Turn On, Log In, Drop Out:
The social world of the Internet
By Jason Snell -- jsnell@etext.org
In many ways, the Friday night social life on the campus of the University
of California, Berkeley is the same now as it was twenty years ago -- students
tap the keg at a fraternity party, fill one of the cafes that line the streets
skirting the campus, or settle the issues of the day in their dorm rooms.
But one of the hottest social events on campus can be found in the basement
of Evans Hall, a dull concrete building that is widely viewed as an architectural
misfortune. The basement of Evans, known as the Web, is packed with dozens
of computer terminals, all connected to the worldwide network known as the
Internet. The corridors of the Web, and places like it in colleges all over
the country, are filled with students -- not just on Friday night but just
about any time, any day. Even more log in from home, using their personal
computer and a modem.
The students ensnared in the Web aren't talking to each other. In fact,
they're not talking at all -- the Web is silent, save for the clicking of
computer keyboards. What these students are doing is having an on-line party
whose boundaries go beyond the confines of UC Berkeley and beyond the borders
of the United States.
At the center of the hype about the coming "information superhighway"
is the Internet, a network of computer networks that reaches every continent.
Originally a network for military installations, the Internet was adopted
by colleges and universities in the '80s. Just about every college in the
United States provides Internet access to its students and faculty. The
Internet is becoming more popular among American corporations, and is also
reaching growing numbers of schools and corporations in Europe and Asia.
The Internet is touted--usually by the same people who have made "information
superhighway" a household phrase--as an incredible resource for learning
and research. Pacific Telesis, the "Baby Bell" telephone company
that serves California and Nevada, now provides Internet access for elementary
and high schools through its Knowledge Network--and advertises that network
as an important learning resource for schoolchildren. And with cable TV
and telephone companies beginning to test high-speed data links between
central computer systems and individual households, what's on the Internet
now will likely be in most homes by the end of the decade.
But the on-line encyclopedias and academic journals aren't the most popular
features of the Internet. Like the UC Berkeley students who log in from
Evans Hall (or from their personal computers), Internet users around the
world are using the Internet to talk to one another.
The frat party and dorm chat session have gone digital.
The hot tub is made of molded fiberglass: on three sides a bench
will seat five comfortably (and ten who are friendly), and on
the fourth side there is a contoured couch for one luxurious
soak. There are two rubber mounted buttons here. You may push
either the right or left button. The bright sunlight glinting
off the water makes you squint. The underwater light is on. The
bubbling jets are on.
Calvin, reznor, Redman, Silver_Guest, Ralstan, Poetic-Justice,
Captain_N, E.J., Cyan_Guest, and Denny are here.
Aaaahhhh! The water is at that perfect temperature where you can
just lie in here forever.
E.J. wraps his arms around you and hugs you tightly. You feel
comfortable in his warm embrace...
This could be a fraternity party, as long as the fraternity house has a
hot tub in the back yard. And the people in the tub -- all ten of them --
are in the midst of spirited conversation.
But this hot tub doesn't exist in the real world, and those ten people are
probably scattered all over the country, if not the world. This "virtual
party" -- complete with the warm hugs of someone named E.J. -- is part
of a genre of Internet chat programs called MUDs, or Multi-User Dimensions.
The original MUD, written in 1979 by two graduate students at Essex University
in England, was just a computerized adventure game that looked a little
like an electronic book. A few paragraphs of description would appear on
the computer's screen, and then players could direct the action, typing
"go west" or "kill dragon" and reading a paragraph that
displayed the result.
The new thing about MUD was the "Multi-User" part of its name:
several people could play the game at once, working with or against one
another. That game was soon followed by variations on the same theme: different
users on a network interacting in a world of text descriptions ("Bob,
a strapping half-elf carrying a sparkling sword, is standing in the middle
of the room") toward a common goal.
But a funny thing happened on the way to slaying the text-constructed dragon:
users slowly found that the communal aspect of the program, the person-to-person
interplay that made MUDs different from solo adventure games, was more interesting
than the game itself. MUDs without a game framework began to appear, emphasizing
nothing more than interaction. The dreary dungeons of sword-and-sorcery
games went away, replaced by social locales in which there's no real objective
except to mingle and chat.
