Playful Expressivity and Artfulness in Computer-mediated Communication

The publication of this special issue on "Play and Performance" gives prominence to a "new wave" of research on expressive aspects of computer- mediated communication (CMC). In the 1970's and 1980's, pioneering research on CMC (e.g., Short, et al., 1976; Hiltz and Turoff, 1978; 1993; Kiesler, et al., 1984; Johansen, et al., 1988) focused primarily on instrumental or work-related aspects of the new medium, usually within organizations, rather than between organizations or between people generally. While researchers took some note of expressive phenomena such as "smiley" icons, and began to realize that "online communities" could develop via computers (Hiltz and Turoff, 1978; 1993), they were mainly interested in how the new medium affected organizational functioning--efficiency, hierarchical relationships, and so on.

The frequency of the terms "conferencing" and "teleconferencing" in discourse about CMC back then, and even to this day, is revealing. Even when studies were performed under laboratory conditions, more often than not, the implicit or explicit expectation was that the new technologies would primarily be used in intra-organizational settings. Within the field of communication research, organizational applications of CMC clearly dominated (Hiemstra, 1983; Steinfield, 1986).

Today, the field of CMC research is exploding in many new directions, in keeping with the tremendous expansion in uses and applications of the medium, including new forms of conviviality. Researchers from a wide range of disciplines are becoming involved, as the various issues of this pioneering online journal, both planned and completed, are already demonstrating. This issue examines a range of phenomena which can be designated as "playful," "expressive," "recreational," and in some cases (particularly, my own paper and that of Kozar) even "artful." Although the playfulness of the medium began to be recognized by persons other than hackers and computer professionals in the 1980's (e.g., Rafaeli, 1984, 1986; Myers, 1987), full-fledged, empirically grounded ethnographic research on this topic has only very recently come into its own.

Thus, it is no coincidence that three of the papers in this issue were authored by doctoral students. Just starting out as researchers, doctoral students tend to be especially open to new ideas, fields and topics. Lee- Ellen Marvin is a doctoral student in folklore at the University of Pennsylvania. Haya Bechar-Israeli is now preparing her dissertation proposal in communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Seana Kozar is a Ph.D. student in folklore at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. Moreover, Nancy Baym's study of a Usenet newsgroup was part of her recently completed doctoral dissertation in communication at the University of Illinois. All of my co-authors on the paper on virtual theater on IRC are advanced graduate students in sociology or communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Thus, only anthropologist Alan Aycock and I (sociologist and communication researcher) are veteran researchers whose interests have switched to CMC in recent years.

A Buzzing Hive of Social and Cultural Activity

All too often, people observing others seated before a computer screen think of computers as cold, alienating, even forbidding, and of people who use them extensively as lonely social misfits escaping into technology. Ironically, despite our celebration of themes of play, performance, and conviviality in this special issue, publication of these papers in a hypermedia journal will unfortunately do little to dispel this largely incorrect stereotype. Obviously, only people with advanced computer equipment, quite sophisticated computer skills, and access to the Internet will be able to read them.

Nevertheless, these papers demonstrate in a host of ways that the Internet today is a buzzing hive of exciting cultural and social activity and experimentation. This issue will focus primarily not on private email--what is still perhaps the single most widely used form of CMC--but on synchronous and non-synchronous varieties of social, rather than organizational, many-to-many or one-to-many communication, among people dispersed around the globe. With the exception of the paper by Seana Kozar, all the papers are based on studies of group communication of one kind or another, and even hers is related to collective matters: the celebration of the Chinese New Year.

Regulars in cyberspace already speak of "Net" culture in global fashion, and "netiquette" is a term which by now doesn't generally need explaining, except to "newbies." At the same time, important processes of social and cultural differentiation are at work, and it is by no means clear what is characteristic of the Net globally, and what is unique to "local" subcultures. Cyberspace is still something of a Wild West ( Barlow, 1990; Danet, et al., in press). There are few norms governing interaction, (Meyer and Thomas, 1990) and the new medium gives us freedom to be and do what we want. But cyberspace is no free-for-all either; there is a fair amount of corrective commentary on reproachable behavior (e.g., McLaughlin, et al., 1995, and the papers by Marvin and Bechar-Israeli in this issue).

Synchronous Chat Modes

Expressive, playful aspects of CMC flourish particularly in synchronous modes of CMC, in which people "chat" in real time by typing their contributions. These chat fora have become enormously popular in the last few years, as is indicated by the recent print publication of specialized manuals for them (e.g., Harris, 1995; Shah and Romine, 1995), and by extensive listings on Yahoo!, the popular World Wide Web catalogue site for some 100 channels on IRC (Internet Relay Chat), and for dozens of MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons, or Multi-User Domains) and MOOs (MUDs, Object Oriented). A brief history of MUDs and MOOs is provided in a link in Lee-Ellen Marvin's paper.

