MY SECRET LIFE ON THE BOARDS
By J.D. Hildebrand
Reproduced by permission
    
    I learned everything I know about gerbil ranching from a
computer enthusiast I know only as Sysmoose.
    I've engaged in serious philosophical debates with good
friends I've never met, people with names like Doctor Catalog,
Sir Eric, Dragonfly, Lord Kalkin and Xeno Paradoxus.
    I've corresponded for almost two years with a small group
of people who live in or near Madison, Wisconsin--where I've
never been. I don't know their names, ages, genders, races or
educational backgrounds. Most of them wouldn't recognize each
other on the street--and I wouldn't recognize any of them. But
we share citizenship in a community complete with taxation, law
enforcement, class stratification and civil disobedience.
    The community exists, if that's the right word, as a pattern
of on and off bits in a home-built computer, and in the network
of wires, transformers and relays that allow computer users with
modems to send messages over telephone lines.
    I'm a citizen of the Bulletin Board of the Absurd, a private
bulletin board service (BBS) that's just one of thousands across
the U.S. That citizenship has changed the way I think about computers,
communication, friendship and society. I believe that the BBS
represents an important new communications medium that will do
much to change the texture of American life of the next several
decades.
    
IN THE BEGINNING
    I had no awareness of online communities the first time
I dialed The Absurd. I was evaluating a communications software
package for a magazine article. I picked the phone number at
random from a published list of bulletin boards.
    My modem made dialing sounds, then I heard a high-pitched
squeal. Text began scrolling across my screen: 'Welcome to the
Bulletin Board of the Absurd. Seven cps speed limit enforced
24 hours per day.' I had made contact with a BBS.
    I typed in my name and a made-up password in response to
prompts, and that was that. From then on I was free to read messages,
reply to them or start new conversations. I was a member of The
Absurd.
    I read some messages, and was immediately struck by the
zany names adopted by most of the users and by the off-the-wall
messages they'd posted, which included a discussion of the moral
implications of eating avocados posted by someone called Theron
'This Message Brought to You by the Guacamole Achievers' Ware.
The Bulletin Board of the Absurd was well named.
    Having verified that my software could receive messages,
I felt obliged to test its text-sending capabilities. I pushed
'W' for Write. I addressed my message to ALL, and tagged it 'Howdy'
in the Subject line.
    One and all--
    This is my first time here, so if I break any local rules
please bear with me. I live in San Francisco. What kind of computers
do you use? --J.D.
    The BBS displayed my message to me, offered me an opportunity
to edit it, then posted it. 'Your message is number 122,' I was
told. Now all I had to do was log on again in a day or two and
read the replies to my message.
    
BREAKING THE ICE
    I gave The Absurd a three-day wait, just to make sure, before
logging on again. 'Message base contains 108 messages,' the board
informed me. 'Checking mail...No mail for you.'
    No mail? Could it be that none of The Absurd's members wanted
to talk about their computer systems? Had my message been improperly
posted? Had I innocently broken some BBS custom and offended
the other users?
    I started searching the board's menus for a 'Help' or 'New
user' section, and was intrigued by a command called 'Chat.'
I pressed C to see what it would do.
    
    ** CHAT **
    
    Paging the Operator...
    The Operator is here.
    Hi.
    
It seemed I was in direct communication with the BBS's system
operator. 'Hi,' I typed. 'Are you the sysop?'
    
    Yes. Are you really calling
    from San Francisco? We don't
    get too many out-of-state
    callers--the long-distance
    charges are too high.
    
'I'm calling from my office, researching a magazine article,'
I replied. 'How many users do you have?'
    
    The directory has about 120
    names, but more than half
    just log on to read the
    messages and never leave
    any. The active base is about
    25-35 users.
    
'Did I do something wrong? Why didn't I get any response to
my message?
    
    'Hi, I'm new here' messages
    addressed to ALL rarely get
    a response. Send a message
    or two with some ideas in
    them and address them to the
    other users. Respond to
    their messages--the more
    absurd the better. Insults
    almost always get response
    (a high percentage of the
    messages here are of the
    creative insult variety).
    
'Thanks,' I said. 'I'll try that.'
    
** OUT OF CHAT MODE **
    
I had completed my first real-time electronic conference. I
had also completed my software review. So any further long-distance
calls to The Absurd would have to be on my own phone line, at
my own expense.
    At this point I was committed to getting noticed online.
So that night I logged on from home and left a half-dozen messages
that I felt would be sure to create controversy. My final opus
was addressed to 'Knuckleheads,' and in it I took specific users
and The Absurd in general to task for what I perceived as an
overall lack of literacy. I noted many examples of poor spelling
and grammar, and closed by suggesting that users who couldn't
compose simple sentences shouldn't bother replying.
    
