---| --- ---| ---| | | |---| | | | | | | | | | | -- |---| |--- |--- |---| | | | | | | | | | | | | ---- | | |--- |--- | | |---| GASSHO Electronic Journal of DharmaNet International and the Global Online Sangha Volume 1, Number 3 ISSN 1072-2971 March/April 1994 ======================================================================= Editor-in-Chief: Barry Kapke dharma@netcom.com or Fidonet: 1:125/33.0 Copy Editor: John Bullitt john.bullitt@metta.ci.net Production Staff: David Savage @lchance.sat.tx.us Board of Advisors: Robert Aitken Roshi Amaro Bhikkhu Carl Bielefeldt Bhikkhu Bodhi Thubten Chodron T. Matthew Ciolek Roger Corless Rev. Karuna Dharma Christina Feldman Gangcen Tulku Rinpoche Maha Ghosananda Joseph Goldstein Joan Halifax Ayya Khema Anne C. Klein Jack Kornfield Jacqueline Mandell Ken McLeod Andrew Olendzki Charles S. Prebish Alan Senauke Thanissaro Bhikkhu Christopher Titmuss others to be announced ======================================================================== GASSHO is a Buddhist newsletter, published by DharmaNet International, P.O. Box 4951, Berkeley, CA 94704-4951, a not-for-profit organization. ======================================================================== Table of Contents: {1} EDITORIAL: Message from the Editor {2} NEWS BRIEFS: Nobel Peace Prize Nominees; Dalai Lama to Receive Freedom Medal; Pali Tipitaka CD-ROM {3} DHARMANET NEWS: How to Access DEFA; Internet <=> DharmaNet Wormhole; INSIGHT Mailing List; DharmaBase {4} NEW RESOURCES: BUDSIR; Dialing for Dharma; alt.* Newcomers; DharmaDebateHall MOO {5} CONFERENCE NEWS: Envisioning Tibet (Australia) {6} LETTERS: Say NO!; Bring Out the Best; GASSHO Format {7} DIALOGUE: The Second Precept: Generosity (Thich Nhat Hanh) {8} ARTICLE: A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community (Howard Rheingold) {9} ARTICLE: Computer Networks and the Emergence of Global Civil Society (Howard H. Frederick) {10} PRACTICE: Questions and Answers (Ajahn Chah) {11} CALENDAR: March - May 1994 {12} REVIEWS: Buddhism After Patriarchy {13} RESOURCES: ANU Social Sciences Information Services (T.M. Ciolek) {14} SANGHA: FPMT Centers (World) {15} ANNOUNCEMENTS {16} A PARTING THOUGHT {17} ABOUT GASSHO [Ed.: Page numbers are not particularly meaningful in an electronic format. Instead, each article is demarcated by a number within braces. This allows you to use the Search feature of your newsreader or file viewer program to "fast forward" to the section you want to read. Also, italics are represented in the electronic version of GASSHO by the code "//"; while this employs two characters rather than one, it was found to be more aesthetically representative of italics for low-ASCII viewing, as well as being relatively unproblematic for using the "search and replace" features of text processors to substitute other italics codes.] ======================================================================= {1} EDITORIAL ======================================================================= My apologies for the delayed release of this issue. I'm discovering what a big job producing and editing an electronic journal is. This issue was originally intended to be focussed on "Women in Buddhism." Surprisingly (or, perhaps, tellingly) I discovered that very little material was being submitted. Consequently, I decided to postpone the "Women in Buddhism" issue until later in the year. This issue, then, presents itself as a potpourri. Two of the feature articles, by Howard Rheingold and Howard Frederick, are not about Buddhism -- yet I feel these are important musings upon issues that are very relevant to Buddhists, particularly as we are exploring and trying to develop our own virtual communities and our own engagement in an emerging global civil society. The WELL, the APC networks, and DharmaNet are three very different approaches to this electronic environment and it is productive, I think, to see these approaches side by side. This forms a fitting backdrop for Thich Nhat Hanh's discussion of the Second Precept, which traditionally is phrased in terms of vowing to abstain from taking what is not given, but which Nhat Hanh illuminates in the proactive light of "generosity." And the humor and impeccable heart-wisdom of the late Ajahn Chah brings us back continually to what is essential. Enjoy! ======================================================================= {2} NEWS BRIEFS ======================================================================= Sulak Sivaraksa and Samdech Preah Maha Gosananda, two Asian Buddhist teachers and activists, have been nominated for the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize. Sulak, who was nominated for the prize last year by Nobel Laureate Mairead Maquire last year as well, was nominated by the American Friends Service Committee for his commitment to peace and nonviolence in the fullest sense, and for building the institutions and structures which will create an environment in which peace and justice can flourish. Samdech Preah Maha Gosananda was nominated by U.S. Senator Clairborne Pell, Chair of the Foreign Relations Committee for his dedication to peace and the war time protection of the culture and people of Cambodia. Ven. Gosananda has established numerous temples in the Cambodian diaspora and co-founded the Inter-religious Mission for Peace in Cambodia. He also has lead two walks for peace (Dhammayietra) and will be leading a third one to the Khmer Rouge headquarters at Pailin in May 1994. Ven. Gosananda received the prestigious Norwegian Rafto Foundation Prize for Human Rights in 1992, and he has also received an honorary doctorate of humanitarian service from Providence College. We congratulate these exemplars of compassionate activity on receiving much deserved recognition for their work. May their efforts on behalf of all beings prosper. [Source: Alan Senauke] * * * * * The Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet and recipient of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, has been named the recipient of the 1994 Franklin Delano Roosevelt Freedom Medal by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. The theme of this year's awards is "human rights and resistance to the tyrannical forces of oppression." William J. Vanden Heuvel, president of the Roosevelt Institute, remarked: "He [the Dalai Lama] is such a universal symbol of human rights... All of us recognize the importance of our relationship to China, but we shouldn't lessen our commitment to him and to what he represents." The award will be presented at ceremonies in Middelburg, the Netherlands, on June 4. [Source: Nadine Brozan] * * * * * The American Academy of Religion has announced that two CD ROM will be distributed as part of the program of electronic publication. The first will be the Tipitaka portion of the Siam Edition of the Pali canon (vols 1-45) with full search software (BUDSIR IV). This CD ROM is the product of work done at Mahidol University and is the first complete set of a Buddhist canon to be made available. The preliminary price is $500.00 for institutions and $250.00 for individuals. It is expected that shipment of the CD ROM will occur in April. Orders can be sent to Scholar's Press in Atlanta Georgia. A second CD ROM will be the Shinto Encyclopedia prepared by Mr. Handa in Nagoya, Japan. Containing some 600 technical words, this data base contains text, moving images and sound for most words. The preliminary price is $100.00. There will be discounts for those who order both CDs at once. AAR invites individuals and groups to submit proposals for publications or distribution of electronic data bases. The electronic publication editor is Lewis Lancaster, University of California, Department of East Asian Languages, Berkeley, CA 94720. Email address is buddhst@garnet.berkeley.edu [Source: Lew Lancaster] [See also: BUDDHIST SCRIPTURES INFORMATION RETRIEVAL, in Section 4] ======================================================================= {3} DHARMANET NEWS ======================================================================= ONLINE LIBRARIES: HOW TO ACCESS THEM DharmaNet is working to bridge the technological borders between Internet and DharmaNet, so that denizens of the respective "virtual communities" may seamlessly visit and communicate with one another, and share joint resources. It is now possible to access DharmaNet's repository of Buddhist texts via various avenues: * DIRECT DIAL-UP: Many DharmaNet BBS sites participate in a Dharma File Distribution Network that relays these files in a manner very similar to the way "echomail" is distributed. BODY DHARMA ONLINE in Berkeley, California, is the central hub for this manner of distribution; other participating sites are listed in the DharmaNet nodelist (updated weekly), with the notation "DFN" or "DFL." The DharmaNet nodelist is available at all DharmaNet BBS sites and from the Dharmanet-info directory at DEFA (see below). Participant sites agree to make these files available to callers at no cost (other than whatever phone costs are incurred by the caller). * FILE REQUEST (F'REQ): Many BBS mailers allow files to be requested and retrieved without actually logging on to the BBS. This still involves making a direct dial connection to a BBS but it is faster and more efficient (hence, less expensive for non-local callers). All DharmaNet files are available via mailer file request from BODY DHARMA ONLINE or any DharmaNet site with a DFL notation in the nodelist; other sites may allow this option as well. A file request for the "magic name" FILES will usually retrieve a BBS' complete listing of files. * FTPMAIL: Files may also be retrieved via ftpmail. To receive uuencoded files via e-mail, send an e-mail message to "ftpmail@metta.ci.net" with the message "Get filename.ext" in the body of the text (minus the quotes, of course). For example, "Get Allfiles.lst" would retrieve the listing of all files available through ACCESS TO INSIGHT BBS in Barre, Massachusetts. The file will be sent as uuencoded e-mail and will need to be unencoded with the utility, uudecode, or a similar utility. Additionally, most files will be compressed and so other utilities may be required as well; most files are compressed with PKZIP v. 2.04g. * ANONYMOUS FTP: The Dharma Electronic Files Archive (D.E.F.A.) has been created as an Internet repository for electronic Buddhist texts, images, and other materials. To access DEFA directly, at the Unix shell prompt, type "ftp ftp.netcom.com". When prompted for //login//, enter "anonymous." When prompted for //password//, enter your e-mail address (example: john.bullitt@metta.ci.net). [Note: if your site has //ncftp// available to you, it has several advantages over //ftp//.] Once logged in, change directory ("cd") to /pub/dharma. "ls" allows you to list the contents of the directory (subdirectories below /pub/dharma are capitalized; filenames are not). With ncftp, you can use the //page// command, to read a text file, such as "INDEX", which is a list describing the various files in a given directory. "get filename.ext" will allow you to retrieve the file to your own home directory; "mget" allows you to retrieve multiple files. You can also use "put" to deposit, or upload, files to DEFA; these uploads should go into the subdirectory /pub/dharma/Inbound and please leave me an e- mail message (dharma@netcom.com) to let me know that you've left something. MIRRORS: DEFA is also mirrored at other Internet sites, such as: ftp.nectec.or.th /pub/mirrors/dharma etext.archive.umich.edu /Religious.Texts/DharmaNet * GOPHER: Gopher is an interactive menu-driven document server that allows you to view and retrieve text files (and retrieve binary files) from various sites. Currently, DEFA may be accessed via Internet Gopher at: gopher.cic.net To arrive at the DEFA areas, follow this path: Electronic Serials => Other Journal Archives => E-Text Archive => Religious.Texts => DharmaNet. coombs.anu.edu.au To arrive at the DEFA areas, follow this path: Coombsquest Networked Facilities => Buddhist Studies Facility => DharmaNet Archives * WWW: The "World Wide Web" is an information service based upon //hypermedia//. The Web is accessed via either terminal-based "browsers", such as Lynx, perlWWW, etc., or GUI-based browsers, such as Mosaic, Cello, Viola, and others. Hypertext "documents" allow resources to be linked via intertextual "pointers" to other documents (or other media). For example, I could be reading about the life of Shakyamuni Buddha, and any number of highlighted "pointers" could be "tunnels" through which I could explore other aspects of the subject; clicking on "Bodhi tree" might transport me seamlessly to another document about Bodh-gaya complete with a high-resolution image of the Mahabodhi Temple, or even an MPEG movie clip, or to a discussion about enlightenment taking place in a DharmaNet newsgroup, and then hop back to the original text. In this way, resources in many media and at various locations throughout the world can be seamlessly interconnected. DharmaNet is very much interested in developing a hypermedia encyclopedia of Buddhism, called //Dharmapedia//, using these tools. In the meantime, resources that are currently accessible via ftp, gopher, WAIS, NNTP, or other methods, can be retrieved via WWW. Presently, DEFA can be accessed via WWW at: http://www.nectec.or.th/nectec.html http://coombs.anu.edu.au/WWWVL-SocSci.html http://coombs.anu.edu.au/CoombsHome.html ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/dharma/defa-home.html It is hoped that people around the world will find these online libraries of value. We also encourage authors and publishers to contribute materials to these archives. Some people have raised the question as to whether promoting "free" access to information such as this is to detract from an author's livelihood or a publisher's ability to market such "products" or "intellectual property." Electronic libraries are in many ways similar to the public library systems and I am convinced that globalizing the availability of such information is one of the best advertisements for author or publisher that one could ask for (and at no cost), in addition to being a wonderful support and educational facility at the local community level. Moreover, for those of us who are Buddhists, it is an extraordinary opportunity to cultivate our field of merit and to keep alive the centuries-old tradition, and practice, of //dana//. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- INTERNET <=> DHARMANET "WORMHOLE" There has been considerable interest expressed in accessing DharmaNet via the Internet. We are currently looking into establishing a direct TC/IP link to the Internet that will allow seamless access between DharmaNet and Internet, enabling the full complement of Internet tools -- telnet, ftp, gopher, wais, www, irc, archie, etc. This will greatly contribute to the flow of information between users at academic and governmental sites, commercial providers, and DharmaNet BBS sites throughout the world. It will also allow the propagation of a DharmaNet newsgroup hierarchy, corresponding to and gatewayed with, the DharmaNet echomail conferences. It is largely a matter of funding that is delaying these developments. Anyone interested in contributing towards this project, please contact Barry Kapke (dharma@netcom.com). In the meantime, John Bullitt has created a mailing list to allow Internet users to participate in discussions related to Buddhism or to DharmaNet or ACCESS TO INSIGHT BBS. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- About the INSIGHT Mailing List What It Is ~~~~~~~~~~ This mailing list was begun in January, 1994 to serve as a bridge between Internet users and the ACCESS TO INSIGHT BBS in Barre, Massachusetts, USA. You are welcome here, whether you call yourself "Buddhist" or not. It's an experiment, meant to serve two simultaneous purposes: 1. To keep Internet users up-to-date with events affecting the BBS in particular and DharmaNet in general. This will include announcements of new books available from DharmaNet via Internet, new Dharma-related Internet resources, and other stuff. If you find something interesting on the Internet that you think might interest other Dharma students, please feel free to post it here. 2. To give Internet users a chance to participate in informal discussions of Dharma. DharmaNet offers many "echoes," in which people may discuss Dharma-related themes, ranging from Ahimsa to Zen. For now, however, you can only join in those discussions by dialing a DharmaNet BBS. For many people this requires making a long-distance telephone call. This mailing list thus gives people a chance to discuss the Dharma with others without having to pay for that long- distance call. The idea is simple: when you send a message to the mailing list, a copy of your message is "reflected" to everyone else on the mailing list. The Rules ~~~~~~~~~ 1. Keep discussions friendly. View this mailing list as an opportunity to practice both ahimsa (harmlessness) and sati (mindfulness). 2. If you quote from other sources, please attribute your sources fully. 3. Please be aware that this mailing list is served by a small PC, with finite disk space. Therefore, please keep your messages of reasonable length. This is NOT the place to send large text files, copies of your favorite GIF file, or anything other than a simple plain ASCII message. If you want to share a large file with others, you can always send it directly to them via private e-mail. To Subscribe ~~~~~~~~~~~~ Send a message to "insight-request@metta.ci.net". In the body of the message, put the word "SUBSCRIBE." To Get Off the List ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Send a message to "insight-request@metta.ci.net". In the body of the message, put the word "UNSUBSCRIBE." To Send a Message to the List ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Send it to "insight@metta.ci.net". Your message will be "reflected" to everyone else on the mailing list. For More Information ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ About ACCESS TO INSIGHT BBS: Send a message to "info@metta.ci.net" About DharmaNet: Send a message to "dharma@metta.ci.net" In each case, an information file will be sent to you by our info-server. How would YOU like to see this mailing list used? If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to post them in the mailing list itself. Or, if you'd rather, you can send them to me privately. //Sabbe satta bhavantu sukhitatta// May all beings be happy! John Bullitt (moderator) john.bullitt@metta.ci.net ----------------------------------------------------------------------- DHARMABASE -- A BUDDHIST DATABASE PROJECT I am constantly being asked for referrals to Dharma teaching centers in metropolitan areas, or how to locate a particular teacher, or what organizations exist to support a certain concern, and so on. There is a wealth of Buddhist resources available to us but often times the difficulty is in finding them, or in knowing where to look. Some type of informational clearinghouse is needed and databases offer a versatile and flexible tool for meeting this need. DharmaNet is building and maintaining a database project called DharmaBase that is presently serving the BBS and home computer communities. It is my hope that electronic data can be easily shared and coordinated between DharmaBase, the Australian National University WAIS servers, and other Buddhist data-gathering repositories. DharmaBase utilizes a DOS //DBaseIII//-compatible program to compile data "magazines." The magazines are geographic (ie, California, SF Bay Area, United States, etc) and will soon be available for downloading from DharmaNet BBSs (as well as the Dharma Electronic Files Archive and its mirrors) in the same way that other binary files are. These can then be used by individuals for their own projects, importing the data into any DBase-compatible program. At participating DharmaNet BBSs, a DharmaBase "door" is online allowing users to update data themselves, so that it is hopefully a largely self-maintaining database. DharmaBase will also allow users to query the database by email (and eventually via WWW browsers). The primary DharmaBase focus is Buddhist monasteries, Dharma centers, and organizations, but we are also compiling databases of journals; publishers; Buddhist BBSs; etc. CAVEAT: we are more or less in beginning stages with this project, so the actual compiled data as of this moment is small but the system is in place and the data is beginning to flow in. I think it will be an enormously valuable resource. I have revised the DharmaBase record format to: Name: Address: City: State: Zip: Country: Contact: Voice#: FAX#: BBS#: E-mail: Lineage: Affiliation: Resident Director: Spiritual Director: Teachers: Description: Newsletter: Updated: Sources Used: Record Compiled By: Please submit listings of Dharma resources in your area, updates, or corrections, to DharmaBase, P.O. Box 4951, Berkeley CA 94704-4951; by e-mail to dharma@netcom.com; or by netmail to Barry Kapke at 1:125/33 (fidonet) or 96:96/475 (dharmanet). Please use the format above. ======================================================================= {4} NEW RESOURCES ======================================================================= [Source: Mahidol University gopher] THE BUDDHIST SCRIPTURES INFORMATION RETRIEVAL OVERVIEW ======== Many people said "This software would be another brave new world." It is the first of its kind in the universe of international Buddhism perusal. Mahidol University Computing Center is very proud to present the world's FIRST complete DIGITAL EDITION of The Buddhist Scripture, //Tipitaka//, which is a collection of scriptures representing the collected teachings and sayings of Buddha and the scripture's commentary, the //Atthakatha//. The Tipitaka's importance is in being the root and basic reference for all teachings and explanations of Buddhism, the standard for measuring the teachings presented as Buddhism, a record of beliefs, religions, traditions and events of times many centuries past, an invaluable source of reference material relating to other fields of knowledge. This digital edition has its name //BUDSIR// and the version to date is //BUDSIR release 4.0//. This latest version is suitable for international use. It is because the whole Pali passages' approximately 78 million characters in both manuscripts have been completely transliterated into "digitally Romanized form." This will no doubt be a provision of another channel through which Buddha's teachings are made accessible to the international community. BUDSIR's internal structure is elaborately developed using mature and efficient information retrieval techniques usually used in large databases and specially designed with the ease of use for users of all levels of competence in mind. OBJECTIVES ========== In the endeavor to pursue a particular subject in Tipitaka and Atthakatha that contain tremendous amounts of information, not only does one have to overcome the barrier of the Pali language, but also overwhelming amounts of information so widely scattered under a variety of headings within a volume. Hence it is extremely difficult to retrieve the information in question, accurately and exhaustively. An attempt has been made to store the entire Tipitaka and Atthakatha in digital form so that any research that needs to gain access to this huge database will be greatly facilitated. BUDSIR is unique in its accuracy, speed and exhaustivity. It can retrieve any word (including compounds), phrase or stretch of text that can be found in the Buddhist Scriptures. Moreover, this digital edition is also capable of searching both the Tipitaka and Atthakatha simultaneously, showing the results in two separate windows so that they can be studied and compared. The BUDSIR's Beginning ====================== The difficulties in studying of Tipitaka and Atthakatha due to the vast size of the volumes cited above brought to the attention of the Council of Mahidol University in one of its meetings in 1987, it was felt that the University should undertake a project to develop a computerized version of the Tipitaka in honour on His Majesty the King's Ratchamangklaphisek Ceremony (The Celebration of the Longest Royal Enthronement Anniversary) and the Celebration of His Majesty the King's 60th birthday. The decision of the Council of Mahidol University gave birth to the Royal Project for the use of computer technology in the study and research of the Tipitaka with Prof. Dr. Nath Phamornparvat, the Chancellor of the University Chairman, Venerable Phra Thepvedi as advisor and Mahidol University Computing Center headed by Dr. Supachai Tangwongsan as the task force. The data contained in the BUDSIR database can be divided into 2 categories. Firstly, the Pali Tipitaka in Romanized form that was thoroughly transliterated and utterly verified from the 45 volumes of Tipitaka Thai script by a Pali expert. Secondly, the 55-volume Atthakatha, texts used in Thai-Pali examinations and two essential scriptures: Milindapanha and Bhikkhu Patimokkhapali. BUDSIR IV -- Features Summary ============================= Several Efficient Search Methodologies -------------------------------------- BUDSIR features 2 efficient search methods. Users are able to launch a search using word/phrase keyword or using volume/page/item indicator. Dual Windows Display -------------------- BUDSIR independently displays Tipitaka and Atthakatha in separate windows. Users are able to freehandedly select which window to display which manuscript. Working brilliantly in graphical environment -------------------------------------------- BUDSIR completely runs in graphics mode display; definitely no need to modify the video graphic adapter to display the characters. Pull-Down Menus and Mouse Support --------------------------------- Any features can be accessed using hot-key, pull-down menus or a mouse. Printing -------- BUDSIR supports every de facto standard 9-pin and 24-pin dot-matrix printer and also Canon LBP-8II laser printer. Requirements ============ BUDSIR essentially needs equipment with the following specification. 1. BUDSIR runs on the IBM PC, AT, PS/2 computers, and true compatibles using Intel-based 80386, 80486 microprocessors. 2. At least 2 MB of RAMs 3. A super-VGA color graphic adapter and a matching monitor 4. A hard drive or optical disk with capacity not less than 250 MB 5. A keyboard and a Microsoft compatible mouse. 6. A floppy disk drive 7. MS-DOS version 4 or higher What will be included in the next version ? =========================================== Several enhancements are planned to be included in the next version of BUDSIR. 1. BUDSIR database using CD-ROM technology with on-the-fly data compression and encryption. 2. BUDSIR on WINDOWS 3.1 platform. 3. VOICE support for Pali pronunciation. Questions and comments are very welcome and can be forwarded to: Dr. Supachai Tangwongsan Director of Mahidol University Computing Center Mahidol University Bangkok, Thailand Email : ccstw@mucc.mahidol.ac.th ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [Source: Snow Lion Newsletter, Winter 1994, p.9] DIALING FOR DHARMA IN THE COMPUTER AGE The Bodhi-Line, a new telephone information service for the computer age, went on-line in October, providing the general public with a means to find out about New York area Buddhist centers. The taped message includes the centers' locations, schedules of classes and meditation sessions, and a list of books, tapes and other materials available. In addition, Bodhi-Line will refer callers to bookshops and mail-order publishers of Dharma material. All that is required to use the service is a touch-tone phone. "Our aim is to give a person every opportunity to find out about the wealth of Buddhist learning available in New York," says Michael Wick, founder and operator of Bodhi-Line. "We're using some of the most up- to-date technology available for information services." He said that an additional feature of the Bodhi-Line is to provide information via fax. It will also be redirecting useful information such as notable articles being carried on electronic bulletin boards and e-mail services and other sources. People who don't have a fax machine can receive printouts by mail. Bodhi-Line has permission from publishers, including Wisdom, Snow Lion, and Dharma Publishing, to reproduce parts of books, including covers, tables of contents and introductions. In addition, there are also taped lectures and computer clip art available. Actual excerpts of lectures can be heard on the Bodhi-Line by pressing the appropriate number. All services offered by the Bodhi-Line are free of charge. The Bodhi-Line number is (212) 677-9354. For more information about Bodhi-Line, contact Michael Wick at Buddhist Information Service of New York, 331 E 5th Street, New York, NY 10003. Tel: (212) 777-3745. Fax & voice mail: (212) 677-9354. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- BUDDHIST NEWCOMERS IN THE ALT.* HIERARCHY alt.zen alt.philosophy.zen ----------------------------------------------------------------------- BUDDHIST DISCUSSION MUD A MUD (Multi-User Domain) is an online Role Playing game that allows multiple players to interact in the same game in more-or-less "real time." Each player constructs an online character and uses English commands ("go right", "pick up book", etc) to interact with other players. MOOs are object-oriented MUDs. Michael Moriarty reported in soc.religion.eastern that he had created his own virtual space with a Buddhist theme in LambdaMOO. He calls it "DharmaDebateHall": "This is a tranquil setting where all MOO is welcome to meditate or join in mindful conversation." DharmaDebateHall is not open at all times, but Mr. Moriarty says that he is often there during evenings, Central Standard time, and would welcome developing group discussions. To access DharmaDebateHall, telnet to 'lambda.parc.xerox.com' at port 8888. On most systems, the command would be: telnet lambda.parc.xerox.com 8888 For further information, e-mail: Moriarty@vm1.nodak.edu ======================================================================= {5} CONFERENCE NEWS ======================================================================= ENVISIONING TIBET: A Conference of Tibetanists Held in Melbourne Australia, February 1994 Tibetan studies in Australia has come of age. Australian scholars of Tibetan culture convened a conference in February, where they made the welcome discovery that there is more research underway than most people realized. Of the 40 scholars attending the two day "Envisioning Tibet" conference in Melbourne, 17 presented papers. Topics of original research were broad, embracing history, philosophy, art, music, linguistics and contemporary issues. Karma Phuntsok, a Master's graduate from Jawarhalal Nehru University, presented a paper on the linguistics of evidentiality in Tibetan. The Tibetanist accompanying the two official Australian Parliamentary Human Rights delegations to China and Tibet, Kevin Garrett, presented a careful analysis of human rights in the Dharamsala magazine //Shes-bya// and the Beijing magazine //Krung-go 'i bod-ljongs.