As 1000s of players can attest, chat fora have a hypnotic quality. Players spend hours and hours participating in them, with sometimes disastrous effect on their real-world obligations. There is even a newsgroup on Usenet for people viewing themselves as "addicted" to IRC; it is called alt.irc.recovery. Indeed, many people are quick to label this behavior as "addiction," though we should be cautious about using this term uncritically.

The text-based virtual realities of MUDs and MOOs are generally one of three types: adventure games which take off on the idea of computer games, notably, Dungeons and Dragons; social MUDs and MOOs, for relaxation, fantasy and recreational role-playing; and professional or educational ones with serious real-world goals. As Lee-Ellen Marvin notes, even the latter type, with its ostensibly serious agenda, also tends to be fairly playful. Generally speaking, the symbolic worlds of MUDs and MOOs have more elaborated, stable features than IRC channels, which are created textually by participants, and may including "furniture," "rooms," and other objects, as well as "outdoor spaces". Similarly, the personas developed on MUDs and MOOs are more elaborate than those on IRC. "Nicks" (nicknames) are the masks people "wear" on IRC. Other than their nicks, individuals can develop a "persona" only by demonstrating their wit and technical skill over time-- earning a "reputation", rather than constructing it in advance. In contrast, as is quite widely known by now, players on MUDs and MOOs create elaborate fantasy characters, often of the opposite gender.

Marvin discusses four categories of cultural activity which have crystallized on MOOs. Her discovery of the centrality of these four categories is especially compelling, since she studied six different MOOs, no small accomplishment, given the large investment needed to master the technical as well as social aspects of each little virtual world. Although there is generally a stable core of commands in MUDs and MOOs, each is a self-contained world to which one must gain entree. By identifying four categories of "deviant" activity, she is able to derive aesthetic values pertaining to ideal behavior in MOO societies.

Two papers in this issue are about IRC, the world's most popular computer-mediated chat forum, with perhaps 25,000 persons participating these days--and the numbers are growing all the time. Each day, hundreds of channels are recreated on IRC, many with ongoing traditions now years-long, since the software was first developed by Jarkko Oikarinen in Finland in 1988. There are different types of channels: many, perhaps most, are social--in effect, virtual pubs or cafes. Others are professional or computer-related, and still others are gathering places for people of specific linguistic and national backgrounds.

Haya Bechar-Israeli's paper focuses on nicks and their relation to play and identity on IRC. She reports on an analysis of the types of nicks chosen by players in selected channels, and implications of the results for individual vs. collective identity of young people today. Her materials offer an intriguing microcosm for the study of globalization of culture as we move toward the 21st century, and of the future of intellectual property in cyberspace.

There is a fascinating parallel between Bechar-Israeli's findings on the use of nicks and the institutionalization of IRC channels. In both cases, the software is so flexible that one can change a nick or create a channel literally at will; yet, just as individuals adopt stable nicks--the central finding in Bechar-Israeli's paper--so channels are also developing stable collective identities. Dozens and perhaps 100s of them, including most of those listed in Yahoo!, now have enough of a sense of their own continuity and emergent tradition to have developed elaborate Home Pages on the World Wide Web, which provide archived photographs of "regulars," document their periodic real-world social gatherings, and provide technical help, advice on the social norms of the group, etc. Links to a few of these institutionalized channels are provided in Bechar-Israeli's paper

My own paper, co-authored with four members of my research group, Tsameret Wachenhauser, Haya Bechar-Israeli, Amos Cividalli and Yehudit Rosenbaum-Tamari, is about fascinating experiments in virtual theater on IRC. The very notion of virtual theater is provocative--it has always been assumed in the past that the magic of theater could take place only in a physical space in which performers and audience are co- present. Our research builds on earlier work on digital writing as performance ( Ruedenberg, et al., 1995; Danet, et al., in press), and is about a group called the Hamnet Players, led by Stuart Harris, a computer professional with considerable real-world theater experience. During performances, the players improvise brilliantly on scripted parodies of Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams. Like much traffic on IRC, Hamnet scripts and performances contain a good deal of profanity. While some readers may find this offensive, analysis of the significance of profanity in this hybrid, oral/written medium is part of our research agenda, and therefore the text contains much profanity too. Readers who are offended by nudity may choose not to view the zoomed version of the first of three graphic images created for "Pcbeth," which are integrated into the text of this paper. This image juxtaposes visually a replica of a familiar male nude statue with elements of computer hardware.

