From: nbaym@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Nancy Baym)
Subject: ALL: Text of the NY Times article
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1992 21:19:49 GMT


Hi all --

someone on a mailing list someone I know reads scanned the NYT article in
and posted it. I thought some of you might be interested. So for those of
you who didn't see the article that briefly discusses this group, here it is:


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_NEW YORK TIMES_, Tuesday, December 1, 1992, pp. C13-C14

Computer as a Cultural Tool:  Chatter Mounts on Every Topic

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Sinead O'Connor recently renounced rock-and-roll and declared her
intention to study opera. Whether the move was a mid-career switch or a
publicity stunt, it did not escape the notice of the opera fans on Prodigy, a
national computer network. No sooner had Ms. O'Connor made her
announcement than some impassioned defenders of opera logged onto
Prodigy's music club, called up the topic  "classical music" and created a
new subject heading: "Sinead and Opera???" Another electronic cultural
debate was off and running.
"Sinead is apparently seeking the peace and tranquillity of Opryland
after being roughly rejected in her current circles," read one note.
"Surprise, Sinead. The manhandling you got from them is nothing
compared to what you'll get from us."
One respondent suggested pitting Ms. O'Connor against the soprano
Kathleen Battle in a "diva battle of the century." Another theorized that all
might be for the best, since "she just might introduce and expose thousands
of pimply-faced teen-agers to an art form that they would otherwise never
experience."
This exchange was part of a cultural explosion taking place on computer
information services around the clock, around the world on subjects as
diverse as "Beverly Hills 90210," Richard Strauss's "Four Last Songs" and
the fine points of Chomskian linguistics. The topics run into the thousands,
the number of posted messages into the millions, and there is evidence that
the madly proliferating back talk, initially a kind of writing in the margins,
has begun to burst its boundaries and inscribe its messages on the
mainstream culture.

The Myriad Uses

Television producers and writers dip into the electronic bulletin boards to
take the temperature of a struggling series or to place an actor on line as a
promotional fillip. Film studios use the boards to reach a dedicated
audience. Bantam Books now posts sample chapters of new books, on
Genie, an on-line service, and au-' thors are discovering that they can add
stops to their publicity tours without leaving home.
In the spring, the Museum of Television and Radio in Manhattan put
together a program showcasing David Lynch's new television series "On
the Air" but did not allow enough time to advertise it. Stuck with a pile of
unsold tickets, the museum posted a note on the David Lynch boards on,
Prodigy, and within a day the event was oversubscribed.
David Jacobs, the creator of "Knots Landing," became aware of his show's
bulletin-board audience last year, when the series went into the shop for
major repairs.
"At one point we shut down, replaced most of our writers and
reevaluated," he said. The first program that reflected the repairs was
show No. 16.
"About three times the day after, I heard: 'The news on Prodigy was great
last night. They're back on track,'" Mr. Jacobs said. "I said, 'What is
this?'"
Mr. Jacobs learned that publicity agents for the show had been monitoring
Prodigy for audience reaction for many months. The reviews had been so
scathing that they had kept him in the dark until things took a turn for the
better.

Forming Group Identities

The producers of "Sneakers," the computer-hacker film starring Robert
Redford, decided to market the film through Compuserve, putting the
film's producer, Phil Robinson, on line to answer questions about the film.
And last month, the comedian Jerry Seinfeld logged onto Prodigy to field
questions about his television series.
"It's a very elaborate writing community creating its own texts," said
Henry Jenkins, the author of "Textual Poachers: Television Fans and
Participatory Culture" (Routledge). "All of these groups are forming
around cultural preferences and building an identity through their
participation in an electronic community."

The number of bulletin board users and the amount of time and space
devoted to cultural comments are difficult to gauge. The 45,0OO public-
access on-line systems in the United States, many of them mom-and-pop
operations, come and go and so do. subscribers. A discussion of Proust can
move effortlessly into an argument about knee socks, and vice versa. The
phenomenon is known as "topic drift." Moreover, subscrlbers often roam
from one subject to another, leaving notes all along the way.
The largest commercial computet service is Prodigy, with 1.75 million
users. It records about 22,000 messages a day in its arts club, which
accounts for a quarter of the messages on its 420 bulletin boards. In
addition, the television club accounts for 5,500 notes a day and music for
9,500.

Other large services are Compuserve with 1.69 million subscribers, Genie
with 350,000 subscribers, America On-Line with 180,000 sub- scribers and
Delphi, the smallest of. the major on-line services, with fewer I than
100,000 subscribers.

