The first scheduled DMCE experience for the group was about four weeks into the semester on September 29th (see Appendix @@ for an overview and synopsis of all face-to-face and DMCE sessions during the semester). On this occasion it was only Tone, Sigrun and myself who took part. Bjørn could not take part on this occasion due to a faculty meeting, but since he already had some DMCE experience - round 24 hours in all - as a MUD-player, this was no great problem for him. Giorgio had at this stage already left for his period of research in Italy, so he could not take part in this particular session either. It was then basically to be a brief working introduction to the most usual communication functions in the DMCE, and to the general social environment at Diversity University. Apart from the relatively limited sub-goal of getting used to communicating in this particular way, and of looking around a bit, we had no more specific agenda for this session, and the general tenor of our activities was relaxed, open-ended and exploratory.
The simplest way to discuss this experience is probably to refer to salient portions of the log transcript from the session as we go along.
Physically speaking we were all still together as a group in Norway, and at the beginning of this first session with we were all in one room, namely our arts faculty Multimedia Lab, but since there were only three machines working there at the time with World Wide Web and/ or text-based interfaces to Diversity University, I had to make do initially with a simple Telnet connection, which after a time gave me so many practical problems that I decided to go upstairs to my office and log in from my own computer there. When I arrived "back" at Diversity University again and began logging what was going on (using a generic recording device object which I had obtained from the Diversity University object library for this purpose and renamed "Sony"), Sigrun and Tone were already discussing a meeting they had planned for the next day so that Tone, who had some experience in this particular area, could give Sigrun some ideas about how to construct her World Wide Web page:
A few explanatory comments with regard to this particular log excerpt might be useful to begin with:
Firstly, a more general comment with regard to translation and the representation of errors across languages: all the excerpts from session logs that are used in this report have been translated by me for the sake of simplicity of use in this context to English from the original Norwegian, whenever this actually was the common language we were using together (some of our other session logs, involve mixed use of several languages, for instance Norwegian, Swedish and English). As far as possible I have tried to maintain typing, spelling or syntactical errors from the original logs across in my translations.
One kind of example of this is in Sigrun 's (signer-pc) two repetitions of her initial utterance at the beginning of the log[17]. This first utterance in Sigrun's original Norwegian format was as follows:
"i morgen passer veldig bra for min del, jeg har forelesning kl.15 s da str hele formiddagen pen til litt interaktivt arbeide"
where the letter 'å' was missing from three words: 'så', 'står' and 'åpen' in the second half of the utterance, which should actually have read as follows:
"i morgen passer veldig bra for min del, jeg har forelesning kl.15 så da står hele formiddagen åpen til litt interaktivt arbeide"
which I have translated as follows:
signer-pc says, "tomorrow suits me just fine, I have a lecture at 3 pm s that leves the whole morning pen for some interactive work"
An example of another kind is to be found in Tone's comment:
tonelys-pc says, "for me this is incredibly interresting as a tool to collect data for my masters project. I want as much material as possible of spontaneous speech, but sinnce this form of communication lies in the borderland between writing and speech, it's perfect for me. An extra advantage is that one does not have to transcribe !"
Where what I have translated as "interresting" in the first line, and "sinnce" in the middle of the second line derive from the original Norwegian words 'interressant' and 'sidden' in the log, which should actually be written as 'interessant' and 'siden', respectively. These are both obviously examples of simple cases of double-keying, something which relatively often occur under conversations in DMCE's, due to the fact that one tends to write as quickly as possible and one generally also avoids correcting so many spelling or keying errors of this kind in order not to fall too far behind the conversation as it develops.
The start date and times that appear on two separate lines above were inserted by the logging program, and there are two insertions after one another at the beginning of the log because I had turned off the recording device before I logged out to change to my office computer, and had asked Tone before I left the lab to go up to my office to turn it on again which she did.
Finally, some explanation is probably necessary as to why Tone and Sigrun are operating with the character names 'tonlys-pc' and 'signer-pc', respectively. Current policy at Diversity University states that teachers who wish to bring groups of students into the environment must first register them with the administration as a group of Virtual Student Player Objects (VSPO's). Personally, I was not very enthusiastic about doing this, since our group was so small, and I believed, too, that these particular students would have been quite capable of managing their own characters if they had been able to obtain these.
Bjørn, Tone and Sigrun logged in initially to Diversity University as "guests", and thereafter they made, assisted by me, an initial application by e-mail from "inside" the DMCE for their own characters. This involved no more than them needing to register their real names and e-mail addresses and providing a short summary statement about why they might need to have a character at Diversity University. However the administation quickly turned their applications down, perhaps primarily because all had honestly mentioned in their summaries that they were students on my course, rather than givng themselves out to be for instance teachers or researchers, as some participants do from time to time.