The unique achievements of the group are remarkable, since technological problems--netsplits and net lag-- constantly hound participants in chat fora, and since the logistics of virtual production are daunting. Analysis of logs of Hamnet performances provides important evidence for the rise of interactive writing as a kind of performance.

Comparing MUDs and MOOs and IRC

It is probably only a matter of time before researchers will begin to carry out comparative studies of play and identity on MUDs and MOOs and on IRC. There already appear to be some similarities. For instance, Marvin mentions in passing that events on MOOs are carnivalesque in nature. In our own paper, we too speak of the phenomena we study as carnivalesque, but take this idea much farther, suggesting that performances by the Hamnet Players are full-blown carnivals of wordplay, which share surprisingly many of the characteristics of real-world carnivals.

But there are serious obstacles to full-fledged comparative studies of IRC and of MUDs and MOOs. The amount of time and effort necessary, in order to "pass" as a full participant observer, or even to be able to understand what goes on while lurking, in these quite different types of virtual cultures is quite off-putting. There is good reason why anthropologists tend to invest in long-term fieldwork in a single culture, making that their specialty. To tackle both IRC and a MUD or MOO would thus be something like trying to study two very different real-world cultures at the same time. An added difficulty is that a case study of one MUD or MOO and of one IRC channel might be of limited generalizability--each is a little cultural world of its own. Still, some ambitious graduate student who is "hooked" on these chat modes will no doubt tackle such a study in the next two to three years.

Comparative studies might provide the answer, for one thing, to the question why it is that lurking has quite negative connotations on MOOs, as Marvin reports, while on IRC and in listserv discussion lists and Usenet newsgroups it is acceptable, if not positively valued. Perhaps the difference is accounted for by the differing numbers of participants in the two cases. Even though IRC channels have their regulars, IRC remains something like the "Grand Central Station" of the Internet, with hundreds of individuals milling around, passing through, channel-hopping, etc. MOOs, on the other hand, are more distinctive entities, with unique addresses in cyberspace. IRC channels still belong to the umbrella "organization" in effect created by the IRC software, whatever network they are on ( Efnet, Dalnet, Undernet, etc.; see Bechar- Israeli, 1995, this issue).

One theme worth pursuing, I believe, is to try to understand these synchronous modes in terms of the literary categories of fiction vs. drama. With its direct representation of written speech on screen, IRC is inherently dramatic. The scrolling script looks much like the script of a play. The resemblance is even greater if logs of IRC encounters are examined after the fact, as printed-out texts. The commands of MUDs and MOOs, on the other hand, represent words and action in a more indirect manner.

Verbal Puppetry?

It is interesting to speculate on MUDs and MOOs as a kind of verbal puppetry. Players move their characters about in textual space, in a manner roughly analogous to the way puppeteers manipulate their puppets in physical space. As Marvin explains, the software causes both verbal utterances and simulated action of characters to be represented on screen in the third person:

Jane says "Hello."
Jane waves.

There is an intriguing resemblance between this mode of textual representation of actions of a character and a particular tradition of puppetry with which I am familiar. In the Western tradition of puppetry, the puppeteer is generally hidden. Whether the technique involves glove or rod puppets, or marionettes operated by strings from above, the operators are generally hidden behind a curtain or other partition (Speaight, 1990). In Asian shadow puppetry, similarly, the manipulators are hidden behind a sheet. In all these types of puppetry, the puppet is meant to "take on a life of its own," and the identity and existence of the puppeteer are for all intents and purposes irrelevant. As Speaight puts it

There are two kinds of emotion in the theatre. We may be moved by the personality of the actor or by the impersonality of the actor....The puppet is...the complete mask--the mask from which the human actor has withdrawn (Speaight, 1990: 11).

In the tradition of Japanese puppetry known as Bunraku <1> (Adachi, 1978; Scott, 1973; Bowers, 1974; Inoura and Kawatake, 1981), meter-tall puppets are each manipulated on stage by no less than three men, who are generally dressed in black. The chief puppeteer, who is a senior artist of recognized accomplishment, is entitled to expose his face and sometimes wears a flamboyant costume; the others always wear black veils or hoods. In addition, the puppets move about (or, technically, are moved about) the stage to the accompaniment of music produced on an instrument called a shamisen, and a narrator or storyteller (joruri) recites the text of the play.