// The impact of modernity on Tibetan communities was examined in several papers, including Elizabeth Stutchbury, whose anthropological field work in Karzha will soon be published; Keith Richmond's history of Bon in exile; Mark Stevenson's fieldwork among Amdo artists, Gabriel Lafitte on the Tibetanness of Sikkim, and a group presentation on the problems of Australian aid projects in Tibet. Professor William Newell compared pastoralism amongst Western Tibetans and Gaddi shepherds in India. Span Henna depicted the Nakhi, close neighbors of the Tibetans. Diana Cousens recovered the religious significance of Phagpa's conversion of Kubilai Khan, rescuing it from those western historians who seek only political explanations for religious events. Contemporary work songs were presented by Elaine Dobson, a composer sensitive to the wider sound environment in which the songs are sung, and their uses in sharing workload. Ancient //tog cha// and their uses were vividly presented by David Templeman. The places of the Potala in western fantasy over two centuries was Peter Bishop's subject, while McComas Taylor offered a spirited reading of traditional popular Tibetan histories, as a way of appreciating the shrewdness, intelligence and humor so valued in Tibetan culture. Major philosophical traditions which are as yet little known in the west were discussed by Deidre Collings in her paper on Mahamudra, Jon Mason on Buddhism and cognitive science, and Peter Fenner on adapting Madhyamika logic to practical programs for people suffering from conflicting beliefs. A few scholars were unable to attend. The number of Australians doing useful research in Tibet, and the number able to read and write Tibetan is growing steadily. Tibetan studies is thriving in Australia, despite limited institutional support. Further conferences are to be held every two years, and conference papers will be published in one volume. The conference was collaborative, supportive and constructive, without the competitiveness which bedevils large academic conferences. For further details of Tibetan studies in Australia, please contact Gabriel Lafitte, Box 1091, Collingwood, Victoria 3066, Australia. Phone (+613) 417-5953. ======================================================================= {6} LETTERS ======================================================================= [Source: CanTibNet Newsletter, 94/03/06 15:30 GMT] SAY NO! TO CHINESE GOODS For more than forty years, the formerly sovereign country of Tibet has been controlled and occupied by the Chinese communist government. Tibetans have been starved, imprisoned, tortured, and executed; more than 1.2 million Tibetans have died as a result of Chinese oppression. Six thousand Tibetan monasteries, nunneries, and centers of learning have been devastated, and 60 percent of Tibet's literature has been destroyed by the Chinese communists. Tibetans are being arrested and thrown into jail merely for displaying their flag. Now China's leaders have set out to eliminate the Tibetan national and cultural identity by a policy of population transfer designed to make Tibetans a minority in their own country. As this policy of repression has continued, China has become a major exporter of goods to the U.S. Have you looked at the labels of items you purchased recently? Many billions of dollars worth of goods come from China, whose communist government denies fundamental human rights to both Tibetans and its own people. When you buy holiday decorations, look at where they are made -- do you want such a repressive regime represented in your home? Do you want toys and other holiday presents for your children to bear the stigma of this regime? Do you want to wear clothing and use sporting goods that proclaim on their //Made In China// labels their identification with such source? We believe that the time has come to NO! to Chinese goods, until the Chinese leaders grant freedom and independence to the Tibetans. Just as in South Africa, it will take economic pressure to get the message across to greedy political leaders that their policies of aggression and repression are unacceptable and must be changed. Just as Mandela and de Klerk have received the Nobel Peace Prize for their work in improving the South African situation, we want a leader of China to receive a Nobel prize for granting freedom to Tibet and the Tibetans. The Dalai Lama of Tibet already has received this prize for his work toward world peace; now it's time for the Chinese to have an enlightened leader. To help the cause of Tibetan independence, we request that you send a copy of this letter to ten of your friends. The Chinese communist government has poured millions of dollars into a theme park in Florida designed to deceive the American people about its role in Tibet. We do not have the resources to launch a mass media campaign in support of the Tibetan cause. But just ten rounds of this letter will bring this message to millions of people in the U.S. and elsewhere. Please participate in keeping the chain unbroken -- this act of compassion is sure to bring great merit to you. T.I.B.E.T. Alliance, P.O. Box 3474 Santa Monica, CA 90408-3474 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Bringing Out the Best ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [...] this just happens to be one of those times when I'm filled with great gratitude for all you've done for the sake of bringing the Dharma to the electronic world. I'm constantly amazed by the level of respect and care that's been manifest in many of the e- mail messages I've been getting lately from new users, old users, Internet folks... The Dharma truly brings out the best in people, and it's a great joy to taste that joy when sitting at the dumb ol' video screen! So thank you! John Bullitt ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Distribution Format of GASSHO ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Greetings from Finland! I am wondering if Dharmanet could distribute //Gassho// in postscript format, with magazine-like layout. I have understood you already now distribute Gassho in printed form, so it might not be much more effort to print it just as plain PS-file. The benefits would be clear. The magazine would more readable and more easily accepted. More people would read it and the temptation to throw it away after reading once would be less. With suitable cover-page and two-sided printing, people would immediately understand immediately what it is all about! I understand that one cannot want too much from non-profit distribution. But page numbering, contents list, big title in cover page, magazine-like narrow columns, article titles and subtitles with clearly separable bigger fonts would make a tremendous difference. Jarkko Lavinen ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [Ed.: Thank you for the suggestions! There may well be a PS version of GASSHO in the future (I experimented with making a WordPerfect 5.1 version of GASSHO available with the last issue). I am constantly experimenting with and re-evaluating the format of GASSHO, and I am very much concerned with finding a readable and aesthetic balance that is suitable to this medium. And at the same time, I feel a commitment to working with *this* medium -- GASSHO is an electronic journal, not a print journal that is distributed electronically. The hardcopy version that we distribute is produced as a courtesy to those who do not have access to these computer resources -- YET -- but our (that is, DharmaNet's) primary aim is the development of electronic resources to serve the Buddhist community.] ======================================================================= {7} DIALOGUE ======================================================================= THE SECOND PRECEPT: GENEROSITY by Thich Nhat Hanh //Aware of the suffering caused by exploitation, social injustice, stealing, and oppression, I vow to cultivate loving kindness and learn ways to work for the well-being of people, animals, plants, and minerals. I vow to practice generosity by sharing my time, energy, and material resources with those who are in real need. I am determined not to steal and not to possess anything that should belong to others. I will respect the property of others, but I will prevent others from profiting from human suffering or the suffering of other species on Earth.// Exploitation, social injustice, and stealing come in many forms. Oppression is one form of stealing that causes much suffering both here and in the Third World. The moment we vow to cultivate loving kindness, loving kindness is born in us, and we make every effort to stop exploitation, social injustice, stealing, and oppression. In the First Precept, we found the word "compassion." Here, we find the words "loving kindness." Compassion and loving kindness are the two aspects of love taught by the Buddha. Compassion, //karuna// in Sanskrit and Pali, is the intention and capacity to relieve the suffering of another person or living being. Loving kindness, //maitri// in Sanskrit, //metta// in Pali, is the intention and capacity to bring joy and happiness to another person or living being. It was predicted by Shakyamuni Buddha that the next Buddha will bear the name Maitreya, the Buddha of Love. //"Aware of the suffering caused by exploitation, social injustice, stealing, and oppression, I vow to cultivate loving kindness and learn ways to work for the well-being of people, animals, plants and minerals."// Even with maitri as a source of energy in ourselves, we still need to learn to look deeply in order to find ways to express it. We do it as individuals, and we learn ways to do it as a nation. To promote the well-being of people, animals, plants, and minerals, we have to come together as a community and examine our situation, exercising our intelligence and our ability to look deeply so that we can discover appropriate ways to express our maitri in the midst of real problems. Suppose you want to help those who are suffering under a dictatorship. In the past you may have tried sending in troops to overthrow their government, but you have learned that when doing that, you cause the deaths of many innocent people, and even then, you might not overthrow the dictator. If you practice looking more deeply, with loving kindness, to find a better way to help these people without causing suffering, you may realize that the best time to help is before the country falls into the hands of a dictator. If you offer the young people of that country the opportunity to learn your democratic ways of governing by giving them scholarships to come to your country, that would be a good investment for peace in the future. If you had done that thirty years ago, the other country might be democratic now, and you would not have to bomb them or send in troops to "liberate" them. This is just one example of how looking deeply and learning can help us find ways to do things that are more in line with loving kindness. If we wait until the situation gets bad, it may be too late. If we practice the precepts together with politicians, soldiers, businessmen, lawyers, legislators, artists, writers, and teachers, we can find the best ways to practice compassion, loving kindness, and understanding. It requires time to practice generosity. We may want to help those who are hungry, but we are caught in the problems of our own daily lives. Sometimes, one pill or a little rice could save the life of a child, but we do not take the time to help, because we think we do not have the time. In Ho Chi Minh City, for example, there are street children who call themselves "the dust of life." They are homeless, and they wander the streets by day and sleep under trees at night. They scavenge in garbage heaps to find things like plastic bags they can sell for one or two cents per pound. The nuns and monks in Ho Chi Minh City have opened their temples to these children, and if the children agree to stay four hours in the morning -- learning to read and write and playing with the monks and nuns -- they are offered a vegetarian lunch. Then they can go to the Buddha hall for a nap. (In Vietnam, we always take naps after lunch; it is so hot. When the Americans came, they brought their practice of working eight hours, from nine to five. Many of us tried, but we could not do it. We desperately need our naps after lunch.) Then at two o'clock, there is more teaching and playing with the children, and the children who stay for the afternoon receive dinner. The temple does not have a place for them to sleep overnight. In our community in France, we have been supporting these nuns and monks. It costs only twenty cents for a child to have both lunch and dinner, and it will keep him from being out on the streets, where he might steal cigarettes, smoke, use delinquent language, and learn the worst behavior. By encouraging the children to go to the temple, we help prevent them from becoming delinquent and entering prison later on. It takes time to help these children, not much money. There are so many simple things like this we can do to help people, but because we cannot free ourselves from our situation and our lifestyle, we do nothing at all. We need to come together as a community, and, looking deeply, find ways to free ourselves so we can practice the Second Precept. //"I vow to practice generosity by sharing my time, energy, and material resources with those who are in real need."