Who Does What

Jack Rickard, the editor and publisher of Boardwatch Magazine, a monthly
publication devoted to online information services and electronic bulletin
boards, said that about 3.3 million people use commercial services, about 4
million use the Usenet system, which links research institutions and
universities around the world, and about 11 million people use public-
access bulletin boards, with some overlap among the three types.
On the commercial systems, subscribers pay a monthly fee for a package
of services that includes access to the bulletin boards. They are assigned a
log-on number and a secret password. Data is transmitted and received
over a telephone line via modem.
Television, music and film attract the largest audiences, followed by poetry
and fiction, with dance and visual arts virtually nonexistent on the larger
services, which tend to reflect mass taste.
Two boutique-size services, the Well in Sausalito, Calif., and Echo in New
York City, however, are heavily weighted toward the arts and their
subscribers are more likeiy to argue about David Mamet than Andrew
Lloyd Webber.

Reality and Reversal

The quality of discussion varies wildly. A newcomer to a music board
might announce that he has just seen "Amadeus" and would like to know~
more about this fellow Mozart, even as a technical discussion on French
horn mouthpieces rages nearby. "It goes from lowest pun to the most
abstruse discussion of 'Finnegans Wake,' " said Alexander Krislov, the
system operator for the literature forum on Compuserve.
Gossip is welcome. And no piece of information can be too arcane. "In the
best conversations, we dish people in the music world we don't like and
discuss music seriously, exchanging information about recordings and
performances," said Margaret Strother, a 36-year-old New York City artist
who has spent long hours on Prodigy, most memorably in a debate on
recorded performances of Wagner's "Ring" cycle that, she said, "was
almost too technical for me to follow."
Ms. Strother's group included a singer at the Lyric Opera in Chicago who
provided fascinating backstage news and, Ms. Strother said, "kept the level
of discourse high." Another participant was Randall Schoenberg, the
grandson of the composer Arnold Schoenberg.
A popular strategy among likeminded participants on Prodigy is to send
notes on private electronic mail, or E-mail, suggesting that a public
discussion be shifted to Compuserve, Genie or Delphi, where time is billed
per minute (instead of Prodigy's monthly rate) but the E-mail rates are
cheaper.
Nancy Baym, a doctoral candidate in speech communications at the Uni-
versity of lllinois, is writing her dissertation on the 35,000 soap-opera
postings she has tracked on Usenet, a computer service used by universities
and research institutions.
"Some of the people who enjoy extremely high status on the boards tend to
be secretaries, who are low-status at work," she said. "But their exhaustive
knowledge of the soaps gives them status on the network." Other heavy
users are scientists looking to kill time while printing out or executing long
computer programs.

Wit and Manners

Wit is even more highly prized than data, making the soap-opera boards
a kind of democratic salon. Ms. Baym said, "You'll see a posting that says
something like, 'I laughed so hard that everybody in my office knew I
wasn't working.' "
On some boards, the sentiment would be expressed with the letters ROFL,
which stands for "rolling on the floor laughing." BTW stands for "by the
way," IMHO for "In my humble opinion." A remark intended humorously
is often indicated by the letter G in parentheses, for "grin," or, by a
sideways happy face built from punctuation marks. Such symbols are
known as emoticons.
Manners count. On Usenet, the term is netiquette, and in the soapopera
group that Ms. Baym studied, it resembles professional courtesy. Notes
should be signed. "If you repeat an idea that somebody has pu t out there
already, you should cite them," Ms. Baym said. "Also you should post an
update only if you are the officially designated updater for that day." An
update is a detailed synopsis of the day's episode.

A world where wit
dominates fact,
and rumor
dominates all.

The world of the bulletin boards is not quite an electronic Eden, however.
Members may not be judged by appearance or race, but in-groups develop,
intellectual snobbery is not unknown and tempers flare, although system
operators reject messages that they consider personal attacks. (Profanity
and racist or anti-Semitic remarks are also taboo.) Some groups raid other
groups for desirable members. Professional disrupters take pleasure in
roaming the boards and posting snide notes.
The Fox television series "Beverly Hills 90210," a subject so popular that it
had to be given its own topic heading in Prodigy, has spawned a vigorous
outfit called HC, for Haters' Club or Haters Court, whose members describe
their loathing for the show and its characters and regularly ambush
discussions by its fans.

The Silent Lurkers

The fragility of the social edifice that members construct on their computer
screens does not always survive the real world. "People are presenting
themselves in the best light, and sometimes when you meet them they seem
smaller," said Ms. Strother, whose music-discussion group arranged
several social events, a move she described as a mistake. "When you get
these compressed messages you fill in the blanks and think you've met your
soulmate, but in fact a lot of these people have trouble functioning
normally."
The world of the message board breeds rumor and conspiratorial thinking.
Many users will speculate that an important writer or producer is
"lurking": reading messages but not posting one himself. No one ever
knows for certain. Mr. Rickard, of Boardwatch Magazine, estimates that
there are five or six lurkers for each poster on a bulletin board.
  "I do know that the producers of 'Brooklyn Bridge' are on it, basicall
pleading with people to watch the show and to answer questions about it,"
said Jefferson Graham, who is Prodigy's on-line television expert, writing
columns and fielding questions. The television show recently went off the
air.
By and large, however, something close to a Jeffersonian democracy
reigns in a world where users are what they write.
"We really have returned here, in spite of the centralization of technology,
to the old-fashioned definition of what folk culture used to be," said Robert I.