FORGING AN ELECTRONIC IDENTITY
    The next night I hit the E-mail jackpot. I found 11 messages
waiting for me, and many of the messages addressed to other users
concerned my effrontery in attacking the BBS.
    Xeno Paradoxus was particularly vicious in his counter-attack.
He got a lot of mileage out of finding a typo in one of my messages,
and asked if it disqualified me from BBS use under my own elitist
criteria. It was Xeno who first referred to San Francisco as
Lotus Land, providng a key element of my evolving online persona.
The Leviathan replied with a half-dozen scalding limericks that
called my parenthood, intelligence and personal hygiene into
question.
    I had certainly succeeded in my goal of getting noticed.
    After a couple weeks of barbed messages and equally sharp
replies I noticed a curious thing. The Absurd's users referred
to me as 'he' and 'him'--always the masculine, though I'd never
given a hint of my gender in any of my messages.
    And so I left my first serious message, which was destined
to be remembered on The Absurd as 'The Genderless Manifesto.'
I confronted the users with their sexist assumptions and with
other evidence of chauvinism. I signed the message 'J.D. the
Genderless, Lotus Land, USA.' And for the past two years, that's
how I've signed every message.
    The response to my manifesto was mixed. Some rationalized
their assumption with statistics: most computer users are male,
most BBS members are male, and so on. Others defended the use
of 'he' as the generic third-person pronoun, a practice I could
hardly fault.
    But a small group of users, including Xeno and Dragonfly,
responded insightfully and seriously. The admitted the truth
of my charge and sought to uncover more unthinking assumptions
in evidence on the BBS. They sent me long, thoughtful messages
about the nature of a bulletin board and its users, pointing
out that in this electronic medium there lies the potential for
communication free of prejudice.
    'When you meet face-to-face you make assumptions based on
appearance,' Xeno wrote. 'When you see whether a person is a
man or woman, how old he or she is, what race the person belongs
to, how he or she is dressed, you adjust your thinking accordingly.
Over the telephone you make similar adjustments based on the
person's voice. But on a BBS you're free to respond to the person's
ideas with ideas of your own. You're both completely free to
be your true selves. It's the most direct, honest, prejudice-free
communications medium in history.
    
ONLINE ADDICTION
    My first full month of membership on The Absurd yielded
at least one tangible result: a long-distance telephone bill
that approached $300. I began looking for a BBS nearer home.
    I soon found out there's no shortage of boards in the San
Francisco area. Each has its own focus. One is about programming
in Forth. Another is an electronic swapping and shopping forum
for computer equipment. I found a number of boards devoted to
matchmaking.
    I found the single-focus boards boring after the rapid-fire
idea exchanges I'd come to look forward to on The Absurd. Several
were more interesting, but operating under a hierarchy. Only
a select few members got access to the really juicy parts. This
created resentment among the second-class users.
    Homesick for The Absurd's egalitarian expanse, I tightened
my belt and dialed Wisconsin again. It didn't take me long to
realize I was a BBS junkie. Every night after work I rushed to
my computer and logged on to check my E-mail. It was hard to
stay away from the keyboard on weekends--sometimes I logged on
three or four times in a single day.
    Late last year I notified The Absurd's legions that I would
be absent for a week or two--I was entering the hospital to undergo
some minor surgery. During my convalescence I received a get-well
card from my online friends. My message was the excuse for a
rare face-to-face meeting where they all signed the card.
    Later I moved across the country from San Francisco to Maine.
(I immediately changed my online address from Lotus Land to Lobster
Land, of course.) A new job required most of my time, and I became
an infrequent visitor to The Absurd. But several members had
my work address, and they wrote to urge me to log back on.
    Once the dust cleared I settled back into my once-a-day
habit. The Absurd hadn't changed much. Some of my favorite users
were gone (there's been no sign of Dragonfly or The Leviathan
for a couple of months now) but there are plenty of new users.
I've become an old-timer.
    I maintain frequent contact with the sysop, both in CHAT
mode and via private messages to one of his alter egos on the
BBS. The Absurd has required a nightly house-cleaning commitment
from him since he set it up almost three years ago. 'It's one
of the three oldest boards in Madison,' he confided to me. 'The
average half-life for a BBS seems to be about four months.'
    He admits that running the board has changed him. It's served
as a human connection that many hackers lack.
    And if the knowledge he's gained about gerbil ranching hasn't
made him rich, at least he's found an enjoyable way to spend
the evenings.
    
    END
    
POSTSCRIPT: A REPLY FROM THE FIELD
    Although modem-based communities are repeatedly characterized
as classless, genderless and general nondiscriminatory, each
group has its own (usually unarticulated) code of communicative
conduct, enforcement of which can amount to discrimination as
invidious as any encountered within other social units.
    Most of my online work involves studying the extralinguistic
and paralinguistic cues that affect our perceptions of the people
with whom we correspond, cues such as: message formatting; syntax,
punctuation and spelling; use of capital letters only; inclusion
or omission of words and symbols to indicate inflection, intonation
or mood; evidence of an imperfect grasp of system commands (e.g.
a stray './SEND' near the bottom of a message; line length; message
length; inclusion or omission of salutation and signature; number
of typographical errors.
    In a social exchange devoid of sensory data, we tend to
rely on these external cues in much the same way that we would
rely on their missing physical counterparts--height, weight,
gender, age, race, voice, scent, etc. It's not uncommon to observe
group ostracism of an individual whose computer equipment is
apparently inexpensive (no lower-case capability), or whose message
violates an unofficial rule regarding appropriate length or format,
or whose spelling skills do not meet the unpublicized standards
of the community.
    Less obvious but equally pervasive is the difference in
the quality and quantity of replies, with variance frequently
dependent not upon message content, but upon the sender's fortuitous
or intentional transmission of locally acceptable cues.
    It seems, then, that assumptions based on appearance--and
our resultant behavior--are as widespread online as they are
elsewhere. We don't yet have the nerve to fly blind; perhaps
a vestigial biological imperative urges us to constantly gather
and process data, regardless of their value or the accuracy of
our analyses.
    So while you can be certain that I'm not replying because
of the way your jeans fit, you'll never know whether I'm merely
attracted to your tight commas.
    --Mama LaGrande Chung, Archivist
      Neue Electronene Untergrundbewegung


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