To become part of these locales, users type in descriptions of themselves
so that other people can "look" at them by typing an appropriate
command. They can move around to different "rooms" in each program,
too--if you're in the hot tub, typing "get out" will take the
user to a hot tub deck, where more partygoers are waiting to chat. Those
are only two of the hundreds of rooms in that one program alone, and there
were more than 300 different MUD "worlds" active at the end of
March, almost twice as many as existed two years ago.
The Multi-User Dimensions aren't the only popular means of communication
on the Internet. Another program, Internet Relay Chat or IRC, offers a means
of communicating that's less complicated than MUDs. Created by a Finnish
graduate student in 1988, the program owes a lot to the old Citizens Band
radio craze of the '70s: users give themselves "handles" and select
a "channel" they want to tune to.
Once settled on a channel, users can just type away, holding conversations
with people around the world. And they do -- at any given time, several
thousand people from all over the world are using Internet Relay Chat to
discuss sex, politics, television... anything.
While parties and dorm socializing have distracted college students from
their studies for years, parties in the real world have to end. On the Internet,
though, some students find Multi-User Dimensions and Internet Relay Chat
so appealing that they stay on-line for hours, even as their academic careers
and social lives crumble around them.
"I used to [use Internet Relay Chat] around the clock," says Greg
Lindahl, a sixth-year Astronomy Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia
who helped write and improve that very program. "You could see people
getting up in various parts of the world. If you stayed on long enough,
you could see Finland get up and watch Australia get up. And I didn't really
want to get off then, because I wanted to wait for the next set of people
to come along."
Lindahl stopped using the chat program two years ago because, he says, he
was addicted -- just as an alcoholic feels the need to drink, Lindahl says
he felt the need to sit in front of a computer and type for hours on end.
"It's an easy social thing," Lindahl says. "All you have
to be able to do is type quickly... and it doesn't matter what you look
like, what you smell like, all those other things. So a person who isn't
able to compete on normal terms can do a lot better on IRC."
But while Internet Relay Chat lets people communicate with people on an
equal basis in sort of an electronic melting pot, it's also seductive. A
person who doesn't feel particularly attractive or doesn't have well-developed
social skills might see IRC as the ultimate outlet.
"It's a lot easier to believe that something like alcoholism is bad,"
Lindahl says. "[IRC users] say, `Oh, no, I have a social life! These
are my friends.' It's hard to convince them this is something that's bad
for them, whereas if you get falling down drunk and you're destroying your
liver, it makes it easier to convince somebody."
People who have trouble interacting with other people in real life are the
most likely people to become dependent on the communication opportunities
that computers offer, according to Dr. Jeffrey Goldsmith, a professor of
psychiatry and the director of the Alcoholism Clinic at the University of
Cincinnati.
"If you feel greatly intimidated by the social interaction and the
computer screens that out -- giving you the illusion of social relationships
without all the pain and discomfort -- the person might feel more whole
and more complete," Goldsmith says.
"I think the vast majority of MUD users are enthusiasts, but not out
of control -- not addicted," says Pavel Curtis, a researcher at Xerox's
Palo Alto Research Center whose area of study is Social Virtual Realities
-- in other words, Multi-User Dimensions. Curtis is the author and operator
of LambdaMOO, a MUD that's been in operation for more than three years and
opens its virtual doors (and hot tub) to more than a thousand users every
month.
"These people aren't computer addicted, they're communications
addicted," says Curtis. "They're addicted to the particular level
and class of communication they get on those systems -- there's no physical
danger, there's a constantly changing variety of people to communicate with...
It's a place where you can meet real people and have real conversations
with them, and that's all very attractive.
"There are extreme cases of addiction, and there's a regular procession
of them, but compared to the thousands of people using these systems, I
think [the addicts] are a relatively small number," Curtis says. The
extreme cases, the ones Curtis describes as the ones that "make the
best headlines," include one of the users of Curtis' own LambdaMOO.
