Turn On, Log In, Drop Out:

The social world of the Internet

Masters Thesis, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

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 Workshop: Emergent Social and Psychological Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Reality," Apr. 5, 1992.

Bruckman, Amy
and Mitchel Resnick (mres@media.mit.edu), "Virtual Professional Community: Results from the MediaMOO project," May 15, 1993.

Bruckman, Amy,
"Gender-Swapping on the Internet," 1993.

`Challenger II'
(73307.133@compuserve.com), "The Online Wedding Of [ Mike & Silver ]," CBFORUM Library, CompuServe Information Service.

Curtis, Pavel
and David A. Nichols, "MUDs Grow Up: Social Virtual Reality in the Real World," Jan. 19, 1993.

Curtis, Pavel,
"Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities," in Proceedings of the 1992 Conference on Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing, Berkeley, May 1992.

Foner, Leonard
(foner@media.mit.edu), "What's an Agent, Anyway?" May 1993.

Friedrich, Glenn A.
(glennf@fred.fhcrc.org), "The Why of Bolo Addiction," in alt.netgames.bolo, Oct. 29, 1993.

Goehring, Scott
(scott@glia.biostr.washington.edu), "The Totally Unofficial List of Internet Muds," Vol. 6, Issue 9, Nov. 25, 1993.

Hardy, Henry Edward
(seraphim@umcc.umich.edu), "The History of the Net," paper available via e-mail request at hh-thesis-request@nthstone.mi.org

Masinter, Larry
(masinter@parc.xerox.com) and Erik Ostrom (eostrom@nic.gac.edu), "Collaborative Information Retrieval: Gopher from MOO."

Reid, Elizabeth M.
(emr@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au), "Electropolis: Communication and Community on Internet Relay Chat," Honours Thesis, University of Melbourne, 1991.

Rose, Helen Trillian
(hrose@kei.com), "IRC Frequently Asked Qustions."

Rosenberg, Michael,
"Virtual Reality: An Ethnography of a Computer Society."

Serpentelli, Jill,
"Conversational Structure and Personality Correlates of Electronic Communication."

Smith, Jennifer
(jds@math.okstate.edu), "MUD Frequently Asked Questions."

Wozniak, Adam
(awozniak@galay.csc.calpoly.edu), "Doran's Mudlist."


Published Resources

Bartimo, Jim, "Addicted to Information," InfoWorld, July 30, 1984.

Boyle, David,
"Games teens play harm values," Ottawa Citizen, Sept. 23, 1993.

Brown, Mick,
"The key to not getting hooked," The Daily Telegraph, March 19, 1993.

DeDakis, John,
"Computer Addiction" in Future Watch, Cable News Network, July 17, 1993.

--,
"Dungeons, Dragons, and packet switching," Data Communications, June 1985.

Jenish, D'Arcy,
"Fantastic Voyages," Macleans, Dec. 14, 1992.

Kaufman, Margo,
"They Call it Cyberlove," Los Angeles Times, Sept. 12, 1993.

Landis, David,
"A Boom in Chip-Chat," USA Today, Oct. 7, 1993

Leslie, Jacques,
"MUDroom," Atlantic, Sept. 1993

Poole, Gary Andrew,
"Hi. My name is Bob, and I'm a Net Addict," UnixWorld, Jan. 1993.

Quittner, Josh,
"Johnny Manhattan Meets the FurryMuckers," Wired, Mar. 1994.

Rheingold, Howard and Kevin Kelly,
"The Dragon Ate My Homework," Wired, Jul-Aug 1993.

Sather, Jeanne,
"Computer Games are a Time-Consuming Obsession For Many," Reuter European Business Report, June 10, 1993.

Shotton, Margaret A.,
"The Costs and Benefits of `Computer Addiction'," Behaviour & Information Technology, Vol. 10, No. 3, 1991.

Xinhua General Overseas News Service,
"Young Computer Game Addicts High On Aggression," Feb. 15, 1993.


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