While travelling in Japan 12 years ago, I attended a Bunraku performance in which at one point, no less than six puppets and 18 (!!) manipulators were all on stage at the same time. While for Westerners this is extremely disconcerting, to say the least, for the Japanese, "Within a few minutes of the start of the action the operators are completely forgotten by the audience" (Bowers, 1974: 34). Even the chief puppeteer with his face exposed shows no emotion whatsoever; emotion is expressed only through the physical movement of the puppets and the words of the narrators. "And magically enough, after one has settled into the Bunraku atmosphere, the puppeteers fade into the background" (Inoura and Kawatake, 1981: 153).

Despite this convention of the Bunraku puppeteers being experienced as "not there," I would argue, Bunraku plays intriguingly with the border between illusion and reality in a manner which is rather similar to what goes on in MUDs and MOOs. In the latter case, the players manipulate their characters- -by typing! MOO players disappear into their characters; fellow players may learn little or nothing about the "real" person behind the character, even over long periods of time. Yet the fact that events are rendered in third- person descriptions is, in theory, a constant reminder of the gap between the on-screen character and the invisible verbal puppeteer at the computer keyboard. The person behind the character is "there, but not there," just as the Bunraku puppeteers are "there but not there."

Whereas the narrators in Bunraku perform aloud a classical, composed literary text, MOO participants collectively invent a typed hyper-fiction in real time. Along with the stored, pre-composed elements of their characters' nature and of the built virtual environment, they invent real- time, verbally rendered action, which conflates the roles of the puppeteer and the narrator in Bunraku. While this analogy might appear far-fetched to some, I believe it is worth exploring in greater depth than is possible within the confines of this brief Introduction to our special issue.

Recreational Newsgroups on Usenet: Soap Opera and Chess

Among non-synchronous social modes of CMC, two types are prominent on the Internet--Usenet newsgroups and listserv discussion groups. The next two papers offer us detailed glimpses of what goes on in two of the many thousands of recreational newsgroups on Usenet--a group interested in soap opera and one for chess players. Technically, newsgroups work somewhat differently from listserv discussion groups. While in both cases, people subscribe to an interest-based group, in the former, postings are stored on mainframe computers and subscribers read them there. In the latter case, subscribers receive copies of all postings in their personal electronic accounts. In both cases, postings have the character of an ongoing conversation, despite their asynchronous nature.

The paper by Nancy Baym shares with our own paper an interest in the nature of performed humor on the Net. For her doctoral research she studied postings to "r.a.t.s."--a newsgroup called "recreational/ arts/ tv/soaps," for fans of American soap operas (Baym, 1993; 1994; 1995). Baym analyzes sources of humor in a genre of postings called "retellings," in which individuals voluntarily summarize events of preceding episodes, with considerable transformation of the material. Retellings become an opportunity for a performance which is loosely analogous to the performance of the Hamnet Players on IRC. Just as the Hamnet Players "take off" on the stimulus of a given script, so posters to r.a.t.s. "take off" on the script of the television series. Baym shows that retellers develop their own individual style. We shouldn't overdo the analogy, however; in this case performance is not "live". Even if composed online, postings are not fully interactive, whereas on IRC, performances are coordinated in real- time via the device of Greenwich Mean Time.

Newsgroups like r.a.t.s. were among the first to promote new forms of interactivity between the mass media and their publics. It is interesting to note that among the hundreds of channels on IRC, there is now one called #BigCouch , where people exchange opinions on a television series called "Friends". In the commercial sector of the World Wide Web, producers of television programs and the networks that hire them are also developing elaborate Home Pages which enable viewers to interact with producers. Developments like these show that the old distinction in communication research between mass communication and interpersonal communication is becoming obsolete.

Over a period of several years, Alan Aycock has closely studied postings to the Usenet newsgroup recreational.games.chess. In this paper, one of an ongoing series of studies of chess and chess players (see, e.g., Aycock, 1990; 1995), he applies a Foucauldian paradigm to the analysis of "self-fashioning" in postings to this newsgroup. He identifies "romantic" versus "modern" modes of self-fashioning. In the former, the passion and creativity in the game are highlighted; in the latter, the rational aspects of chess, study, planning, and interaction with computers, are foregrounded. While this analysis identifies important sources of meaning for dedicated chess players, it ends on a rather more pessimistic note.

Aycock rightly calls to our attention that all of our activities on the Internet, including the playful ones, are subject to more surveillance than we would like to believe. We can play away to our heart's content, via newsgroups, listservs, and sychronous modes like those analyzed in this issue, but we are not free agents. We should recall here the sobering fact that both IRC and MUDs and MOOs are sometimes banned, quite literally. In Israel, for example, to this date, we at the Hebrew University have to fight for continuing access to IRC for purposes of teaching and research. Only four of the seven Israeli institutions of higher learning allow direct access to it. The official reason given is that constant use of these chat modes eats up bandwidth and prevents others from doing their "serious" work on the Net. But I believe that ostensibly objective, technical reasons for blocking access to IRC are not the only explanation; issues of social control are also clearly at stake. As the papers on the synchronous chat modes in this issue make clear, these new forms of human communication often tend to be subversive of the social order.