That person, a college student, missed the train that was to take him home
for Christmas by more than five hours because he was using a MUD. Even when
he finally reached his home town, he couldn't fight the urge to use the
program. He went to the local college's computer lab and played there for
two hours. In the meantime, his parents had called the police out of fear
that something might have happened to him.
That incident led the addict to ask Curtis to scramble his password, so
he couldn't log into LambdaMOO. Though that ploy worked briefly, not too
long after the student was logging into LambdaMOO with an anonymous "guest"
account, just so he could use the system.
"He started doing some therapy, and learned about why he was staying
away from the real world," Curtis says. "But he's a very social
guy, and spent a lot of time really communicating. He's not escaping from
socializing -- he's socializing all the time."
The fact that MUD users are interacting with a community, even when they're
sitting alone at a computer, is something Curtis believes most people miss
when they think about the program. He says the world inside MUDs isn't really
much different from a friendly corner of the neighborhood pub.
"These are real people getting together and talking about real things,"
he says. "It's every bit as valid and legitimate as the bridge club
or the corner pub or any other excuse we find to get together. There's a
tendency to say, `Oh, those cybernerds, they just can't have a real conversation
with somebody, so they do it in there.' "
While researchers like Curtis believe MUDs and the like are simply alternative
ways to socially interact, psychologist Goldsmith sees them as the beginning
of a dangerous cultural trend.
"I think we need a certain minimum social interaction in order to be
healthy -- in order to keep our priorities straight," he says. "I
don't think people are going to be nourished sufficiently by this kind of
keyboard and network interaction."
In the future, Goldsmith says, we may see a growing part of our population
become socially malnourished, replacing face-to-face, sight, sound and smell
conversation with virtual reality. As we lose the stimulation that Goldsmith
believes we can only get from direct personal contact, we may all begin
to suffer from a technology-caused social malaise.
After seeing first-hand the amazing holding power of Internet Relay Chat,
Greg Lindahl created a "discussion group" for recovering Internet
Relay Chat addicts on Usenet, a bulletin board system accessible by most
Internet users. Every few days, it seems, some user of the program will
come to the realization that they're letting "real life" slip
away from them.
"I formed [the recovery group] partially as a joke," says Lindahl.
"But it turned out not to be a joke because it's a place where I can
sit around and moan about how bad IRC was and why I shouldn't be on it.
It's like I'm an alcoholic and if I go back and take one drink, it would
be very bad for me. I don't know where to draw the line."
One of the people who was drawn to the impromptu on-line support group Lindahl
created is Laura Zurawski, a 20-year-old Junior at the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign. Zurawski, who estimates she was on IRC 20 to 30 hours
each week, was introduced to Internet Relay Chat during her freshman year,
and was "hooked on it from the very first day." She says she spent
five hours on the program during her first session, and every night thereafter
all she could think about was how long it would be until she could get her
next session.
"I came this close to ruining my whole future because of IRC,"
Zurawski wrote to Lindahl's recovery group. "It got to the point where
that was all I could think about... and every minute off IRC was a minute
closer to the next time I could sign onto IRC. I lost interest in everything
else, and would often lose sleep because I'd be on IRC until 4 a.m."
Zurawski stopped using the program after her grades dropped. Those late
nights chatting, she says, were what caused her the most trouble in school.
She would be sluggish and ill during the days after her regular late-night
sessions, and would skip her classes if she wasn't feeling well.
As her grades began to fall, Zurawski made the decision to break away from
IRC. She was able to make more time for both sleep and her classes by taking
a step away from the virtual world of IRC and becoming more involved with
real-life pursuits.
"I made certain that my time was filled with other, more constructive
activities," she says. "I got a job, I joined a singing group,
and I started spending more time with my friends in person rather than on
IRC. I noticed that when I did go back on IRC, I became bored."
Now Zurawksi encourages other chat-line users to kick the habit on Lindahl's
recovery group, telling them that the program won't seem as addictive if
users force themselves to interact in the real world. As Lindahl points
out, face-to-face communication is more efficient: if you're talking to
someone instead of typing to them, you can say a whole lot more in much
less time.