// This sentence is clear. The feeling of generosity and the capacity for being generous are not enough. We also need to express our generosity. We may feel that we don't have the time to make people happy - we say, "Time is money," but time is more than money. Life is for more than using time to make money. Time is for being alive, for sharing joy and happiness with others. The wealthy are often the least able to make others happy. Only those with time can do so. I know a man named Bac Sieu in Thua Thien Province in Vietnam, who has been practicing generosity for fifty years; he is a living //bodhisattva//. With only a bicycle, he visits villages of thirteen provinces, bringing something for this family and something for that family. When I met him in 1965, I was a little too proud of our School of Youth for Social Service. We had begun to train three hundred workers, including monks and nuns, to go out to rural villages to help people rebuild homes and modernize local economies, health-care systems, and education. Eventually we had ten thousand workers throughout the country. As I was telling Bac Sieu about our projects, I was looking at his bicycle and thinking that with a bicycle he could help only a few people. But when the communists took over and closed our School, Bac Sieu continued, because his way of working was formless. Our orphanages, dispensaries, schools, and resettlement centers were all shut down or taken by the government. Thousands of our workers had to stop their work and hide. But Bac Sieu had nothing to take. He was a truly a bodhisattva, working for the well-being of others. I feel more humble now concerning the ways of practicing generosity. The war created many thousands of orphans. Instead of raising money to build orphanages, we sought people in the West to sponsor a child. We found families in the villages to each take care of one orphan, then we sent $6 every month to that family to feed the child and send him or her to school. Whenever possible, we tried to place the child in the family of an aunt, an uncle, or a grandparent. With just $6, the child was fed and sent to school, and the rest of the children in the family were also helped. Children benefit from growing up in a family. Being in an orphanage can be like being in the army -- children do not grow up naturally. If we look for and learn ways to practice generosity, we will improve all the time. //"I am determined not to steal and not to possess anything that should belong to others. I will respect the property of others, but I will prevent others from profiting from human suffering or the suffering of other species on Earth."// When you practice one precept deeply, you will discover that you are practicing all five. The First Precept is about taking life, which is a form of stealing -- stealing the most precious thing someone has, his or her life. When we meditate on the Second Precept, we see that stealing, in the forms of exploitation, social injustice, and oppression, are acts of killing -- killing slowly by exploitation, by maintaining social injustice, and by political and economic oppression. Therefore, the Second Precept has much to do with the precept of not killing. We see the "interbeing" nature of the first two precepts. This is true of all Five Precepts. Some people formally receive just one or two precepts. I didn't mind, because if you practice one or two precepts deeply, all Five Precepts will be observed. The Second Precept is not to steal. Instead of stealing, exploiting, or oppressing, we practice generosity. In Buddhism, we say there are three kinds of gifts. The first is the gift of material resources. The second is to help people rely on themselves, to offer them the technology and know-how to stand on their own feet. Helping people with the Dharma so they can transform their fear, anger, and depression belongs to the second kind of gift. The third is the gift of non-fear. We are afraid of many things. We feel insecure, afraid of being alone, afraid of sickness and dying. To help people not be destroyed by their fears, we practice the third kind of gift-giving. The Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara is someone who practices this extremely well. In the //Heart Sutra,// he teaches us the way to transform and transcend fear and ride on the waves of birth and death, smiling. He says that there is no production, no destruction, no being, no nonbeing, no increasing, and no decreasing. Hearing this helps us look deeply into the nature of reality to see that birth and death, being and nonbeing, coming and going, increasing and decreasing are all just ideas that we ascribe to reality, while reality transcends all concepts. When we realize the interbeing nature of all things -- that even birth and death are just concepts -- we transcend fear. In 1991, I visited a friend in New York who was dying, Alfred Hassler. We had worked together in the peace movement for almost thirty years. Alfred looked as though he had been waiting for me to come before dying, and he died only a few hours after our visit. I went with my closest colleague, Sister Chan Khong (True Emptiness). Alfred was not awake when we arrived. His daughter Laura tried to wake him up, but she couldn't. So I asked Sister Chan Khong to sing Alfred the //Song of No Coming and No Going:// "These eyes are not me, I am not caught by these eyes. This body is not me, I am not caught by this body. I am life without boundaries. I have never been born, I will never die." The idea is taken from the //Samyutta Nikaya//. She sang so beautifully, and I saw streams of tears running down the faces of Alfred's wife and children. They were tears of understanding, and they were very healing. Suddenly, Alfred came back to himself. Sister Chan Khong began to practice what she had learned from studying the sutra //The Teaching Given to the Sick.// She said, "Alfred, do you remember the times we worked together?" She evoked many happy memories we had shared together, and Alfred was able to remember each of them. Although he was obviously in pain, he smiled. This practice brought results right away. When a person is suffering from so much physical pain, we sometimes can alleviate his suffering by watering the seeds of happiness that are in him. A kind of balance is restored, and he will feel less pain. All the while, I was practicing massage on his feet, and I asked him whether he felt my hand on his body. When you are dying, areas of your body become numb, and you feel as if you have lost those parts of your body. Doing massage in mindfulness, gently, gives the dying person the feeling that he is alive and being cared for. He knows that love is there. Alfred nodded, and his eyes seemed to say, "Yes, I feel your hands. I know my foot is there." Sister Chan Khong asked, "Do you know we learned a lot from you when we lived and worked together? The work you began, many of us are continuing to do. Please don't worry about anything." She told him many things like that, and he seemed to suffer less. At one point, he opened his mouth and said, "Wonderful, wonderful." Then, he sank back to sleep. Before we left, we encouraged the family to continue these practices. The next day I learned that Alfred passed away just five hours after our visit. This was a kind of gift that belongs to the third category. If you can help people feel safe, less afraid of life, people, and death, you are practicing the third kind of gift. During my meditation, I had a wonderful image -- the shape of a wave, its beginning and its end. When conditions are sufficient, we perceive the wave, and when conditions are no longer sufficient, we do not perceive the wave. Waves are only made of water. We cannot label the wave as existing or nonexisting. After what we call the death of the wave, nothing is gone, nothing is lost. The wave has been absorbed into other waves, and somehow, time will bring the wave back again. There is no increasing, decreasing, birth, or death. When we are dying, if we think that everyone else is alive and we are the only person dying, our feeling of loneliness may be unbearable. But if we are able to visualize hundreds of thousands of people dying with us, our dying may become serene and even joyful. "I am dying in community. Millions of living beings are also dying in this very moment. I see myself together with millions of other living beings; we die in the Sangha. At the same time, millions of beings are coming to life. All of us are doing this together. I have been born, I am dying. We participate in the whole event as a Sangha." That is what I saw in my meditation. In the //Heart Sutra,// Avalokitesvara shares this kind of insight and helps us transcend fear, sorrow, and pain. The gift of non-fear brings about a transformation in us. The Second Precept is a deep practice. We speak of time, energy, and material resources, but time is not only for energy and material resources. Time is for being with others -- being with a dying person or with someone who is suffering. Being really present for even five minutes can be a very important gift. Time is not just to make money. It is to produce the gift of Dharma and the gift of non-fear. * * * * * [THICH NHAT HANH is a Zen Buddhist monk, peace activist, scholar, and poet. He is the founder of the Van Hanh Buddhist University in Saigon, has taught at Columbia University and the Sorbonne, and now lives in southern France, where he gardens, works to help those in need, and travels internationally teaching "the art of mindful living." Martin Luther King, Jr., nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967, saying, "I do not personally know of anyone more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize than this gentle monk from Vietnam."] ======================================================================= {8} ARTICLE ======================================================================= Copyright 1992, Howard Rheingold A SLICE OF LIFE IN MY VIRTUAL COMMUNITY by Howard Rheingold I'm a writer, so I spend a lot of time alone in a room with my words and my thoughts. On occasion, I venture outside to interview people or to find information. After work, I reenter the human community, via my family, my neighborhood, my circle of acquaintances. But that regime left me feeling isolated and lonely during the working day, with few opportunities to expand my circle of friends. For the past seven years, however, I have participated in a wide-ranging, intellectually stimulating, professionally rewarding, sometimes painful, and often intensely emotional ongoing interchange with dozens of new friends, hundreds of colleagues, thousands of acquaintances. And I still spend many of my days in a room, physically isolated. My mind, however, is linked with a worldwide collection of like-minded (and not so like- minded) souls: My virtual community. Virtual communities emerged from a surprising intersection of humanity and technology. When the ubiquity of the world telecommunications network is combined with the information-structuring and storing capabilities of computers, a new communication medium becomes possible. As we've learned from the history of the telephone, radio, television, people can adopt new communication media and redesign their way of life with surprising rapidity. Computers, modems, and communication networks furnish the technological infrastructure of computer-mediated communication (CMC); cyberspace is the conceptual space where words and human relationships, data and wealth and power are manifested by people using CMC technology; virtual communities are cultural aggregations that emerge when enough people bump into each other often enough in cyberspace. A virtual community as they exist today is a group of people who may or may not meet one another face to face, and who exchange words and ideas through the mediation of computer bulletin boards and networks. In cyberspace, we chat and argue, engage in intellectual intercourse, perform acts of commerce, exchange knowledge, share emotional support, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, find friends and lose them, play games and metagames, flirt, create a little high art and a lot of idle talk. We do everything people do when people get together, but we do it with words on computer screens, leaving our bodies behind. Millions of us have already built communities where our identities commingle and interact electronically, independent of local time or location. The way a few of us live now might be the way a larger population will live, decades hence. The pioneers are still out there exploring the frontier, the borders of the domain have yet to be determined, or even the shape of it, or the best way to find one's way in it. But people are using the technology of computer-mediated communications (CMC technology) to do things with each other that weren't possible before. Human behavior in cyberspace, as we can observe it and participate in it today, is going to be a crucially important factor. The ways in which people use CMC always will be rooted in human needs, not hardware or software. If the use of virtual communities turns out to answer a deep and compelling need in people, and not just snag onto a human foible like pinball or pac-man, today's small online enclaves may grow into much larger networks over the next twenty years. The potential for social change is a side-effect of the trajectory of telecommunications and computer industries, as it can be forecast for the next ten years. This odd social revolution -- communities of people who may never or rarely meet face to face -- might piggyback on the technologies that the biggest telecommunication companies already are planning to install over the next ten years. It is possible that the hardware and software of a new global telecommunications infrastructure, orders of magnitude more powerful than today's state of the art, now moving from the laboratories to the market, will expand the reach of this spaceless place throughout the 1990s to a much wider population than today's hackers, technologists, scholars, students, and enthusiasts. The age of the online pioneers will end soon, and the cyberspace settlers will come en-masse. Telecommuters who might have thought they were just working from home and avoiding one day of gridlock on the freeway will find themselves drawn into a whole new society. Students and scientists are already there, artists have made significant inroads, librarians and educators have their own pioneers as well, and political activists of all stripes have just begun to discover the power of plugging a computer into a telephone. When today's millions become tens and hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, what kind of place, and what kind of model for human behavior will they find? Today's bedroom electronic bulletin boards, regional computer conferencing systems, global computer networks offer clues to what might happen when more powerful enabling technology comes along. The hardware for amplifying the computing and communication capacity of every home on the world-grid is in the pipeline, although the ultimate applications are not yet clear. We'll be able to transfer the Library of Congress from any point on the globe to any another point in seconds, upload and download full-motion digital video at will. But is that really what people are likely to do with all that bandwidth and computing power? Some of the answers have to come from the behavioral rather than the technological part of the system. How will people actually use the desktop supercomputers and multimedia telephones that the engineers tell us we'll have in the near future. One possibility is that people are going to do what people always do with a new communication technology: use it in ways never intended or foreseen by its inventors, to turn old social codes inside out and make new kinds of communities possible. CMC will change us, and change our culture, the way telephones and televisions and cheap video cameras changed us -- by altering the way we perceive and communicate. Virtual communities transformed