Software Inspection

This book could almost be subtitled 'Confessions of a Spod' to adopt the slang by which users of bulletin boards and virtual discussions refer to themselves. Howard Rheingold bases it around his own experience over several years as a user, particularly of a system called WELL. But Rheingold is no preoccupied hacker with limited social skills. He joined an electronic community in the mid-1980s, attracted by the chance to watch a society growing, developing its own conventions and learning how best to use its own peculiar method of communication. His (real life) family became used to seeing him in earnest discussion with the computer, and his description of this society and its members as he meets them is varied, absorbing and at times touching. Without leaving his home, he has met students, medics, librarians and lawyers, many with a story to tell about themselves. He has watched history unfold as it happens, participated in fund-raising for sick members of the community, watched romances made and broken and in extreme cases met people in real life once he had got to know them over the net. Even when he addresses the allegations that such systems are for the lonely, it is refreshing to see that he refuses to be pejorative about users who are lonely: 'one honest answer. is that most people don't have a terribly glamorous life'. Within the virtual world there are numerous communities general fora for asking specialized questions, cult discussions, live chats (the most addictive and potentially damaging to productivity) where users can watch words appear on a screen as their counterpart types them, pornographic bulletin boards with their attendant ethical problems and multiuser dungeons (the connotations of the word dungeon vary amongst different people). There are people hiding behind multiple identities, crafting their own personalities, sometimes creating complete fictitious characters and joining the network in character, sometimes disguising their gender (Rheingold is rather over-charitable on this; in practice most networks have more male than female users, so presenting as a woman is a way of attracting attention). The book is an engaging account of what it feels like to join such a borderless community. While clearly enthused by the network's possibilities, Rheingold ends by looking at some of the drawbacks, not so much of virtual community but of a society where there are no restrictions on spreading information (unfortunately there is no mention of the British Data Protection Act) and the infrastructure to distribute it is very cheap. His (powerful) analogy for people feeling imprisoned by technology is the Panopticon, a prison proposed in the 19th century by Jeremy Bentham where every inmate would be under constant surveillance but unable to see anybody else. Nevertheless, Rheingold raises more questions for the researcher than he answers. When do bulletin boards become addictive? What are the implications of users revealing or concealing their identity? What sort of ethical code is needed to control interactive behaviour on the network? How close to universal access will such networks get in the future? Rheingold has given us a readable and evocative account, but it remains a valuable starting point, with much work still to be done. MARTIN RICH City University Business School