But while Lindahl and Zurawski have found a way out of Internet Relay Chat
by turning back to the outside world, the number of people still using the
program is still in the thousands. Every chat user seems to know at least
one addict who flunked out of school because they couldn't keep their grades
up while staying on-line for days at a time. Even Jarkko Oikarinen, the
Finn who wrote IRC, stopped using his creation when it began hurting his
schoolwork.
"I did not consider myself to be addicted to IRC," Oikarinen says
now. "I just spent too much time using it because it was more interesting
than studies. Then I grew up, finished my thesis, and got a job."
While IRC is probably the reigning king of real-time computer conversation,
owing mostly to the size of the Internet and the fact that use of it is
free for most university students who are on-line, it's hardly one-of-a-kind.
H&R Block's CompuServe Information Service, a commercial network that's
been operating since the late '70s offers its users a "CB Simulator,"
a program quite similar to IRC. America Online, a flourishing commercial
network, also offers a live chat session to its subscribers. Apple Computer's
new on-line service, eWorld, touts live on-line chats as one of its major
drawing points.
These services also have had their addicts, though addiction on a commercial
service can carry a price tag that goes beyond the social and emotional
toll of Internet Relay Chat. For Dave Winer, a longtime CompuServe user
who is now the president of Userland Software, that price tag reached $500
a month in the early '80s. For a period of six months, he told industry
magazine Infoworld in 1984, he "spent most of his free time
huddled in front of the computer."
"It was exciting -- a whole new form of communication," Winer
says now. "But it cost too much, and I felt that I had gotten all I
was going to get out of it."
These days, Winer no longer has to worry about giant CompuServe bills (he
has a free account) and only uses CompuServe's on-line chat facilities as
part of his business. On that level, he says, on-line chat systems can be
a boon.
"We had an on-line chat session on [CompuServe's] Desktop Publishing
Forum, and that was very interesting," he says. "There's a great
level of anonymity that you can't have in many other mediums. You judge
a person on what they say, and nothing else. If we could live our lives
that way, we'd be a lot better off."
Multi-User Dimensions may be even more attractive social worlds that the
chat lines like Internet Relay Chat, because MUD users can write descriptions
of themselves that allow them to "look" any way they want, and
live out their fantasies in the program's simulated world. An overweight
boy can describe himself as a powerfully-built man, and then play the part.
More often, according to veterans like Curtis, men pose as beautiful women,
perhaps in order to see "how the other half lives."
"At one time I faked being female, and I have to say it's awful,"
says Michael Haardt, a user of both Internet Relay Chat and Multi-User Dimensions
who lives in Germany. "I got flooded with messages of all kinds, from
a simple `Hi' up to directly sexually-oriented offers. One guy from Israel
got attached real fast -- after twenty minutes he was talking about love
and after some more time he would have paid a flight from Germany to Israel
for me."
For Haardt, the experience wasn't all he expected. "Faking a female
is something I won't do again," he says. "I'm not into hurting
others," like the man from Israel.
Because the users of chat systems seem to be predominantly male and are
fairly anonymous, female characters are usually propositioned with a regularity
that would never occur in real life -- mostly because in real life, rejection
is a whole lot more painful.
"[Many] women choose neutral nicknames for that reason," says
Haardt. "It only looks like there are only a few women on-line.
In fact, there are a lot -- but they're hiding."
Not all of the female users of MUDs mind the attention that men give them.
In fact, they like to attract attention to themselves. Take this description
of a character named Leather Goddess in Pavel Curtis' LambdaMOO:
Confident, brown eyes look out at you, covering you with a warm,
soothing glow. She has long, straight hair that reaches down to
her waist and outlines the form of her shapely, perfect figure.
She wears bright red lipstick that makes the slight curl at the
end of her lips all the more enticing. She sees your glance, and
winks to you. She wears a skimpy leather bikini top, which does
not adequately cover her figure. Her stomach is flat and tight,
covered with light sun oil that makes her skin glisten slightly
in the light. Her arms are toned, but slender. Leather Goddess
has soft, delicate hands, with long, carefully manicured
fingernails. Leather Goddess has on a leather miniskirt that
tightly hugs her body, showing off her figure to its best
advantage. Her legs are wrapped up in black silk stockings,
which show you every line and curve. Leather Goddess's wears a
pair of black pumps, which arch her calves nicely.