my life profoundly, years ago, and continue to do so. A Cybernaut's Eye View The most important clues to the shape of the future at this point might not be found in looking more closely at the properties of silicon, but in paying attention to the ways people need to, fail to, and try to communicate with one another. Right now, some people are convinced that spending hours a day in front of a screen, typing on a keyboard, fulfills in some way our need for a community of peers. Whether we have discovered something wonderful or stumbled into something insidiously unwonderful, or both, the fact that people want to use CMC to meet other people and experiment with identity are valuable signposts to possible futures. Human behavior in cyberspace, as we can observe it today on the nets and in the BBSs, gives rise to important questions about the effects of communication technology on human values. What kinds of humans are we becoming in an increasingly computer-mediated world, and do we have any control over that transformation? How have our definitions of "human" and "community" been under pressure to change to fit the specifications of a technology-guided civilization? Fortunately, questions about the nature of virtual communities are not purely theoretical, for there is a readily accessible example of the phenomenon at hand to study. Millions of people now inhabit the social spaces that have grown up on the world's computer networks, and this previously invisible global subculture has been growing at a monstrous rate recently (e.g., the Internet growing by 25% per month). I've lived here myself for seven years; the WELL and the net have been a regular part of my routine, like gardening on Sunday, for one sixth of my life thus far. My wife and daughter long ago grew accustomed to the fact that I sit in front of my computer early in the morning and late at night, chuckling and cursing, sometimes crying, about something I am reading on the computer screen. The questions I raise here are not those of a scientist, or of a polemicist who has found an answer to something, but as a user -- a nearly obsessive user -- of CMC and a deep mucker-about in virtual communities. What kind of people are my friends and I becoming? What does that portend for others? If CMC has a potential, it is in the way people in so many parts of the net fiercely defend the use of the term "community" to describe the relationships we have built online. But fierceness of belief is not sufficient evidence that the belief is sound. Is the aura of community an illusion? The question has not been answered, and is worth asking. I've seen people hurt by interactions in virtual communities. Is telecommunication culture capable of becoming something more than what Scott Peck calls a "pseudo-community," where people lack the genuine personal commitments to one another that form the bedrock of genuine community? Or is our notion of "genuine" changing in an age where more people every day live their lives in increasingly artificial environments? New technologies tend to change old ways of doing things. Is the human need for community going to be the next technology commodity? I can attest that I and thousands of other cybernauts know that what we are looking for, and finding in some surprising ways, is not just information, but instant access to ongoing relationships with a large number of other people. Individuals find friends and groups find shared identities online, through the aggregated networks of relationships and commitments that make any community possible. But are relationships and commitments as we know them even possible in a place where identities are fluid? The physical world, known variously as "IRL" ("In Real Life"), or "offline," is a place where the identity and position of the people you communicate with are well known, fixed, and highly visual. In cyberspace, everybody is in the dark. We can only exchange words with each other -- no glances or shrugs or ironic smiles. Even the nuances of voice and intonation are stripped away. On top of the technology-imposed constraints, we who populate cyberspace deliberately experiment with fracturing traditional notions of identity by living as multiple simultaneous personae in different virtual neighborhoods. We reduce and encode our identities as words on a screen, decode and unpack the identities of others. The way we use these words, the stories (true and false) we tell about ourselves (or about the identity we want people to believe us to be) is what determines our identities in cyberspace. The aggregation of personae, interacting with each other, determines the nature of the collective culture. Our personae, constructed from our stories of who we are, use the overt topics of discussion in a BBS or network for a more fundamental purpose, as means of interacting with each other. And all this takes place on both public and private levels, in many-to-many open discussions and one-to-one private electronic mail, front stage role- playing and backstage behavior. When I'm online, I cruise through my conferences, reading and replying in topics that I've been following, starting my own topics when the inspiration or need strikes me. Every few minutes, I get a notice on my screen that I have incoming mail. I might decide to wait to read the mail until I'm finished doing something else, or drop from the conference into the mailer, to see who it is from. At the same time that I am participating in open discussion in conferences and private discourse in electronic mail, people I know well use "sends" -- a means of sending one or two quick sentences to my screen without the intervention of an electronic mail message. This can be irritating before you get used to it, since you are either reading or writing something else when it happens, but eventually it becomes a kind of rhythm: different degrees of thoughtfulness and formality happen simultaneously, along with the simultaneous multiple personae. Then there are public and private conferences that have partially overlapping memberships. CMC offers tools for facilitating all the various ways people have discovered to divide and communicate, group and subgroup and regroup, include and exclude, select and elect. When a group of people remain in communication with one another for extended periods of time, the question of whether it is a community arises. Virtual communities might be real communities, they might be pseudocommunities, or they might be something entirely new in the realm of social contracts, but I believe they are in part a response to the hunger for community that has followed the disintegration of traditional communities around the world. Social norms and shared mental models have not emerged yet, so everyone's sense of what kind of place cyberspace is can vary widely, which makes it hard to tell whether the person you are communicating with shares the same model of the system within which you are communicating. Indeed, the online acronym YMMV ("Your Mileage May Vary") has become shorthand for this kind of indeterminacy of shared context. For example, I know people who use vicious online verbal combat as a way of blowing off steam from the pressures of their real life -- "sport hassling" -- and others who use it voyeuristically, as a text-based form of real-life soap-opera. To some people, it's a game. And I know people who feel as passionately committed to our virtual community and the people in it (or at least some of the people in it) as our nation, occupation, or neighborhood. Whether we like it or not, the communitarians and the venters, the builders and the vandals, the egalitarians and the passive-aggressives, are all in this place together. The diversity of the communicating population is one of the defining characteristics of the new medium, one of its chief attractions, the source of many of its most vexing problems. Is the prospect of moving en-masse into cyberspace in the near future, when the world's communication network undergoes explosive expansion of bandwidth, a beneficial thing for entire populations to do? In which ways might the growth of virtual communities promote alienation? How might virtual communities facilitate conviviality? Which social structures will dissolve, which political forces will arise, and which will lose power? These are questions worth asking now, while there is still time to shape the future of the medium. In the sense that we are traveling blind into a technology-shaped future that might be very different from today's culture, direct reports from life in different corners of the world's online cultures today might furnish valuable signposts to the territory ahead. Since the summer of 1985, I've spent an average of two hours a day, seven days a week, often when I travel, plugged into the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) via a computer and a telephone line, exchanging information and playing with attention, becoming entangled In Real Life, with a growing network of similarly wired-in strangers I met in cyberspace. I remember the first time I walked into a room full of people (IRL) whose faces were completely unknown to me, but who knew many intimate details of my history, and whose own stories I knew very well. I had contended with these people, shot the breeze around the electronic water cooler, shared alliances and formed bonds, fallen off my chair laughing with them, become livid with anger at these people, but I had not before seen their faces. I found this digital watering hole for information-age hunters and gatherers the same way most people find such places -- I was lonely, hungry for intellectual and emotional companionship, although I didn't know it. While many commuters dream of working at home, telecommuting, I happen to know what it's like to work that way. I never could stand to commute or even get out of my pajamas if I didn't want to, so I've always worked at home. It has its advantages and its disadvantages. Others like myself also have been drawn into the online world because they shared with me the occupational hazard of the self-employed, home-based symbolic analyst of the 1990s -- isolation. The kind of people that Robert Reich, call "symbolic analysts" are natural matches for online communities: programmers, writers, freelance artists and designers, independent radio and television producers, editors, researchers, librarians. People who know what to do with symbols, abstractions, and representations, but who sometimes find themselves spending more time with keyboards and screens than human companions. I've learned that virtual communities are very much like other communities in some ways, deceptively so to those who assume that people who communicate via words on a screen are in some way aberrant in their communication skills and human needs. And I've learned that virtual communities are very much not like communities in some other ways, deceptively so to those who assume that people who communicate via words on a screen necessarily share the same level of commitment to each other in real life as more traditional communities. Communities can emerge from and exist within computer-linked groups, but that technical linkage of electronic personae is not sufficient to create a community. Social Contracts, Reciprocity, and Gift Economies in Cyberspace The network of communications that constitutes a virtual community can include the exchange of information as a kind of commodity, and the economic implications of this phenomenon are significant; the ultimate social potential of the network, however, lies not solely in its utility as an information market, but in the individual and group relationships that can happen over time. When such a group accumulates a sufficient number of friendships and rivalries, and witnesses the births, marriages, and deaths that bond any other kind of community, it takes on a definite and profound sense of place in people's minds. Virtual communities usually have a geographically local focus, and often have a connection to a much wider domain. The local focus of my virtual community, the WELL, is the San Francisco Bay Area; the wider locus consists of hundreds of thousands of other sites around the world, and millions of other communitarians, linked via exchanges of messages into a meta-community known as "the net." The existence of computer-linked communities was predicted twenty years ago by J.C.R. Licklider and Robert Taylor, who as research directors for the Department of Defense, set in motion the research that resulted in the creation of the first such community, the ARPAnet: "What will on-line interactive communities be like?" Licklider and Taylor wrote, in 1968: "In most fields they will consist of geographically separated members, sometimes grouped in small clusters and sometimes working individually. They will be communities not of common location, but of common interest..." My friends and I sometimes believe we are part of the future that Licklider dreamed about, and we often can attest to the truth of his prediction that "life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity." I still believe that, but I also know that life also has turned out to be unhappy at times, intensely so in some circumstances, because of words on a screen. Events in cyberspace can have concrete effects in real life, of both the pleasant and less pleasant varieties. Participating in a virtual community has not solved all of life's problems for me, but it has served as an aid, a comfort and an inspiration at times; at other times, it has been like an endless, ugly, long-simmering family brawl. I've changed my mind about a lot of aspects of the WELL over the years, but the "sense of place" is still as strong as ever. As Ray Oldenburg revealed in "The Great Good Place," there are three essential places in every person's life: the place they live, the place they work, and the place they gather for conviviality. Although the casual conversation that takes place in cafes, beauty shops, pubs, town squares is universally considered to be trivial, "idle talk," Oldenburg makes the case that such places are where communities can arise and hold together. When the automobile-centric, suburban, high- rise, fast food, shopping mall way of life eliminated many of these "third places," the social fabric of existing communities shredded. It might not be the same kind of place that Oldenburg had in mind, but so many of his descriptions of "third places" could also describe the WELL. The feeling of logging into the WELL for just a minute or two, dozens of times a day is very similar to the feeling of peeking into the cafe, the pub, the common room, to see who's there, and whether you want to stay around for a chat. Indeed, in all the hundreds of thousands of computer systems around the world that use the UNIX operating system, as does the WELL, the most widely used command is the one that shows you who is online. Another widely used command is the one that shows you a particular user's biography. I visit the WELL both for the sheer pleasure of communicating with my newfound friends, and for its value as a practical instrument forgathering information on