This was all a bit frustrating and time-wasting for all of us, so avoid further delays at this point I quickly requested and initialized a VSPO group for the course. Something that surprised me a bit in this particular connection was that I was simultaneously advised by the administrator who granted the request that all VSPO names should be "tagged" with my own initials. The rationale behind this policy is apparently that new student users often need help when they are frequenting Diversity University at times outside of group sessions, and the tagging is supposed to make it easier for administrators/ help-providers to recognize them as students, and also to know who to contact as teacher responsible for the group in the case of possible transgressions of the curennt norms for communication and interaction at Diversity University.
Personally I found this all a bit unnecessary and overly bureaucratic, especially in relation to my three students, whom I had got to know quite well by this time, and who I believed would manage very well should they actually decide to visit Diversity University on their own outside of course hours, and who would, I was convinced, have no interest whatsoever in transgressing any kinds of participant norms while they were there. After consultation with Tone, Bjørn and Sigrun we decided we would just accept, for the time being at least, that policy at Diversity was this, and that all the student VSPO's would be tagged with -pc, even though it seemed to them all a bit childish, and we then began to use these VSPO's for our subsequent sessions.
After we had been logged in for a while and our conversation had taken on an easy and relaxed style, we had a visitor from Oslo, namely Karen[18], who was one of the students who had taken part in the previous course I had held in the Fall semester of 1995. After Christmas that year Karen had moved south from Trondheim to Oslo to continue her studies there, but I had continued to encounter her at Diversity University from time to time since then, and had quite recently told her that a new group would be starting the course using Diversity University in the Fall of 1996, and invited her to drop in and visit us some time. I thought it might be interesting for the fresh students to meet someone who had had a bit more experience of Diversity University over time than they did, and for them to get to know someone who was from the same university, and who had actually taken the same course as they were now taking.
We shall go on to look a bit more closely at the first encounter of Karen and the rest of the group below. The most convenient way of doing this seems to be insert contemporaneously my own comments and reflections on the sequence of interactions that go to make up this particular event as they are developing.
This particular sequence began when I received a page from Karen asking if she could join us for a while. Since pages are not visible for other participants, I chose to inform Tone and Sigrun directly of Karen's impending arrival. As can be seen below, she actually arrived before I was finished with my explanation, to be greeted immediately by Tone, followed by myself.
Karen then went on to explain that she was having some trouble with the software that she was using, and that we should expect her to be limited in her communications with us.
karen says, "hi everyone...I'm using telnet now, which is som sh...., so I can't follw everything"
At this point I had briefly had a look at Karen's character description and noticed that it had changed considerably since the previous year when she had taken part in the course, and commented on this, perhaps in the hope that Tone and Sigrun too, would take this cue to find out a bit more about Karen in this way, and that this might possibly enrich the initiationary stage of the encounter. This is something I generally tend to do myself whenever I encounter someone I have never met before in an DMC environment, and in some sense it is a kind of developing norm for these kinds of encounters that participants take a look more or less simultaneously at one another's descriptons. I also took the opportunity of sympathising with her software interface problems, ones similar to which I had experienced myself fairly recently.
It had taken Sigrun a bit longer to formulate her welcome to Karen, but when she did so, this was in a quite compact and effective way, helpfully and co-operatively contextualising the whole present configuration of our group in Trondheim for the distant Karen.
signer-pc says, "hi karen, I'm signer and I'm sitting nw in trondheim together with your previous techer and a fellow student called tonlys"
Karen chose initially to respond to my remark about her personal description, noting that her boyfriend Tom[19], whom she had met initially at Diversity University during the course of the previous year, and whom I too, had heard about from one of the other students in the previous year's group, had taken the initiative to change the description without telling her. I then went on to ask her whether what I had heard from the other students about her meeting Tom at Diversity University were thus true:
Karen chose for the time being to leave my question unanswered, and instead went on to respond to Sigrun's opening move, emphasizing in this connection that the main attraction with Diversity University was for her the social aspect, rather than her having any particular academic pretensions with her involvement there. Tone then went on to take her up on this point:
At this point, Karen decided for the moment to leave Tone's question unanswered, and returned to my question with regard to her "virtual boyfriend" first, confirming that she and Tom had actually met a number of times in real life, and indeed even spent the following summer together, before returning to her own theme of social as opposed to academic activities at Diversity University which Tone had followed up on:
This theme interested both Tone and Sigrun obviously, and the rest of the portion of our conversation in this particular sequence more or less centred round this theme, with a few excursions from Karen's side into the question of the relative functionality of various types of software, which neither Tone nor Sigrun seemed to have had much practical or theoretical background in relation to, nor any special interest in discussing, something which seems clear from their responses, or lack of these, on these kinds of topics below.