Thompson, an associate professor of television at Syracuse University. "We
have these jokes and stories that will never see the printed page, that exist
only as glowing dots of phosphorus. It's not word-of-mouth folk culture but
word-of-modem folk culture. "


Sidebar 1:

Obscure Discussions, Electronically

Suscribers to the Prodigy electronic network can communicate with each
other with a home computer and modem. A roundtable discussion held on
the network follows. Stos  is Robert Stoskopf, Ray is Ray Welch, Joanne  is
Joanne Waldron, Raymond  is Raymond Jones.

From: Prodigy music club, classical topic.

Subject: Forgeries for Viola
Time: Late October 1992
It is said that the viola concerti by J. C. Bach, G. F. Handel and J. N.
Hummel are all forgeries foisted on unsuspecting violists by Robert
Casadesus. Any definite information? Is it important who wrote a concerto
if it's a decent piece of music.... Is this any different than the trickery in
which Fritz Kreisler engaged?          STOS

Stos, it wasn't Robert Casadesus, it was his brother Marius, the
violinist/violist. His most famous forgery is probably the so-called
"Adelaide" Concerto aby Mozart," which Menuhin actually recorded.
Speaking of famous forgeries, rumor has it that there is going to be a new
recording of the "Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky Symphony No. 27." Remember that
clever forgery which fooled the great Mravinsky, who recorded it back in the
50's?     RAYMOND

Ray, well, we were both wrong. It was Henri Casadesus. STOS

Stos, the problem of authenticity in art I have always found a vexing one.
On the one hand, I feel that it should make no difference, the value of the
work lying in the work itself, and extraneous things should have no
bearing. But we are all too human, and no one likes to be fooled, so to find
out that a work is a deliberate forgery (as oppsed to a dubious attribution)
makes me balky, queasy and resentful.          RAY

Stos, I've read that Kreisler engaged in the "trickery" because he did not
want to play entire programs with his name on every composition. I think a
work should be judged on its own merit. BTW, Kreisler is a favorite of mine!
JOANNE

Ray, I tend to agree, but the fact is that these are pretty decent concerti,
something the viola has far too few of. Yet the International Viola Society
has practically denounced them as worthless because they are not what
they are purported to be. Shouldn't they pronounce them as the work of X
rather than A, B & C and accept them into the repertoire with open arms?
STOS

Stos, I think both Henri and Marius were at work with the forgeries (and
probably Robert Casadesus, tooanything would be preferable to his Triple
Piano Concerto). The 1942 Gramophone Shop catalogue gives credit to
Marius Casadesus for "orchestrating" the recently discovered "Adelaide"
violin concerto by Mozart. Another music whodunit here!         RAYMOND

Glad to hear it, Joanne.  Chrysler has long been a favorite of mine as well.

LEE IACOCCA


Sidebar 2:

What You Get; What It Costs

PRODIGY: $49.95 starter kit includes software, one month's service and
identification numbers for six people; $14.95 a month, unlimited use of
bulletin boards and 30 pieces of Email a month at no extra charge, 25 cents
each thereafter. (800) 776-3449.
COMPUSERVE:    $49.95 starter kit ($39.95 if bought from Compuserve)
and $7.95 a month for unlimited access to 30 basic services, with 60 E-mail
messages a month at no extra charge, 15 cents thereafter. Access to
bulletin boards costs 21 cents a minute or $12.60 an hour at 1,200 or 2,400
Baud (bits per second). (800) 848-8199.
GENIE:  $4.95 a month for basic service. Bulletin boards cost $6 an hour
from 6 P.M. to 8 A.M. and S18 an hour at all other times. (800) 638-9636.
DELPHI: The 10/4 plan is S10 a month for 4 hours on-line. The 20/20
plan costs S20 a month for 20 hours on-line. (800) 544-4005.
ECHO: $18.95 a month ($12.95 for students and the elderly) for 30 hours
on-line; additional time is $1 an hour. (212) 255-3839.
THE WELL: $15 a month plus $2 an hour on-line. Users from outside
the 415 area code in California can use the Well through Internet or
through Compuserve, which charges $4 an hour. (415) 332-4335.
AMERICA ONLINE: $7.95 a month includes 2 hours on-line;
additional time is 10 cents a minute. (800) 827-6364.




P.S.  (from Simon)  I can't figure out where the phrase below fits in; it was
placed at the top of the back page by a particularly nonlinear _NY Times_
copy editor.  You win the booby prize if you can figure it where it goes.  Here
it is:

hoped to present it later.



-- 
Nancy Baym  (N-Baym@uiuc.edu)  	"Education is the only place where people try 
Speech Communication/U of I      to get the least for their money"    --my mom 
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv.soaps