subjects that are of momentary or enduring importance, from child care to neuroscience, technical questions on telecommunications to arguments on philosophical, political, or spiritual subjects. It's a bit like a neighborhood pub or coffee shop. It's a little like a salon, where I can participate in a hundred ongoing conversations with people who don't care what I look like or sound like, but who do care how I think and communicate. There are seminars and word fights in different corners. And it's all a little like a groupmind, where questions are answered, support is given, inspiration is provided, by people I may have never heard from before, and whom I may never meet face to face. Because we cannot see one another, we are unable to form prejudices about others before we read what they have to say: Race, gender, age, national origin and physical appearance are not apparent unless a person wants to make such characteristics public. People who are thoughtful but who are not quick to formulate a reply often do better in CMC than face to face or over the telephone. People whose physical handicaps make it difficult to form new friendships find that virtual communities treat them as they always wanted to be treated -- as thinkers and transmitters of ideas and feeling beings, not carnal vessels with a certain appearance and way of walking and talking (or not walking and not talking). Don't mistake this filtration of appearances for dehumanization: Words on a screen are quite capable of moving one to laughter or tears, of evoking anger or compassion, of creating a community from a collection of strangers. From my informal research into virtual communities around the world, I have found that enthusiastic members of virtual communities in Japan, England, and the US agree that "increasing the diversity of their circle of friends" was one of the most important advantages of computer conferencing. CMC is a way to meet people, whether or not you feel the need to affiliate with them on a community level, but the way you meet them has an interesting twist: In traditional kinds of communities, we are accustomed to meeting people, then getting to know them; in virtual communities, you can get to know people and then choose to meet them. In some cases, you can get to know people who you might never meet on the physical plane. How does anybody find friends? In the traditional community, we search through our pool of neighbors and professional colleagues, of acquaintances and acquaintances of acquaintances, in order to find people who share our values and interests. We then exchange information about one another, disclose and discuss our mutual interests, and sometimes we become friends. In a virtual community we can go directly to the place where our favorite subjects are being discussed, then get acquainted with those who share our passions, or who use words in a way we find attractive. In this sense, the topic is the address: You can't simply pick up a phone and ask to be connected with someone who wants to talk about Islamic art or California wine, or someone with a three year old daughter or a 30 year old Hudson; you can, however, join a computer conference on any of those topics, then open a public or private correspondence with the previously-unknown people you find in that conference. You will find that your chances of making friends are magnified by orders of magnitude over the old methods of finding a peer group. You can be fooled about people in cyberspace, behind the cloak of words. But that can be said about telephones or face to face communications, as well; computer-mediated communications provide new ways to fool people, and the most obvious identity-swindles will die out only when enough people learn to use the medium critically. Sara Kiesler noted that the word "phony" is an artifact of the early years of the telephone, when media-naive people were conned by slick talkers in ways that wouldn't deceive an eight-year old with a cellular phone today. There is both an intellectual and an emotional component to CMC. Since so many members of virtual communities are the kind of knowledge-based professionals whose professional standing can be enhanced by what they know, virtual communities can be practical, cold-blooded instruments. Virtual communities can help their members cope with information overload. The problem with the information age, especially for students and knowledge workers who spend their time immersed in the info-flow, is that there is too much information available and no effective filters for sifting the key data that are useful and interesting to us as individuals. Programmers are trying to design better and better "software agents" that can seek and sift, filter and find, and save us from the awful feeling one gets when it turns out that the specific knowledge one needs is buried in 15,000 pages of related information. The first software agents are now becoming available (e.g., WAIS, Rosebud), but we already have far more sophisticated, if informal, social contracts among groups of people that allow us to act as software agents for one another. If, in my wanderings through information space, I come across items that don't interest me but which I know one of my worldwide loose-knit affinity group of online friends would appreciate, I send the appropriate friend a pointer, or simply forward the entire text (one of the new powers of CMC is the ability to publish and converse with the same medium). In some cases, I can put the information in exactly the right place for 10,000 people I don't know, but who are intensely interested in that specific topic, to find it when they need it. And sometimes, 10,000 people I don't know do the same thing for me. This unwritten, unspoken social contract, a blend of strong-tie and weak-tie relationships among people who have a mixture of motives, requires one to give something, and enables one to receive something. I have to keep my friends in mind and send them pointers instead of throwing my informational discards into the virtual scrap-heap. It doesn't take a great deal of energy to do that, since I have to sift that information anyway in order to find the knowledge I seek for my own purposes; it takes two keystrokes to delete the information, three keystrokes to forward it to someone else. And with scores of other people who have an eye out for my interests while they explore sectors of the information space that I normally wouldn't frequent, I find that the help I receive far outweighs the energy I expend helping others: A marriage of altruism and self-interest. The first time I learned about that particular cyberspace power was early in the history of the WELL, when I was invited to join a panel of experts who advise the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). The subject of the assessment was "Communication Systems for an Information Age." I'm not an expert in telecommunication technology or policy, but I do know where to find a group of such experts, and how to get them to tell me what they know. Before I went to Washington for my first panel meeting, I opened a conference in the WELL and invited assorted information-freaks, technophiles, and communication experts to help me come up with something to say. An amazing collection of minds flocked to that topic, and some of them created whole new communities when they collided. By the time I sat down with the captains of industry, government advisers, and academic experts at the panel table, I had over 200 pages of expert advice from my own panel. I wouldn't have been able to integrate that much knowledge of my subject in an entire academic or industrial career, and it only took me (and my virtual community) a few minutes a day for six weeks. I have found the WELL to be an outright magical resource, professionally. An editor or producer or client can call and ask me if I know much about the Constitution, or fiber optics, or intellectual property. "Let me get back to you in twenty minutes," I say, reaching for the modem. In terms of the way I learned to use the WELL to get the right piece of information at the right time, I'd say that the hours I've spent putting information into the WELL turned out to be the most lucrative professional investments I've ever made. The same strategy of nurturing and making use of loose information- sharing affiliations across the net can be applied to an infinite domain of problem areas, from literary criticism to software evaluation. It's a neat way for a sufficiently large, sufficiently diverse group of people to multiply their individual degree of expertise, and I think it could be done even if the people aren't involved in a community other than their company or their research specialty. I think it works better when the community's conceptual model of itself is more like barn-raising than horse-trading, though. Reciprocity is a key element of any market-based culture, but the arrangement I'm describing feels to me more like a kind of gift economy where people do things for one another out of a spirit of building something between them, rather than a spreadsheet-calculated quid pro quo. When that spirit exists, everybody gets a little extra something, a little sparkle, from their more practical transactions; different kinds of things become possible when this mindset pervades. Conversely, people who have valuable things to add to the mix tend to keep their heads down and their ideas to themselves when a mercenary or hostile zeitgeist dominates an online community. I think one key difference between straightforward workaday reciprocity is that in the virtual community I know best, one valuable currency is knowledge, elegantly presented. Wit and use of language are rewarded in this medium, which is biased toward those who learn how to manipulate attention and emotion with the written word. Sometimes, you give one person more information than you would give another person in response to the same query, simply because you recognize one of them to be more generous or funny or to-the-point or agreeable to your political convictions than the other one. If you give useful information freely, without demanding tightly- coupled reciprocity, your requests for information are met more swiftly, in greater detail, than they would have been otherwise. The person you help might never be in a position to help you, but someone else might be. That's why it is hard to distinguish idle talk from serious context-setting. In a virtual community, idle talk is context- setting. Idle talk is where people learn what kind of person you are, why you should be trusted or mistrusted, what interests you. An agora is more than the site of transactions; it is also a place where people meet and size up one another. A market depends on the quality of knowledge held by the participants, the buyers and sellers, about price and availability and a thousand other things that influence business; a market that has a forum for informal and back-channel communications is a better-informed market. The London Stock Exchange grew out of the informal transactions in a coffee-house; when it became the London International Stock Exchange a few years ago, and abolished the trading-room floor, the enterprise lost something vital in the transition from an old room where all the old boys met and cut their deals to the screens of thousands of workstations scattered around the world. The context of the informal community of knowledge sharers grew to include years of both professional and personal relationships. It is not news that the right network of people can serve as an inquiry research system: You throw out the question, and somebody on the net knows the answer. You can make a game out of it, where you gain symbolic prestige among your virtual peers by knowing the answer. And you can make a game out of it among a group of people who have dropped out of their orthodox professional lives, where some of them sell these information services for exorbitant rates, in order to participate voluntarily in the virtual community game. When the WELL was young and growing more slowly than it is now, such knowledge-potlatching had a kind of naively enthusiastic energy. When you extend the conversation -- several dozen different characters, well-known to one another from four or five years of virtual hanging- out, several hours a day -- it gets richer, but not necessarily "happier." Virtual communities have several drawbacks in comparison to face-to- face communication, disadvantages that must be kept in mind if you are to make use of the power of these computer-mediated discussion groups. The filtration factor that prevents one from knowing the race or age of another participant also prevents people from communicating the facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice that constitute the inaudible but vital component of most face to face communications. Irony, sarcasm, compassion, and other subtle but all-important nuances that aren't conveyed in words alone are lost when all you can see of a person are words on a screen. It's amazing how the ambiguity of words in the absence of body language inevitably leads to online misunderstandings. And since the physical absence of other people also seems to loosen some of the social bonds that prevent people from insulting one another in person, misunderstandings can grow into truly nasty stuff before anybody has a chance to untangle the original miscommunication. Heated diatribes and interpersonal incivility that wouldn't crop up often in face to face or even telephone discourse seem to appear with relative frequency in computer conferences. The only presently available antidote to this flaw of CMC as a human communication medium is widespread knowledge of this flaw -- aka "netiquette." Online civility and how to deal with breaches of it is a topic unto itself, and has been much-argued on the WELL. Degrees of outright incivility constitute entire universes such as alt.flame, the Usenet newsgroup where people go specifically to spend their days hurling vile imprecations at one another. I am beginning to suspect that the most powerful and effective defense an online community has in the face of those who are bent on disruption might be norms and agreements about withdrawing attention from those who can't abide by even loose rules of verbal behavior. "If you continue doing that," I remember someone saying to a particularly persistent would-be disrupter, "we will stop paying attention to you." This is technically easy to do on Usenet, where putting the name of a person or topic header in a "kill file" (aka "bozo filter") means you will never see future contributions from that person or about that topic. You can simply choose to not see any postings from Rich Rosen, or that feature the word "abortion" in the title. A society in which people can remove one another, or even entire topics of discussion, from visibility. The WELL does not have a bozo filter, although the need for one is a topic of frequent discussion. Who Is The WELL? One way to know what the WELL is like is to know something about the kind of people who use it. It has roots in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in