The person behind Leather Goddess is Lynn, a law student in real life. "I
spent a lot of time on my description... this is part of the way I can fantasize
a little," she says. "I decided to have an S&M-themed character
because I've always had fantasies about rough sex, and because it gives
you a certain sense of power here." While Lynn said she was "continually
bothered by jerks with rude comments" when her character was a non-descript
female, she believes her persona as Leather Goddess is strong enough to
repel advances from other players.
Does Lynn look anything like Leather Goddess? She says she considers herself
"highly desirable" physically in real life, but there's no way
of telling for sure. And most MUD characters look like Leather Goddess.
In this world, everyone is beautiful and sexy, and that's quite an attraction.
"When I was really in the thick of MUDding, sometimes I played all
night long and went to bed around 9 a.m. My roommate thought I was nuts,"
says Eddie Krebs, a student at Armstrong State College in Savannah, Ga.
who flunked out of Georgia Tech last year after spending too much time on-line.
"I played around five or six hours a day," Krebs says. "I'd
start and lose all track of time. I'd say, `I'm going to play until 6 p.m.,
then go back to the dorm.' I'd stay until 3 a.m."
After getting an D-minus grade average one quarter, Georgia Tech placed
Krebs on a year's academic probation. For one quarter, he managed to avoid
playing and got a B average, well above the C average he was required to
maintain. But the next quarter he was playing again, and he flunked out
of school.
Now Krebs uses the program only on weekends, and is busy looking for ways
to access to the Internet from outside his school. He has been warned by
school officials that if he's found using his computer account to play,
his access will be revoked. Not only does he still play, but he even worked
two years to help create a Dungeons & Dragons-style program called "Arctic."
Unlike the "video game addiction" that parents of children with
Nintendo or Sega video games strapped to their television sets fear, the
people who become enthralled with these new manifestations of computer technology
are all attracted to the people behind the screen--even if they are
viewed through the cracked looking-glass of a MUD character's liberally-drawn
description.
If future developments in technology allow us to participate in sessions
like MUDs or IRC, except with senses of sight, sound and even touch included
in the package, many people might be inclined to avoid the dangers and mundanity
of real life altogether and escape into a world where you can be whomever
you want to be, just as MUD users do now with their simple word descriptions.
The potential for future addiction to these seductive systems has even surfaced
in popular culture. In the ABC miniseries Wild Palms, a company combines
a synthetic drug called Mimezine with virtual reality technology to create
an addictive, "realistic" false reality. In William Gibson's influential
series of cyberpunk science fiction novels, some characters waste away in
"real life" while spending all their time in a virtual reality
world called "cyberspace."
As more homes in America and around the world go on-line, connecting to
a world-wide network (be it the Internet or some new system that takes its
place), and as technology advances, there's no doubt that more people will
feel the attraction of talking with people from around the world, letting
them see you only as you wish to be seen.
While we've seen some examples of the attraction of anonymous communication
before -- the prevalence of 976 telephone chat lines, which allow people
to anonymously talk dirty with strangers, for example -- the real impact
this technology will have on society is probably yet to come. It could have
as big an impact on our culture as television did -- except this time, instead
of spending hours a day sitting passively in front of fantasy worlds created
by someone else, people will be able to interact with others in fantasy
worlds of their own making.
When we're all wired to our virtual reality machines, or even in a few years
when anybody sitting at home will be able to log into a chat system via
their cable TV, our society will probably have to change its way of looking
at people who spend all their time in front of a screen, "talking"
to someone with a keyboard. It may all become more socially acceptable.
But that doesn't mean it'll be any less dangerous.
"Social stigmas shift from era to era," says psychiatrist Goldsmith.
"The compulsively sexual woman years ago was called a nymphomaniac,
but now she might just be the life of the party. Twenty-five years from
now, this may not be considered a problem -- but in terms of mental health,
it'll still be one."