Re-creating Ritual on the Net: Celebrating the Chinese New Year

Seana Kozar's paper moves us to an entirely different set of issues. The central theme of her paper is the re-creation of the tradition of celebrating the Chinese New Year on the Internet. To provide some of the flavor of the rich appeal to the senses in real-world celebrations of the New Year, she offers us a digital image of a stunning red banner, with many motifs characteristic of Chinese culture. Given the mediated nature of communication in cyberspace, and its lack of physicality, can this new medium provide a basis for the reconstitution of ritual? This is an enormous question which goes beyond her particular case study (see Danet, in press); however, she has assembled for us a fascinating collection of New Year greetings circulated by Chinese students and others in the last few years. Her own technical skills in collecting, manipulating, and making them accessible to us are themselves impressive.

Kozar identifies two complementary modes of performance and production of these greetings: the recycling of traditional Chinese motifs and large- character texts, such as lanterns or wishes for good fortune, from year to year in different combinations to create novel greetings, and the practice of incorporating festive symbols from other cultures, such as menorahs and Christmas trees, into the electronic greetings. She suggests that analyzing the content of these virtual greetings offers a fruitful way to study Chinese students' struggle over their identity when living in a multicultural environment, and speculates on what the inclusion of non- Chinese motifs may mean about their adaptation to such an environment.

Kozar performs an important service for us in making these materials from Chinese language and folklore and from the Chinese Internet accessible to an English-speaking audience. A moment's reflection reveals that all of the other papers in this issue are based on modes and phenomena of communication in English. English and English-speakers do dominate the net, for better or for worse, at the present time, but other linguistic and cultural groups are creating rich sub-worlds of their own, and Kozar offers us a rare glimpse into just one of them.

Exploiting Multimedia Possibilities: Playful Performance by Authors and Editors

The papers in this issue exploit the multimedia possibilities of this journal in varying degrees. Some are traditional text-based essays which have merely been transformed via the HTML markup language to be readable via Netscape or Mosaic ( Baym, 1995, Aycock. Others incorporate full-fledged hypertext links ( Marvin, Bechar-Israeli, Danet, et al., Kozar), graphics ( Bechar-Israeli, Danet, et al., Kozar), sound ( Danet, et al.), and even animation ( Kozar).

Both as author and as editor, learning to think and work in hypermedia terms has been an intriguing experience for me. There has been a good deal of playful performance in the production of this issue. Even for those who are far more experienced and skilled than we are at the logistics of virtual publishing--the general editors of this journal--I would argue, our medium is still so new that we are all performers of a kind--showing the world, "Look what we can do!"

I am grateful to Tsameret Wachenhauser, a member of my research team, and chief co-author of the paper on the Hamnet Players, for creating the HTML version of our paper, and for designing the handsome cover page of our issue. For those readers who may not have noticed or given much thought to it, the "c" in the word "performance" has been deliberately placed above the line and at an angle--in order to appear as if it is just bouncing into place. This is meant to convey something of the dynamic play with typography which is such a prominent feature of CMC, particularly its synchronous modes. Thanks to all authors for their cooperation in the double task of preparing these papers for online publication both substantively and technically. Finally, many thanks to both Sheizaf Rafaeli and Margaret McLaughlin for their patience, comments and help of many kinds.

It has been a novel experience to conduct all phases of the editing of this issue--including distribution of the Call for Papers; communication with potential and actual authors, from early queries to final submission of papers; solicitation of reviewers, receipt of reviews and their transmission to authors; revision and editing of papers; technical communication with the general editors about HTML markup of the papers, and so on--entirely by email. Surely it is of some research interest to reveal that in the course of editing this special issue I have exchanged about 1000 messages with all parties involved. Online publication challenges and changes our norms and practices with respect to academic publishing in a host of ways. But just how this is so is a topic for another special issue.

Brenda Danet

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List of URLs

(1) links to all 6 papers in issue:
Marvin
Bechar-Israeli
Danet, et al.
Baym
Aycock
Kozar.
(2) Meyer and Thomas, 1990
(3) Barlow, 1990
(4) Puppetry page
(5) Bunraku/Awaji
(6) Kabuki page
(7) Yahoo!
(8) #BigCouch home page
(9) Harris's page
(10) links to EFnet, Dalnet, Undernet