At this point I felt that things were moving along well, so I excused myself and actually physically left the lab, and hence also Diversity University for a while to let Tone, Sigrun and Karen chat together on their own, prompting Tone's comment to Karen on my abscence at the beginning of the next section of the log reproduced below. Prior to this I had actually tried to restrict myself to establishing a setting for the general scene of things and facilitating the conversational environment in the group, rather than setting too much of an agenda for what was to go on there, but I felt at this particular stage that, in spite of having this policy, I was still functioning too much of an agenda-setter for the conversation, and I decided that it would be most effective to leave the situation physically for a while and see how things had subsequently developed when I returned. As we can see, it was still the social aspects of participation in the Diversity University environment which seemed to command most attention:
To digress for a moment : the general lack of interest and practical and theoretical bakground relative to interface issues shown by Tone and Sigrun in the excerpts from the log above was probably to some degree also exacerbated by the fact that on this occasion I had decided to organize the introduction to the use of the hard- and software tools we would be using myself, rather than engaging someone from the humanities computer services group to do this for us, as had been done for the previous group in 1995. In my introduction, which actually only lasted about four or five minutes, I had concentrated on merely showing the students exactly which computers were available for use by them in the lab, and how they could find and start up the particular software that they would be using on those they would be using during the course. This was intentionally done out without any deep-going discussions or descriptions of what kind of software this was, or how it actually worked. This seemed to have been an advantage for the present group; most certainly for Bjørn and Tone who already had had some prior experience with the use of computers and who did not really need any kind of special introduction to the technology in a more general sense. For Sigrun, on the other hand, who seemed to lack more basic computer-user skills, this particular approach may in one sense have been rather too minimalistic, and thus less functional, due in part to her prior lack of experience with computers in general, and more specifically with using a keyboard to write quickly. At times she seemed rather handicapped in this situation, where it was necessary to be able to write reasonably quickly on a keyboard in order to communicate in real time. This in turn meant that she often found that she lagged behind a bit in relation to what was going during in the few DMCE sessions that she took part in.
Most of the participants in Karen's group had been more or less at the same level of familiarity as Sigrun with regard to computer use at the beginning of the course the previous year, but they had on the other hand received a considerably longer, much more detailed, and more soft- and hardware oriented, introduction to the technology as it had been presented by our people from the humanities computer services. Having had this more detailed and lengthy introduction turned out to be functional in the sense that several members of the group had learned how to use a computer in relation to some quite basic word-processing, e-mail and World Wide Web user-skills, which obviously would be useful for them in other kinds of contexts in the longer term, but this was, on the other hand, not a main objective for the hypermedia in the humanities course per se. From a more negative point of view, the rather strong focus on explanations of, and group training in how to use a number of rather redundant functions in the various kinds of software presented - rather than, as I had tried to do in my brief introduction for the present group, to focus only on the bare essentials for using the technology to access and communicate in DMCE's - did not however seem to work to the students' advantage, and certainly in Karen's case, since she had, initially at least, seemed confused by having to absorb a large amount of detail; something which is borne out by the logs from the previous years sessions at Diversity University, since she was one of those in the previous group of participants who had spent the most time of all asking what might be referred to as novice computer-user related questions during our first few sessions at Diversity University at the beginning of the semester. In this context, however, it may seem that Karen's persistent strategy of trying to understand how to use properly the systems we were using (sometimes to the extent that she had been chided by other members of the group for using time that could have been used for other things - see Coppock 1996, p.@@), had been a personal success for her in the sense that once she had seen the possible advantages in having access to this means of communication, she had managed to position herself in this respect by working to develop her insight and skills as much as possible before the course was over. The fact that she was more or less the only member of the previous group who continued to visit Diversity University, and to actually become an active member of the community there, after the course was over, tends to support this particular interpetation.
The reference made by Karen below to the students having to use a diskett which they had to use in order to connect to Diversity University reflects a particular computer services policy at that particular time which dictated that certain types of software or program configurations should be kept by individual students on their own diskettes, rather than being left on machines in the computer lab we were then using, which apart from having teaching functions, also doubled as a general student lab for word-processing and various kinds of networking purposes for most of the week.