Though even the most ardent supporters interactive computer communication
like Pavel Curtis, admit that those programs produce a steady trickle of
addicts, nobody seems to be rushing to stop them from spreading. Some news
stories have reported a movement to ban chat programs like IRC from college
campuses, but the truth is that the campuses that have banned such
programs have done it because of overloaded hardware, not due to a fear
of the programs' addictive powers.
"Once we upgrade our system, I'm planning to re-enable MUD access here,"
says John Manly, a systems administrator at Amherst College in Amherst,
Mass.
Though they're very seductive, programs like Internet Relay Chat and Multi-User
Dimensions can do a great deal of good. Russians were able to relay information
about Boris Yeltsin's siege of the Russian parliament live to users around
the world via Internet Relay Chat. One Multi-User Dimension program is being
used to bring together academics in virtual "conventions" where
they can meet and chat about their field without leaving the comfort of
their offices or paying exorbitant travel bills. Another program, a scientifically-accurate
virtual space station, is being used to teach schoolchildren about science
and physics.
But these computer programs can have an incredible holding power, and as
they begin to reach the vast audience beyond college campuses through interactive
TV systems and the like, more serious addicts will also begin to appear.
It's only a matter of time.
As recovering IRC addict Greg Lindahl likes to say, "There are no revolutions
in addiction -- only in technology."
After taking a test-drive with a virtual reality helmet, comedian Dennis
Miller commented, "If some unemployed punk lying on a sofa can get
a cassette to make love to Elle MacPherson for $19.95, this virtual reality
stuff is going to make crack look like Sanka."
In other words, while our machines may improve, the people who use them
-- and the people who abuse them -- never do.
References
On-Line Resources
Bartle, Richard (Richard%tharr.UUCP@ukc.ac.uk), "Interactive
Multi-User Computer Games," report for British Telecom, plc., Dec.
1990.
Bruckman, Amy (asb@media-lab.media.mit.edu), "Identity
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Reality," Apr. 5, 1992.
Bruckman, Amy and Mitchel Resnick (mres@media.mit.edu), "Virtual
Professional Community: Results from the MediaMOO project," May 15,
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Bruckman, Amy, "Gender-Swapping on the Internet," 1993.
`Challenger II' (73307.133@compuserve.com), "The Online Wedding
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Curtis, Pavel and David A. Nichols, "MUDs
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"Collaborative
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Interviews
Jim Ausman, former computer addict, San Francisco. Nov. 9-Dec. 5,
1993.
Pavel Curtis, Xerox researcher, Palo Alto. Dec. 2, 1993.
David M. Chess, MUD user. Nov. 8, 1993.
Bill Davis, Director, Computer Resources, SUNY Geneseo, Nov. 8, 1993.
Warren Ernst, IRC user, Dec. 14, 1993.
"Gharlane of Eddore," IRC user, Nov. 11, 1993.
Jeffrey Goldsmith, Professor of Psychiatry, University of Cincinnati.
Dec. 1, 1993.
Lori Havens, Univ. of Rochester administrator. Nov. 17, 1993.
"Lynn", MUD user. April 20-24, 1994.
Devindran Jeyathurai, IRC addict. Nov. 19, 1993.
Michael Haardt, MUD/IRC user. Nov. 28, 1993.
Eddie Krebs, MUD user, Armstrong State College. Nov. 16, 1993.
Greg Lindahl, IRC contributing author, Virginia Tech. Nov. 10, 1993.
John W. Manly, Amherst College administrator. Nov. 8, 1993.
Kenneth Mencher, MUD user, Nov. 15, 1993.
Scott Moir, friend of MUD addicts. Nov. 1, 1993.
Jarkko Oikarinen, inventor of IRC. Dec. 11, 1993.
Cyrus Shoul, MUD researcher. Nov. 2, 1993.
Dave Winer, President, UserLand software. Dec. 5, 1993.
Benjamin Witz, IRC user. Oct. 29, 1993.
Laura Zurawski, former IRC addict, Univ. of Illinois. Oct. 31-Nov. 7,
1993