publishes guides to colleges."

 

Russell, J.H. (1995).

"I sent a message to the list [about a proposed grape boycott on campus] and received five answers to it. Two were sent as e-mail, while the other three were conversations I had in the lounge with people who had read my message."

 

"I attribute the lack of a response to a pervasive tendency of my dormmates to simply 'lurk.' .... Rarely do people delete messages sent to the list before they have read them, yet they do not reply. [footnote:] Aside from personal experience in this area, my information comes from a survey I created and circulated in the dorm."

 

"The way we interacted [as a result of the extended rape and gender discussion thread] underwent a transformation and people noticed the difference."

 

Shulyakovskaya, N. (1996).

"Julie Jones, an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Missouri at Columbia, died suddently Oct. 8 in her sleep in a dorm room. Julie was a gifted jazz pianist, writer and singer, a fan of Tori Amos, and a fun, caring person.... Her classmates and friends needed to talk about her death."

 

"The Web, some Internet dwellers say, revolutionizes the way people deal with death. What was once an intensely private experience now turns into an emotional electronic stream that people can share with thousands of others."

 

"In the past, when a person died up the street or down the hall, death was a shared memory for the community. The Web allows people to return to this shared experience of death ...."

 

Spellmeyer, K. (1994).

"...we could say that within every institution different communities form and re-form as each member tries to play a role in reshaping ostensibly stable conventions. Instead of arising from any prior like-mindedness, these communities are produced by the arguments over what counts as truly common and over how the commonalities ought to be respected."

 

Sproull, L. & Kiesler, S. (1991).

"...controlled studies of electronic talk suggest that such communication is relatively impersonal, yet paradoxically, it can make people feel more comfortable about talking. People are less shy and more playful in electronic discussions; they also express more opinions and ideas and vent more emotion."

 

"In some ways, electronic groups resemble nonelectronic social groups. They support sustained interactions, develop their own norms of behavior and generate peer pressure."

 

"Part of the explanation is that networks make the cost of responding extremely low in time and effort expended. Also, open-access networks favor the free flow of information. Respondents seem to believe that sharing information enhances the overall electronic community and leads to a richer information environment. The result is a kind of electronic altruism quite different from the fears that networks would weaken the social fabric of organization."

 

"Employees who used electronic mail extensively reported more commitment to their jobs and to their co-workers than did those who rarely used the network."

 

Stoll, C. (1995).

"We're turning colleges into a cubicle-directed electronic experience and denying the importance of learning to work closely with other students and professors, and developing social adeptness."

 

Ziv, O. (1996).

"1. How do people work together differently when electronic forms of communication are made available? 2. How do such technologies interact with the social patterns of the workplace?"

 

"Popular claims of egalitarian effects of computer networking are often based on management hyperbole rather than research taking into account the perspectives of workers...."

 

"Reder and Schwab (1989) studied how the use of e-mail shaped task-oriented workgroup behavior among technical professionals within a high-tech firm. These researchers found that computer-mediated communication does not have a uniform set of interactive or functional characteristics, as some of the earlier, less empirical literature on e-mail has implied. Instead, they found that professionals often used computer-mediated communication along with other types of communication for related sequences of interaction, where interactants' choices of vehicle were made in relation to their personal set of communicative strategies and tactics. The authors suggest that users ascribe active social meanings and evaluations to the use of computer-mediated communications technologies."

 

"My basic data-gathering units were communicative events, which I sorted according to the communicative channel used by members of the group. These channels included face-to-face meetings, printed documents, and e-mail messages.... By contrasting the use of e-mail with the use of these other communicative channels, I sought to understand both when and how e-mail communication takes place, and the social context that surrounds it."

 

"Taxonomy of Communicative Purposes" in Table 2.