As I mention in my response to Karen in the transcript above, the Fall 1996 group was in a sense more autonomous than the Fall 1995 group in that we had been able to obtain the use of the humanities Multimedia Lab for this, and our subsequent twice-weekly DMCE sessions during the semester, rather than being dependent on having to use the student lab mentioned above, which was always very much in use both before and after our sessions there, and sometimes in heavy demand to the extent that other students would come and ask to work on the computers that we were not using during our sessions there. The Multimedia Lab on the other hand, which is administered by the department of Applied Linguistics, with technical assistance from the humanities computer services group, has the distinct advantage of maintaining a policy of restricted admission, with use of it being reserved solely for those doctoral students, staff and researchers who can document involvment in projects which are investigating different aspects of the use of new multi- and hypermedia technology in various disciplines, making it a much quieter and more focused place to work. This meant amongst other things that we could leave the configuration files for logging in to Diversity University and Karelia on the computers we were using, and be sure of finding them there where we had left them from week to week.
This first session at Diversity University was also marked by our first meeting with Anatoli, who was later to invite us to his start-up DMCE at Karelia. Since the selections from this section of the log commented on below originally involved exchanges carried out in both Norwegian and English, those which were originally uttered in Norwegian have been translated into English, and these parts italicised, with the exception of a few occasional usages of English words or idioms in some of these utterances which have not been italicised. The rest of the selections from the log have been reproduced as actually recorded at the time. After Anatoli arrives, Karen, who has obviously met him before, probably while spending time together with some other friends of hers at Diversity University, makes it clear that she is not particularly interested in talking to him at the present time, and rather bluntly expresses that she now takes exception to him arriving without "knocking"[20] and requesting to join the group. I on the other hand, was of the opinion that it might be useful and interesting for Tone and Sigrun to actually 'meet' someone from another country during their first DMCE session, so I was inclined to be more liberal and accomodating to interruptions of the agenda than Karen was in this particular case. As it turned out, Tone and Sigrun were actually more interested in getting to know Karen, and continuing their discussions of the various social aspects of "life in the net" on the basis of Karen's experiences and knowledge, which they did after having exchanged a few perfunctory remarks with Anatoli. Having noticed from Anatoli's self-description that he was interested in artificial intelligence and human-computer communication, this formed a starting point for our conversation, which as the portion of the log below shows, merely bifurcated neatly from the one going on in the group and was carried on more or less to the end of the session, in parallell with that carried on by Tone, Sigrun and Karen.
After the piece of humoristic bantering above about, and subsequently with, Anatoli and with Tone's speculations about him being a possible Russian spy, he went on to tell us about his own space, "Russia", at Diversity University, and about his own, new DMCE project at Karelia:
Having exchanged our respective e-mail adresses, Anatoli and I then had established the possiblity of making further contact with one another off-line if we wished, and since the allotted time for our own DMCE session was almost over, we all began to round off our respective conversations:
Some brief reflections may be made at this point on the relative efficacy of communication in this kind of environment. As we can see from the log above, the two conversations that developed after Anatoli had made his appearance quickly began to function more or less in parallell, and seemingly without noteworthy problems for any of the participants. One reason for this can be that the two threads were carried on more or less exclusively in two different languages, Norwegian and English, but it is also of interest in this connection to add that both Sigrun and Tone had very quickly mastered the use of the "to", rather than the more generic "say" command, both of which I had mentioned for them in my brief introduction prior to this session. The "to" command[21], which allows a "speaker" to identify his or her addressee for any given utterance very useful since it clearly separates out to whom the various utterances are adressed in situations where several conversational threads develop and are are going on more or less at the same time. Tone seemed to some extent to be monitoring both conversations, since she actually took part to some degree in both, at least to begin with, while Sigrun seemed mainly content to carry on conversing with Karen. Taken into account that this was the first time they both had used a distributed environment of this kind to communicate, it seems clear that even relative novices can quickly manage to organise their interactions into functional multi-threaded conversations, even when several other actors they do not know unexpectedly appear on the scene in the course of a session.
Of interest too in this context is the fact that, jokingly or not, Karen, Tone and Sigrun quickly formed a kind of mini-alliance against our "intruder", Anatoli, this alliance being reinforced by Karen's initial "scolding" of Anatoli, and her subsequent "blackening of his character" by her referral to his being "well-known for not understanding normal politeness", and having been "warned before":
This alliance developed in spite of my few interspersed well-meant attempts to moderate the tone of our interactions with our Russian visitor to a more accepting one by pointing out that he obviously did not have the possibility of following what was being said about him since the conversational thread above was being carried out in Norwegian. My half-ironic comment about Norwegian functioning as "almost a secret language on the net" did not fall on sympathetic ears either, and neither did Anatoli's own attempt to point out to Karen that he did not understand Norwegian:
Of course, it is difficult to make any "objective" and non-speculative interpretation of the social and interpersonal dynamics of this particular situation without a much wider discussion on many points of finer detail with all those participants involved. On the other hand, in order to have such a discussion, it would seem to be an advantage to have at least one interpretation of the situtation explicated in a reasonably coherent form which then might be able to act as a concrete basis for some further discussions. I shall briefly attempt that here.