two separate cultural revolutions that took place there in past decades. The Whole Earth Catalog originally emerged from the counterculture as Stewart Brand's way of providing access to tools and ideas to all the communes who were exploring alternate ways of life in the forests of Mendocino or the high deserts outside Santa Fe. The Whole Earth Catalogs and the magazines they spawned, Co-Evolution Quarterly and Whole Earth Review, have outlived the counterculture itself, since they are still alive and raising hell after nearly 25 years. For many years, the people who have been exploring alternatives and are open to ideas that you don't find in the mass media have found themselves in cities instead of rural communes, where their need for new tools and ideas didn't go away. The Whole Earth Catalog crew received a large advance in the mid-1980s to produce an updated version, a project involving many geographically-separated authors and editors, many of whom were using computers. They bought a minicomputer and the license to Picospan, a computer conferencing program, leased an office next to the magazine's office, leased incoming telephone lines, set up modems, and the WELL was born in 1985. The idea from the beginning was that the founders weren't sure what the WELL would become, but they would provide tools for people to build it into something useful. It was consciously a cultural experiment, and the business was designed to succeed or fail on the basis of the results of the experiment. The person Stewart Brand chose to be the WELL's first director -- technician, manager, innkeeper, and bouncer -- was Matthew McClure, not-coincidentally a computer-savvy veteran of The Farm, one of the most successful of the communes that started in the sixties. Brand and McClure started a low- rules, high-tone discussion, where savvy networkers, futurists, misfits who had learned how to make our outsiderness work for us, could take the technology of CMC to its cultural limits. The Whole Earth network -- the granola-eating utopians, the solar- power enthusiasts, serious ecologists and the space-station crowd, immortalists, Biospherians, environmentalists, social activists -- was part of the core population from the beginning. But there were a couple of other key elements. One was the subculture that happened ten years after the counterculture era -- the personal computer revolution. Personal computers and the PC industry were created by young iconoclasts who wanted to have whizzy tools and change the world. Whole Earth had honored them, including the outlaws among them, with the early Hacker's Conferences. The young computer wizards, and the grizzled old hands who were still messing with mainframes, showed up early at the WELL because the guts of the system itself -- the UNIX operating system and "C" language programming code -- were available for tinkering by responsible craftsmen. A third cultural element that made up the initial mix of the WELL, which has drifted from its counterculture origins in many ways, were the deadheads. Books and theses have been written about the subculture that have grown up around the band, the Grateful Dead. The deadheads have a strong feeling of community, but they can only manifest it en masse when the band has concerts. They were a community looking for a place to happen when several technology-savvy deadheads started a "Grateful Dead Conference" on the WELL. GD was so phenomenally successful that for the first several years, deadheads were by far the single largest source of income for the enterprise. Along with the other elements came the first marathon swimmers in the new currents of the information streams, the futurists and writers and journalists. The New York Times, Business Week, the San Francisco Chronicle, Time, Rolling Stone, Byte, the Wall Street Journal all have journalists that I know personally who drop into the WELL as a listening post. People in Silicon Valley lurk to hear loose talk among the pros. Journalists tend to attract other journalists, and the purpose of journalists is to attract everybody else: most people have to use an old medium to hear news about the arrival of a new medium. Things changed, both rapidly and slowly, in the WELL. There were about 600 members of the WELL when I joined, in the summer of 1985. It seemed that then, as now, the usual ten percent of the members did 80% of the talking. Now there are about 6000 people, with a net gain of about a hundred a month. There do seem to be more women than other parts of cyberspace. Most of the people I meet seem to be white or Asian; African-Americans aren't missing, but they aren't conspicuous or even visible. If you can fake it, gender and age are invisible, too. I'd guess the WELL consists of about 80% men, 20% women. I don't know whether formal demographics would be the kind of thing that most WELL users would want to contribute to. It's certainly something we'd discuss, argue, debate, joke about. One important social rule was built into Picospan, the software that the WELL lives inside: Nobody is anonymous. Everybody is required to attach their real "userid" to their postings. It is possible to use pseudonyms to create alternate identities, or to carry metamessages, but the pseudonyms are always linked in every posting to the real userid. So individual personae -- whether or not they correspond closely to the real person who owns the account -- are responsible for the words they post. In fact, the first several years, the screen that you saw when you reached the WELL said "You own your own words." Stewart Brand, the WELL's co-founder likes epigrams: "Whole Earth," "Information wants to be free." "You own your own words." Like the best epigrams, "You own your own words" is open to multiple interpretations. The matter of responsibility and ownership of words is one of the topics WELLbeings argue about endlessly, so much that the phrase has been abbreviated to "YOYOW," As in, "Oh no, another YOYOW debate." Who are the WELL members, and what do they talk about? I can tell you about the individuals I have come to know over six years, but the WELL has long since been something larger than the sum of everybody's friends. The characteristics of the pool of people who tune into this electronic listening post, whether or not they every post a word in public, is a strong determinant of the flavor of the "place." There's a cross-sectional feeling of "who are we?" that transcends the intersecting and non-intersecting rings of friends and acquaintances each individual develops. My Neighborhood On The WELL Every CMC system gives users tools for creating their own sense of place, by customizing the way they navigate through the database of conferences, topics, and responses. A conference or newsgroup is like a place you go. If you go to several different places in a fixed order, it seems to reinforce the feeling of place by creating a customized neighborhood that is also shared by others. You see some of the same users in different parts of the same neighborhood. Some faces, you see only in one context -- the parents conference, the Grateful Dead tours conference, the politics or sex conference. My home neighborhood on the WELL is reflected in my ".cflist," the file that records my preferences about the order of conferences I visit. It is always possible to go to any conference with a command, but with a .cflist you structure your online time by going from conference to specified conference at regular intervals, reading and perhaps responding in several ongoing threads in several different places. That's the part of the art of discourse where I have found that the computer adds value to the intellectual activity of discussing formally distinct subjects asynchronously, from different parts of the world, over extending periods, by enabling groups to structure conversations by topic, over time. My .cflist starts, for sentimental reasons, with the Mind conference, the first one I hosted on the WELL, since 1985. I've changed my .cflist hundreds of times over the years, to add or delete conferences from my regular neighborhood, but I've always kept Mind in the lede. The entry banner screen for the Mind conference used to display to each user the exact phase of the moon in numbers and ASCII graphics every time they logged in to the conference. But the volunteer programmer who had created the "phoon" program had decided to withdraw it, years later, in a dispute with WELL management. There is often a technological fix to a social problem within this particular universe. Because the WELL seems to be an intersection of many different cultures, there have been many experiments with software tools to ameliorate problems that seemed to crop up between people, whether because of the nature of the medium or the nature of the people. A frighteningly expensive pool of talent was donated by volunteer programmers to create tools and even weapons for WELL users to deal with each other. People keep giving things to the WELL, and taking them away. Offline readers and online tools by volunteer programmers gave others increased power to communicate. The News conference is what's next. This is the commons, the place where the most people visit the most often, where the most outrageous off-topic proliferation is least pernicious, where the important announcements about the system or social events or major disputes or new conferences are announced. When an earthquake or fire happens, News is where you want to go. Immediately after the 1989 earthquake and during the Oakland fire of 1991, the WELL was a place to check the damage to the local geographic community, lend help to those who need it, and get first-hand reports. During Tienamen square, the Gulf War, the Soviet Coup, the WELL was a media-funnel, with snippets of email from Tel-Aviv and entire newsgroups fed by fax machines in China, erupting in News conference topics that grew into fast-moving conferences of their own. During any major crisis in the real world, the routine at our house is to turn on CNN and log into the WELL. After News is Hosts, where the hottest stuff usually happens. The hosts community is a story in itself. The success of the WELL in its first five years, all would agree, rested heavily on the efforts of the conference hosts -- online characters who had created the character of the first neighborhoods and kept the juice flowing between one another all over the WELL, but most pointedly in the Hosts conference. Some spicy reading in the Archives conference originated from old hosts' disputes - and substantial arguments about the implications of CMC for civil rights, intellectual property, censorship, by a lot of people who know what they are talking about, mixed liberally with a lot of other people who don't know what they are talking about, but love to talk anyway, via keyboard and screen, for years on end. In this virtual place, the pillars of the community and the worst offenders of public sensibilities are in the same group -- the hosts. At their best and their worst, this ten percent of the online population put out the words that the other ninety percent keep paying to read. Like good hosts at any social gathering, they make newcomers welcome, keep the conversation flowing, mediate disputes, clean up messes, and throw out miscreants, if need be. A WELL host is part salon keeper, part saloon keeper, part talk-show host, part publisher. The only power to censor or to ban a user is the hosts' power. Policy varies from host to host, and that's the only policy. The only justice for those who misuse that power is the forced participation in weeks of debilitating and vituperative post-mortem. The hosts community is part long-running soap opera, part town meeting, bar-room brawl, anarchic debating society, creative groupmind, bloody arena, union hall, playpen, encounter group. The Hosts conference is extremely general, from technical questions to personal attacks. The Policy conference is supposed to be restricted to matters of what WELL policy is, or ought to be. The part-delusion, part-accurate perception that the hosts and other users have strong influence over WELL policy is part of what feeds debate here, and a strong element in the libertarian reputation of the stereotypical WELLite. After fighting my way through a day's or hour's worth of the Hot New Dispute in News, Hosts, and Policy, I check on the conferences I host -- Info, Virtual Communities, Virtual Reality. After that my .cflist directs me, at the press of the return key, to the first new topic or response in the Parenting, Writers', Grateful Dead tours, Telecommunication, Macintosh, Weird, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Whole Earth, Books, Media, Men on the WELL, Miscellaneous, and Unclear conferences. The social dynamics of the WELL spawn new conferences in response to different kinds of pressures. Whenever a hot interpersonal or doctrinal issue breaks out, for example, people want to stage the brawl or make a dramatic farewell speech or shocking disclosure or serious accusation in the most heavily-visited area of the WELL, which is usually the place that others want to be a Commons -- a place where people from different sub-communities can come to find out what is going on around the WELL, outside the WELL, where they can pose questions to the committee of the whole. When too many discussions of what the WELL's official policy ought to be, about censorship or intellectual property or the way people treat each other, break out, they tended to clutter the place people went to get a quick sense of what is happening outside their neighborhoods. So the Policy conference was born. But then the WELL grew larger and it wasn't just policy but governance and social issues like political correctness or the right of users to determine the social rules of the system. Several years and six thousand more users after the fission of the News and Policy conferences, another conference split off News -- "MetaWELL," a conference was created strictly to discussions about the WELL itself, it nature, its situation (often dire), its future. Grabbing attention in the Commons is a powerful act. Some people seem drawn to performing there; others burst out there in acts of desperation, after one history of frustration or another. Dealing with people who are so consistently off-topic or apparently deeply grooved into incoherence, long-windedness, scatology, is one of the events that challenges a community to decide what its values really are, or ought to be. Something is happening here. I'm not sure anybody understands it yet. I know that the WELL and the net is an important part of my life and I have to decide for myself whether this is a new way to make genuine commitments to other human beings, or a silicon-induced illusion of community. I urge others to help pursue that question in a variety of ways, while we have the time. The political dimensions of CMC might lead to situations that would pre-empt questions of other social effects; responses to the need for understanding the power- relationships inherent in CMC are well represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others. We need to learn a lot more, very quickly, about what kind of place our minds are homesteading. The future of virtual communities is connected to the future of everything else, starting with the most precious thing people have to gain or lose -- political freedom. The part played by communication technologies in the disintegration of communism, the way broadcast television pre-empted the American electoral process, the power of fax and CMC networks during times of political repression like Tienamen Square and the Soviet Coup attempt, the power of citizen electronic journalism, the power-maneuvering of law enforcement and intelligence agencies to restrict rights of citizen access and expression in cyberspace, all point to the future of CMC as a close correlate of future political scenarios. More important than civilizing cyberspace is ensuring its freedom as a citizen-to-citizen communication and publication medium; laws that infringe equity of access to and freedom of expression in cyberspace could transform today's populist empowerment into yet another instrument of manipulation. Will "electronic democracy" be an accurate description of political empowerment that grows out of the screen of a computer? Or will it become a brilliant piece of disinfotainment, another means of manipulating emotions and manufacturing public opinion in the service of power. Who controls what kinds of information is communicated in the international networks where virtual communities live? Who censors, and what is censored? Who safeguards the privacy of individuals in the face of technologies that make it possible to amass and retrieve detailed personal information about every member of a large population? The answers to these political questions might make moot any more abstract questions about cultures in cyberspace. Democracy itself depends on the relatively free flow of communications. The following words by James Madison are carved in marble at the United States Library of Congress: "A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." It is time for people to arm themselves with power about the future of CMC technology. Who controls the market for relationships? Will the world's increasingly interlinked, increasingly powerful, decreasingly costly communications infrastructure be controlled by a small number of very large companies? Will cyberspace be privatized and parceled out to those who can afford to buy into the auction? If political forces do not seize the high ground and end today's freewheeling exchange of ideas, it is still possible for a more benevolent form of economic control to stunt the evolution of virtual communities, if a small number of companies gain the power to put up toll-roads in the information networks, and smaller companies are not able to compete with them. Or will there be an open market, in which newcomers like Apple or Microsoft can become industry leaders? The playing field in the global telecommunications industry will never be level, but the degree of individual freedom available through telecommunication technologies in the future may depend upon whether the market for goods and services in cyberspace remains open for new companies to create new uses for CMC. I present these observations as a set of questions, not as answers. I believe that we need to try to understand the nature of CMC, cyberspace, and virtual communities in every important context -- politically, economically, socially , culturally, cognitively. Each different perspective reveals something that the other perspectives do not reveal. Each different discipline fails to see something that another discipline sees very well. We need to think as teams here, across boundaries of academic discipline, industrial affiliation, nation, to understand, and thus perhaps regain control of, the way human communities are being transformed by communication technologies. We can't do this solely as dispassionate observers, although there is certainly a huge need for the detached assessment of social science. But community is a matter of the heart and the gut as well as the head. Some of the most important learning will always have to be done by jumping into one corner or another of cyberspace, living there, and getting up to your elbows in the problems that virtual communities face. * * * * * [HOWARD RHEINGOLD is the author of //The Virtual Community//, //Virtual Reality//, //Tools for Thought//, and other books. He is also the editor of the Millenium Whole Earth Catalog (forthcoming) and is a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner. Contact: hlr@well.sf.ca.us] ======================================================================= {9} ARTICLE ======================================================================= (Copyright 1992, Howard H. Frederick) COMPUTER NETWORKS AND THE EMERGENCE OF GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY: The Case of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) by Howard H. Frederick, Ph.D.<1> (Paper Presented at the Annual Conference of the Peace Studies Association, Boulder, CO, February 28, 1992 Workshop on "How to Utilize Communications Networks for Peace Studies") WHEN IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS it becomes possible to dissolve the communication frontiers that have divided peoples one from another and to assume among the Powers of the Earth the interdependent and balanced communication relations to which the Development of Technology has entitled them, WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, that all human communicators are created equally, endowed with certain Unalienable Rights, among them the right to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. The Right to Communicate includes the right to be informed and well as to inform, the right to reply as well as to listen, the right to be addressed as well as to speak and the right for communication resources to satisfy human social, economic and cultural needs. THAT TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS, a global computer communications network has now arisen benefiting the Common Good of Humankind by loosing the bonds of the marketplace and the strictures of government on the media of communications and allowing that part of human endeavor known as global civil society to communicate outside the barriers imposed by commercial or governmental interests. * * * * * These are possible opening lines of what might be called a Charter of Communication Interdependence of the global nongovernmental movements for peace, human rights and environmental preservation. The growth of such global interdependent communication relations has been greatly accelerated by the advent of decentralizing communication technologies such as computer networking. Global civil society as represented by the "NGO Movement" (nongovernmental organizations) now represents a force in international relations, one that circumvents hegemony of markets and of governments. This paper outlines the concept of global civil society and the NGO Movement, describes the obstacles that they face from governments and transnational corporations, and sketches the emergence of the Association for Progressive Communications network as an illustration of this worldwide phenomenon. * * * * * What we call "community" used to be limited to face-to-face dialogue among people in the same physical space, a dialogue that reflected mutual concerns and a common culture. For thousands of years, people had little need for long-distance communication because they lived very close to one another. The medieval peasant's entire life was spent within a radius of no more twenty-five miles from the place of birth. Even at the beginning of our century, the average person still lived in the countryside and knew of the world only through travelers' tales. Today, of course, communications technologies have woven parts of the world together into an electronic web. No longer is community or dialogue restricted to a geographical place. With the advent of the fax machine, telephones, international publications, and computers, personal and professional relationships can be maintained irrespective of time and place. Communication relationships are no longer restricted to place, but are distributed through space. Today we are all members of many global "non-place" communities. In the last decade there has emerged a new kind of global community, one that has increasingly become a force in international relations. We speak of the emergence of a global civil society, that part of our collective lives that is neither market nor government but is so often inundated by them. Still somewhat inarticulate and flexing its muscles, global civil society is best represented in the global "NGO Movement," nongovernmental organizations and citizens advocacy groups uniting to fight planetary problems whose scale confound local or even national solutions. Previously isolated from one another, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are flexing their muscles at the United Nations and other world forums as their power and capacity to communicate increase. The concept of civil society arose with John Locke, the English philosopher and political theorist. It implied a defense of human society at the national level against the power of the state and the inequalities of the marketplace. For Locke, civil society was that part of civilization -- from the family and the church to cultural life and education -- that was outside of the control of government or market but was increasingly marginalized by them. Locke saw the importance of social movements to protect the public sphere from these commercial and governmental interests. From the industrial age to the present, mercantilist and power- political interests pushed civil society to the edge. In most countries, civil society even lacked its own channels of media communication. It was speechless and powerless, isolated behind the artifice of national boundaries, rarely able to reach out and gain strength in contact with counterparts around the world. What we now call the "NGO Movement" began in the middle of the last century with a trickle of organizations and has now become a flood of activity. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) today encompass private citizens and national interest groups from all spheres of human endeavor. Their huge increase in number and power is due in no small measure to the development of globe-girdling communications technologies.<2> As Dutch social theorist Cees J. Hamelink has written, we are seeing a new phenomenon emerging on the world scene -- global civil society, best articulated by the NGO movement.<3> New communications technologies now facilitate communication among and between the world's national civil societies, especially within the fields of human rights, consumer protection, peace, gender equality, racial justice, and environmental protection. From Earth Summit to GATT, from the United Nations General Assembly to the Commission on Human Rights, NGOs have become the most important embodiment of this new force in international relations. The development of communications technologies has vastly transformed the capacity of global civil society to build coalitions and networks. In times past, communication transaction clusters formed among nation- states, colonial empires, regional economies and alliances -- for example, medieval Europe, the Arab world, China and Japan, West African kingdoms, the Caribbean slave and sugar economies. Today new and equally powerful forces have emerged on the world stage -- the rain forest protection movement, the human rights movement, the campaign against the arms trade, alternative news agencies, and planetary computer networks. * * * * * The continued growth and influence of global civil society face two fundamental problems: increasing monopolization of global information and communication by transnational corporations; and the increasing disparities between the world's info-rich and info-poor populations. Global computer networking makes an electronic "end-run" around the first problem and provides an appropriate technological solution to overcome the second. Hamelink observed that the very powers that obstructed civil society at the national level -- markets and governments -- also controlled most of the communication flows at the global level. Government monopolies still control a huge share of the world's air waves and telecommunications flows. Even worse, a handful of immense corporations now dominate the world's mass media. If present trends continue, Bagdikian predicted, by the turn of the century "five to ten corporate giants will control most of the world's important newspapers, magazines, books, broadcast stations, movies, recordings and videocassettes."<4> Telecommunications infrastructures and data networks must also be included in this gloomy account. Today's "lords of the global village" are huge corporations that "exert a homogenizing power over ideas, culture and commerce that affects populations larger than any in history. Neither Caesar nor Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt nor any Pope, has commanded as much power to shape the information on which so many people depend to make decisions about everything from whom to vote for to what to eat."<5> Why is this happening? The most fundamental reason is that fully integrated corporate control of media production and dissemination reaps vast profits and creates huge corporate empires. Already more than two-thirds of the U.S. work force is now engaged in information- related jobs.<6> Almost half the Gross National Product of the 14 most industrialized countries, and one-quarter of all international trade, comes from services.<7> Telecommunications services grew by 800 percent worldwide in the 1980s. According to Unesco, the total world information and communication economy in 1986 was $1,185 billion, about 8 to 9 percent of total world output, of which $515 billion was in the United States.<8> Growth in this sector is accelerating and it is no surprise that a few large corporations now predominate in the world's information flow. While there are more than one hundred news agencies around the world, only five -- Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Agence France Presse, and TASS -- control about ninety-six percent of the world's news flows.<9> Such corporations as Sears, IBM, H&R Block, and Lockheed control the bulk of the videotex information markets. In addition to transnational control of information, global civil society and the NGO movements confront the increasing gap between the world's info-rich and info-poor populations. In virtually every medium, the disparities are dramatic. Ninety-five percent of all computers are in the developed countries. While developing countries have three-quarters the world's population, they can manage only thirty percent of the world's newspaper output. About sixty-five percent of the world's population experiences an acute book shortage. Readers of the New York Times consume more newsprint each Sunday than the average African does in one year. The only Thi