John likened his work at The Well to an innkeeper whose job it is to keep all the lodgers residing at the inn relatively happy. This panel included several peopl e who have been involved with electronic communities for years. Sandy Stone has studied the relati onship between technology and social relations in systems from telephone sex to electronic networks to MUDs. The Media Space project supports remote v ideo presence for distributed collaborative research teams. There were also several workshops and presentations devoted to variations on the virtual community theme.
Telephones offer ubiquitous access to anybody with a quarter.
Carl Farrington and Evelyn Pine gave a presentation on the Community Memory Project. A goal of the projec t is to reach the homeless and at-risk youth. Additionally, DIAC featured demos of several electronic co mmunities including The Well, LambdaMOO, and Community Memory. At the same time as we see lots of promise and activity in this area ther e are reasons to suspect that old patterns may die hard. Linda Parry and Robert Wharton of the University o f Minnesota presented the results of current research that show that, while males tend to use compu ters more in every setting, it appears that the trend is toward greater homogeneity, and thus computer t raining should be available to everyone.