One way of interpreting the particular sections of the log referred to above, could be to hypothesise that Karen had obviously appreciated the opportunity that this meeting with two relative novices offered her to recount some central episodes from her personal story related to her own experiences and evaluations of the various social realities associated with MCDE life and community in general to such an extent that the appearance of Anatoli (whom we later came to know as a person with a strong personal agenda of his own) was not perceived as welcome in this particular situation. We have of course here, no firm basis to discern which impressions, above that of someone with a tendency to ignore or gloss over social politeness conventions, as is clearly implied by Karen's description of Anatoli as "well-known for not understanding normal politeness", which Karen herself had formed of him on the basis of previous encounters. Certainly, in the session we are examioning here, Anatoli did not seem to be overly worried by Karen's strict (and possibly humorous) admonition: "you just never learn!!!!! how many times have we all told you that you are supposed to knock!!!", which he seemed to interpret as more a form of harmless banter rather than a serious display of anger, since he merely replied "Sure" to this:
Karen, on the other hand, as mentioned above, seemed determined not to let Anatoli butt in on her conversation with Tone and Sigrun, and was quite content to let him and me get on with our thread while she merely continued the previously started conversation, with the implicit support of Tone and Sigrun, in Norwegian.
This is not really the place to begin any kind of in-depth analysis of how individual and group perceptions of gender and gender roles may actually be correlated with certain kinds of processes of development and change in textual and interactional norm systems more generally speaking.
Nonetheless, I believe that may be appropriate here to note that more generally accepted norms of behaviour that contribute to instantiate and construe normal social cohesion in everyday life may be somewhat in conflict with, or at the very least oriented dynamically away from, the kind of extreme interpersonal openness and spontaneity that DMC environments of this type seem to foster. Since there is an ever-present potential for surprise meetings occurring with previously unknown others from more or less anywhere in the world at almost any time, the various ways in which both individuals and groups of participants intuitively react to such chance meetings will obviously affect the experiential and interpersonal tenor of the emerging social field, and thus whether new arrivals will some to experience a sense of inclusion or exclusion relative to other participants and what they are doing there.
Let us for a moment look at a log excerpt from a conference session at ICDE 95 where several fairly routined DMC environment participants (Donald, Kaisa, Stephanie) are taking part in a session on DMCE's and possible uses in the humanities and where a "stranger", Lapis_Guest, who may or may not be a potential participant in the on-going presentation and discussion, arrives. Here it is "Donald" is chairing the session, and "Stephanie" is about to give a presentation:
Here we can see that both Donald and Stephanie are prepared to take considerable trouble to make the unknown Lapis_Guest feel welcome. They employ various strategies in which to do so, and in doing so, seek to provide the kind of information they deem minimally necessary for Lapis_Guest to quickly find his- or her "feet" in the environment. Donald's suggestion that he or she use the "look" commant to see the description and contents of the conference room will for instance in this case activate the following screen:
This information is actually very useful for Lapis_Guest in this particular context, since it has been obvious from his or her prior queries that s/he has little prior knowledge of how this particular kind of room, which both has conference tables, as well as seats around them for people to "sit" in, actually "functions":
As we can see from the first excerpt from the session log above, Donald replies to Lapis_Guest's second question with By simply passing the responsibility for discovering oneself by for instance reading the room description how things are supposed to work here, back to Lapis_Guest, Donald seems to be trying in his role as moderator to free up, as quickly and effectively as possible, so much of the public discourse space as possible for what he deems to be actually supposed to be going on there. This seems to be happening rather earlier than later which presumably risking to have this space monopolised by too many questions of a more practical nature, such as those initially being asked by Lapis_Guest. Stephanie on the other hand assumes some prior experience on the part of the guest by comparing the present room with other conference rooms at Diversity University, where those sitting at some table or other could only be "heard" by others at the same table.
Donald's elliptical utterance:
Donald says, "tble"
is probably given in direct response to Lapis_guest's question above about where to sit:
Lapis_Guest says, "OK, I'll sit, but where?"
but seems a bit anomalous since it comes after Donald's prior instruction about how to actually sit down:
