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Global Networks
Computers and International Communication
Edited by Linda M. Harasim

Preface
I Overview
1 Global Networks: An Introduction
Historical Context
Electronic Mail
Computer Conferencing
Televirtuality
The Global Village: Concepts and Prophets
Organization of This Book
August 1993
ISBN 0-262-08222-5 Part 1: Overview: From Technology to Community
424 pp., 18 illus. Part 2: Issues in Globalizing Networks
$60.00/£38.95 (CLOTH)
Part 3: Applications of Global Networking

ADD TO CART Part 4: Visions for the Future

2 Networlds: Networks as Social Space
Networlds
Networks as Place
Social Networlds
Networkplaces
Educational Networlds
Human Communication in the Networld
Anyplace Communication
Anytime Communication
Group Interactivity
Computer Mediation
Socializing the Networld: Shaping Networks into
Networlds
Purpose: Task Structures
Place: Spatial Structures
Population: Group Roles
Democratizing the Networld
Networks: Freedom or Control?
Globalization: Centralization or Decentralization?
Access: Different Networks, Different Citizens
Policy: Role of the User
Conclusions
3 The Global Matrix of Minds
 NSFNET
Population
Resource Naming
Resource Access
Information Access
People
Resource Sharing
Communication
Places
Travel
Communities
Politics
Economics
Legal Issues
Society
Boundaries
Political
Time
Language
Organizational
Size
Charging
Conclusion
4 A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community
A Cybernaut's Eye View
Social Contracts, Reciprocity, and Gift Economies
in Cyberspace
Who Is the WELL?
My Neighborhood on the WELL
Conclusion
II Issues
5 Jurisdictional Quandaries for Global Networks
Extraterritoriality
What Constitutes Information Property?
Jurisdictional Barriers to Access
Varying Definitions of Miscreant Behavior
New Forms of Communication: Which Laws and
Whose Laws Apply?
New Kinds of Communities: Network Governance
New Forums for the Resolution of Disputes:
Harmonization of Legal Systems
 Globalization and Its Implications
Critical Strategic Issues: People and
Organizations
Information Technology as a Competitive Weapon
Competitive Advantage or Competitive Necessity?
Organization Structure and Coordination
Major Organizational Forms
Geographic versus Product Group
Organization Structure--Multiple Power Centers
Hetarchic Organizations and EC 92
Teams
Strategic Opportunities: Overview
Teams: Opportunity for Competitive Advantage
Conclusions
Acknowledgments
8 Cross-Cultural Communication and CSCW
CSCW and Groupware
The Iceberg and Human Communication
From HCI to HHI
Cross-Cultural Groupware?
The Decision-making Process and Nemawashi
Face-to-Face Meetings
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
9 Global Networking for Local Development: Task
Focus and Relationship Focus in Cross-Cultural
Communication
Groups, Tasks, and Relationships
Relationship-Focused Communities and Task-
Focused Groups
The Value of Having Both Task and Relationship
Focuses
Intra-, Inter-, and Cross-Cultural Communication
Intracultural Communication
Intercultural Communication
Cross-Cultural Communication
Perspectival Enrichment: The Virtue of Cross-
Cultural Networking for Intercultural
Communication
Task-Focused Networks for Relationship-Focused
Communities: Cross-Cultural Applications for
Intercul...
Task Focus or Relationship Focus? Not Either/Or,
but Both/And
 Information Security: New OECD Initiatives
Status Of The OECD Project on Information
Security
OECD's Mission
Other Initiatives
Conclusions
III Applications
11 Building a Global Network: The WBSI Experience
The WBSI Experience
Building a Community
Inventing a Pedagogy
Designing an Educational Interface
Conclusion
12 Computer Conferencing and the New Europe
The European Context
The Role of the Commission of the European
Communities
The Added Value of Electronic Networks
Cultural Awareness
Language Learning
Efficient and Flexible Education and Training
Facilitating Business Partnerships and Community
Projects
Research and Development on Advanced
Technologies
ELNET Case Study
"Virtual College" Design
Technological Infrastructure
Organizational Issues
Curriculum Integration
Language Learning
Summary of ELNET Outcomes
Conclusions
13 Global Education through Learning Circles
Change in the Role of Teaching and Learning
The Use of Communication Technology in the
Classroom
Global Education through Learning Circles
Phases of a Learning Circle
Global Education in the Local Context
Perspective Consciousness
State-of-the-Planet Awareness
 Development of Teachers
Global Networking
14 Technology Transfer in Global Networking: Capacity
Building in Africa and Latin America
The Internationalization of BESTNET
The Need for Networking in the Developing World
The Problem of the Last Mile
The AFRINET Project
Networking the AAS and BESTNET in AFRINET
Distributed Global Nets
Developing South-South Communications with
Latin America
Addressing Information Needs in Development
The Future of Global Networks
15 Islands in the (Data)Stream: Language, Character
Codes, and Electronic Isolation in Japan
Setting Sail: The Japanese Writing System
Treacherous Waters: Platforms, Standards, and
Other Characters
Archipelagos and Islands: Isolation and Parallel
Realms
Isolation in Tokyo Bay: The Case of TWICS
The Nature of the Community and Its
Communication Needs
The Influences of Language, Character Codes,
and Environment
Global Directions: Building Bridges for the Future
People's Republic of China
Taiwan
Korea
Japan
Conclusion
16 Cognitive Apprenticeship on Global Networks
Cognitive Apprenticeship and Learning
Environments
Online Mentorship and Peer Collaboration
Domain Knowledge and Knowledge-Building
Strategies
Scaffolding
Reflection
Exploration
Sequencing Instruction
Peer Collaboration for Expert Practice
Cross-Cultural Awareness Case Study
18 Social and Industrial Policy for Public Networks:
Visions for the Future
Framing a Policy Approach to the International
Public Network
Protect Free Expression by Promoting Common-
Carriage Regimes
Encourage the Growth of Interconnected, Market-
Based, Network Communications Services
Commercial Network Service Providers Expand
Access
Target Government Support Directly to Users, Not
GovernmentSelected Carriers
Research Agenda: Standard Financial Settlement
Practices for Interconnecting Networks
Allow Mixed Commercial and Noncommercial Use
of Networks
The NREN Implementation Plan
Eliminate "Acceptable Use Policies" that Restrict
the Flow of Information on Public Networks
The Need for Service Classifications
Conclusion
19 Co-Emulation: The Case for a Global Hypernetwork
Society
From Networks Today to Hypernetworks
Tomorrow
Informatization in Historical Perspective
Informatization as an Economic Transition
Informatization as a Sociological Transition
Informatization as a Civilizational Transition
How the Hypernetwork Society Will Be Shaped
Information Rights
Intelprise as the Main Actor in the Wisdom Game
Groupmedia as Enabling Technology
Co-Emulation in the Global Hypernetwork Society
New Guiding Principles for the Global Network
Society
"Japanese" Ways to Contribute to Global
Problems
Conclusion: Global Co-Emulation
20 Sailing through Cyberspace: Counting the Stars in
Passing
Civility
Conviviality
Reciprocity
Harmony
 Conclusion
21 The Global Authoring Network
Epilogue
The GAN Process
Outcomes
Moderating
Group Review
Impacts
Networking Technology
Design
Prologue: Looking Ahead
Appendix: A Sampler of Global Network Addresses
Contributors
Notes
References
Index
Preface

Global networks are increasingly a part of our work and social life
today. To illuminate and guide our participation in this process of
transformation, this book examines global networking from a multi-
plicity of viewpoints: social, educational, political, and work-related.
The interdisciplinary nature of the book is itself a networking of
themes, analyzing the subject from diverse but interrelated perspec-
tives. The contributors to this volume, all experts in their fields, provide
timely and critical analyses of networking from different disciplines as
well as from different geographic viewpoints: North America, South
America, Asia, Africa, Australia, and Europe.
At another level, the book is a testament to global networking, since
the process of producing it involved networking the contributors over
a period of four months in what came to be known as the GAN: the
Global Authoring Network. The GAN used computer networks to link
contributors in a group review of each chapter (see chap. 21 by Harasim
and Walls for a discussion of the process). The networkers were net-
worked. New linkages and connectivities among networking theorists
and practitioners were established.
I thank the contributors to this volume, who shared their ideas,
research, and expertise as well as their commitment to a vision of how
global networking can make the world a better place. It has been a
pleasure to work with you, to learn from you, and to have your contri-
butions in this volume. The process of networking with the chapter
authors on the GAN contributed to enhancing our unity of purpose
and vision for the book as well as enhancing the sense of the person-
alities behind the chapters. It was a lot of work, but there were many
Preface

good times as our conversations on the network brought smiles, laughs,

and new insights. Through our network interactions, the book came
alive. I especially thank Jan Walls, an enthusiastic supporter of the book
and the GAN from the outset. For those authors unable to participate
on the GAN, I had the opportunity and pleasure of working with you
using a variety of new communication media that enabled significant
dialogue between us about the book.
In addition to the chapter authors, the GAN benefited from the
participation of Bobbi Smith who assisted me in organizing the GAN
and who took an active role in discussing the chapters; from Ian Chunn
who helped to launch the GAN and also took part in the discussions;
from the participation of Jon Boede, Grete Pasch, and Tracy LaQuey
Parker; and from students in my graduate class who discussed many of
the chapters in our online seminars (Bruce Girard, Neil Guy, Betty
Laughy, Michael Hayward, Jane Mackay, Cyndia Pilkington, and David
Smith).
I am grateful for the assistance of Stephen Buckley: his word process-
ing skills, his commitment to this project, and his facility in global
networking made him a much valued part of the team. I also owe many
thanks to Bob Prior, Sandra Minkkinen, Lome Lejeune, and Beth LaFor-
tune Gies of the MIT Press for their interest in this book and their
valuable editorial guidance.
Finally, I thank my personal network who supported me through
the process of initiating, implementing, and completing this book:
my mother, Mary Harasim, and my grandmother, Katherine Myronyk,
who were always a source of encouragement; Luiza Leite who helped
keep my life organized; and especially my husband, Lucio, and my
two daughters, Tanikka and Tasya, my most important sources of
inspiration.
Global Networks: An Introduction

Linda M. Harasim

. . . after more than a century of electronic technology, we have extended our

central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and
time as far as our planet is concerned.
—Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
Global networks are communication networks, media that connect
people with other people. Historically, the introduction of new com-
munication tools has transformed humanity. From the development of
oral language to literacy, print, and now telecommunications, commu-
nication technologies have opened new doors for human contact and
new avenues for social, intellectual, economic, and political growth.
Global networks, the use of computers for international communica-
tion, will further enhance and expand how humans connect, commu-
nicate, and create community.
McLuhan foresaw global connectivity decades ago. But whereas the
broadcast media of McLuhan's time and vision implied populations of
passive consumers, today's computer communication networks enable
communities of active participants. Global networks are not only tools
but offer a venue for the global village, a matrix where the world can
meet. The extension of human community onto a global scale is un-
precedented; we are challenged to understand the scope and implica-
tions of such powerful social transformations in order to take part in
shaping, socializing, and ensuring the accessibility of networks for the
global community.
Global Networks addresses that challenge. As one of the first books to
explore this new social phenomenon, Global Networks presents the
most current thinking and practice by leaders in the field. Global Net-
4 Linda M. Hamsim

works examines the state of the art from different international and
interdisciplinary perspectives. The authors explore how the interna-
tionalization of electronic network infrastructure fits into a context of
global social networking. The focus is not on the technology per se, but
on issues related to its social adoption, application, impact and future.
Global Networks looks at how technology becomes a social space,
considers the kind of space it can and ought to become, and debates
the issues and implications that attend the reinvention of social con-
nectivity in a new realm. Perspectives from communication theory,
network design, policy, social science, education, organizational theory,
linguistics, and computer science explore the human side of network
environments.
This book is an invitation to learn about and become involved in
the new realm of human communication and community on global
networks.

Historical Context

The past 150 years have brought fundamental and rapid transformation
of society by communication technologies. In this brief time span,
major innovations that radically changed how humans communicate
have become integrated into our daily reality. Telecommunications are
a fundamental component of political, economic, and personal life
today. Yet, until recently human encounter was place-dependent. Com-
munication across distance was only possible by such technologies as
talking drums or smoke signals, relatively immediate but limited to
messages that were terse and susceptible to error. More detail and accu-
racy could be conveyed by messengers traveling by foot, boat, horse, or
other beast of burden.
Messages from distant locations could take weeks or years to arrive
and were used to communicate affairs of state, nobility, church, and
commerce. These communication forms were not interactive and not
available to common people. The voyages of Marco Polo, conveying
letters from the Church of Rome to the Emperor of China, took dec-
ades. Transmission of messages was very slow and expensive even up
to 150 years ago. As Arthur C. Clarke noted: "When Queen Victoria
came to the throne in 1837, she had no swifter means of sending
messages to the far parts of her empire than had Julius Caesar—or, for
Global Networks: An Introduction

that matter, Moses. . . . The galloping horse and the sailing ship re-
mained the swiftest means of transport, as they had for five thousand
years" (Clarke, 1992, 3-4).
The events of the telecommunication revolution have come together
within a few years and with tremendous societal implications. In the
1840s, the first steps of change arrived with the introduction of the
telegraph (assisted by the development of the Morse code in 1844). In
1875, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. It was only in
1956 that the first submarine telephone cable was laid successfully. The
first telecommunications satellite was in 1960, a balloon; it was only in
1962 that the first efficient civil telecommunications satellite, Telstar,
was launched into orbit. The lightwave (or fiber optic) communications
system was first utilized in 1977.
The foundations of global networking are thus recent, astonishingly
so given the degree of the transformations that have been adopted and
integrated so intimately into the fiber of humanity. The ability to make
and receive a long-distance telephone call is now possible for people in
most parts of the planet, and for many it is considered an essential
service, perhaps a basic right.
Global networking is another dimension of change, opportunity, and
challenge. The first large-scale packet switched network, the ARPANET,
was implemented in 1969, and electronic mail on the network soon
followed. Now, little more than two decades later, global networks link
millions of users around the planet, and the rate of adoption is growing
dramatically.
For participants of global networks, these technologies are already as
integral to their work and community as the telephone and the postal
service, and perhaps more so. Even our language and ways to express
human interaction are changing to reflect the new realms of experience
enabled by computer networking. It has become necessary to coin such
terms as face-to-face (f2f or f-t-f), awkward as they are, to distinguish
real-time, real-place meetings from those held on the network, also
known as "online" or in "cyberspace." Mail sent electronically, "email,"
is wryly distinguished from "snail mail," regular postal delivery.
What are the technologies that form today's global networks?
Global networks are based upon systems such as electronic mail,
bulletin boards, and computer conferencing, interconnecting users lo-
6 Linda M. Harasim

cally, regionally, and globally for business, research, education, and

social interaction.
Here is a brief introduction to the networking technologies dis-
cussed in Global Networks: electronic mail, computer conferencing, and
televirtuality.

Electronic Mall

Electronic mail (or email) on computer networks has in its history of

little over two decades laid the basis for global connectivity. This feat
has been accomplished with the most modest of means: using comput-
ers to exchange place-independent, asynchronous, text-based mes-
sages. Electronic mail systems support one-to-one (personal) and
one-to-many (broadcast) communication. User groups and bulletin
board services support group communication. Using a personal com-
puter and modem linked by a telephone line to a computer network,
people send and receive messages across the hallway or across the
planet.
Today electronic mail networks reach millions of people, at their
offices, in their classrooms, at home, or on the road via portable com-
puters. While many offices have local area networks (LANs) for messag-
ing among employees in the same workplace, these are increasingly
linked to the wide area networks (WANs), the basis for global networks.
A global network is an interconnection of many smaller email net-
works. The main global networks referred to in this book are: Internet,
BITNET, USENET, FidoNet, and AT&T Mail. The first four are sometimes
referred to as forming a matrix, Latin for mother.
Internet is a meganetwork, a network of networks connecting over
two thousand smaller networks. The Internet provides access to email,
bulletin boards, databases, library catalogues, chat lines, multiuser do-
mains, discussion groups, and, for scientists and researchers, access to
supercomputers. BITNET (Because It's Time Network) connects aca-
demic institutions in over thirty countries and offers mailing lists (dis-
cussion groups on various topics), email, and short real-time
interactions. USENET (User's Network) is a series of newsgroups or dis-
cussion groups supported by a worldwide voluntary member network,
with approximately 37,000 nodes in universities, government, busi-
ness, and military sites (some commercial services and FidoNet bulletin
7 Global Networks: An Introduction

boards also carry the newsgroups). FidoNet has been called the "peo-
ple's network" because it is open to anyone and usually carries no fee.
FidoNet consists of over twenty thousand individual bulletin boards
connected across six continents, to facilitate private email, public con-
ferences (group discussions), and file transfers. AT&T Mail is a world-
wide, commercial email service that connects subscribers to each other
and to the USENET/UUCP network.

Computer Conferencing

Computer conferencing systems are based on communication software

specifically designed to facilitate collaboration among all sizes of
groups, from two-person dialogues to conferences with hundreds or
thousands of participants. People can join conferences on topics of
personal interest; all messages to that conference are organized and
stored sequentially in one's inbox. The system coordinates the mes-
sages. The term "computer conference" is used in the book as a generic
descriptor of a type of communication networking software, distinct
from user groups on email systems.
Computer conferencing systems provide groups with spaces or con-
ferences that can be tailored to their needs. The tailoring of group
communication structures is an important element in creating a par-
ticular social system, enabling the shaping and definition of the social
space. Specific spaces can be organized by group membership and topic.
Computer conferencing systems, like electronic mail networks, are
text-based. Multimedia communication networks combining text,
graphics, scanned images, audio and/or video are becoming available.
Ishii (chap. 8) describes issues in developing one, and the use of hyper-
media networks for new forms of social organization is addressed by
Kumon and Aizu (chap. 19).

Televirtuality

Of all forms of networks, perhaps the one to most fire our imaginations
with the possibility of engaging the whole person is virtual reality (VR).
VR offers the possibility of building and entering a customized three-
dimensional environment in which the user is enveloped in a sunogate
reality.
8 Linda M. Harasim

The use of VR for entertainment or work demands extraordinarily

high data capacity to cany the video and graphic signals. And, most of
the experimental work on VR networking or televirtuality involves
digital pipelines to cany the data. Televirtuality, the ability to share a
three-dimensional environment over a telecommunications network, is
still in the experimental stages. But as Jacobson (chap. 20) observes, the
technical challenges, however daunting, are more easily resolved than
the social challenges that attend televirtuality.

The Global Village: Concepts and Prophets

Concepts of global networking have been around for some time. The
most popular sources of discussion have circulated around the term
"global vUlagization."
The term "global village" was coined in the 1960s by Marshall
McLuhan, a University of Toronto professor. Adoption of the term, like
the global technologies themselves, has spread worldwide. Yet
McLuhan was not the first to contemplate human interconnectivity on
a global scale. McLuhan attributed the inspiration for his term to
Nathaniel Hawthorne, who in 1851 had written:

Is it a fact... that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a

great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather,
the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we
say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance
which we deemed it! (Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables)

The possibility of the interconnected world raises the fundamental

question: what kind of world will the global village offer? One of the
major themes that emerged in literary texts considering this scenario is
that of cultural consolidation and, ultimately, homogenization. In 1925
Aldous Huxley presented the following exchange in Those Barren
Leaves:

"It's comforting to think," said Chelifer, "that modern civilisation is doing its
best to re-establish the tribal regime, but on an enormous, national and even
international scale. Cheap print, wireless telephones, trains, motor cars, gramo-
phones and all the rest are making it possible to consolidate tribes, not of a few
thousands, but of millions In a few generations it may be that the whole
planet will be covered by one vast American-speaking tribe, composed of innu-
merable individuals, all thinking and acting in exactly the same way, like the
characters in a novel by Sinclair Lewis ..."
9 Global Networks: An Introduction

Cyberspace, a term coined by science fiction writer William Gibson,

connotes a future world mediated by computer networks, with direct
and total access—mental and sensorial—to a parallel world of pure
digitized information and communication.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legiti-

mate operators, in every nation A graphic representation of data abstracted
from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complex-
ity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constella-
tions of data. Like city lights, receding ..." (1984, 51)

The challenges of a global future were not lost on these early literary
explorers. What were the implications of life in a global village? Espe-
cially if that global village were on a network?
These challenges, and more, are being confronted by the first wave
of travelers and settlers in the global networks.

Organization of This Book

Global Networks explores the new realms of the global network worlds
and considers issues involved in socializing and globalizing cyberspace.
The major theme weaving through the book is global networks as a so-
cial space, shaped for and by human communication and community.
Global Networks is organized along four perspectives:

1. Overview: From Technology to Community

2. Issues in Globalizing Networks
3. Applications of Global Networking
4. Visions for the Future

Part 1: Overview: From Technology to Community

The first part of the book, the Overview, introduces and examines the
social nature of global networks. Chapters in the Overview section look
at networlds and network communities to explore human interaction
on the networks as technology becomes community.
Chapter 2, by Linda Harasim, launches the theme of social relation-
ships on the networks. Computer networks have become new en-
vironments or networlds for business, educational, and social
communication. The key questions addressed are what kind of commu-
nication does the network support and how can the network be shaped
Linda M. Harasim

to enhance and improve human communication? Attention is paid to

both the need to shape the internal contours of the networlds as well
as the importance of developing informed social policy governing the
global use of networks.
Chapter 3, by John Quarterman, examines how technology becomes
community. As Quarterman argues, networks are not just technology.
Faster networks lead to new services, then new uses, then communities.
These communities cross national, organizational, and time bounda-
ries, forming global matrices of people facilitated by the global Matrix.
This chapter discusses aspects of the history and near future of selected
international networks (the ARPANET, the Internet, UUCP, USENET,
and BITNET) to illustrate patterns of globalization.
The final chapter of the Overview section is a personal tour of life in
one networld community, the WELL. Howard Rheingold describes the
WELL as a community not of common location but of common inter-
est, in which the people with whom one interacts most strongly are
selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by geo-
graphical proximity. Chapter 4 presents an insider's view of life on the
WELL and identifies issues that both enhance as well as challenge
community life in virtual space.

Part 2: Issues In Globalizing Networks

In part 2, issues related to policy, organizational communication, and
cross-cultural communication are explored from several perspectives.
In chapter 5, Anne Branscomb identifies key questions encountered
in drawing proprietary boundaries within electronic space, establishing
legal jurisdictions, and applying legal and regulatory schemes that are
appropriate for the new legal frontiers. The chapter presents contempo-
rary cases and discusses the numerous efforts underway to harmonize
national laws with global networks.
Chapter 6, by Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler, focuses on the impacts and
implications of global networks on work. Electronic interactions differ
significantly from face-to-face exchanges. The implications for the
structure of organizations and the conduct of work is profound. This
chapter considers how computer networks can affect the nature of work
and the relationships between managers and employees in order to
help people better exploit the opportunities that networks offer and to
avoid or mitigate the potential pitfalls of networked organizations.
;1 Global Networks: An Introduction

In chapter 7, Marvin Manheim focuses on how an organization can

use information technology to gain competitive advantage in an era of
globalization. The chapter presents several hypotheses about critical
issues facing globally competing companies and concludes that systems
designed to support teams working on critical tasks will have the great-
est strategic return to a globally competing company. An approach
to designed and implemented task-focused, team-specific systems is
outlined.
In chapter 8, Hiroshi Ishii presents the case of the importance of
cultural issues in the design of computer networking tools. Tools de-
signed for Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Ishii ar-
gues, should be viewed as cultural tools as well as computer tools. This
chapter describes differences in social protocols between two cultures,
American and Japanese, in decision making processes and face-to-face
meetings and the implications of cross-cultural issues for groupware
design and CSCW research to facilitate global communication and
cooperative work.
The cultural nature of communication and relationships in a global
network is further explored by Jan Walls in chapter 9. As Walls notes,
shared sodolinguistic experience creates and reinforces shared expecta-
tions in interpersonal communication (most often intracultural), in-
cluding shared language and discourse habits. The chapter explores
what happens when globalizing networks bring together people whose
discourse habits and expectations have been created by different (i.e.,
cross-cultural) sodolinguistic experience.
Chapter 10, by Michael Kirby and Catherine Murray, examines the
opportunities global networks provide for new assaults on data security,
which will require international initiatives to harmonize national laws.
Various principles to be recommended in the upcoming OECD (Organi-
zation for Economic Cooperation and Development) Guidelines on In-
formation Security are discussed. But the thesis of the chapter is that we
remain at risk—less from illegitimate intrusions into data security than
from the frailty of international institutions and incapacity of demo-
cratic processes to keep pace with the social implications of technology.

Part 3: Applications of Global Networking

Part 3 presents and analyzes case studies of practical experiences. The
contributors to this section are all pioneers in global networking and
Linda M. Harasim

present their experiences within a framework that can provide lessons

for other organizations in implementing their own networking
ventures.
In chapter 11, Andrew Feenberg describes a pioneering venture as the
basis for identifying lessons for future applications. In the ten years of
its activity in global networking, the Western Behavioral Sciences Insti-
tute built a community of executives from twenty-one countries. Feen-
berg generalizes from the history of the WBSI to explain how other
organizations can proceed in building similar networks.
Chapter 12, by Robin Mason, looks at the role of networking in
facilitating the creation of the "European village." The European Com-
mission is funding a wide variety of projects using computer conferenc-
ing, an initiative that has lent support to private and institutional
applications of the medium in training, education, and business com-
munication. This chapter provides a general overview of the phenome-
nal growth of electronic networking in Europe, illustrated by examples
of networking activities to illuminate particular European issues.
Chapter 13, by Margaret Riel, presents a case and a model for global
networking in the classroom. Learning circles on the AT&T Learning
Network provide an instructional strategy for global education. Stu-
dents use communication technology to work with their counterparts
in distant locations. This chapter describes how learning circles address
the objectives of global education and what students in elementary and
secondary schools are able to accomplish using a globalizing commu-
nication technology embedded in an educational program.
In chapter 14, Beryl Bellman, Alex Tindimubona, and Armando Arias,
Jr. describe a globalized computer network that combines computer
conferencing, videotex, electronic mail, and computer phone to create
a distributed educational, scientific, and social development research
network linking universities in North America, Latin America, and
Africa. The chapter explores issues in the building of a sustainable
network combining academic, social development, and commercial
interests and support.
Jeffrey Shapard, in chapter 15, notes that Japan is a nation of islands,
natural as well as electronic. Shapard's chapter explores the relationship
of language and character codes with isolation on computer systems
and networks in Japan. The issues raised have significance for other
Global Networks: An Introduction

languages that require character codes that are not compatible with
current international standards, and implications for global networks.
Chapter 16, by Lucio Teles, looks at learning through interaction
with computer-mediated peers, mentors, and experts, using global net-
works and conferencing systems. Global networks introduce new op-
portunities and issues for learning on a global scale, which should be
taken into account by instructional designers. Two approaches to cog-
nitive apprenticeship on networks are illustrated and elaborated
through case studies.
In chapter 17, Howard Frederick presents the case for the emergence
of global civil society, accelerated by decentralized communication
technologies such as computer networking. Global civil society as rep-
resented by the nongovernmental movement is now a force in inter-
national relations in the cause of peace, human rights, and the
environmental movement. This chapter outlines the concepts of global
civil society and the NGO Movement, describes the obstacles that they
face, and sketches the emergence of the APC network as an illustration
of this worldwide phenomenon.

Part 4: Visions for the Future

Based on experiences in communication networking, where are we
headed, and what concepts, goals, and concerns should guide us? The
final four chapters set out their visions of the next steps.
In chapter 18, Mitchell Kapor and Daniel Weitzner suggest that while
our society has made a commitment to openness and free communica-
tion, if our legal and social institutions fail to adapt to new technology,
basic access to the global electronic media could be seen as a privilege
granted to those who play by the strictest rules, rather than a right for
anyone who needs to communicate. The authors set out their vision
for the development of the International Public Network (IPN), an
interconnected confederation of numerous networks that will form the
main channels for commerce, learning, education, and entertainment
in a global society. This chapter looks at lessons from the Internet as a
testbed for developing public policy to guide the development of the
IPN as a ubiquitous global network for the future.
In chapter 19, Shumpei Kumon and Izumi Aizu present a case for
co-emulation as a strategy for developing a global hypernetwork society
Linda M. Harasim

of the future. Co-emulation is a response to the information age

whereby nations learn from one another to produce a prototype socio-
economic model that each country can mold to fit its unique history
and culture. Global networks can enable the sharing of collective goals
and relevant information among their members and making collective
decisions by means of consensus formation. Co-emulation offers a
strategy for nations to move beyond competitive relationships into
more consensual and reciprocal relationships to meet the social, eco-
nomic, and environmental challenges of the twenty-first century.
Chapter 20, by Robert Jacobson, considers life in cyberspace for the
network traveler. A person's ability in the virtual world to transcend
time and space, to be anywhere, anytime, with anyone, is the principal
attraction of virtual worlds technology. But throughout human experi-
ence transcendence has been a tricky business, leading to greater aware-
ness or insanity. This chapter considers the possibilities and challenges
of virtual cyberspace, such as training and individual effort to enter and
master this environment.
Chapter 21, by Linda Harasim and Jan Walls, concludes with a look
at the role of global networking in creating this book and the lessons
of this experience for future global networks.
Networlds: Networks as Social Space

Linda M. Harasim

The fusion of computers and telecommunications over the past twenty

years has created a worldwide web of computer networks; these net-
works, initially established for transferring data, have been adopted
by people who want to communicate with other people. Human com-
munication has become the major use of computer networks and
has transformed them into a social space where people connect with
one another. Computer networks are not merely tools whereby we
network; they have come to be experienced as places where we network:
a networld.
The computer screen is a window to this world, "accessed through
any computer linked into the system; a place, one place, limitless;
entered equally from a basement in Vancouver, a boat in Port-au-
Prince, a cab in New York, a garage in Texas City, an apartment in Rome,
an office in Hong Kong ..." (Benedikt, 1991,1).

"It feels like walking into a room full of friends .. .wl

"You have electronic mail waiting." Every morning . . . networks deliver mes-
sages to me from all over the world. Sometimes they are news, sometimes
season's greetings, and sometimes business contracts and scripts. You are con-
nected to the entire world using networks.2

The range and speed of computer networks has increased at a phe-

nomenal rate, reaching tens of millions of personal computer users at
home and at work, across globally connected telephone lines. Tools
such as electronic mail, bulletin boards, and computer conferencing
16 Linda M. Harasim

facilitate group communication across time and space. Groups can

now socialize and work together regardless of different locations or
schedules.
Computer networking does not replace other forms of human com-
munication; it increases our range of human connectedness and the
number of ways in which we are able to make contact with others.
Historically, changes in the means of communication—from speech to
writing to the printing press—have transformed human development
and society. Technological change, writes Zuboff (1988), defines the
horizon of our material world as it shapes the limiting conditions of
what is possible and what is barely imaginable. New opportunities are
opened, others are closed, augmenting and changing our material
world and our relation to and within it. As a technological innovation
and a social construct, global networks impact the ways in which we
communicate, with transformative implications for how we form com-
munity, how we work, and how we learn.
This chapter looks at the kinds of worlds opened up by computer
networks and considers such issues as: What kinds of social spaces do
networks offer? What happens to communication mediated by net-
working? What critical issues need to be addressed in socializing net-
works into new environments for human communication? The chapter
describes the new social spaces for human interaction available in the
networld and examines how these spaces affect communication. The
chapter ends by discussing issues in socializing and democratizing com-
munication in the networld.

Networks as Place

Computer networking is, for many, already an integral part of profes-

sional, business, intellectual, and social life. Millions of users around
the world are linked by thousands of computer networks and the num-
bers are growing exponentially (see Quarterman, chap. 3). Increasingly,
small local and national networks are linking with large international
networks like the Internet to become nodes on a vast global web. Some
networks are private, others are public; some charge a fee, others are
free to users. Whatever the differences, users are beginning to have a
common experience: networks are a social environment. They become
a destination, a place to link with other people.
Networlds: Networks as Social Space

The network has become one of the places where people meet to do
business, collaborate on a task, solve a problem, organize a project,
engage in personal dialogue, or exchange social chitchat. We "go to
work" on the network and "drop in" to an online conference. Com-
ments such as "See you online!" or "Lefs meet online" reflect the
experience of the network as a place to conduct work or socialize. The
phrase "I'm here" is common, expressing a sense of presence that links
people on the network. Yet where is "here"? It is likely that the receiver
of the message has no idea of the physical location of the sender: home,
school, work, or on the road. "Here" has come to signify a virtual world
on the network, shared with others, constituted by the group.
A world is defined as all that concerns or all who belong to a specified
class, time, domain, or sphere of activity. What kind of "worlds" are
available on global networks? Three main networlds are described:
social networlds, networkplaces, and educational networlds.

Social Networlds
The social networlds that exist on electronic mail networks are vast and
wide ranging. The Internet, for example, hosts thousands of distributed
groups, linking universities, offices, schools, and homes on a diverse
range of subjects. As one networker noted:
Internet is a sort of international cocktail party where you can talk to people
from all over the world about all sorts of things that interest you.
It's informative. You need a piece of information? Post a question to the right
group and you will get what you wanted and a dozen more related references.
Also, sometimes information . . . just comes to you.
I've made very good friends on the nets. I've gotten friendship, inspiration,
consolation in times of loss, support in times of self-doubt, information and just
plain fun.

A second forum for social community occurs on computer conferencing

and bulletin board services. These systems are often organized around
metaphors that reflect human settlement and activities: townhalls,
classrooms, villages, clubs, and shopping malls. Rheingold describes the
networlds on the WELL as close-knit virtual communities with friend-
ships, feuds, marriages, divorces, and funerals (see chap. 4). Confer-
ences on the Japan-based TWICS system (discussed in chap. 17) are
organized around geographic metaphors that evolved, according to
Shapard (1992), from user input.
Linda M. Harasim

We . . . came up with this elaborate structure of three main structural topics—

mura (village), minato (port), and yama (mountain)—from which other struc-
tural topics would branch, such as yoriai (public meeting hall) for topics of
general interest to our members, akihabara (the name of the infamous Tokyo
consumer electronics district) for techie topics, sekai (world) for ported topics
and topics related to regions elsewhere, onsen (hot springs) for recreational
topics, and yakuba (town office) for topics about system policy and so on. We
used Japanese names for local flavor and to emphasize a sense of place, even
though the community was and remains very multicultural, with Japanese and
a range of other kinds of people.

A third form of social networlds is found on commercial videotex

systems, which present information as a page of text-based message
enhanced with simple graphics. The French government-owned
videotex network, Teletel, has transformed France into a networked
nation, providing a network gateway to over twelve thousand informa-
tion services for about 20 percent of the households in France. Over five
million users access information on theaters, movies, or restaurants;
schedule airline and hotel reservations; order items from computerized
catalogues; and chat with one another on the synchronous messageries.
The Teletel network (also known as Minitel) is simple to use and has
become integrated into the fabric of French life: holidays are planned
and reservations booked online; the TV music channel solicits online
input from viewers; and millions of users from all corners of France chat
as neighbors on the network.
Commercial videotex networks exist in the United States as well.
CompuServe is one of the oldest systems in the United States, first
launched as an information service in 1979. By 1991, an estimated
eight hundred thousand CompuServe users from over one hundred
countries had access to fourteen hundred databases and services for
shopping, travel, financial and news reports, games, and the most
dynamic and popular part of the service—the group forums. Prodigy,
GEnie, Delphi, America Online, and others offer similar online services
and social meeting places.
Social communication accounts for a sizable portion of all network
use. One recent survey among users of online (commercial) services
found that of the respondents, primarily male professionals, two thirds
used their computer and modem at home rather than in a conventional
office (Rosenthal, 1992). Many of these also did work from home, since
almost half (48 percent) utilized online business services. Over 80 per-
79 Networlds: Networks as Social Space

cent, however, signed on to engage in social activities as well. The most

popular online services were the bulletin boards or conferences. People
talking with one another is the major use of all commercial service
networks, and this survey reflected that reality. The survey showed that
79 percent used bulletin boards (or conferences) and 59 percent used
email (email was used for business and personal uses). Other services
were also popular: 48 percent of the respondents play online games; 32
percent shop electronically; 23 percent use airline reservations systems.
Market research (23 percent) and media information (31 percent) were
also widely used services. The respondents in this survey spent consid-
erable time online: 42 percent spend six or more hours per week online,
while 16 percent log more than fifteen hours online per week. For
business uses, about $220 was spent per month, while the average
personal user spent about $51 per month for services and transactions.

Networkplaces
The term "networkplace" is introduced here to describe the network!
primarily devoted to work-related communication. For increasing num-
bers of business people and professionals, the networkplace is an inte-
gral part of how work is conducted. Networks make it possible for
people to do information work effectively at locations remote from
their managers, their coworkers, the people who report to them, and
even from customers and clients with whom they must interact (Iick-
lider and Vezza, 1988). For example, telework increasingly involves the
use of networks to link the worker with the work; electronic cottage
industries use networks to link producers with markets; networks are
used by organizations to link employees with one another and with
other sources of expertise and data resources. The network becomes a
networkplace, enhancing and transforming how business and work are
conducted.
Telework and telecommuting use networks to disperse assignments
to workers in satellite and home offices. Teleworkers use networks to
exchange work-related information with one another and employers,
discuss and conduct joint tasks, interact with customers and clients,
participate in meetings, and maintain social contact. Telework is in-
creasingly attractive to companies struggling to reduce overhead, en-
hance productivity, and attract the best workers; to governments
seeking ways to reduce overcrowding and pollution on highways and
Linda M. Harasim

in urban centers; and to employees demanding alternatives to the

stresses of commuting to distant centralized worksites and long ab-
sences from family and home. It can also enable gainful employment
for people living in remote locations or who are housebound.
Global networks also facilitate new forms of entrepreneurship such
as the "electronic cottage." A Japanese journalist describes working
online:

I decided to do some business online, because despite the extreme cost, the
efficiency and information available online were worth more.
You can live 'in the world' using CompuServe and other networks. I was born
Japanese and I live in Japan. I can make many American and other global friends
using online services. I am able to retrieve news and data from throughout the
world. I am able to do business in America, online, without paying for air
tickets You may easily understand that this globe is so small online. Friend
after friend, business after business will visit you if you use networks. (Schepp
and Schepp, 1990, 12)

Professionals such as academics, scientists, students, and researchers

have adopted networking as an integral and in some cases principal
work space. Knowledge workers use networks to collaborate with col-
leagues, access specific expertise, share information about current re-
search, and generally sift, sort, and channel key information in the field
(Hiltz, 1984; Greif, 1988; Galegher, Kraut, and Egido, 1990).
Businesses use networks to link employees and management in one
or multiple sites, facilitating exchange of information and enabling
teamwork among colleagues located in different parts of the country or
the world. Manheim (chap. 7) describes how gains in productivity and
competitive advantage are increasingly related to the use of global
networks.
The new opportunities also bring new challenges. Ishii (chap. 8)
notes that developing a global groupware tool is more a cultural than
a technical task. The changing nature of work enabled by global net-
work technologies raises organizational issues as well. Networking, as
Sproull and Kiesler note in chapter 6, can change social relations:
hierarchy and authority are shifted in favor of more decentralized,
horizontal forms of organization. The design and implementation of a
networkplace introduces issues such as whether networking brings in-
creased monitoring over or increased control by the employees. The
changes and opportunities for the organization of the future depend
Networlds: Networks as Social Space

not only on the shape of the technology but also on how managers
and users employ the opportunities that it offers for changing work
structures.

Educational Networlds
As a result of over a decade of pioneering and visionary work by edu-
cators all over the planet, learners today can access virtual classrooms,
online work groups, learning circles, peer networks, electronic cam-
puses, and online libraries in a shared space, a network!, that connects
people all over the globe (Harasim et al., 1994).
Educational networlds are a dynamic field of innovation and growth.
In the United States alone, five million primary and secondary school
students from about twenty thousand schools with as many as one
hundred thousand teachers participate in local, national, and global
network activities. Networks are used by educators in all parts of the
world, and the number of users is growing rapidly, creating global
classrooms and global campuses. Bellman, Tindimubona, and Arias, Jr.
(chap. 14) describe the use of networks to link faculty, students, and
researchers in American, Canadian, Latin American, and African uni-
versities for course delivery and collaborative projects.
Students in the networld engage in group learning projects with peers
from other regions and countries; share ideas and resources; access
information on current events or historical archives; and interact with
experts, interviewing scientists or sending poems and short stories to
peers and "electronic writers in residence." Techniques for teaching and
learning are being reinvented and augmented through such approaches
as cognitive apprenticeship (Teles, chap. 16) and learning circles (Riel,
chap. 13). Networks amplify the range of learning experiences and
solidify international linkages (Mason, chap. 12), expanding the range
of resources that teachers and learners can access.
Teachers testify to the value of networlds for enhancing the learning
options they can offer their students. And teachers find that they
benefit as well from networking. The opportunity to interact with other
teachers and to share ideas has resulted in teacher revitalization.
Educational networld applications are proliferating in universities,
colleges, and distance education and training institutions as well.
Adults can take credit courses at the college, university, or graduate
school level, or participate in professional development, training, infor-
22 Linda M. Harasim

mal forums, or executive seminars that are offered entirely or partially

online (see Feenberg, chap. 11).
Educational networlds introduce a new world of learning: the oppor-
tunity for interaction on any subject, with peers and experts from
around the world; active participation in knowledge building and in-
formation sharing; and lifelong learning. Educational networlds pro-
mote the development of a learning society.

Human Communication in the Networld

Networlds are inhabited by a dynamic, diverse, and rapidly growing

population, attracted by the new communication opportunities. Yet we
know little about the nature of these opportunities and how the net-
working technology leads to specific advantages and disadvantages.
How does the mediation of computer networks affect human inter-
action and communication? What are the salient properties of the
technology and how do they impact on the communication?
Networlds exist on many types of computer networks, and new ones
based on high bandwidth multimedia systems are emerging. However,
most networlds today use email, bulletin board, or computer conferenc-
ing systems that support communication that occurs by exchanging
anyplace, anytime (asynchronous), text-based, computer-mediated
messages between two or more people. These attributes provide a
framework for understanding the nature of communication on the
networid and the opportunities and constraints currently available to
shape the network into a networid (Harasim, 1990). The framework
below presents the most common attributes.

Anyplace Communication
Networlds are distinguished by place-independent communication, ex-
panding the human neighborhood to global proportions. Networlds
enable people to socialize, work, and learn based on who they are rather
than where they are located. People have more choice.
Anyplace communication transcends geographic barriers to enable
people to access the people and resources they need, regardless of
where they are located. Global networking is made increasingly mo-
bile and available anyplace with the advent of cellular and satellite
technologies.
Networlds: Networks as Social Space

Networlds especially enhance access to those who might be hindered

for reasons such as geographic remoteness, age, physical disability, or
family or work responsibilities. Place-independence empowers other-
wise isolated people by providing them with access to other people as
well as to resources that they need to accomplish their goals. "Conven-
tional media (particularly informal/unscheduled meetings) tend to dis-
advantage those physically distant from the central locus of work; by
contrast, electronic media allow direct access to that locus irrespective
of physical distance" (Bikson and Eveland, 1990, 286).
Global networks enable new social relationships such as global work
groups. Networks are a fast, low-cost alternative to surface mail and
overcome the expense and inconvenience of travel. In addition, em-
ployees in networked organizations report that the introduction of
electronic mail gave them a new sense of the company as a whole and
developed feelings of belonging to an organization that felt increas-
ingly familiar and accessible (Zuboff, 1988).
Educational networlds provide learners and educators with global
access to expertise and learning resources beyond what is available in
the local classroom, textbook, or library: students are able to link with
teachers, experts and peers in all corners of the world to enhance
regular classroom activities or for taking courses entirely online.
Global networks enrich our experience and knowledge options but
also introduce new and complex issues. Cultural, linguistic, and politi-
cal factors in global conversations can confound our ability to establish
the meaningfulness of the discourse. Place-independence challenges
many habits and customs of interpersonal and group communication.

Anytime Communication
Most networlds are based on asynchronous, not real-time, communica-
tion. The millions of messages that CTOSS the globe each day testify to
the power of overcoming time zones and personal schedules for en-
abling active communication.
Asynchronicity offers many advantages for conversations in the net-
world. The major benefit is the increased user control: the sender and
the receiver don't have to be available at the same time. Networlds are
always open, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. High-speed
information exchange can reduce the time and work involved in dis-
tributing information among group members. Work can be discussed
24 Linda M. Harasim

and the individuals can get on with their job, without the need for
extensive coordination of personal schedules and delays in waiting for
the next face-to-face meeting.
Active participation in decision making and knowledge building is
facilitated by the fact that airtime is not limited and thus not as easily
controlled by a few individuals. People who prefer or require more time
to provide input find asynchronidty an advantage over real-time face-
to-face situations. Analysis of interaction in educational networlds
(university courses) has shown that most students contribute actively
and that the distribution of communication (the volume of input) is
spread quite evenly among all the students (Harasim, 1987; 1989;
1991).
Participants can take time to formulate their ideas into a more com-
posed and thoughtful response, contributing to improved quality of
communication. This attribute is especially advantageous for educa-
tional and business networld activities, but, it is also important in the
social networld, where the time to reflect before responding can en-
hance the exchange.
There are also constraints to asynchronous communication. Commu-
nication anxiety is reported by people who receive no response or at
least no immediate reply to their message (see Feenberg, chap. 11).
Moreover, the lack of immediate feedback makes it difficult to ascertain
whether the receiver has understood the message; people find they are
not as easily able to tailor their communication to be readily under-
standable (Finholt, Sproull, and Kiesler, 1991, 295).
Certain types of interactions, especially those associated with urgent
or tight timelines, can be negatively affected. Asynchronous communi-
cation involves unpredictable and sometimes extensive lags in feed-
back. Real-time communication may be more appropriate to situations
requiring immediate response. Processes of negotiation are extended
within asynchronous environments. Research has found that the time
required to achieve consensus is prolonged, but more people have
provided input and minority views are voiced more often than in
face-to-face situations (Rice, 1984).

Group Interactivity
Networlds provide new ways to meet people. Online, people can estab-
lish communication on the basis of shared interest, not merely shared
25 Networlds: Networks as Social Space

geography. Posting a comment or question in the networld invites

response and feedback, often generating consultation and multiple per-
spectives on a topic. We receive not only a response to our message, but
in the process meet someone with similar interests. Global networks
provide links to trusted sources and to new contacts.
The social and intellectual isolation that characterized human his-
tory has been reduced only with the advent of new communication
technologies, from literacy and the printing press to the telegraph,
newspapers, the telephone, and now increasingly, computer network-
ing. Group interactivity distinguishes networks and creates the basis for
networlds. Unlike broadcast media such as television, radio, or newspa-
pers—which are noninteractive, one-way media involving passive re-
ceipt of information—in the networld people can act directly to
question, probe, or elaborate on any piece of information that is
posted. Different perspectives on an issue are generated and shared; the
multilogue of the networld can provide a fuller picture. Moreover,
group discussion and shared experience are powerful forces toward
creating broad understanding.
Group interaction can be more evenly distributed in the networlds.
Networlds do not eliminate domination by more vocal participants, but
what is new is that dominance by a few doesn't exclude the ability of
others to have their say. Yet, managing conversations within a global
group can be daunting. Active participation and interaction can create
information overload, and few information management tools are as
yet available. While active participation in group activities offers im-
portant cognitive and social benefits for all participants, some tasks
may become unwieldy without organization of the individual input.

Computer Mediation
Most networlds today are mediated by text-based messaging and the
computer; multimedia telecommunication systems are not yet widely
available. Nonetheless, text-based communication does offer important
benefits for establishing meaningful and effective conversation.
Text-based messaging creates a new form of interpersonal interaction
with advantages over postal mail, telephone calls, and even face-to-face
encounters. It is at once direct while informal—enabling effective and
efficient yet nonoffensive communication. Email messages have not
become associated with the formality of letters; informality and imper-
26 Linda M. Harasim

feet typing are tolerated even in messages to an older person in a

superior position or to a person one does not know well (Ucklider and
Vezza, 1988, 147).
Text-only communication can free people from the bonds of physical
appearance and enable communication at the level of ideas. For exam-
ple, in face-to-face situations physical and social status cues extend
authority and influence over others. Cues such as dress, presentation,
voice intonation, and seating anangement denote power, leading to
unequal communication between people. In the networld "status,
power, and prestige are communicated neither contextually (the way
secretaries and meeting rooms and clothes communicate) nor dynami-
cally (the way gaze, touch, and facial paralinguistic behavior commu-
nicate)" (Kiesler, Siegel, and McGuire, 1991). Communication in the
networld is "blind" to vertical hierarchy in social relationships (ibid.).
Charisma, status, and other physical cues associated with appearance
and presentation have less influence because they cannot be (easily)
communicated electronically.
Text-based messaging benefits people who may not have a "voice" in
face-to-face situations (i.e., due to discrimination based on cues associ-
ated with gender, ethnicity, race, age, socioeconomic status, or physical
appearance). Bellman, Tindimubona, and Arias, Jr. (chap. 14) report
that anonymity provided by the text-based interface of computer con-
ferencing empowered Latin American female students to be active and
to argue and debate with their classmates, whereas in the face-to-face
classes they remained silent. For many people, the opportunity to
formulate (and edit) their messages improves their confidence and
communication skills.
Intellectual and social benefits are associated with text-based commu-
nication (Harasim, 1990). Traditional education is based on textbooks,
lectures, and written assignments; interactive text-based messaging of-
fers additional advantages to learners. Students can improve their writ-
ing, reading, and analytical skills online. The text-based nature of
networlds requires that to be present students must "say something,"
send a message about the topic. Sending a message involves formulat-
ing and articulating an idea or comment, a cognitive act. Feedback to
that message stimulates further consideration of the message. Discus-
sion and interaction on the ideas often motivates the sender to either
refine and expand the ideas or to correct or abandon them.
27 Networlds: Networks as Social Space

There is, moreover, a preservable record of the discussion: messages

are stored on the computer and hence can be reread and reflected upon.
A group memory is created. Asynchronous text-based conversation fa-
cilitates thoughtful consideration and review of messages and careful
formulation of responses. The text-based nature of the communication
enables users to observe each other's contributions, enhancing group
learning and group maintenance.
People new to network communication may imagine a world of cold
and impersonal messages, unable to convey emotion. Yet those in the
network! point to the power of prose for expressing and releasing
strong emotions (see Rheingold, chap. 4). Ingenuity in overcoming the
mechanical constraints of the medium has also led to the creation of a
range of symbols, called "smileys," such as the happy face:-) to express
emotions. Nonetheless, difficulties in establishing intent do occur—^at-
tempts at irony or sarcasm can be misunderstood. The reduced cues in
text-based messages make it difficult to resolve conflicts of ideology or
interest (Finholt, Sproull, and Kiesler, 1990).
Establishing authenticity is also difficult online, especially in groups
with little prior affiliation. There are many well-publicized stories
and folklore about people who created entirely new persona online.
The reaction to these cases is mixed: some people view them as impos-
tors, others as explorers or seekers. Van Gelder (1991) reports the case
of a man who used the network to play out assumptions about gen-
der roles. In real life he was a psychiatrist; on the network he pre-
sented himself as a female neuropsychologist, "Joan," who had
recently been severely disfigured in a car accident that had affected her
speech and her ability to walk. Over the two years that Joan was online,
she became a "monumental on-line presence who served both as a
support for other disabled women and as an inspiring stereotype-
smasher to the able-bodied. Through her many intense friendships and
(in some cases) her online romances, she changed the lives of dozens
of women;' (ibid., 365).
Eventually it was revealed that Joan was not only not disabled, but
that she was a he—"a prominent New York psychiatrist in his early
fifties who was engaged in a bizarre, all-consuming experiment to see
what it felt like to be female, and to experience the intimacy of female
friendship" (ibid.). The response to this revelation was intense: many
28 Linda M. Harasim

felt betrayed and outraged. Others wished to continue a friendship with

the person, "to relate to the soul, not the sex of the person" (ibid.).
Computer cross-dressing and use of persona are condoned or even
encouraged in certain networlds, such as those devoted to games and
role plays. Anonymity or noms de plume have also been used in edu-
cation and business to encourage frank response or unbiased exchange.
Other networlds discourage anonymity or pen names. As Rheingold
(chap. 4) notes, anonymity is not permitted on the WELL The norms
of the WELL are that "you own your own words."
The advent of video conferencing in networlds may help to alleviate
identity problems, although a related medium—televirtuality—prom-
ises to further complicate how we establish authenticity and sincerity
in networld conversations.
The mediation of the computer thus transforms communication op-
tions; the features discussed above combine to provide new and un-
precedented forms of human interaction. The ability of the computer
to store and process data augments our communication and intellectual
skills and extends our reach and opportunities for human community.
New tools such as word processing, spell checkers, spreadsheets, data-
bases, intelligent agents (knowbots), hypertextual information manag-
ers, and supports for group decision making and knowledge building
can enhance the quality of communication processes.
The mediation of the computer also promises more sophisticated
networld environments, with increased bandwidth involving multi-
media (see Kumon and Aizu, chap. 19) and televirtual systems (see
Jacobson, chap. 20).

Socializing the Networld: Shaping Networks into Networlds

Technological features do not assure effective communication, and

technical linkage alone does not create community. While the attri-
butes of the networks enable significant advantages for human commu-
nication, they are not a guarantee. The creation of networlds requires
human intervention in organizing the technology and in shaping the
human interactions to make the promise a satisfying and effective
reality.
Lessons gained over the past two decades of experience in network
communication highlight the importance of designing the environ-
29 Networlds: Networks as Social Space

ment. Networlds are the intersection of social and technical systems;

design involves both technical and social considerations. The network-
ing technologies used to create networlds are, to use the classification
of Galegher and Kraut (1990), permissive systems. These open spaces
enable and require social shaping by users for the most effective and
satisfying results.
As several authors in this volume describe, organizing group interac-
tions online can make text-based messages feel and function like a
meeting, a learning circle, or a cafe—transforming inhospitable mes-
sage systems into a vibrant social community, a business team that
functions effectively, a graduate seminar, or a group of people conduct-
ing a task. There is a purpose, a place, and a population.

Purpose: Task Structures

Tasks or activities in networlds are typically structured around a goal,
an agenda, and a timeline. The purpose may be loosely formulated,
as in an ongoing public conference for sharing jokes, or it may be
tightly defined, as in accomplishing a specific task within a defined
time period.
A network! involves organizing the activities so as to demarcate that
group/task from others on the network. In this way, networlds suggest
the experience of "doing something," with a certain population or
group—be it shopping in an electronic mall open to the public or
socializing with an intimate gathering.

Place: Spatial Structures

Definition of topics with specific purposes and memberships creates the
sense of place on the network. An online classroom, for example, in-
volves a structured environment, with different conferences for differ-
ent activities: a seminar "room," a student "cafe," a resource "library,"
and a "help" line (Harasim et al., 1994). Group membership might be
different in each space, as might the scheduling. Some spaces, such as
the cafe, could be open to all students for the semester while others,
such as a seminar room, would be open only to those students regis-
tered, and the seminar spaces would change weekly or according to
some schedule for each new topic.
Early, satisfying, and productive adoption of networlds for work or
play is related to familiarity. Metaphors provide familiarity and serve as
Linda M. Harasim

navigational and cognitive aids, helping to organize the interactions

and set participant expectations. To help us navigate around the maze
more effectively, many networlds are organized around metaphors
drawn from human settlements (offices, malls, campuses, cafes) and
social structures (groups, meetings, seminars, parties). Choosing a par-
ticular topic takes the user to a virtual space filled with activities,
information, or access to products and services.
Moreover metaphors convey what is socially appropriate: an online
cafe or shopping mall carries the implicit convention of dropping in at
one's own convenience or pleasure, whereas participants in an online
graduate seminar or weekly business meeting recognize that a different
code of behavior is expected.

Population: Croup Roles

Group structure involves the definition of roles and responsibilities
of the members of the group. Two roles are most common in the net-
world: the moderator and the participant. Moderators have rights and
responsibilities distinct from the other participants. Moderators create
the conference, establish membership, and may assist in maintaining
the communication focus and flows.
The degree of moderator involvement varies, largely according to the
nature of the activity. Social networlds with loose affiliations such as
mailing lists on recreational topics may involve little moderation be-
yond sponsoring the topic, administering the membership lists, and
setting some social norms. Anyone can join, and participants can read
or participate to the degree that they wish so long as they observe the
social conventions and stay on topic. There are no formal expectations
regarding quality, quantity, or timing of participation.
Moderated groups include large public forums or small closed gath-
erings in which one or more moderators actively organize the discus-
sion: posing questions, maintaining the topic focus, synthesizing
or weaving the themes that emerged in discussion, and encouraging
participation.
Task-oriented groups involve significantly more organizational shap-
ing. Additional roles may be identified: in addition to the moderating,
roles associated with coordinating, with making presentations, with
editing, or with synthesizing or assessing the discussions to date may
be designated. Moderator responsibilities may be increased, shaping
37 Networlds: Networks as Social Space

user interactions by such techniques as scheduling and sequencing the

activities; providing an agenda; setting out roles, tasks, timelines, and
responsibilities; providing spaces (such as subconferences) for small
group activities or specialized topics; and setting an appropriate tone
and normative behavior.
Networlds, like all social spaces, are shaped by social norms. None-
theless, as a new form of social space they require a new set of social
rules and etiquette to organize how we communicate online. In the
networld these rules are often referred to as "netiquette"—the set of
conventions that govern manners and conduct, the norms for behavior
in that space. Each particular networld has its own culture and norms
for acceptable and appropriate communication. Standards vary as to
what is considered legal, tasteful, and manageable communication. It
is typically the moderator or organizer of the specific group activity
who sets the netiquette—whether by written guidelines or by modeling
the appropriate behavior.

Democratizing the Networld

The shaping of the social interaction on the networld is a critical factor

enabling effective and satisfying communication and community.
Nonetheless, larger social forces need to be considered to ensure the
democratic and democratizing potential of networlds.

Networks: Freedom or Control?

Computer networking today is largely the result of cooperation among
self-reliant individuals and nodes. This notion of networking has con-
notations of increased self-organization and a conscious alternative to
top-down organization (Zuboff, 1988; Feenberg, 1991). Zuboff (1988)
discusses the potential for networking to enhance the horizontal di-
mensions of organizational life, in which management has reduced its
needs for control and encourages nonhierarchical communication in
which individuals are augmented by their participation in group life
and in which work and play, productivity and learning, are ever more
inseparable.
Yet, while networking can augment our communication potential,
others worry that users of global networks will be caught in a Big
Brother web of social control, in which all traffic and communication
32 Unda M. Harasim

can be monitored and in which networks become nets to catch and

confine prey. Zuboff (1988) has documented an example of a corporate
research network transformed by management into a panopticon, a
glass prison in which all actions are visible to supervisors.
As in the physical world, the network! is defined by social forces.
Networks enable but do not guarantee democratic communication.
Decisions related to access, cost, design, and control will determine the
nature of the social system a network! can offer.

Globalization: Centralization or Decentralization?

The globalization of computer networking has generated a debate over
whether networks will increase centralization of economic, cultural,
and societal forces or offer new opportunities for reconfiguring eco-
nomic and social development and facilitating new forms of settlement
systems.
Given the flexible nature of systems such as computer networks, both
centralization and decentralization are possible. The growth of multi-
national corporations as global entities is viewed as an indication of the
potential of computer networking technologies to centralize market
forces and create a homogeneous economy and culture.
However, scenarios of decentralization are also possible. The prolif-
eration of computer networks has enabled new forms of work and
education. Indeed, networking may lead to significant nonmetropolitan
development, where place of residence is no longer determined by
place of work. Economic and cultural forces may preserve some of their
diversity and uniqueness while still participating in and contributing
to a global network through strategies such as co-emulation, described
by Kumon and Aizu in chapter 19. The development of global collabo-
ration systems that acknowledge and support different cultural and
linguistic codes is also important (see Shapard, chap. 15). Moreover, as
Walls explains in chapter 9, support for cross-cultural communication
can help facilitate global networking for local development.

Access: Different Networks, Different Citizens

Networks provide access to people, to services, and to information. The
cost of networking tools is decreasing rapidly while telecommunication
systems involving radio frequencies and satellites are able to reach
people who have long been geographically and technically disenfran-
33 Networlds: Networks as Social Space

chised, promising new opportunities for collaboration, dialogue, and

exchange on a global basis.
Yet there is no guarantee that wide dissemination of knowledge and
information will actually occur and that vital information will be dis-
tributed equally to all. Will networks be used to facilitate a common
sharing of knowledge, a pool of information accessible by rich and
poor? Or will networks be used to segregate the "info-rich" from the
"info-poor." While networks increase access to resources that many
argue enhance our humanity and democracy, many of these services
are expensive. If freedom of choice is important, what happens to those
members of the planet who cannot afford the costs associated with
access? Economic disenfranchisement may be the greatest challenge
that looms for the global network (see Frederick, chap. 17). Will net-
working meet the dreams held by its proponents for equalizing access
and enabling community on a global scale? Or will the best informa-
tion be reserved for those who can afford it?
Awareness of the challenges together with efforts such as those de-
scribed in the following chapters, and especially the vision of the
International Public Network presented by Kapor and Weitzner in
chapter 19, are part of the initiatives to democratize the networlds and
make networks themselves a democratizing agent.

Policy: Role of the User

The history of computer networking has been characterized by user
input and definition. From the transformation of electronic file transfer
protocols into electronic mail networks to the appropriation and refor-
mulation of online databases into dynamic, vast, global, human com-
munication networks like Teletel, CompuServe, and the late Source,
users have reshaped data networks into social networks.
User input has transformed cyberspace into social space characterized
by open, lateral communication linkages. However, the future of these
spaces is still to be determined, with tremendous implications. Com-
mercial interests are seeking increased involvement and control. Policy
(organizational and governmental) and technical constraints set by
international standards, protocols, and economics are also consequen-
tial in shaping this social space (see Branscomb, chap. 5, and Kirby and
Murray, chap. 10). What and who will determine the shape of tomor-
row's networlds? There is a need to ensure the continuing role of user
34 Linda M. Harasim

participation in the design and development of these spaces and in

shaping policy regarding their use.

Conclusions

The need for human beings to communicate and develop new tools to
do so forms the history of civilization and culture. Computer networks
are recent developments and immediately were adopted by people for
human communication and adapted into networlds—new spaces for
social, work, and educational interaction. Networlds offer a new place
for humans to meet and promise new forms of social discourse and
community.
We are only at the threshold of understanding their promises and
challenges. The way that network environments are shaped and de-
signed influences the nature and quality of the social space that they
offer. Social policy will also determine their role and implications.
Social awareness of the need to shape networlds and to participate in
that process will be essential to ensuring that networks enable human-
ity to express itself in new and hopefully better ways.
 The Global Matrix of Minds

John 5. Quarterman

Networks are not just technology. Faster networks lead to new services,
then new uses, then communities. This chapter discusses aspects of the
history and near future of a few networks to illustrate some patterns
that have occurred on many networks. The network services mentioned
here are intended to be typical of those also found on other networks.
They are used as background to a sketch of the kinds of community and
society that have been built from them. These communities cross na-
tional, organizational, and time boundaries. The most widespread use
of the global Matrix of interconnected computer networks is commu-
nication among its users. This forms global matrices of minds.
The main historical example used in this chapter is the ARPANET
(1969-1990, R.I.P.), which was the oldest of all computer networks
before it succumbed to technological obsolescence. The main current
example used here is the Internet, a global network of networks. The
Internet permits interactive file transfer and remote login across all its
parts. It also supports electronic mail, an asynchronous communica-
tions service.
Mail does not require direct interactive connectivity, and the Internet
is just part of the worldwide Matrix of all computers that interchange
electronic mail. Other parts of this global web of computers include
UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy), FidoNet, and BITNET, as well as many net-
works inside companies or other organizations, and many single-ma-
chine systems, some of them conferencing systems or BBSes (bulletin
board systems). Many of these other networks use different kinds of net-
work protocols (technological communication conventions). They are
each webs of computers. Together they form the web of webs that is the
36 John 5. Quarterman

Matrix. Some parts of the Matrix, like USENET, are just services (in this
case, news, or many-to-many asynchronous communication among
people) overlaid on the other parts. Dewdrops on a forest of webs?
If you can send a file, using file transfer protocol (FTP), to
nnsc.nsf.net, ftp.uu.net, or ftp.psi.com and transfer a file, you are on
the Internet. If you can send electronic mail to any of those machines
(or perhaps two million others), you are in the Matrix, whether you are
on the Internet or not.
The relations of the networks in the Matrix have been described
elsewhere (Quarterman, 1990; 1992). This chapter is about their uses
and effects more than about the networks themselves. It builds from
some technical information in its early sections to place, community,
and society in its later sections. That the former leads to or enables or
permits the latter is the subject of the chapter. It does not attempt to
determine which of those verbs is appropriate. It attempts to raise more
questions than it answers.

Speeds and Services

As shown in figure 3.1, available network speeds tend to grow in jumps.

The ARPANET used 56Kbps (kilobytes per second) links for more than
a decade. The Internet had 10Mbps Ethernet speeds commonly avail-
able from its inception in 1983, but used 56Kbps long-distance links
until about 1987, when Tl at 1.544Mbps (megabytes per second)
started to be used. Since then, network speeds have begun to climb. A
T3 (45Mbps) test network is in place, and faster wide area network
speeds are expected. FDDI local area network speeds of 100Mbps are
now available. The speed increases shown for the years after 1990 are
meant to be illustrative of a tendency for spurts every few years, with
LAN speeds keeping somewhat ahead of WAN speeds. Such speed in-
creases permit new services.

The ARPANET

The earliest multisite packet-switched network, the ARPANET, was in-

tended for resource sharing. That is, the sponsoring agency, ARPA (now
DARPA, the Defense Research Projects Agency), thought that a network
to connect its sponsored organizations would be less expensive than
37 The Global Matrix of Minds

Speed
(bits/sec)

1T
100G
10G

1G WAN
Speed
100M FDDI

10M Ethemel

1M T1 WAIS
X.500 Archie
100K
56K NNTP knowbot
10K WHOIS DNS
1K BBOARD

100 mail
10 FTP
TELNET
1
1970 1980 1990 2000
Year
Figure 3.1
Network speeds and services

buying new large computers for each of them. The organizations could
just use the network to log in on each others' computers and transfer
files among them. This approach influenced the naming of network
constituents: connected computers with users were called hosts, be-
cause people from elsewhere could log in to them as guests. It also
influenced network protocol terminology, as processes or computers
with resources to share were called servers, and processes or computers
that used those resources were called clients. Services like FTP (File
Transfer Protocol) and TELNET (remote login) were part of the original
network plan, and were implemented soon after the first ARPANET
nodes were in place in 1969. Host names were mapped to network
addresses by a central file on each host, updated from a master copy at
a centralized site.
Early ARPANET users quickly discovered they wanted to use the net-
work to send messages to each other about the status of their projects.
Electronic mail had been available on some time-sharing systems since
John S. Quarterman

the early 1970s (Carswell, 1988; Carl-Mitchell, 1992), but it had not
previously been used on a network (since there had been no networks).
The idea of networked electronic mail "was added to the FUe Transfer
Protocol as an afterthought; it was an interim solution to be used only
until a separate mail transmission protocol was specified" (Vittal,
Crocker, and Henderson, 1977). This was done by 1971 (North, 1971)
or 1973 (Bressler and Thomas, 1973). This seemed natural at the time,
since mail was placed in a mailbox file per user, and the name of the
mailbox file could be taken from the destination user's login name.
Mail was popular enough by September 1973 that headers were sys-
tematized in a de facto standard (Bhushan et al., 1973). This mail
message format was based on that used on the TENEX operating system
that ran on Digital's PDP-10 computers. The basic format was much the
same as that of the current Internet mail message format, as defined in
RFC-822 (Crocker, 1982), although To: and Cc: hadn't been invented
yet. Conflicts with headers used on another operating system, Multics,
soon led to more standard formats being developed (Vittal, Crocker,
and Henderson, 1977). Mail was soon the most-used service on the
network.
Users soon discovered that they often wanted to send mail not just
to specific people but also to fixed groups of people, such as everybody
participating in a particular implementation or planning task. These
electronic mailing lists (or distribution lists) were implemented using
aliases, that is, names that looked like mailbox names but that were
expanded by mail agents to lists of addresses for delivery. This idea was
formalized in 1977, along with a distinction between the envelope
address (for delivery of a particular copy of a message) and mail headers
(containing all relevant addresses) (Vittal, Crocker, and Henderson,
1977).
Mailing lists show that mail is something basically different from file
transfer, since addresses in a mail alias may refer to users on any system
reachable through the network; that is, they are not limited to the
sending or receiving (or controlling) host, as in FTP. Thus, a mail
transfer agent (MTA) distinct from FTP is useful. When the ARPANET
mail specifications were rewritten in the late 1970s, they were separated
from the FTP specifications, and implementations of the new Simple
Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server were separate from the FTP server
(Postel, 1982).
The Global Matrix of Minds

The next step was made when system administrators noticed that
mailing lists included a copy of the same message for each recipient on
a host. This was a waste of disk space for large lists, since there were
typically many users per host in those days. Many of those hosts were
TOPS-20 or TWENEX systems. (These ran on Digital DEC-20 hardware;
TWENEX was developed by BBN to run on Digital's DEC-20 computers
and was descended from BBN's TENEX operating system for Digital's
PDP-10 computers. Digital later revised TWENEX as TOPS-20.) On such
systems, a mechanism called BBOARD became popular. Mailing lists
could send one copy of a message to the BBOARD for each TOPS-20
host. Users would then use the BBOARD command to select a BBOARD
and read the messages in the mailing list it corresponded to.
Eventually, there were enough users using mail, lists, and BBOARDS
that they wanted ways to find each other's mail addresses and other
contact information. The finger and WHOIS services were invented for
this purpose. Finger shows information about users on a single system.
WHOIS is a centralized database for a whole network, with access
methods.
All this was on the ARPANET, before 1980, with links running at
56Kbps. This information is presented not only as a historical overview
of a particular case—the protocols and services of the ARPANET were
direct ancestors of those of some other networks, especially the In-
ternet. There is, however, a pattern here of resource sharing, mail, lists,
groups, and user information services that recurs on many other net-
works, even unrelated ones. We will return to this pattern later in the
chapter.

Local Area Networks

While the ARPANET was spreading all over the country and sprouting
links to Hawaii and Norway, local area networks were being invented.
Here we concentrate on Ethernet. The original Ethernet, as invented at
Xerox, had a theoretical maximum speed of 3Mbps and was designed
to throw away bandwidth. The later version from Xerox, Intel, and
Digital ran at 10Mbps, as did the protocol that was standardized as IEEE
802.3. Even though 10Mbps Ethernet was still designed to throw band-
width away, 30 percent of 10Mbps is still 3Mbps, which is fifty-three
times faster than 56Kbps. (It turns out that it really is possible to get
40 John S. Quarterman

10Mbps transmission speeds out of 10Mbps Ethernet, but that is an-

other story.)
A speed of 56Kbps wasn't really fast enough (at least when multi-
plexed) to handle distributed file systems. Ethernet was. Xerox imple-
mented a shared file system and a distributed name service, as did
others such as Apollo.

The Internet
Researchers involved with the ARPANET could see that one future of
networking was interconnected sets of dissimilar networks, such as
Ethernets, connected by slower wide area networks of ARPANET-like
technology. The Internet Protocol (IP) was invented to permit this. IP
permits building Internets, which are networks of networks that use IP,
along with the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the User Data-
gram Protocol (UDP), and others in the TCP/IP protocol suite. (Other
protocol suites, such as TCP/IP and ISO-OSI, can also support In-
ternets.) In 1983, the ARPANET split into ARPANET (for network re-
search) and MILNET (for operational use). Both ARPANET and MILNET
became wide area backbone networks connecting local area networks
into an Internet, then called the ARPA Internet, now called just the
Internet. All the old ARPANET services were available on the Internet
as part of the new TCP/IP protocol suite.
The growth of the Internet was spurred by the release of the 4.2BSD
version of the UNIX operating system in 1983 and its revision as
4.3BSD in 1986. The 4.2BSD version contained an implementation of
the complete TCP/IP protocol suite and was available for cost of distri-
bution, since its development had been funded by public (U.S. Govern-
ment and State of California) moneys (Leffler et al., 1989). Meanwhile,
new hardware technology allowed faster, smaller, and cheaper comput-
ers to spread.
New companies, such as Sun Microsystems, were formed to take
advantage of these developments. Sun invented a Network File System
(NFS) that allowed relatively transparent remote access to files, unlike
FTP, where the user has to explicitly transfer a file before using local
native programs with it. NFS was written to be used on top of UDP (a
TCP/IP transport protocol). It was made possible by the above develop-
ments plus the availability of fast network technology such as Ethernet.
The Global Matrix of Minds

Such networked file systems brought a need for quick and distributed
access to information about users across at least a local area network.
For this purpose Sun provided YP (Yellow Pages, now known as NIS, for
Network Information Service). NIS was designed for fast networks and
is almost solely used on them.
Fast local area network speeds also permitted new variations on re-
mote login. The X Window System was invented by MIT Project Athena
around 1984. It, unlike NFS and NIS, is also fairly widely used over even
fairly slow wide area networks, but its development was clearly spurred
by fast network speeds. Similarly, the Andrew File System (AFS) can be
used over slow networks but was designed first on fast local area net-
works. Many other network applications developed on local area net-
works (Quarterman, 1991c).

About 1984, proposals were drafted for a national supercomputer access

network, later called NSFNET, after the National Science Foundation
(NSF). Deployed in 1986, this became the main backbone network in
the Internet. The NSFNET backbone was implemented to use Tl
(1.544Mbps) links about 1987. Experimental services such as packetized
video and packetized voice became available (some of these had been
under development on the old ARPANET but weren't practical until
higher speeds were available).
The ARPANET was retired from service in 1988/89 because its link
speeds were considered obsolete. Meanwhile, much of NSFNET runs
over T3 (45Mbps) links.
Although the ARPANET and the Internet itself were started by the
U.S. Department of Defense, the current Internet is much bigger and
more diverse than its origins might indicate. Military organizations and
users on the Internet are a small and shrinking minority. There are
several national backbone networks in the Internet in the United States
alone, including several, such as PSINet and AlterNet, that are privately
owned and support themselves by charging for access. Even for
NSFNET, only a small fraction of its funds come from the U.S. federal
government, and those come from NSF, not DoD.
Elsewhere, Canada has its own national backbone in the Internet, as
do many countries in Europe. There are several multinational IP back-
42 John 5. Quarterman

bone networks in Europe. Japan has three national IP backbone net-

works. Australia and New Zealand have their own. Many other coun-
tries, such as Argentina and South Africa, have international IP links,
even though IP may not have spread far internally yet.
Other networks, often UUCP and FidoNet dialup networks, serve the
rest of the United States. Sites connected that way do not have many
basic Internet services, such as interactive file transfer (FTP) or remote
login (TELNET). They are part of the Matrix, but they aren't part of the
Internet—until they upgrade to IP.

Population

Higher network speeds are not the only cause of invention of new
protocols. Increasing numbers of networks, hosts, and users also have
effects. Figure 3.2 gives very rough estimates of the user population of
the ARPANET and then of the Internet from the beginning (1969) to
the near future (2000). The ARPANET (pre-1983) figures are outright

Users

1T

100G

10G
World population
1G
US population economics
100M ^r Internet
legalities
politics >' growth
10M

1M communities
100K communications _

10K resource /
sharing ^ '
1K

100
10
1 1 1 1 1—
1970 1980 1990 200C
Year

Figure 3.2
Internet growth and uses
The Global Matrix of Minds

guesses. The Internet (1983-1990) figures were computed by multiply-

ing the number of networks in the Internet by an average of one
hundred hosts per network and ten users per host, or one thousand
users per network. That factor of one thousand users per network
matches one arrived at by different means, which produced a conser-
vative figure of 1.88 million users as of January 1991 (Partridge, 1991).
In January 1992 the Internet had about four million users, and by
August 1992 the Internet had about one million hosts and five to ten
million users.
The growth rate from about 1987 has been exponential as the num-
ber of networks has doubled each year. This exponential growth rate is
borne out not only by the figures for numbers of networks but also by
recently published figures for numbers of hosts that were measured
approximately every three months (Lottor, 1992). There are monthly
measurements of numbers of hosts for Europe for 1991 that show the
European growth rate is not only exponential, like the growth in the
Internet worldwide, but is actually faster (Terpstra, 1992; Blokzijl,
1990). The Internet in Europe is actually increasing by a factor of
four annually, instead of the worldwide growth annual factor of two
(Quarterman, 1992).
The near future numbers (1991-2000) assume a simple continuation
of the worldwide annual doubling. Obviously that exponential growth
rate can't continue forever, since we run out of people on the planet
before 2000. However, few who have tried to estimate Internet growth
have shown any slacking in the exponential curve before the next five
years or so. What is the real limit to Internet growth? Number of
computer-literate people? Number of computers, including PCs and
pen computers? There are by some estimates sixty million PCs in the
world already, and that number is also growing rapidly.

Resource Naming
Meanwhile, Internet protocol developers had to contend with not just
one or two networks but hundreds and anticipated thousands in a few
years, together with tens or hundreds of thousands of hosts. The old
centralized tables for mapping hosts to network addresses would no
longer be adequate. A distributed host naming service, DNS (the Do-
main Name Service), was invented and deployed around 1984 to meet
this need. This is one of the first examples of an Internet service that
44 John S. Quarterman

was clearly motivated by population pressures, not by higher available

network speeds (e.g., DNS secondary servers just make a copy of the
whole database). However, higher speeds later made the cunent very
wide use of DNS practical.
Similarly, the old-style WHOIS service eventually proved to be inade-
quate for large user populations. New services such as X.500 (the ISO
name and directory service) have been implemented and deployed for
this reason. No service has adequately met this need yet, and this is an
active topic of network research and policy discussions.
Increased numbers of networks and hosts have led to an alphabet
soup of network routing and management protocols to deal with them,
but those are peripheral to the main topic of this chapter because users
do not see them directly; they merely support other protocols.

Resource Access
In a network of tens of thousands of hosts, it can be very difficult to
find specific information. For example, FTP supports an access method
called anonymous FTP, which allows anyone to connect to a host that
supports it with FTP, log in as user anonymous with password guest, and
retrieve files left there for general use. Source code for programs, bina-
ries of programs, archives of mailing lists, protocol specifications, and
a plethora of other information is available from anonymous FTP serv-
ers. But which anonymous FTP server host has the files you want? The
traditional method of finding out is by polling or word of mouth—not
very efficient.
A newer method is illustrated by the Archie service of McGill Univer-
sity in Montreal. The Archie server looks at a list of anonymous FTP
servers, polls each one and retrieves an index from it, and keeps the
indexes on a single host. Users may then connect to the Archie server
and examine these indexes to determine which anonymous FTP servers
have the files they want.
Similarly, the Knowbot Information Service (KIS), or knowbot for
short, developed by the Corporation for the National Research Initia-
tive (CNRI), automates searching servers that provide user directory
information. A knowbot can be configured to use the WHOIS service,
the X.500 service, the finger service on an appropriate host, and other
services to fetch information about a user (or perhaps about a host,
network, domain, or organization). Some formatting is done on the
retrieved information to make it more legible, but no attempt is made
45 The Global Matrix of Minds

to merge what comes from different servers, nor are relative values
given.

Information Access
It would be even more useful if computers could be used to automate
choosing information, not just finding it. A step in this direction has
been made with the Wide Area Information Service (WAIS), recently
operational on the Internet. WAIS not only assists in locating servers
but also accepts rules from the user that help it determine what infor-
mation to select. It can also be configured to keep looking and inform
the user of new information.
Meanwhile, USENET news, which had developed independently on
the UUCP dialup network at speeds of first 300bps, then 1200bps,
2400bps, and more recently 10Kbps and even 14.4Kbps, had grown
very popular by about 1988. The USENET news network had about four
hundred newsgroups at that time. Newsgroups are discussion forums
somewhat similar to mailing lists, but kept by hosts like BBOARD, and
different from both in being much more widely distributed geographi-
cally (worldwide) and somewhat more independent of underlying
hardware or software platform (most USENET hosts run UNIX, but
there are also MS-DOS, VMS, CMS, etc. hosts).
The amount of traffic became the main problem in keeping the
network running. Successively faster modem speeds had permitted it to
continue to grow, but even 10Kbps became too slow. Fortunately, many
of the main USENET hosts were also on the Internet, and the new
NSFNET Tl backbone allowed even more traffic. Since USENET news
over UUCP over TCP over IP was not particularly efficient or conven-
ient, the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) was invented to allow
convenient distribution of news over the Internet.

People
There is clearly a pattern of networks permitting services (e.g., FTP) that
are then used to build other services (e.g., mail). Faster network speeds
then allow more transparent relatives of the earlier services (e.g., NFS)
and also new services (e.g., X, although some say it is just a spiffy kind
of TELNET). Population pressures combine with available speeds to
permit and demand more transparent and distributed services (DNS,
X.500, NNTP). Eventually, increasing population requires development
of services to find and access other services (Archie, knowbot). Finally,
46 John S. Quarterman

services are needed that not only find and retrieve information but that
also actually interpret it for you (WAIS). But the more interesting aspect
of this cumulative development of network services is what people do
with them.

Resource Sharing
The original goal of the ARPANET was to share resources. This was also
the goal that was used to justify funding of NSFNET and is one of the
goals being used to justify the proposed NREN (National Research and
Education Network) in the United States (Habegger, 1991).
Being able to access a computer located elsewhere is good and useful,
as is being able to retrieve someone else's program or data. Resource
sharing is essential to research and development or commerce. It is
usually the first goal of R&D or enterprise networks. The first use of new
network speeds is often more sophisticated resource sharing, for exam-
ple, NFS, NIS, and X.
Even the USENET network developed from the UUCP mail network.
UUCP stands for UNIX to UNIX CoPy, and the underlying protocol
does file transfers and remote job execution. Mail is implemented as a
combination of the two. News was added later by the same kind of
combination. But resource sharing preceded communication on UUCP
and USENET, just as it did on the ARPANET.

Communication

People want to talk to people, not just to machines. Computer net-

works rapidly become used for communication, thus known as com-
puter-mediated communication (CMC). Mail was quickly invented on
the ARPANET and UUCP. Even BITNET, whose underlying support
mechanism emulates punch cards, has mail as its most widely used
service. The X.400 Message Handling System (MHS) is another method
of providing electronic mail and related services (Carl-Mitchell, 1991).
However, lefs avoid getting buried in network application protocol
differences and talk about what happens when the protocols are used.

Places
People want to talk not only to individuals but also to groups. Mailing
lists develop on every network that has mail. People begin to depend
on them as places to get information or hear interesting news.
47 The Global Matrix of Minds

Travel
Given places, people begin to travel between them. Given enough
places, navigation is necessary. Sophisticated management services like
BBOARD, LISTSERV (on BITNET), and USENET news (with its many
interfaces) develop.
At this level of sophistication, the appropriate metaphor for use of
computer networks may not be communications—with its familiar
analogies of telephones, paper post, fax, radio, and television—but
travel, with its immediacy of experience and its tendency toward total
immersion (rapture of the netways?).

Communities
Once you can go to other places and come back, you begin to notice
there are some places where you feel more comfortable or get more
work done. People begin to frequent these places, and some develop
into communities. There is a sort of evolution from resource sharing
through communication, places, and travel to community.
For example, communication serves as the basis of community but is
not the same. I can communicate with a national politician by writing
him a letter, but that doesn't mean I consider myself to be in a commu-
nity with him. Even when communication does serve as the basis of a
community, the community itself is something different. There is an
analogy between the way community builds on communication and
the way network protocols and services build on previous services and
protocols. Mail is not just file transfer and remote job entry, even
though it may be built out of them. Mailing lists differ from personal
mail, even though they are built from it. And communities differ from
mailing lists, even though they may be built from them.
Computer networks have never been used solely for work. One of the
earliest online communities was probably the SF-LOVERS (Science Fic-
tion Lovers) mailing list, which was widely distributed over the AR-
PANET as early as 1978, despite never being sanctioned by any network
authority and after several attempts to suppress it. There are thousands
of online communities today, many geographically distributed. These
include the publicly advertised USENET newsgroups and Internet, BIT-
NET, UUCP mailing lists, and others. Such communities can form
whenever a group of people decide to start a mailing list.
Many networks have been justified on the basis of resource sharing,
and many people say they use networks for communications. But some
 John S. Quarterman

of those who pioneered networks such as NSFNET say that the real
purpose was to form or facilitate communities. These goals are not
necessarily contradictory. But it's easier to get resource sharing or com-
munications funded by the federal government, at least if you're trying
to get the money through DARPA (the military) or NSF, even though
the specific resource sharing purpose of NSFNET, that is, supercomputer
access, turns out to account for about 2 percent of the real usage of the
NSFNET backbone.
These networked communities differ in some ways from other com-
munities. By the nature of the services and networks that support most
of them, they are distributed, asynchronous, and recorded. They are
also diverse, and are described as egalitarian.
Some people worry that networked communities are "thin" commu-
nities in that they do not involve direct human interactions as in
"thick" communities such as a baseball team, a musical group, or a
neighborhood church. Probably more networked communities tend to
be thin than, for example, work groups in businesses. However, many
networked communities lead to interactions among their members by
other means, such as traditional media like telephone and paper post,
and especially by travel for personal meetings. Perhaps it would be
better to say that the networks facilitate communities.

Politics
Wherever there are communities of people, politics follows. The battles
over the creation or charter of a USENET newsgroup can make old-time
Chicago ward politics look tame. On a larger scale, the existence, fund-
ing, and accessibility of the networks themselves have become political
issues on local, national, and international levels.
Politics in networked communities (or using network communica-
tions) may be somewhat different than traditional politics, even about
networks. Traditional communication media tend to fall into two
groups. Paper press, radio, and TV reach mass audiences, convey infor-
mation, and leave impressions. Paper post, telephone, and fax reach
individuals, are interactive, and can be used for actions. Computer-me-
diated communications can do both. Could this lead to accountability
of leaders? And perhaps empowerment of citizens?
Although power may come from the barrel of a gun, as Chairman
Mao said, it is often preserved by seaecy. In networking, seaecy is not
The Global Matrix of Minds

power and may not even be possible. Therefore, networking is subver-

sive. That may or may not be the opposite of electronic democracy, but
I will avoid that discussion here.
It is interesting to remember that all this was made possible by an
early grant from the U.S. Department of Defense. But it has long since
grown past the control of that department or of any government.

Economics
One of the reasons networks have become politicized is that some of
them, such as the NSFNET backbone, are partly government funded
and thus influenced by government-defined acceptable use policies.
Government funding is provided by taxpayers, who often have differ-
ences of opinion over what their tax dollars should go for. One way out
of that morass may be to privatize the networks (Kapor, 1991a), which
would involve making them economically viable for commercial
providers. This appears to be happening already (Quarterman, 1991d).

Legal Issues
Where there are differences over money or politics, we often find law-
yers. And, in recent years, sometimes the FBI or the Seaet Service. But
those are other stories (Kapor, 1991b; Jackson, 1991; Sterling, 1992).

Society
I hope I have sketched the bumpy slope up from bits to barristers.
Networks may start as solely technological tools, but they don't stay
that way if they survive. They develop into places where people go,
which turn into communities, which develop politics, economics, and
legal issues. The sum of all these things is a society.
Radio and television produced a different society. Computer net-
works will, too. Perhaps this time we can avoid a few mistakes.

The basic function of computer networks is to transfer bits between

computers, for use by humans. Computer network protocols are de-
signed so that any pair of computers with the same protocols and a
connection can transfer bits, regardless of where they are. This simplic-
John 5. Quarterman

ity of abstraction makes it easy for computer networks to cross many

kinds of boundaries. The utility of computer networks, partly derived
from this ability, ensures that networks do cross boundaries.
The boundaries we discuss here are political, time, language, and
specialties. We also discuss resource discovery and charging as two
issues that are strongly affected by this boundary crossing.

Political
I have not been able to verify the rumor that in the early 1980s there
was a trade of guns from Belgium for modems from the Netherlands,
but the rumor nicely characterizes the importance and near-outlaw
nature of networks to many people. European PTTs traditionally license
modems. Yet people can get unlicensed modems and with them estab-
lish communications across national boundaries, bypassing PTT data
carrier restrictions.
Ideas about freedom of speech vary per country, and what a govern-
ment will do to its own citizens doesn't necessarily correspond to what
it will do to foreigners. As John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation (EFF) has pointed out, the First Amendment of the U. S.
Constitution is a local ordinance. It does not apply, for instance, in the
former Soviet Union, even though the KGB neglected to shut down
RELCOM during the coup of August 1991, to their later chagrin but the
satisfaction of those who resisted.

Time
Time zones can be a real problem for a medium such as the telephone.
Tokyo is seven hours earlier than Vancouver. Actually, it is seventeen
hours later, given that the world time zone system is centered in Lon-
don, and the International Date Line is between Japan and Canada. So
if it is 9 A.M. Thursday in Tokyo, it is 4 RM. Wednesday in Vancouver.
Even though Japanese often start work early, that still only gives about
a one-hour window for someone in Tokyo (8:50-10 A.M.) to call some-
one in Vancouver (3-5 P.M.).
The problem is just as bad in the other direction. Paris is eight hours
earlier than Tokyo, so when it is 5 P.M. in Tokyo it is 9 RM. in Paris. Even
though people in Tokyo tend to work late, there's still not much of a
telephone window between Japan and Europe.
51 The Cbbal Matrix of Minds

Paris to Vancouver is a nine-hour difference, so there's essentially no

telephone window during regular working hours on either end.
Add to this time window problem the uncertainty of whether the
other person is on daylight time (summer time in Europe) or not. This
is telephone tag with a vengeance.

Tokyo
0102 03 04 05 060708<09+10+ll+12+13+14+15+16+17>18192021222324

Vancouver
08<09+10+ll+12+13+14+15+16+17>1819202122 23 241010203 04050607
Paris
17>1819202122 23 241010203 04 05 060708<09+10+ll+12+13+14+15+16+

Time zones are less of a problem for electronic mail or file transfer.
When the sender posts electronic mail, it gets queued for transfer and
will arrive whether the recipient is actually there at the time or not. A
sender in Tokyo can queue mail at 5 RM. Tokyo time, and it will prob-
ably be read in Vancouver the next morning (nine hours later). The
recipient in Vancouver then has almost all day to respond in time to
get mail back to Tokyo by the original sender's next working day. This
tends to lead to a full day (from the viewpoint of either party) for
turnaround on an exchange of messages. This delay may be increased
if mail is being sent over a network (such as dialup long-distance
telephone or X.25 PDN) that charges for connect time. Such networks
often charge different rates at different times of the day, which leads
system administrators to transfer mail at off-hours local time. However,
dependable daily turnaround is usually better than chancy telephone
tag that may result in no turnaround at all. And a mail transfer usually
takes less time (and thus perhaps less cost) than a telephone conversa-
tion at any time of the day.
Worldwide mailing lists tend to show constant activity, because it is
always the middle of the day (or the middle of the night, depending on
the phase of the hacker) somewhere in the Matrix.
There have also been interesting collaborative software projects in-
volving people in California working all day, followed by people in
Melbourne, followed by people in Amsterdam, all using the same ma-
chine in time zone shifts by means of international interactive connec-
tivity (e.g., 4.3BSD).
52 John 5. Quarterman

Language
Latin was once the lingua franca of the West ("plain speech/' a lan-
guage used between those with different native languages). Before that
there was Greek. In the East, Chinese held a similar position, and in
India, Sanskrit. In the House of Islam, Arabic is still such a language to
some extent. Many of these languages were actually only widely used
or intelligible across geographical or political distances in writing, and
some were primarily liturgical languages, used almost solely for relig-
ion. But we are discussing a set of written computer media, so written
languages are relevant.
The term lingua franca now usually refers to a family of pidgin or
Creole languages, many originally based on Portuguese, that were used
for trade in the Mediterranean and then elsewhere. Other trade pidgins
were based on other languages, such as Arabic; Swahili started that way.
These were primarily spoken languages (Dillard, 1975).
The rise of the vernaculars came around the same time as the spread
of printing in the West. These had been primarily spoken tongues but
became also written languages. Martin Luther, for example, was very
influential not only in spreading his version of the Bible across Ger-
many, but also in standardizing and making respectable the German he
wrote it in. That language helped bind the Germany that had been a
collection of hundreds of small to medium-sized states into a nation-
state with achievements in the arts and especially the sciences that
spread the language beyond its borders (Febvre and Martin, 1990).
As recently as a hundred years ago, German was the international (or
at least Western) language of science and technology, French of culture,
and English of trade. Today, English serves all three functions for much
of the world. But many people read and write English better than they
speak it.
Melbourne may be only an hour from Tokyo in time zones, but it is
thousands of years distant in language history. A telephone conversa-
tion between Tokyo and Vancouver often encounters both time and
language problems. The languages are still different with electronic
mail, but those who do not have English as a native tongue can take
time to organize and translate thoughts.
Most worldwide mailing lists are conducted in English. Some of them
have large majorities of people with other native languages. Curiously
enough, it is usually the nonnative English speakers who insist the
53 The Global Matrix of Minds

most on the use of English, because they don't want to have to deal
with somebody else's native tongue, which they almost surely won't
know as well as English. Of course, many people don't know English as
well as they think they do. An interesting custom that has developed
on a few lists is to post a message in one's mother tongue, followed in
the same message by one's translation into English. Thus those who
know the original language can read it, and those who don't can read
the English (and maybe correct it with what they know of the original
language).
There is at least one electronic mail directory that was compiled in
English entirely by people who have different mother tongues. Lan-
guages have been driven in the past by brute force (Latin), trade (the
lingua francas), religion (Arabic and Sanskrit), and technology (the
vernaculars and the printing press; English and movies and television),
among other reasons, such as sheer number of people in a single nation
(Chinese in its various forms). Will this new set of electronic media
make English even more widespread? Or will it enable more use of
national languages? Or even encourage some new Creole?
Thus far, one of the main reasons for the use of English internation-
ally has been that the only really widespread character codeset, ASCII,
is only capable of supporting American English and a very few other
languages unaltered. That barrier fell in Japan some years ago for Japa-
nese, and is starting to fall all over the world this year, with the release
of new specifications and implementations of electronic mail formats
(MIME) that extend the most widely used mail format (RFC-822) to
handle most languages. Will the rest of the world, like Japan, prefer to
use its national languages? Perhaps, even probably, since many coun-
tries already have found ways to do that. But will they use them for
international communication?

Organizational
Networks tend to bypass some traditional communications mecha-
nisms. You don't need to get everybody in the same place, as for a
face-to-face meeting, or even at the same time, as for a telephone
conference call. You don't need a secretary, a paper envelope, or a
postage stamp. You usually don't have to wait days to weeks (or
months, for sea mail) for delivery. The difference between local delivery
and international delivery is often small. If you don't want a message,
John 5. Quarterman

you can delete it and its bits get reused; there's no paper to destroy and
no trees to worry about. At least one company (Sun Microsystems) has
won an environmental award for shifting distribution of daily memos
from paper to electronic mailing lists.
All these things lead to a tendency of people in the same organiza-
tions to use computer-mediated communication (CMC) and other net-
work services heavily, both within the organization and with people
outside of the organization.
In industry, there are numerous examples of companies as diverse as
computer hardware and software manufacturers, oil companies, and
banks, who say they simply could not do business without networks to
organize their internal operations and to communicate with customers,
as a recent survey shows (Quarterman et al., 1991; GAO, 1991).
In academia, networks permit researchers to communicate readily
with a larger subset of the colleagues in their field than would otherwise
be possible. They don't have to go to a conference or pay for long-dis-
tance telephone calls to exchange informal views. They don't have
to wait months or years for a journal publication to see a formal write-
up of research results. It doesn't take six months of waiting for paper
post to compose a collaborative report with coauthors from different
universities.
Networks can have interesting effects on education both of children,
who can communicate with their peers worldwide, (Presno, 1991) and
adults, who can avoid problems of timing and physical handicaps, and
take advantage of the many-to-many features of CMC (Coombs, 1991).
Ready collaboration is of interest not only to capitalists and academ-
ics. Artists in growing numbers are using networks. Art is traditionally
a relatively solitary activity, punctuated by occasional showings or per-
formances, which are normally broadcast media. With networks, the
audience talks back, and colleagues can be consulted. Art can become
collaborative. One's colleagues and audience no longer have to be
physically near by, nor have to all look or listen at the same time. They
can be anywhere at any time: art can become global (Couey, 1991).
These advantages apply not only to the actual creation of art (which
is often hampered by the lack of common visual and audio services on
networks), but also to the facilitation of art, by allowing easier verbal
criticism and scheduling of events. Networks also allow bypassing
many of the hierarchies (funding, distribution, geographical) that get
in the way of art.
55 The Global Matrix of Minds

In general, remember that CMC can be many-to-many. No tradi-

tional medium can do this. As we have already discussed, paper press,
radio, and television are one-to-many, and paper post, telephone, and
fax are one-to-one. A few variants, such as telephone conference calls,
are many-to-many, but only on a small scale, and only in a limited
manner, since only one person can really speak at once. With many-to-
many CMC (mailing lists, news, bulletin boards, conferencing), every-
one can speak at once, and everyone can decide what to pay attention
to. Despite the potential (and often the actuality) of information over-
load, this basic capability of CMC promotes the globalization of any
community that uses it and leads to the formation of communities
where there may have formerly only been specialists (Quarterman,
1991e).
Networks can also make independent research more feasible. For the
last hundred years or more, probably most respectable science and
engineering has been done at large institutions, such as universities and
government-sponsored research facilities. No doubt many people have
and will continue to have good reasons for preferring such institutions.
But this was not the way of Pythagoras or Socrates, nor of Charles
Darwin. With networks, it doesn't have to be the way of all modern
researchers.
Consider four reasons for large research institutions: physical plant
for people and equipment; informal access to other researchers; access
to libraries; and publication. Computers themselves used to be the
pieces of equipment requiring the most maintenance, but you can now
sit in a hammock in the sun and hack on one. CMC promotes informal
access to researchers, and does so in such a way that it doesn't matter
much where the researchers are. Libraries are still mostly on paper and
in specific locations, but librarians and others are busily working on
changing that (Barron, 1991). In the meantime, much current work is
already available on the networks before it gets published on paper.
More paper journals and book publishers are accepting online copy
these days. Paper is usually still required for copy editing, but fast post
services alleviate that problem. The independent researcher such as
James Lovelock (who discovered the thinning of the ozone layer) may
become no longer an anomaly, given networks.
Thus networks change and produce organizational structures in ways
that promote both globalization and individualization (Asante and
Gudykunst, 1989).
56 John 5. Quarterman

Size
Network size requires innovative solutions for resource discovery. How-
ever, that same size facilitates those innovative solutions. Consider
Archie, which collects indexes of files available from anonymous FTP
servers. It was written by a few people at McGill University in Montreal,
and logged 120,000 uses in its first seven months. Also by the end of
that period, most of its usage from 5 P.M. to midnight Eastern time was
from Europe, prompting the installation of a European Archie server
(Deutsch, 1991). Thus a few people in one country can affect usage
patterns for the whole network by providing a service that people all
over the world want.

Charging
Finally, the tendency of networks to cross boundaries of all kinds makes
charging difficult, which makes supporting useful services and facilities
difficult. This problem is exacerbated by the blurring by networks of
boundaries between academia and industry, R&D and operations
(Quarterman, 199 If).
This problem has to be solved, since far too much of current networks
and networking technology is supported by volunteer or quasi-volun-
teer labor. As networks expand, they must be made to support their own
weight, or, rather, their users must be persuaded to support them (Quar-
terman and Carl-Mitchell, 1991).

Conclusion

Networks lead to the formation of new communities and the global

expansion of previous ones. Simultaneously, they may facilitate inde-
pendence of individuals from large organizations. They cross political,
time, language, and organizational boundaries. The large and exponen-
tially growing sizes of current networks may produce problems for
resource location and charging for services, but such sizes may also be
part of the solutions to such problems.
Computers are means of communication at least as much as they are
tools, and the global Matrix of interconnected computer networks fa-
cilitates the formation of global matrices of minds.
A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community

Howard Rheingold

I'm a writer, so I spend a lot of time alone in a room with my words

and my thoughts. On occasion, I venture outside to interview people
or to find information. After work, I reenter the human community, via
my family, my neighborhood, my circle of acquaintances. But that
regime left me reeling isolated and lonely during the working day, with
few opportunities to expand my circle of friends. For the past seven
years, however, I have participated in a wide-ranging, intellectually
stimulating, professionally rewarding, sometimes painful, and often
intensely emotional ongoing interchange with dozens of new friends,
hundreds of colleagues, thousands of acquaintances. And I still spend
many of my days in a room, physically isolated. My mind, however, is
linked with a worldwide collection of like-minded (and not so like-
minded) souls: my virtual community.
Virtual communities emerged from a surprising intersection of hu-
manity and technology. When the ubiquity of the world telecommu-
nications network is combined with the information-structuring and
storing capabilities of computers, a new communication medium be-
comes possible. As we've learned from the history of the telephone,
radio, and television, people can adopt new communication media and
redesign their way of life with surprising rapidity. Computers, modems,
and communication networks furnish the technological infrastructure
of computer-mediated communication (CMC); cyberspace is the con-
ceptual space where words and human relationships, data and wealth
and power are manifested by people using CMC technology; virtual
communities are cultural aggregations that emerge when enough peo-
ple bump into each other often enough in cyberspace.
58 Howard Rheingold

A virtual community is a group of people who may or may not meet

one another face-to-face, and who exchange words and ideas through
the mediation of computer bulletin boards and networks. In cyber-
space, we chat and argue, engage in intellectual discourse, perform acts
of commerce, exchange knowledge, share emotional support, make
plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, find friends and lose them,
play games and metagames, flirt, create a little high art and a lot of idle
talk. We do everything people do when people get together, but we do
it with words on computer screens, leaving our bodies behind. Millions
of us have already built communities where our identities commingle
and interact electronically, independent of local time or location. The
way a few of us live now might be the way a larger population will live,
decades hence.
The pioneers are still out there exploring the frontier, the borders of
the domain have yet to be determined, or even the shape of it, or the
best way to find one's way in it. But people are using the technology of
computer-mediated communications to do things with each other that
weren't possible before. Human behavior in cyberspace, as we can
observe it and participate in it today, is going to be a crucially impor-
tant factor. The ways in which people use CMC always will be rooted
in human needs, not hardware or software.
If the use of virtual communities turns out to answer a deep and
compelling need in people, and not just snag onto a human foible like
pinball or pac-man, today's small online enclaves may grow into much
larger networks over the next twenty years. The potential for social
change is a side effect of the trajectory of telecommunications and
computer industries, as it can be forecast for the next ten years. This
odd social revolution—communities of people who may never or rarely
meet face-to-face—might piggyback on the technologies that the big-
gest telecommunication companies already are planning to install over
the next ten years.
It is possible that the hardware and software of a new global telecom-
munications infrastructure, orders of magnitude more powerful than
today's state-of-the-art technology, now moving from the laboratories
to the market, will expand the reach of this spaceless place throughout
the 1990s to a much wider population than today's hackers, technolo-
gists, scholars, students, and enthusiasts. The age of the online pioneers
will end soon, and the cyberspace settlers will come en masse. Telecom-
59 A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community

muters who might have thought they were just working from home
and avoiding one day of gridlock on the freeway will find themselves
drawn into a whole new society. Students and scientists are already
there, artists have made significant inroads, librarians and educators
have their own pioneers as well, and political activists of all stripes have
just begun to discover the power of plugging a computer into a tele-
phone. When today's millions become tens and hundreds of millions,
perhaps billions, what kind of place, and what kind of model for
human behavior will they find?
Today's bedroom electronic bulletin boards, regional computer con-
ferencing systems, global computer networks offer clues to what might
happen when more powerful enabling technology comes along. The
hardware for amplifying the computing and communication capacity
of every home on the world-grid is in the pipeline, although the ulti-
mate applications are not yet clear. We'll be able to transfer the Library
of Congress from any point on the globe to any other point in seconds,
upload and download full-motion digital video at will. But is that really
what people are likely to do with all that bandwidth and computing
power? Some of the answers have to come from the behavioral rather
than the technological part of the system. How will people actually use
the desktop supercomputers and multimedia telephones that the engi-
neers tell us we'll have in the near future?
People are likely to do what people always do with a new commu-
nication technology: use it in ways never intended or foreseen by
its inventors to turn old social codes inside out and make new kinds
of communities possible. CMC will change us, and change our cul-
ture, the way telephones and televisions and cheap video cameras
changed us—by altering the way we perceive and communicate. Virtual
communities transformed my life profoundly, years ago, and continue
to do so.

A Cybernaut's Eye View

The most important clues to the shape of the future at this point might
not be found in looking more closely at the properties of silicon but in
paying attention to the ways people need to, fail to, and try to commu-
nicate with one another. Right now, some people are convinced that
spending hours a day in front of a screen, typing on a keyboard, fulfills
Howard Rheingold

in some way our need for a community of peers. Whether we have

discovered something wonderful or stumbled into something insidi-
ously unwonderful, or both, the fact that people want to use CMC
to meet other people and experiment with identity is a valuable sign-
post to a possible future. Human behavior in cyberspace, as we can
observe it today on the nets and in the BBSs, gives rise to important
questions about the effects of communication technology on human
values. What kinds of humans are we becoming in an increasingly
computer-mediated world, and do we have any control over that trans-
formation? Have our definitions of "human" and "community" been
under pressure to change to fit the specifications of a technology-
guided civilization?
Fortunately, questions about the nature of virtual communities are
not purely theoretical, for there is a readily accessible example of the
phenomenon at hand to study. Millions of people inhabit the social
spaces that have grown on the world's computer networks, and this
previously invisible global subculture has been growing at a tremen-
dous rate (e.g., the Internet is growing by 25 percent per month).
I've lived here myself for seven years; the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lec-
tronic link) and the net have been a regular part of my routine, like
gardening on Sunday, for one sixth of my life thus far. My wife and
daughter long ago grew accustomed to the fact that I sit in front of my
computer early in the morning and late at night, chuckling and curs-
ing, sometimes crying, about something I am reading on the computer
screen. The questions I raise here are not those of a scientist, nor of a
polemicist who has found an answer to something, but as a user—a
nearly obsessive user—of CMC and a deep mucker-about in virtual
communities. What kind of people are my friends and I becoming?
What does that portend for others?
If CMC has a potential, it is in the way people in so many parts of
the net fiercely defend the use of the term "community" to describe the
relationships we have built online. But ferocity of belief is not sufficient
evidence that the belief is sound. Is the aura of community an illusion?
The question has not been answered and is worth asking. I've seen
people hurt by interactions in virtual communities. Is telecommunica-
tion culture capable of becoming something more than what Scott Peck
(1987) calls a "pseudo-community," where people lack the genuine
personal commitments to one another that form the bedrock of genu-
61 A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community

ine community? Or is our notion of "genuine" changing in an age

where more people live their lives in increasingly artificial environ-
ments? New technologies tend to change old ways of doing things. Is
the human need for community going to be the next technology
commodity?
I can attest that I and thousands of other cybernauts know that what
we are looking for, and rinding in some surprising ways, is not just
information but instant access to ongoing relationships with a large
number of other people. Individuals find friends, and groups find
shared identities online through the aggregated networks of relation-
ships and commitments that make any community possible. But are
relationships and commitments as we know them even possible in a
place where identities are fluid? The physical world, known variously
as "IRL" (In Real life), or "offline," is a place where the identity and
position of the people you communicate with are well known, fixed,
and highly visual. In cyberspace, everybody is in the dark. We can
only exchange words with each other—no glances or shrugs or ironic
smiles. Even the nuances of voice and intonation are stripped away. On
top of the technology-imposed constraints, we who populate cyber-
spaces deliberately experiment with fracturing traditional notions of
identity by living as multiple simultaneous personae in different virtual
neighborhoods.
We reduce and encode our identities as words on a screen, decode
and unpack the identities of others. The way we use these words, the
stories (true and false) we tell about ourselves (or about the identity we
want people to believe us to be), is what determines our identities in
cyberspace. The aggregation of personae, interacting with each other,
determines the nature of the collective culture. Our personae, con-
structed from our stories of who we are, use the overt topics of discus-
sion in a BBS or network for a more fundamental purpose, as means of
interacting with each other. And all this takes place on both public and
private levels, in many-to-many open discussions and one-to-one pri-
vate electronic mail, front stage role-playing and backstage behavior.
When I'm online, I cruise through my conferences, reading and
replying in topics that I've been following, starting my own topics
when the inspiration or need strikes me. Every few minutes, I get a
notice on my screen that I have incoming mail. I might decide to wait
to read the mail until I'm finished doing something else or drop from
Howard Rheingold

the conference into the mailer, to see who it is from. At the same time
that I am participating in open discussion in conferences and private
discourse in electronic mail, people I know well use "sends"—a means
of sending one or two quick sentences to my screen without the inter-
vention of an electronic mail message. This can be irritating, since you
are either reading or writing something else when it happens, but
eventually it becomes a kind of rhythm: different degrees of thought-
fulness and formality happen simultaneously, along with the simulta-
neous multiple personae. Then there are public and private conferences
that have partially overlapping memberships. CMC offers tools for
facilitating all the various ways people have discovered to divide and
communicate, group and subgroup and regroup, include and exclude,
select and elect.
When a group of people remain in communication with one another
for extended periods of time, the question of whether it is a community
arises. Virtual communities might be real communities, they might be
pseudocommunities, or they might be something entirely new in the
realm of social contracts, but I believe they are in part a response to the
hunger for community that has followed the disintegration of tradi-
tional communities around the world.
Social norms and shared mental models have not emerged yet, so
everyone's sense of what kind of place cyberspace is can vary widely,
which makes it hard to tell whether the person you are communicating
with shares the same model of the system within which you are com-
municating. Indeed, the online acronym YMMV ("Your Mileage May
Vary") has become shorthand for this kind of indeterminacy of shared
context. For example, I know people who use vicious online verbal
combat as a way of blowing off steam from the pressures of their real
lire—"sport hassling"-^and others who use it voyeuristically, as a text-
based form of real-life soap opera. To some people, ifs a game. And I
know people who feel as passionately committed to our virtual com-
munity and the people in it (or at least some of the people in it) as to
our nation, occupation, or neighborhood. Whether we like it or not,
the communitarians and the venters, the builders and the vandals, the
egalitarians and the passive-aggressives are all in this place together.
The diversity of the communicating population is one of the defining
characteristics of the new medium, one of its chief attractions, the
source of many of its most vexing problems.
63 A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community

Is the prospect of moving en masse into cyberspace in the near

future, when the world's communication network undergoes explosive
expansion of bandwidth, a beneficial thing for entire populations to
do? In which ways might the growth of virtual communities promote
alienation? How might virtual communities facilitate conviviality?
Which social structures will dissolve, which political forces will arise,
and which will lose power? These are questions worth asking now,
while there is still time to shape the future of the medium. In the sense
that we are traveling blind into a technology-shaped future that might
be very different from today's culture, direct reports from life in differ-
ent corners of the world's online cultures today might furnish valuable
signposts to the territory ahead.
Since the summer of 1985, I've spent an average of two hours a day,
seven days a week, often when I travel, plugged into the WELL via a
computer and a telephone line, exchanging information and playing
with attention, becoming entangled In Real Life, with a growing net-
work of similarly wired-in strangers I met in cyberspace. I remember the
first time I walked into a room full of people (IRL) whose faces were
completely unknown to me, but who knew many intimate details of
my history and whose own stories I knew very well. I had contended
with these people, shot the breeze around the electronic water cooler,
shared alliances and formed bonds, fallen off my chair laughing with
them, become livid with anger at these people, but I had not before
seen their faces.
I found this digital watering hole for information-age hunters and
gatherers the same way most people find such places—I was lonely,
hungry for intellectual and emotional companionship, although I
didn't know it. While many commuters dream of working at home,
telecommuting, I happen to know what if s like to work that way. I
never could stand to commute or even get out of my pajamas if I didn't
want to, so I've always worked at home. It has its advantages and its
disadvantages. Others like myself also have been drawn into the online
world because they shared with me the occupational hazard of the
self-employed, home-based symbolic analyst of the 1990s—isolation.
The kind of people that Robert Reich (1991) calls "symbolic analysts"
are natural matches for online communities: programmers, writers,
freelance artists and designers, independent radio and television pro-
ducers, editors, researchers, librarians. People who know what to do
64 Howard Rheingold

with symbols, abstractions, and representations, but who sometimes

find themselves spending more time with keyboards and screens than
with human companions.
I've learned that virtual communities are very much like other com-
munities in some ways, deceptively so to those who assume that people
who communicate via words on a screen are in some way aberrant in
their communication skills and human needs. And I've learned that
virtual communities are very much not like communities in some other
ways, deceptively so to those who assume that people who communi-
cate via words on a screen necessarily share the same level of commit-
ment to each other in real life as more traditional communities.
Communities can emerge from and exist within computer-linked
groups, but that technical linkage of electronic personae is not
sufficient to create a community.

Social Contracts, Reciprocity, and Gift Economies in Cyberspace

The network of communications that constitutes a virtual community

can include the exchange of information as a kind of commodity, and
the economic implications of this phenomenon are significant; the
ultimate social potential of the network, however, lies not solely in its
utility as an information market but in the individual and group rela-
tionships that can happen over time. When such a group accumulates
a sufficient number of friendships and rivalries and witnesses the
births, marriages, and deaths that bond any other kind of community,
it takes on a definite and profound sense of place in people's minds.
Virtual communities usually have a geographically local focus and
often have a connection to a much wider domain. The local focus of
my virtual community, the WELL, is the San Francisco Bay Area; the
wider locus consists of hundreds of thousands of other sites around the
world, and millions of other communitarians, linked via exchanges of
messages into a meta-community known as "the net."
The existence of computer-linked communities was predicted twenty
years ago by J. C. R. Iicklider and Robert Taylor who, as research
directors for the Department of Defense, set in motion the research that
resulted in the creation of the first such community, the ARPANET.
"What will online interactive communities be like?" Licklider and Tay-
lor wrote in 1968: "In most fields they will consist of geographically
65 A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community

separated members, sometimes grouped in small clusters and some-

times working individually. They will be communities not of common
location, but of common interest...."
My friends and I sometimes believe we are part of the future that
Licklider dreamed about, and we often can attest to the truth of his
prediction that "life will be happier for the online individual because
the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected
more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of prox-
imity." I still believe that, but I also know that life also has turned out
to be unhappy at times, intensely so in some circumstances, because of
words on a screen. Events in cyberspace can have concrete effects in
real life, of both the pleasant and less pleasant varieties. Participating
in a virtual community has not solved all of life's problems for me, but
it has served as an aid, a comfort, and an inspiration at times; at other
times it has been like an endless, ugly, long-simmering family feud.
I've changed my mind about a lot of aspects of the WELL over the
years, but the "sense of place" is still as strong as ever. As Ray Oldenburg
(1991) revealed in The Great Good Place, there are three essential places
in every person's life: the place they live, the place they work, and the
place they gather for conviviality. Although the casual conversation
that takes place in cafes, beauty shops, pubs, town squares is universally
considered to be trivial, "idle talk," Oldenburg makes the case that
these are the places where communities can arise and hold together.
When the automobile-centric, suburban, high-rise, fast food, shopping
mall way of life eliminated many of these "third places," the social
fabric of existing communities shredded. It might not be the same kind
of place that Oldenburg had in mind, but so many of his descriptions
of "third places" could also describe the WELL.
The feeling of logging into the WELL for just a minute or two, dozens
of times a day, is very similar to the feeling of peeking into the cafe, the
pub, the common room, to see who's there, and whether you want to
stay around for a chat. Indeed, in all the hundreds of thousands of
computer systems around the world that use the UNIX operating sys-
tem, as does the WELL, the most widely used command is the one that
shows you who is online. Another widely used command is the one
that shows you a particular user's biography.
I visit the WELL both for the sheer pleasure of communicating with
my newfound friends, and for its value as a practical instrument for
Howard Rheingold

gathering information on subjects that are of momentary or enduring

importance, from childcare to neuroscience, technical questions on
telecommunications to arguments on philosophical, political, or spiri-
tual subjects. Ifs a bit like a neighborhood pub or coffee shop. It's a
little like a salon, where I can participate in a hundred ongoing conver-
sations with people who don't care what I look like or sound like, but
who do care how I think and communicate. There are seminars and
wordfights in different corners. And it's all a little like a groupmind,
where questions are answered, support is given, inspiration is provided,
by people I may have never heard from before and whom I may never
meet face-to-face.
Because we cannot see one another, we are unable to form prejudices
about others before we read what they have to say: race, gender, age,
national origin, and physical appearance are not apparent unless a
person wants to make such characteristics public. People who are
thoughtful but who are not quick to formulate a reply often do better
in CMC than face-to-face or over the telephone. People whose physical
handicaps make it difficult to form new friendships find that virtual
communities treat them as they always wanted to be treated—as think-
ers and transmitters of ideas and feeling beings, not carnal vessels with
a certain appearance and way of walking and talking (or not walking
and not talking). Don't mistake this filtration of appearances for dehu-
manization: words on a screen are quite capable of moving one to
laughter or tears, of evoking anger or compassion, of creating a com-
munity from a collection of strangers.
From my informal research into virtual communities around the
world, I have found that enthusiastic members of virtual communities
in Japan, England, and the United States agree that "increasing the
diversity of their circle of friends" was one of the most important
advantages of computer conferencing. CMC is a way to meet people,
whether or not you feel the need to affiliate with them on a community
level, but the way you meet them has an interesting twist. In traditional
kinds of communities, we are accustomed to meeting people, then
getting to know them; in virtual communities, you can get to know
people and then choose to meet them. In some cases, you can get to
know people who you might never meet on the physical plane.
How does anybody find friends? In the traditional community, we
search through our pool of neighbors and professional colleagues, of
A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community

acquaintances and acquaintances of acquaintances, in order to find

people who share our values and interests. We then exchange informa-
tion about one another, disclose and discuss our mutual interests, and
sometimes we become friends. In a virtual community we can go di-
rectly to the place where our favorite subjects are being discussed, then
get acquainted with those who share our passions, or who use words in
a way we find attractive. In this sense, the topic is the address: you can't
simply pick up a phone and ask to be connected with someone who
wants to talk about Islamic art or California wine, or someone with a
three-year-old daughter or a thirty-year-old Hudson; you can, however,
join a computer conference on any of those topics, then open a public
or private correspondence with the previously unknown people you
find in that conference. You will find that your chances of making
friends are magnified by orders of magnitude over the old methods of
finding a peer group.
You can be fooled about people in cyberspace, behind the cloak of
words. But that can be said about telephones or face-to-face communi-
cations, as well; computer-mediated communications provide new
ways to fool people, and the most obvious identity-swindles will die out
only when enough people learn to use the medium critically. Sara
Kiesler (1986) noted that the word "phony" is an artifact of the early
years of the telephone, when media-naive people were conned by slick
talkers in ways that wouldn't deceive an eight-year old with a cellular
phone today.
There is both an intellectual and an emotional component to CMC.
Since so many members of virtual communities are the kind of knowl-
edge-based professionals whose professional standing can be enhanced
by what they know, virtual communities can be practical instruments
for information gathering. Virtual communities can also help their
members cope with information overload. The problem with the infor-
mation age, especially for students and knowledge workers who spend
their time immersed in the info-flow, is that there is too much infor-
mation available and no effective filters for sifting the key data that are
useful and interesting to us as individuals. Programmers are trying to
design better and better "software agents" that can seek and sift, filter
and find, and save us from the awful feeling one gets when it turns out
that the specific knowledge one needs is buried in fifteen thousand
pages of related information.
Howard Rheingold

The first software agents are now becoming available (e.g., WAIS,
Rosebud), but we already have far more sophisticated, if informal, social
contracts among groups of people that allow us to act as software agents
for one another. If, in my wanderings through information space, I
come across items that don't interest me but which I know one of my
worldwide loose-knit affinity group of online friends would appreciate,
I send the appropriate friend a pointer, or simply forward the entire text
(one of the new powers of CMC is the ability to publish and converse
with the same medium). In some cases, I can put the information in
exactly the right place for ten thousand people I don't know, but who
are intensely interested in that specific topic, to find it when they need
it. And sometimes, ten thousand people I don't know do the same thing
for me.
This unwritten, unspoken social contract, described by Walls in chap-
ter 9 as a blend of strong-tie and weak-tie relationships among people
who have a mixture of motives, requires one to give something and
enables one to receive something. I have to keep my friends in mind
and send them pointers instead of throwing my informational discards
into the virtual scrap heap. It doesn't take a great deal of energy to do
that, since I have to sift that information anyway in order to find the
knowledge I seek for my own purposes; it takes two keystrokes to delete
the information, three keystrokes to forward it to someone else. And
with scores of other people who have an eye out for my interests while
they explore sectors of the information space that I normally wouldn't
frequent, I find that the help I receive far outweighs the energy I expend
helping others: a marriage of altruism and self-interest.
The first time I learned about that particular cyberspace power was
early in the history of the WELL, when I was invited to join a panel of
experts who advise the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment
(OTA). The subject of the assessment was "Communication Systems for
an Information Age." I'm not an expert in telecommunication technol-
ogy or policy, but I do know where to find a group of such experts and
how to get them to tell me what they know. Before I went to Washing-
ton for my first panel meeting, I opened a conference in the WELL and
invited assorted information-freaks, technophiles, and communication
experts to help me come up with something to say. An amazing collec-
tion of minds flocked to that topic, and some of them created whole
new communities when they collided.
A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community

By the time I sat down with the captains of industry, government

advisers, and academic experts at the panel table, I had over two hun-
dred pages of expert advice from my own panel. I wouldn't have been
able to integrate that much knowledge of my subject in an entire
academic or industrial career, and it only took me (and my virtual
community) a few minutes a day for six weeks. I have found the WELL
to be an outright magical resource, professionally. An editor or producer
or client can call and ask me if I know much about the Constitution,
or fiber optics, or intellectual property. "Let me get back to you in
twenty minutes," I say, reaching for the modem. In terms of the way I
learned to use the WELL to get the right piece of information at the
right time, I'd say that the hours I've spent putting information into
the WELL turned out to be the most lucrative professional investments
I've ever made.
The same strategy of nurturing and making use of loose information-
sharing affiliations across the net can be applied to an infinite domain
of problem areas, from literary criticism to software evaluation. It's a
neat way for a sufficiently large, sufficiently diverse group of people to
multiply their individual degree of expertise, and I think it could be
done even if the people aren't involved in a community other than
their company or their research specialty. I think it works better when
the community's conceptual model of itself is more like barn-raising
than horse-trading, though. Reciprocity is a key element of any market-
based culture, but the arrangement I'm describing feels to me more like
a kind of gift economy where people do things for one another out of
a spirit of building something between them, rather than a spreadsheet-
calculated quid pro quo. When that spirit exists, everybody gets a little
extra something, a little sparkle, from their more practical transactions;
different kinds of things become possible when this mindset pervades.
Conversely, people who have valuable things to add to the mix tend to
keep their heads down and their ideas to themselves when a mercenary
or hostile Zeitgeist dominates an online community.
I think one key difference between straightforward workaday reci-
procity is that in the virtual community I know best, one valuable
currency is knowledge, elegantly presented. Wit and use of language are
rewarded in this medium, which is biased toward those who learn how
to manipulate attention and emotion with the written word. Some-
times, you give one person more information than you would give
Howard Rheingold

another person in response to the same query, simply because you

recognize one of them to be more generous or funny or to-the-point or
agreeable to your political convictions than the other one.
If you give useful information freely, without demanding tightly-cou-
pled reciprocity, your requests for information are met more swiftly, in
greater detail, than they would have been otherwise. The person you
help might never be in a position to help you, but someone else might
be. Thars why it is hard to distinguish idle talk from serious context-
setting. In a virtual community, idle talk is context-setting. Idle talk is
where people learn what kind of person you are, why you should be
trusted or mistrusted, what interests you. An agora is more than the site
of transactions; it is also a place where people meet and size up one
another.
A market depends on the quality of knowledge held by the partici-
pants, the buyers and sellers, about price and availability and a thou-
sand other things that influence business; a market that has a forum for
informal and back-channel communications is a better-informed mar-
ket. The London Stock Exchange grew out of the informal transactions
in a coffee house; when it became the London International Stock
Exchange a few years ago and abolished the trading-room floor, the
enterprise lost something vital in the transition from an old room
where all the old boys met and cut their deals to the screens of thou-
sands of workstations scattered around the world.
The context of the informal community of knowledge sharers grew
to include years of both professional and personal relationships. It is
not news that the right network of people can serve as an inquiry
research system: you throw out the question, and somebody on the net
knows the answer. You can make a game out of it where you gain
symbolic prestige among your virtual peers by knowing the answer.
And you can make a game out of it among a group of people who have
dropped out of their orthodox professional lives, where some of them
sell these information services for exorbitant rates, in order to partici-
pate voluntarily in the virtual community game.
When the WELL was young and growing more slowly than it is now,
such knowledge-potlatching had a kind of naively enthusiastic energy.
When you extend the conversation—several dozen different characters,
well-known to one another from four or five years of virtual hanging-
out, several hours a day—it gets richer but not necessarily "happier."
A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community

Virtual communities have several drawbacks in comparison to face-

to-face communication, disadvantages that must be kept in mind if you
are to make use of the power of these computer-mediated discussion
groups. The filtration factor that prevents one from knowing the race
or age of another participant also prevents people from communicating
the facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice that constitute
the inaudible but vital component of most face-to-face communica-
tions. Irony, sarcasm, compassion, and other subtle but all-important
nuances that aren't conveyed in words alone are lost when all you can
see of a person are words on a screen.
It's amazing how the ambiguity of words in the absence of body
language inevitably leads to online misunderstandings. And since the
physical absence of other people also seems to loosen some of the social
bonds that prevent people from insulting one another in person, mis-
understandings can grow into truly nasty stuff before anybody has a
chance to untangle the original miscommunication. Heated diatribes
and interpersonal incivility that wouldn't crop up often in face-to-face
or even telephone discourse seem to appear with relative frequency in
computer conferences. The only presently available antidote to this
flaw of CMC as a human communication medium is widespread knowl-
edge of this flaw—AKA "netiquette."
Online civility and how to deal with breaches of it is a topic unto
itself, and has been much-argued on the WELL. Jacobson, in chapter
20, discusses civility as one of the guiding principles in humanizing the
net. Degrees of outright incivility constitute entire universes such as
alt.flame, the USENET newsgroup where people go specifically to spend
their days hurling vile imprecations at one another. I am beginning to
suspect that the most powerful and effective defense an online commu-
nity has in the face of those who are bent on disruption might be
norms and agreements about withdrawing attention from those who
can't abide by even loose rules of verbal behavior. "If you continue
doing that," I remember someone saying to a particularly persistent
would-be disrupter, "we will stop paying attention to you." This is
technically easy to do on USENET, where putting the name of a person
or topic header in a "kill file" (AKA "bozo filter") means you will never
see future contributions from that person or about that topic. You can
simply choose to not see any postings from John Doe, or that feature
the word "abortion" in the title. An online community can be a society
72 Howard Rheingold

in which people can remove one another, or even entire topics of

discussion, from visibility. The WELL does not have a bozo filter, al-
though the need for one is a topic of frequent discussion.

Who Is the WELL?

One way to know what the WELL is like is to know something about
the kind of people who use it. It has roots in the San Francisco Bay Area
and in two separate cultural revolutions that took place there in past
decades. The Whole Earth Catalog originally emerged from the counter-
culture as Stewart Brand's way of providing access to tools and ideas to
all the communes who were exploring alternate ways of life in the
forests of Mendocino or the high deserts outside Santa Fe. The Whole
Earth Catalogs and the magazines they spawned, Co-Evolution Quarterly
and Whole Earth Review, have outlived the counterculture itself since
they are still alive and raising hell after nearly twenty-five years. For
many years, the people who have been exploring alternatives and ideas
not available in the mass media have found themselves in cities instead
of rural communes, where their need for new tools and ideas didn't go
away.
The Whole Earth Catalog crew received a large advance in the mid-
1980s to produce an updated version, a project involving many geo-
graphically-separated authors and editors, many of whom were using
computers. They bought a minicomputer and the license to Picospan,
a computer conferencing program, leased an office next to the maga-
zine's office, leased incoming telephone lines, set up modems, and the
WELL was born in 1985. The idea from the beginning was that the
founders weren't sure what the WELL would become, but they would
provide tools for people to build it into something useful. It was con-
sciously a cultural experiment, and the business was designed to suc-
ceed or fail on the basis of the results of the experiment. The person
Stewart Brand chose to be the WELL's first director—technician, man-
ager, innkeeper, and bouncer—was Matthew McClure, not coinciden-
tally a computer-sawy veteran of The Farm, one of the most successful
of the communes that started in the sixties. Brand and McClure started
a low-rules, high-tone discussion, where savvy networkers, futurists,
misfits who had learned how to make our outsiderness work for us,
could take the technology of CMC to its cultural limits.
A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community

The Whole Earth network—the granola-eating Utopians, the solar-

power enthusiasts, serious ecologists and the space-station crowd, irn-
mortalists, Biospherians, environmentalists, social activists—was part
of the core population from the beginning. But there were a couple of
other key elements. One was the subculture that happened ten years
after the counterculture era—the personal computer revolution. Per-
sonal computers and the PC industry were created by young iconoclasts
who wanted to have whizzy tools and change the world. Whole Earth
had honored them, including the outlaws among them, with the early
hackers conferences. The young computer wizards, and the grizzled
old hands who were still messing with mainframes, showed up early at
the WELL because the guts of the system itself—the UNIX operating
system and "C" language programming code—were available for tink-
ering by responsible craftspeople.
A third cultural element that made up the initial mix of the WELL,
which has drifted from its counterculture origins in many ways, were
the deadheads. Books and theses have been written about the subcul-
ture that has grown up around the band, the Grateful Dead. The dead-
heads have a strong feeling of community, but they can only manifest
it en masse when the band has concerts. They were a community
looking for a place to happen when several technology-sawy dead-
heads started a "Grateful Dead Conference" on the WELL. GD was so
phenomenally successful that for the first several years deadheads were
by far the single largest source of income for the enterprise.
Along with the other elements came the first marathon swimmers in
the new currents of the information streams, the futurists and writers
and journalists. The New York Times, Business Week, the San Francisco
Chronicle, Time, Rolling Stone, Byte, the Wall Street Journal—-all have
journalists that I know personally who drop into the WELL as a listen-
ing post. People in Silicon Valley lurk to hear loose talk among the pros.
Journalists tend to attract other journalists, and the goal of journalists
is to attract everybody else: most people have to use an old medium to
hear news about the arrival of a new medium.
Things changed, both rapidly and slowly, in the WELL. There were
about six hundred members of the WELL when I joined in the summer
of 1985. It seemed that then, as now, the usual 10 percent of the
members did 80 percent of the talking. Now there are about six thou-
sand people, with a net gain of about a hundred a month. There do
74 Howard Rheingold

seem to be more women than in other parts of cyberspace. Most of the

people I meet seem to be white or Asian; African-Americans aren't
missing, but they aren't conspicuous or even visible. If you can fake it,
gender and age are invisible, too. I'd guess the WELL consists of about
80 percent men, 20 percent women. I don't know whether formal
demographics would be the kind of thing that most WELL users would
want to contribute to. If s certainly something we'd discuss, argue,
debate, and joke about.
One important social rule was built into Picospan, the software that
the WELL lives inside: Nobody is anonymous. Everybody is required to
attach their real "userid" to their postings. It is possible to use pseudo-
nyms to create alternate identities, or to carry metamessages, but the
pseudonyms are always linked in every posting to the real userid. So
individual personae—whether or not they correspond closely to the
real person who owns the account—are responsible for the words they
post. In fact, the first several years, the screen that you saw when you
reached the WELL said "You own your own words." Stewart Brand, the
WELL's cofounder likes epigrams: "Whole Earth," "Information wants
to be free," "You own your own words." Like the best epigrams, "You
own your own words" is open to multiple interpretations. The matter
of responsibility and ownership of words is one of the topics WELLbe-
ings argue about endlessly, so much that the phrase has been abbrevi-
ated to "YOYOW," as in, "Oh no, another YOYOW debate."
Who are the WELL members, and what do they talk about? I can tell
you about the individuals I have come to know over six years, but the
WELL has long since been something larger than the sum of every-
body's friends. The characteristics of the pool of people who tune into
this electronic listening post, whether or not they ever post a word in
public, is a strong determinant of the flavor of the "place." There's a
cross-sectional feeling of "who are we?" that transcends the intersecting
and nonintersecting rings of friends and acquaintances each individual
develops.

My Neighborhood on the WELL

Every CMC system gives users tools for creating their own sense of
place, by customizing the way they navigate through the database of
conferences, topics, and responses. A conference or newsgroup is like a
75 A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community

place you go. If you go to several different places in a fixed order, it

seems to reinforce the feeling of place by creating a customized neigh-
borhood that is also shared by others. You see some of the same users
in different parts of the same neighborhood. Some faces you see only
in one context—the parents conference, the Grateful Dead tours con-
ference, the politics or sex conference.
My home neighborhood on the WELL is reflected in my ".cflist," the
file that records my preferences about the order of conferences I visit.
It is always possible to go to any conference with a command, but with
a .cflist you structure your online time by going from conference to
specified conference at regular intervals, reading and perhaps respond-
ing in several ongoing threads in several different places. That's the part
of the art of discourse where I have found that the computer adds value
to the intellectual activity of discussing formally distinct subjects asyn-
chronously, from different parts of the world, over extending periods,
by enabling groups to structure conversations by topic, over time.
My .cflist starts, for sentimental reasons, with the Mind conference,
the first one I hosted on the WELL, since 1985. I've changed my .cflist
hundreds of times over the years, to add or delete conferences from my
regular neighborhood, but I've always kept Mind at the beginning. The
entry banner screen for the Mind conference used to display to each
user the exact phase of the moon in numbers and ASCII graphics every
time they logged in to the conference. But the volunteer programmer
who had created the "phoon" (phases of the moon) program had
decided to withdraw it, years later, in a dispute with WELL manage-
ment. There is often a technological fix to a social problem within this
particular universe. Because the WELL seems to be an intersection of
many different cultures, there have been many experiments with soft-
ware tools to ameliorate problems that seemed to crop up between
people, whether because of the nature of the medium or the nature of
the people. A frighteningly expensive pool of talent was donated by
volunteer programmers to create tools and even weapons for WELL
users to deal with each other. People keep giving things to the WELL
and taking them away. Offline readers and online tools by volunteer
programmers gave others increased power to communicate.
The News conference is what's next. This is the commons, the place
where the most people visit the most often, where the most outrageous
off-topic proliferation is least pernicious, where the important an-
Howard Rheingold

nouncements about the system or social events or major disputes or

new conferences are announced. When an earthquake or fire happens,
News is where you want to go. Immediately after the 1989 earthquake
and during the Oakland fire of 1991, the WELL was a place to check the
damage to the local geographic community, lend help to those who
need it, and get first-hand reports. During Tiananmen square, the Gulf
War, the Soviet Coup, the WELL was a media-funnel, with snippets of
email from Tel Aviv and entire newsgroups fed by fax machines in
China, erupting in News conference topics that grew into fast-moving
conferences of their own. Ehiring any major crisis in the real world, the
routine at our house is to turn on CNN and log into the WELL.
After News is Hosts, where the hottest stuff usually happens. The
hosts community is a story in itself. The success of the WELL in its first
five years, all would agree, rested heavily on the efforts of the confer-
ence hosts—online characters who had created the character of the first
neighborhoods and kept the juice flowing between one another all over
the WELL, but most pointedly in the Hosts conference. Some spicy
reading in the Archives conference originated from old hosts' dis-
putes—and substantial arguments about the implications of CMC for
civil rights, intellectual property, censorship, by a lot of people who
know what they are talking about, mixed liberally with a lot of other
people who don't know what they are talking about but love to talk
anyway, via keyboard and screen, for years on end.
In this virtual place, the pillars of the community and the worst
offenders of public sensibilities are in the same group—the hosts. At
their best and their worst, this 10 percent of the online population put
out the words that the other 90 percent keep paying to read. Like good
hosts at any social gathering, they make newcomers welcome, keep the
conversation flowing, mediate disputes, clean up messes, and throw out
miscreants, if need be. A WELL host is part saloon keeper, part talk-
show host, part publisher. The only power to censor or to ban a user is
the hosts' power. Policy varies from host to host, and that's the only
policy. The only justice for those who misuse that power is the forced
participation in weeks of debilitating and vituperative postmortem.
The hosts community is part long-running soap opera, part town
meeting, barroom brawl, anarchic debating society, creative group-
mind, bloody arena, union hall, playpen, encounter group. The Hosts
conference is extremely general, from technical questions to personal
A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community

attacks. The Policy conference is supposed to be restricted to matters of

what WELL policy is, or ought to be. The part-delusion, part-accurate
perception that the hosts and other users have strong influence over
WELL policy is part of what feeds debate here and is a strong element
in the libertarian reputation of the stereotypical WELLite. After fighting
my way through a day's or hour's worth of the hot new dispute in News,
Hosts, and Policy, I check on the conferences I host—Info, Virtual
Communities, Virtual Reality. After that my .cflist directs me, at the
press of the return key, to the first new topic or response in the Parent-
ing, Writers/ Grateful Dead tours, Telecommunication, Macintosh,
Weird, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Whole Earth, Books, Media,
Men on the WELL, Miscellaneous, and Unclear conferences.
The social dynamics of the WELL spawn new conferences in response
to different kinds of pressures. Whenever a hot interpersonal or doc-
trinal issue breaks out, for example, people want to stage the brawl or
make a dramatic farewell speech or shocking disclosure or serious accu-
sation in the most heavily-visited area of the WELL, which is usually
the place that others want to be a Commons—a place where people
from different subcommunities can come to find out what is going on
around the WELL, and outside the WELL, where they can pose ques-
tions to the committee of the whole. When too many discussions of
what the WELL's official policy ought to be, about censorship or intel-
lectual property or the way people treat each other, break out, they
tended to clutter the place people went to to get a quick sense of what
is happening outside their neighborhoods. So the Policy conference
was born.
But then the WELL grew larger and it wasn't just policy but govern-
ance and social issues like political correctness or the right of users to
determine the social rules of the system. Several years and six thousand
more users after the fission of the News and Policy conferences, another
conference split off News—"MetaWELL," a conference created strictly
for discussions about the WELL itself, its nature, its situation (often
dire), its future.
Grabbing attention in the Commons is a powerful act. Some people
seem drawn to performing there; others burst out there in acts of
desperation after one history of frustration or another. Dealing with
people who are so consistently off-topic or apparently deeply grooved
into incoherence, long-windedness, or scatology is one of the events
78 Howard Rheingold

that challenges a community to decide what its values really are, or

ought to be.

Conclusion

Something is happening here. I'm not sure anybody understands it

yet. I know that the WELL and the net is an important part of my life,
and I have to decide for myself whether this is a new way to make
genuine commitments to other human beings or a silicon-induced
illusion of community. I urge others to help pursue that question in a
variety of ways, while we have the time. The political dimensions of
CMC might lead to situations that would preempt questions of other
social effects; responses to the need for understanding the power rela-
tionships inherent in CMC are well represented by the Electronic Fron-
tier Foundation and others (see Kapor and Weitzner, chap. 18). We need
to learn a lot more, very quickly, about what kind of place our minds
are homesteading.
The future of virtual communities is connected to the future of
everything else, starting with the most precious thing people have to
gain or lose—political freedom. The part played by communication
technologies in the disintegration of communism, the way broadcast
television preempted the American electoral process, the power of fax
and CMC networks during times of political repression like Tiananmen
Square and the Soviet Coup attempt, the power of citizen electronic
journalism, the power-maneuvering of law enforcement and intelli-
gence agencies to restrict rights of citizen access and expression in
cyberspace—all point to the future of CMC as a close correlate of future
political scenarios. More important than civilizing cyberspace is ensur-
ing its freedom as a citizen-to-citizen communication and publication
medium; laws that infringe equity of access to and freedom of expres-
sion in cyberspace could transform today's populist empowerment into
yet another instrument of manipulation. Will "electronic democracy"
be an accurate description of political empowerment that grows out of
the screen of a computer? Or will it become a brilliant piece of disinfo-
tainment, another means of manipulating emotions and manufactur-
ing public opinion in the service of power?
Who controls what kinds of information are communicated in the
international networks where virtual communities live? Who censors,
A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community

and what is censored? Who safeguards the privacy of individuals in the

face of technologies that make it possible to amass and retrieve detailed
personal information about every member of a large population? The
answers to these political questions might make moot any more ab-
stract questions about cultures in cyberspace. Democracy itself depends
on the relatively free flow of communications. The following words by
James Madison are carved in marble at the U.S. Library of Congress: "A
popular government without popular information, or the means of
acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to
be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which
knowledge gives." It is time for people to arm themselves with power
about the future of CMC technology.
Who controls the market for relationships? Will the world's increas-
ingly interlinked, increasingly powerful, decreasingly costly communi-
cations infrastructure be controlled by a small number of very large
companies? Will cyberspace be privatized and parceled out to those
who can afford to buy into the auction? If political forces do not seize
the high ground and end today's freewheeling exchange of ideas, it is
still possible for a more benevolent form of economic control to stunt
the evolution of virtual communities if a small number of companies
gain the power to put up toll-roads in the information networks and
smaller companies are not able to compete with them.
Or will there be an open market in which newcomers like Apple or
Microsoft can become industry leaders? The playing field in the global
telecommunications industry will never be level, but the degree of
individual freedom available through telecommunication technologies
in the future may depend upon whether the market for goods and
services in cyberspace remains open for new companies to create new
uses for CMC.
I present these observations as a set of questions, not as answers. I
believe that we need to try to understand the nature of CMC, cyber-
space, and virtual communities in every important context—politically,
economically, socially, culturally, cognitively. Each different perspective
reveals something that the other perspectives do not reveal. Each dif-
ferent discipline fails to see something that another discipline sees very
well. We need to think as teams here, across boundaries of academic
discipline, industrial affiliation, nation to understand, and thus per-
80 Howard Rheingold

haps regain control of, the way human communities are being trans-
formed by communication technologies. We can't do this solely as
dispassionate observers, although there is certainly a huge need for the
detached assessment of social science. But community is a matter of the
heart and the gut as well as the head. Some of the most important
learning will always have to be done by jumping into one corner or
another of cyberspace, living there, and getting up to your elbows in
the problems that virtual communities face.
// Issues
Jurisdictional Quandaries for
Global Networks

Anne Wells Branscomb

Global networks are offering new challenges to users, providers, and

their lawyers as they produce new forms of information property, new
concerns about access, new forms of miscreant behavior, new types of
communications, and new kinds of communities. This chapter iden-
tifies some of the questions encountered in drawing proprietary
boundaries within electronic spaces, establishing legal jurisdictions,
applying existing laws, or promulgating new laws and regulatory
schemes more appropriate for the new electronic frontiers.
Digital data transmitted by a computer network may easily cross
national borders and be seen and modified by many users worldwide.
Witness the speed with which the Christmas virus invaded the IBM
intracorporate message system in December 1987 and the speed with
which the worm designed by Robert T. Morris, Jr., circulated through
and hindered access to the Internet in November 1988. The propaga-
tion rate of potential destruction demands instantaneous response and
is, therefore, troublesome to a legal system that is slow and deliberative.
Networks using satellite technology inherently fail to recognize geo-
graphical jurisdictions. There are very few countries that lie within the
entire footprint of a satellite. Signals intended for the United States spill
over into Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Signals to Europe cover
the entire continent encompassing more than twenty nation-states,
most of which have different laws concerning the use of information
within their borders. The Internet, the world's largest system for inter-
connecting computer networks, now claims to reach millions of com-
puter terminals in 107 nations (Landweber, 1992). Researchers cannot
accurately determine the exploding number of users accessible through
this global system.
Anne Wells Branscomb

Anyone who can purchase a small computer and a modem can net-
work globally through existing telecommunications facilities. How can
nation-states maintain sovereign control over information within their
borders while employing the latest technology to enhance their eco-
nomic development and to participate in world economy? A similar
question also confronts institutional users who want to use the tech-
nology in increasingly novel and useful ways according to their own
needs and capabilities. Thus large users (most often multinational com-
panies) are successfully urging governments and public telecommuni-
cation monopolies to give them more and more freedom in configuring
their own telecommunications networks for the exchange of informa-
tion transnationally. This we might call corporate sovereignty.
There is also a serious concern about personal sovereignty over infor-
mation. Many online information services that provide the opportu-
nity to network can also monitor the content of the messages and/or
package and sell the transaction-generated information to third parties
who market that information for profit or bombard the individuals
with junk mail offering retail merchandise or causes with which to
become associated.
The primary concern in this chapter is how to exercise jurisdictional
control over these new electronic information environments. The crea-
tion of global electronic villages of closed user groups or open public
discussions has gone beyond the capacity of the law to keep up with
these developments.
A political analyst at the Rand Corporation has offered a new lexicon
for these jurisdictions. Adopting the use of the word "cyberspace" as
the electronic environment that conquers, time, space, geography, and
political organization,1 Donald Ronstadt has also offered the word "cy-
berocracy" to describe something beyond bureaucracy that will rule
cyberspace and "cyberology" as the study of the effects of information
deployment as a major economic resource. The electronic communities
and their social classes he calls "cybernets" and "cyberstrata." Whether
or not one is attracted to these newly coined words, the reality exists
that governance of global networks offers major challenges to the users,
providers, and policymakers to define their boundaries and their system
of governance.
What Ronstadt has recognized is the conflict between the jurisdic-
tional boundaries of geopolitically organized nation-states and transna-
85 Jurisdictional Quandaries for Global Networks

tionally effective electronic communities knitted together by the tech-

nological marriage of the computer, the satellite, and optical fibers that
weave a mesh of interconnectability for individuals and like-minded
"others" distributed all over the globe.
We are moving out of an era of global interdependence into an era of global
interconnection. As these networks build, cutting across public and private
sectors and national borders and interests, influential new sub- and supra na-
tional actors may increasingly compete for influence with national actors. As
political and economic interests grow in protecting and expanding the net-
works, the networks themselves may increasingly take precedence over nation-
states as the driving factor in domestic and foreign affairs.2

Extraterritoriality

This extraterritoriality within computer networks is terra incognita

with no known territorial boundaries. Legal jurisdiction is largely terri-
torial in nature involving the statutory reach of those persons residing
within its boundaries.
Electronic communities abound, tied together through independent
nodes operating cooperatively through various consortia of like-
minded institutions, through dedicated corporate or institutional net-
works, through public switched virtual networks, through personal
computer bulletin boards, and/or through computer conferences of-
fered by information service providers such as CompuServe, Prodigy, or
EIES (Electronic Information Exchange System). This multiplicity of
communities suggests that electronic communities may choose to
promulgate their own rules of the road on electronic highways and to
enforce them with sanctions appropriate to their circumstances and
codes of ethics. Indeed, as Eli Noam, an economist at Columbia Uni-
versity, has observed "Computer networks acquire quasi-governmental
power."3 Whether this power will be exercised in an authoritarian or
democratic manner remains to be determined.
The earliest global networks, such as the electronic funds transfer
system SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Transfers),
operate under very stringent rules to which member banks agree when
joining the system. Network managers of university network services,
which had been loosely organized and largely undisciplined, scurried
to set up their own codes of conduct in the aftermath of disruption of
86 Anne Wells Branscomb

services created by the Internet worm that Robert T. Morris, Jr., un-
leashed into this electronic environment in November 1988.
The process of meshing these codes of conduct with local, state and
national laws will prove challenging. A dialogue held on the WELL, a
computer bulletin board operating out of Marin County, California,
and published in Harper's magazine, suggests that the "computer crack-
ers" will push the outer limits of network security so long as there exists
a barrier to the free flow of information.4 And the recent revolt of
Prodigy users protesting censorship of electronic messages suggests that
users want more voice in determining the rules under which they will
opt to participate.

What Constitutes Information Property?

Access to global networks facilitates the collection and sharing of per-

sonal data without regard to national borders and national laws con-
cerning the collection and archiving of personal information. The
following quotes indicate the nature of the concerns that are being
raised by the ability of computers attached to global networks to gather
and correlate data about network transactions.

The 'information revolution' has aeated new forms of property and made long
familiar forms—from customer lists to telephone directories—valuable in new
ways. (Walter, 1991)

Each of us dashes through dozens of private electronic intersections and turn-

stiles everyday when we phone, work, or shop till we drop. These data flows are
easily monitored at many different points, and the rest is up to the electronic
gatekeepers and tabulators. Buying broccoli by credit card is a serious undertak-
ing. The profiles generated from electronic transactions of this kind are there-
fore detailed and reliable. (Peters, 1990)

The data swept up at a grocery checkout counter—your choice of toothpaste,

breakfast cereal, deodorant, contraceptives, whether you smoke cigarettes or
drink beer—is worth millions of dollars to stores and manufacturers. And its
value soars when it is linked to the names of specific individuals, along with
their lifestyles, shopping preferences and ability to pay.5

The telephone number is fast becoming at least as important an

identifier as the social security card or the motor vehicle license number
(which in many states are the same). Information obtained from use of
87 jurisdictional Quandaries for Global Networks

the telephone has come to be known as transaction-generated informa-

tion (TGI). Such TGI can be mixed and matched with census data,
postal codes, and other publicly available information such as automo-
bile and boat registrations, birth registrations, and death certificates
to provide rather precise profiles of potential buyers of a variety of
products.
This information has long been available (at a cost prohibitive to
small marketers) from large corporate information gatherers such as
Equifax Marketing Decision Systems. However, when Equifax joined
forces with Lotus to offer a new product called "Lotus Marketplace:
Households" that would make the same data available to smaller mer-
chants at a fraction of the cost, thirty thousand people wrote in to have
their names removed from the database. The product, a set of laser disks
containing information about 80 million households and over 120
million individuals, could be ordered in small packages of five thou-
sand names for $695 and would have been updated on a quarterly basis.
The information contained was gleaned from forty different sources but
carefully designed, according to Lotus executives, to protect privacy of
individuals by not disclosing telephone numbers, credit history, actual
income, age, or purchasing history.
Although this database was not available online, because the hard
copy version was much cheaper, it is typical of the type of information
that is available online when credit cards or any electronically readable
media or "smart-card" are used to make a purchase. K-Mart, Sears, and
Hudson collect point-of-sale data from credit card customers and either
reward frequent buyers like the frequent flyers, or solicit to their tastes
and buying habits. Williams-Sonoma, Inc. of California tracks one hun-
dred fifty different characteristics of its customers. Quaker Oats, one of
the most aggressive of the new "relationship marketers" has a database
of 35 million households to whom it sends discount coupons and
tracks their redemption. Citicorp has been experimenting with a data-
base of two million consenting purchasers shopping at supermarket
chains across the country to package clusters of coupons tailored to the
individual purchasing habits and tastes. Suppliers can use this informa-
tion to count their customers as well as to identify and market to those
who purchase competitive products. Sharper Image maintains a list of
800,000 mail order customers along with 1.2 million shoppers at their
88 Anne Wells Branscomb

mall stores. These names are correlated with information gleaned from
returned product registration cards collected by National Demograph-
ics and Lifestyles, a Denver-based company specializing in the analysis
of lifestyles of 30 million Americans.
Clearly the uproar over Lotus Marketplace, which was canceled along
with another product designed to cover 7 million businesses, is merely
the tip of the iceberg or more likely the smoldering fire from a volcano
about to erupt. Citizens are becoming very apprehensive about the
information collected and correlated about them and want to have a
greater say about how the use of proliferating computer networks is
affecting their mailboxes, their trash collection, and even their forests.
More seriously they are concerned about the access to their credit
ratings, medical histories, and personal lifestyles by third parties be-
yond their control. Information in the hands of the wrong people can
be devastating.
Moreover, if this personal data is so valuable, why not share the value
with the source? George Trubow, a professor specializing in privacy law,
has suggested the quite ingenious but implausible possibility of credit-
ing social security accounts each time personal data is purchased. Regu-
lation of TGI is a legal nightmare waiting to happen. As computer
networks expand, individuals, whether or not they are knowing users
of data communications, will surely become more aware of the collec-
tion and correlation of information about themselves that is being
exploited for some other entity's ulterior interest.
The treatment of personal data varies widely throughout the world.6
In the United States there is no omnibus law. State as well as federal law
applies, and the latter is primarily directed toward the collection of data
by the federal government, although there are some restrictions on the
collection of credit and financial information and electronic funds
transfers.7 In Europe there is a more concerted effort to harmonize laws
related to data collection within the European Community. The Or-
ganization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) prom-
ulgated voluntary guidelines to be used in the transfer of personal data
from one country to another in 1980,8 and the Council of Europe
(consisting of twenty-six European nations) enacted its own conven-
tion for the protection of personal data the following year.9 The twelve
nations constituting the European Community have produced numer-
ous recommendations concerning the treatment of personal informa-
89 Jurisdictional Quandaries for Global Networks

tion to which its member nations are expected to conform. Even so, the
laws of the various European countries vary. Some apply only to indi-
vidual personalized data and some apply to legal entities as well. How-
ever, as the EC becomes more unified after 1992, more conformity may
be expected. Standards may be instituted to which other countries will
have to comply if they expect to transfer data to and from these Euro-
pean countries. Indeed, the first prohibition against transfer of a mail-
ing list took place in 1990, when the United Kingdom stopped an
American direct mail organization from transferring information from
the United Kingdom to the United States.10

Jurisdictional Barriers to Access

In an interdependent global economy, legal rights to access data stored

in computers are critical to the normal operations of such an economy.
The right to unencumbered transit across national boundaries is a fun-
damental aspect of the infrastructure of that global economy. Today no
such right is guaranteed. National laws are just that, national in orien-
tation and application. Telecommunications systems are also by and
large national in scope, operation, and regulation. Only by consensus
and treaty do nation-states give up their national sovereignty over
information stored within and transiting across their boundaries.
There exists a long tradition that messages contained in diplomatic
pouches are subject only to the laws and control of the national sover-
eign sending and receiving such messages11 unless it is clear that they
are acting in contravention of the laws or best interests of the host
nation.12 There is also a generally recognized principle that private
messages sent through the telecommunications systems are to remain
private.13 Yet there are no generally recognized principles governing
access to data stored or in transit across national boundaries. Indeed,
until the enactment of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of
1986,14 there was no prohibition against electronic eavesdropping on
data transmission in the United States.
Legal systems are nationally limited; jurisdiction can only be exer-
cised by the national court system or by a cooperating jurisdiction that
chooses to apply the laws of that nation state. Thus transnational
application of national laws depends upon reciprocity, as in the case of
Anne Wells Branscomb

extradition, or the strength of force whenever extraterritorial jurisdic-

tion is claimed by virtue of nationality of citizens living or traveling
abroad. In some cases, nations attempt to extend the force of their law
beyond their borders by virtue of commercial activities of legal entities
operating under the protection of their national laws.
As data resides outside the territorial boundaries of a nation state in
that litigation occurs, we must consider how the courts obtain access
to the evidence that is necessary to enforce domestic laws. Take, for
example, the case of the Canadian law which prohibits circulation of
racially offensive literature. A computer bulletin board operated by the
Aryan Nations Liberty Net—based in Hayden Lake, Idaho; Fayetteville,
North Carolina; and Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas—promoted white su-
premacy and was reported to contain a list of target names for extermi-
nation.15 These messages, which contravened Canadian but not U.S.
law, were readily available over the interconnected telephone carriers
operating between the United States and Canada. Presumably, potential
Canadian prosecutors could avail themselves (in this case) to the open
lines to tap into the neo-Nazi bulletin board and download or print out
the messages in the same way that the Canadian callers could. They
could not however obtain jurisdiction over the bulletin board operators
without obtaining an order of extradition, nor could they obtain an
injunction against the bulletin board without the cooperation of the
U.S. authorities, nor could they require the U.S. or Canadian telephone
companies to deny access to that number without likely inhibiting the
normal business use of such lines for other purposes. Perhaps they
could obtain the cooperation of host country authorities to require
bulletin board operators to post a message stating that accessing data
from this bulletin board contravenes Canadian law.
Access to financial data stored in computers and available through
networked lines has been explored in two cases involving the Bank of
Nova Scotia, a multinational bank with over twelve hundred branches
in forty-six countries.16 A Miami branch of the Canadian bank was
subpoenaed by a U.S. federal district court to produce financial data
contained in subsidiary banks domiciled in the Bahamas, Cayman
Islands, and Antigua. No documents were found in the Antigua branch,
and both Bahamian and Cayman law prohibited disclosure of the data
held by those branches. Nonetheless, the Miami Court mandated its
Jurisdictional Quandaries for Global Networks

production, with a fine of $25,000 a day for nondisclosure. Thus the

cost of obeying two sovereigns may become very expensive (in this case
the total levied was $1.8 million). However, as communication of data
between nations with conflicting laws increases, some regularly estab-
lished principles for the production of evidence seem timely and, in-
deed, necessary.
Another situation in which transnational access to data is critical was
that of the Swiss banks in disclosing information about the bank ac-
counts of ex-President Marcos to the Philippines government and of
Duvalier (Baby Doc) to the Haitian government. The secrecy of the
numbered Swiss accounts has been a prime attraction of the Swiss
banking system. However, in the case of the Philippine and Haitian
claims, national assets had been siphoned off by their national leaders
for personal purposes and sequestered in these secret accounts. The
disclosure of details was a matter of much controversy within the Swiss
banking community. Ultimately, the decision was disclosure, but for
the first time in the history of the system.17
Data residing outside the nation-state of its origin will be subject to
political turmoil beyond the control of its owner. For example, Iranian
assets were frozen by the U.S. government during the Iranian revolu-
tion and hostage crisis.18 Panamanian assets have been frozen as a
device for forcing Noriega to leave office, and U.S. companies were
mandated by the U.S. government not to pay taxes lawfully assessed
under Panamanian law.19 When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the
United States prohibited Dresser Industries from supplying data from a
U.S.-situated computer to their French subsidiary, which was supplying
pipeline equipment to the Soviet Union.20
In the case of national assets, it may be assumed that the political
situation, in some cases, both requires and justifies the use of economic
sanctions. However, it can also be argued that the stability of the world
economy demands some rules of the road so that innocent bystanders
will not be injured and critical industries can be permitted to continue
operations.
Consequently, an excursion into the drafting of rights of access to
transnational data must be entered with much caution, understanding
the murky waters from which such rights must emerge, and compre-
hending the limited goals that can be attained.
92 Anne Wells Branscomb

Varying Definitions of Miscreant Behavior

Malicious and intentional destruction of data usually can be treated

under the existing criminal statutes, although there is often a problem
in interpreting the precise language to cover the new circumstances
presented in the operation of computer networks. Definitions of crimi-
nal behavior do not necessarily conform in different countries. One of
the reasons that the Hannover Hackers, convicted in Germany for un-
authorized entry into U.S. data networks, were given lenient sentences
was that the taking of U.S. data was not prohibited by German laws.
Computer hackers operating in both Australia and the Netherlands
have identified their activities roaming through U.S. networks, while
thumbing their noses at U.S. authorities who had no jurisdiction over
foreign nationals unless they have committed an extraditable crime. In
order to obtain extradition the nature of the crime must be identical in
both countries, and a nation can refuse extradition even if the nature
of the crime is identical should they find it in their national interest to
do so.
Reports of transnational transgressions abound. The OECD working
party on transborder data flow gathered data on unauthorized access of
Canadian computers by West Germans, Norwegians, and Americans. A
West German perpetrator took control of a mainframe computer oper-
ated by a research facility in Vancouver, changed passwords and privi-
lege levels and inflicted a cost of $20,000 to reconstruct and secure the
system. In a dispute over a franchise, a Canadian company tampered
with tapes stored in the U.S. firm, preventing their continued use.21
One of the major questions that is unresolved in an international
context is whether information is property for the purpose of applying
existing criminal statutes. In addition to the question of whether mali-
cious destruction of data is an offense under the laws of the nation
where the misaeant behavior is committed, there is a question of
which country to seek redress of grievances, and whether or not one
can identify and obtain jurisdiction over the miscreant culprit in any
event.
In recent years computer networks have been invaded by "worms,"
"viruses," and other rogue programs that do not necessarily destroy,
steal, or corrupt data but may merely overstuff mail boxes, use up space,
or distract network managers attempting to identify and remove them.
93 jurisdictional Quandaries for Global Networks

This is what happened with the Internet worm inserted by Robert T.

Morris, Jr., in November 1988. These are self-propelling programs that
enter and reenter existing software and continue to cause disruption
throughout the network despite cessation at the source. How to treat
these intrusions presents new and unique challenges to the legal sys-
tems of the many nations that may experience a disruption of services
caused by such miscreant behavior.
Although there is no assurance that terrorism can be contained, there
is certainly a need for nations that expect to participate in the global
information economy to band together to fight computer terrorists as
any other kind of terrorism. Although there have been few instances of
computer terrorism in the past, as terrorists become more computer
literate the opportunities for them to take advantage of networks will
become more apparent. Clearly, the cost of such terrorism is exorbitant
in terms of lost time, lost business, and efforts to restore the systems to
normal.
Hacking as compared with terrorism is not merely a matter of de-
gree.22 Terrorists are motivated by the desire to destroy data, whereas
hackers are motivated by curiosity or determination to prove their
computer skills. Indeed, many hackers think they are improving the
state-of-the-art or identifying vulnerabilities. Contending with the
hacker problem is more a matter of public relations, education, and an
underlying social ethic that "cracking" is improper and should be pun-
ished. The criminal statute in the United Kingdom makes any un-
authorized entry into an electronic network a misdemeanor and entries
with malevolent intent a felony. The U.S. federal statute was interpreted
to cover the unauthorized entry of the Internet worm by Robert T.
Morris, Jr., into the network as punishable culpability23 even though no
malevolent intent could be established. Thus the law enforcement
officials in the United States have shown a determination to crack
down on miscreant behavior within the networks. In May 1990 the
Secret Service executed Operation Sun Devil, the end ploy of a two-year
investigation into the miscreant behavior of some computer hackers,
and efforts to increase the curbing of miscreant behavior continues
unabated.
Harmonization of the laws of most nations has not been achieved,
although the laws in many countries are being changed to clarify that
unauthorized entry and use, interference with, or destruction of com-
94 Anne Wells Branscomb

puterized data is unacceptable behavior. Clearly a standardized and

internationally harmonized definition of what is and what is not ac-
ceptable access to global networks and use of data found within is
highly desirable.
There is also a question of vulnerability to distortion by negligence
of the custodian. In most cases liability of the custodian of the data will
be spelled out in contracts. However, such contracts can vary enor-
mously and create uncertainties concerning the exposure to users and
providers of the data. Clearly, there are cases in which negligence can
be generally assumed to exist and others in which there can be agree-
ment that no liability should accrue. Thus to the extent that clearly
established norms of custodial behavior can be achieved, the efficiency
of the information economy will be improved.
The Aldus virus, for example, was introduced to a large number of
Macintosh users at a Mac conference in Toronto via a popular game
program called Potato Head, allegedly to demonstrate how fast and
how far software piracy can extend. As many attendees did copy the
program for their own use, the perpetrators proved their point when a
peace message popped up on the screens of thousands of Macintosh
users on March 2, 1988, and wished them a happy anniversary of
Macintosh use. However, the incident sent a shock of alarm through
the computer software industry as several thousand disks of the Aldus
Company were found to be contaminated. It was the first incident of
commercially available software infected with a virus. Thus software
providers became apprehensive that such occurrences could lead to a
widespread concern about the integrity of the software sold, leading to
warranties for fitness for use or the issuance of bug-free software—a
requirement that many thought would lead to the detriment of the
industry by overregulation and litigation.
The jurisdictional quandary represented by this incident is illuminat-
ing. The offending software was copied from a Macintosh machine
residing in Canada. The transfer to commercial software occurred in a
manufacturing facility in Ohio, but the injured party was the Aldus
Company, a legal entity in Seattle, Washington. The district attorney
has spent several years trying to decide whether or not to prosecute
whom for what infringement of the law, and a great deal of the evi-
dence has been gathered from electronic bulletin boards reporting com-
ments about the effects of the offending software. However, a suit for
95 Jurisdictional Quandaries for Global Networks

damages for negligence would likely be appropriate if the situs of the

negligence could be determined, whether in the United States or Can-
ada, and the tortfeasor24 were solvent and capable of paying damages
assessed.

New Forms of Communication: Which Laws and Whose Laws Apply?

Problems keep arising because services like Prodigy don't neatly fit into any of
the legal boxes we've developed over the past hundred years. Prodigy's online
news services are a lot like those provided by newspapers, its conferences are
like town meetings, and its Email like telephone service. All of these services are
very different, but all are regulated in the same way—not at all.25

Digital signals do not differentiate between video, sound, image, text

and data. All the bits traveling through electronic networks are similar
electronic messages. Established laws governing communications trans-
port apply specifically to mail, telephones, newspapers, cable, and radio
and television broadcasting. In an electronic bitstream it may be impos-
sible to distinguish into which of these legal categories they fall. In-
deed, there may be categories of services such as computer bulletin
boards or computer conferences that do not resemble any of the estab-
lished legal regimes.
Already we are seeing the lines between cable and broadcasting be-
coming blurred as are the lines between what constitutes a common
carrier and a content provider (e.g. newspapers, journals, and books).
The large metropolitan newspaper (which is not traditionally regulated
as a common carrier required to carry whatever is offered) has become
a major distributor of printed advertising inserts of all kinds. The broad-
caster has always been a hybrid of both carrier (though not regulated
as common) and content provider with less first amendment insulation
from mandated carriage of content (e.g., political announcements, fair-
ness, and personal attack replies). Even the common carriers—the local
telephone companies—are becoming information providers as well as
providers of information transport. The Federal Communications Com-
mission in the United States has recently authorized telephone compa-
nies to provide television services as a quid pro quo for installing the
optical fiber to the home in the hope that the income from such service
will facilitate access to a fully digital and networked environment for
the future. Cable television companies also seek the opportunity to
96 Anne Wells Branscomb

become competitive with the telephone companies by providing

switched voice service to the home.
If the clarity of legal lines between what has constituted an unregu-
lated newspaper from a highly regulated common carrier is becoming
clouded, this is a modest problem compared with determining the legal
status of the newer breeds of information services. In late 1990, there
erupted a heated controversy precipitated when Prodigy, an online
service co-owned by IBM and Sears, discontinued service to a number
of its subscribers. The subscribers in question had mounted a protest
against Prodigy's change in charges from a flat rate per month to
additional charges for high-end users of electronic mail. According to
Prodigy, 90 percent of the users were sending fewer than the thirty
messages per month (or about 360,000 messages), which Prodigy strate-
gists had predicted, but the other 10 percent were sending 3.6 million.
One user saturated the electronic mail services with twenty thousand
messages in the month of August 1990, and average of forty-two mes-
sages per hour, a contingency Prodigy had not anticipated. When a
group calling itself "The Cooperative Defense Committee," organized a
revolt using the electronic mail service and urging that users boycott
Prodigy's advertisers, Prodigy reacted precipitously by suspending thir-
teen organizers of the revolt, alleging harassment of other subscribers
as the grounds, and prohibiting any discussion of the rate increase on
the service.
At the time of the ejection, or excommunication, the protesters
claimed to have garnered some nineteen thousand users to support
their opposition to both the rate change as well as the presence of
online merchants and advertisers on every videotex screen. However,
the controversy involved far more than a mere dispute over rates.
Indeed, the telephone companies are still trying to extricate themselves
from the monthly flat rate for local service. More important, Prodigy
was accused of censorship not merely for the curtailment of the discus-
sion over the rates but for discontinuing several controversial computer
conferences involving sexual preferences. Thus the public debate blos-
somed forth into a full-fledged airing of the nature of open discussion
on electronic media.
Prodigy admitted to prescreening and editing public messages posted
on bulletin boards and conferences on the basis that it was similar to
97 jurisdictional Quandaries for Global Networks

the Disney Channel, a family service. The service agreement required

members not to submit messages to the public forums that were "de-
famatory, inaccurate, abusive, obscene, profane, sexually explicit,
threatening, ethnically offensive or illegal."
However, some of the consumers looked upon the electronic service
as far more than delivery of advertisements, news, entertainment, and
mail. What Prodigy failed to understand, according to William Zach-
mann writing in PC Week, was that:

. . . a new medium such as an online service has a dynamic—even a life—of its

own, quite independent of the intentions of its creators. They fail to see that
online services like Prodigy are fundamentally neither electronic providers of
information nor electronic substitutes for shopping or paying bills. These as-
pects are merely secondary. First and foremost, online services like Prodigy are
a communications medium. They are a way for people to encounter other
people electronically. They create a radically new social medium that will prove
to be at least as important (and as revolutionary) as the telephone, radio, or
television. (Zachmann, 1990)

The only case to confront some of these issues head on involved

CompuServe, one of the earliest of the electronic mail and conferenc-
ing services. CompuServe was a computer time-sharing company look-
ing for a way to sell unused time available on their equipment. For over
a decade the company has developed a dedicated following of
aficionados numbering 838,000 at the time of the litigation in 1991.
CompuServe, now owned by H&R Block, offers a wide variety of con-
ference topics that users may join to offer their own comments. In
addition to electronic mail and conferences, the CompuServe Informa-
tion Service (CIS) offers an electronic library of reference materials and
many other information services. The open forums involving special
topics number more than fifty. Users may also enter what is called a
chat mode in which they encounter other users who are using the
system, or online, at the same time that they are. This is an interactive
discussion in real time rather than messages entered at asymmetrical
time periods as in a computer conference or forum mode.
The forum that was the subject of the litigation was one called
"Rumorville USA," a part of the Journalism Forum. Rumorvllle resem-
bled, for most purposes, a daily newsletter and was operated by Don
Fitzpatrick Associates of San Francisco, which assumed under its con-
tract with CompuServe "total responsibility for the contents." Com-
Anne Wells Branscomb

puServe claimed that it had neither responsibility for the content nor
an opportunity to prescreen the contents of Rumorville before it was
entered into the CompuServe system. Thus it claimed no responsibility
for alleged defamatory statements that appeared in Rumorville and for
which the plaintiff was concerned.
The trial court agreed with the defendant that it was operating solely
as a distributor and not as publisher and, therefore, could not be liable
for the contents of the publishers placing material into the system:

CompuServe has no more editorial control over such a publication than does a
public library, book store, or newsstand, and it would be no more feasible for
CompuServe to examine every publication it carries for potentially defamatory
statements than it would be for any other distributor to do so .. . Technology
is rapidly transforming the information industry. A computerized database is
the functional equivalent of a more traditional news vendor, and the inconsis-
tent application of a lower standard of liability to an electronic news distributor
such as CompuServe than that which is applied to a public library, book store,
or newsstand would impose an undue burden on the free flow of information.26

This decision brought cheer to the providers of electronic mail and

information services, since most, other than Prodigy, preferred not to
assume responsibility for the content of the many forms of communi-
cation passing through their systems. However, the cheer may be short-
lived as it pertains only to those messages that look more or less like
publications and for which there is a responsible party upon whom
liability can be placed. There is less certainty concerning the protection
to be provided other forms of communications over electronic messag-
ing systems. Providers of existing messaging and electronic information
services have also been reluctant to assume the nomenclature of "infor-
mation utility," which might insulate them from liability for content
as a "common carrier" but would expose them to a right of access to
anyone prepared to pay the price of admission, a hazard most are
unwilling to assume. Thus the actual status remains in a legal limbo.
There are many proposals afoot including a full-fledged constitu-
tional amendment guaranteeing first amendment rights to all elec-
tronic systems.27 However, there are a myriad of legal issues to be
resolved even if first amendment rights apply. First amendment rights
can include both the right of a "publisher" to publish without govern-
ment censorship as well as the right of privacy of the individual to
control access to and issue of information coming into and out of the
99 jurisdictional Quandaries for Global Networks

protected space called "home" or "persona." Moreover, it is not clear to

what extent the right of anonymity will be preserved, as this has firm
legal roots.28
It is not at all clear, however, that the law of the United States or other
countries will recognize such individual responsibility in electronic
media. Indeed, there is much danger that the law will attempt to cover
all electronic media under the same rubric without recognizing the vast
diversity of types of networks that are currently developing, some with
unique cultures of their own.

New Kinds of Communities: Network Governance

More important than the substance of the legal rules that are likely to
arise governing electronic communications is the question of what
group will determine which laws or operating rules shall apply.
In 1990 a contributor to the WELL effected an electronic death by
removing all of his contributions to the continuing electronic conver-
sation. The WELL proclaims to its participants that each user is respon-
sible for content entered into the system. However, there was an outcry
of protest from the surviving participants when they discovered that
Brian Newman had deleted his contributions from their collective
memory. Many thought that the messages, once entered, became a part
of the public domain. If not in the public domain, they considered their
conference community property that should properly remain under
their collective control or at least under the control of the operator of
the WELL. A number were quite angry and recorded their complaints
about Newman's unacceptable behavior. Certainly the integrity of the
electronic conversation had been altered, but it is not clear whether or
not any rights had been dishonored.
This incident demonstrates the ease with which "information prod-
ucts" can be authored by multiple contributors and the lack of clarity
concerning who has a legal right to control the combined output. It
also highlights a concern over the demarcation line between the private
and public domain for information assets. How do we determine what
can be protected as private speech? What has become part of the public
domain or community property, and when does the transformation
from private to public take place? Under the 1976 revision of the
copyright law one must assume that any original work is protected by
100 Anne Wells Branscomb

an unpublished copyright until published. Thus it is a matter of con-

siderable legal interest when precisely a work is published and under
what proviso it is released.
A computer bulletin board is a new breed—nan electronic hybrid—
that may be looked upon either as a public or a private place depending
upon the desires of the participants. In normal circumstances this
electronic environment might be considered to be more like a street
corner or parlor where one is entitled to make informal remarks to one's
intimate friends. Usually the material would not be archived, since the
content is more of a transitory nature.
However, many bulletin boards are employed by more serious users,
perhaps scientists pursuing common interests in a research project or
environmentalists seeking a common solution to devastating effects of
acid rain. The cooperative writing may, therefore, have substantial his-
torical, political, or scientific value as a publishable research paper,
journal article, treatise, or textbook.
These electronic pen pals have evolved into very cohesive electronic
enclaves or "telecommunities," and they want to govern their own
electronic environment. The Reverend Paul Milner, system operator for
"Lutherlink," a computer network of the Lutheran church affiliated
with EcuNet, has observed that the participants on his network want
to do their own policing of behavior and they do not tolerate outside
interference any more than they tolerate user behavior that is objec-
tionable to the user group.29
What is the nature of the community in which this activity takes
place? A community is usually governed by its duly enacted laws that
represent the ethical values of the participants—for example, what is
considered acceptable or unacceptable behavior? Should the laws of the
community be those of the geographical locus or the electronic locus?
If the latter, how should they be promulgated? By whom administered?
Enforced by what sanctions?

New Forums for the Resolution of Disputes: Harmonization of Legal Systems

What institutions are responsible for resolving transnational disputes?

The information marketplace is not national but global. Trade secrets
are not recognized in most countries. For patents to be valid, they must
be filed in each country. The same is true for trademarks. Not everybody
1 01 Jurisdictional Quandaries for Global Networks

recognizes the applicability of copyright to computer software nor in-

deed any obligation to compensate producers of information. Some
nations permit copyrights only for nationals of the country or for
artistic works "published" within the national boundaries.
In some societies, and some groups within our society, to plagiarize
your teacher or mentor is the ultimate compliment and to withhold
information that could be of value to society is sinful and to be dero-
gated. Ethical values are not necessarily shared by different societies.
Some are highly socialistic and others are highly individualistic. To live
in the same networked world, each will have to accommodate to the
other.
Efforts are underway to clarify the substance of intellectual property
laws with respect to the new information technologies as well as to
determine where and under what circumstances these laws can be
enforced across national boundaries and what rights of access may be
exercised by newly industrializing countries. Efforts are ongoing within
the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the European Economic Com-
munity (EEC), and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Devel-
opment (UNCTAD) as well as through bilateral negotiations between
interested governments and interest groups. The difficulties UNCTAD
has experienced in attempting to reach an agreement on an interna-
tional code of conduct for the transfer of technology to developing
countries has presaged the complications that the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) encountered within the Uruguay Round
to negotiate a General Agreement on Information Trade (GAIT).30
The reliance upon the GATT, however, rather than the International
Telecommunications Union (ITU) marks a significant change in the
promulgation of global policies with respect to telecommunications
services.

By placing services high on the agenda for the new trade round, trade ministers
have, in effect, declared that telecommunications has become too important to
the future prosperity of the world economy to be left in the hands of commu-
nication experts. (Aronson, 1987)

The efforts of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and De-

velopment (OECD) to issue a Declaration on Transborder Data Flows in
April 1985 were designed to pursue a common interest of the developed
Anne Wells Branscomb

economies to facilitate transborder data flows and harmonize policy

objectives. The OECD has also been a leader in seeking harmonization
of criminal laws with respect to curbing miscreant behavior in the use
of computer networks.
The efforts of the European Community (EC) to harmonize the laws
governing the deployment of computer communications within the
twelve member nations constitutes a major multinational effort to seek
accommodations among varying legal systems. The guidelines, which
are numerous and complex, represent a major force in offering leader-
ship to the world community and may in time become global norms,
in the absence of strong objections of other regional groupings of
nation-states (see Kirby and Murray, chap. 10).
There are numerous such groupings, however, most of which have
initiatives directed toward the accommodation of their telecommuni-
cations systems to global interconnectMty. These include such regional
entities as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and a
consortium of South American Countries (ANDEAN). There are also
many nongovernmental groups seeking to find new alternatives to the
jurisdictional inadequacies. These include bar associations, law reform
groups, user consortia such as the International Users Group (INTUG),
and the International Chamber of Commerce. There are also a plethora
of international conferences organized by policy institutes, manage-
ment consulting firms, and think tanks of various ilk such as the Aspen
Institute for Humanistic Studies, the Trilateral Commission, the Club
of Rome, Tide 2000, the Atwater Institute, the International Manage-
ment Institute, the Weizman Institute, the U.S. National Academy of
Sciences, the Salzburg Seminar, Ditchley Park, Courcheval, as well as a
number of policy-oriented institutes in universities and a large number
of ad hoc efforts initiated by concerned citizens.

Global networks are the electronic highways of world commerce, cul-

ture, credit, scientific research, and literary productivity. They provide
communications capability to both criminals as well as their captors.
They are essential to our economic, social, and political survival. How-
ever, there are many conflicts of interest among user groups. Although
encryption offers many attractions to privacy proponents, law enforce-
103 Jurisdictional Quandaries for Global Networics

ment officials claim that a completely secure system of encryption will

inhibit their efforts to track down criminal behavior facilitated through
the use of the networks.
Many nation-states fear loss of sovereignty over their territorial do-
mains through the erosion of control over the private interconnections
across national boundaries. Others fear a diminution of cultural iden-
tity and loss of ethnic integrity. Many fear a loss of control over their
economic futures from the rapid proliferation of transnational data
traffic that may reflect values that better serve the nationals originating
the traffic than those on the receiving end. These concerns have been
expressed most eloquently by the Swedes in their study of vulnerability,
by the Canadians in their numerous policy studies, and by the Brazil-
ians in the actions taken in pursuit of their informatics strategies for
maintaining tight control over the development of the Brazilian com-
puter market, and by the French in their massive investments in infor-
mation technology. Nonetheless, the pressure for an integrated global
economy are quite strong and many nation-states around the world,
both large and small, developed and developing, are restructuring their
national telecommunications systems to adapt to a more competitive
international environment.
The global thrust of these new global communications highways is
to serve people, not nations, as the geopolitical system of governance
is currently formed. It is not apparent how the new information mar-
ketplaces and innovative political systems will be legitimized. It is clear,
however, that the communications world is changing rapidly from one
divided by national telecommunications entities to ones governed by
a multiplicity of user groups who wish to promulgate their own rules
of conduct. Currently the users, large and small, are pressuring govern-
ments for more leeway in organizing their own closed user groups and
private networks, but groups of individual users are also organizing to
lobby for more liberalization of the rules that govern their electronic
environments. The new technologies offer a vast array of alternatives
in connecting people, corporations, and institutions for business, en-
tertainment, political, criminal, or cultural activities.
The next several decades will prove exciting for those engaged in
working out the policy alternatives and forging the new institutional
frameworks that will permit the many differing uses of such global
networks to emerge in all of their diversity.
Computers, Networks, and Work

Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler

Although the world may be evolving into a global village, most people
still lead local lives at work. They spend the majority of their time in
one physical location and talk predominantly to their immediate co-
workers, clients, and customers. They participate in only a few work-
place groups: their primary work group, perhaps a committee or task
force, and possibly an informal social group.
Some people, however, already experience a far more cosmopolitan
future because they work in organizations that have extensive com-
puter networks. Such individuals can communicate with people around
the world as easily as they talk with someone in the next office. They
can hold involved group discussions about company policy, new prod-
uct design, hiring plans, or last night's ball game without ever meeting
other group members.
The networked organization differs from the conventional workplace
with respect to both time and space. Computer-based communication
is extremely fast in comparison with telephone or postal services, deni-
grated as "snail mail'' by electronic mail converts. People can send a
message to the other side of the globe in minutes; each message can be
directed to one person or to many people. Networks can also essentially
make time stand still. Electronic messages can be held indefinitely in
computer memory. People can read or reread their messages at any
time, copy them, change them, or forward them.
Managers are often attracted to networks by the promise of faster
communication and greater efficiency. In our view, the real potential of
network communication has less to do with such matters than with
influencing the overall work environment and the capabilities of em-
Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler

ployees. Managers can use networks to foster new kinds of task struc-
tures and reporting relationships. They can use networks to change the
conventional patterns of who talks to whom and who knows what.
The capabilities that accompany networks raise significant questions
for managers and for social scientists studying work organizations. Can
people really work closely with one another when their only contact is
through a computer? If employees interact through telecommuting,
teleconferencing, and electronic group discussions, what holds the or-
ganization together? Networking permits almost unlimited access to
data and to other people. Where will management draw the line on
freedom of access? What will the organization of the future look like?
We and various colleagues are working to understand how computer
networks can affect the nature of work and relationships between man-
agers and employees. What we are learning may help people to exploit
better the opportunities that networks offer and to avoid or mitigate
the potential pitfalls of networked organizations.
Our research relies on two approaches. Some questions can be studied
through laboratory experiments. For instance, how do small groups
respond emotionally to different forms of communication? Other ques-
tions, particularly those concerning organizational change, require
field studies in actual organizations that have been routinely using
computer networks. Data describing how hundreds of thousands of
people currently use network communications can help predict how
other people will work in the future as computer-based communica-
tions become more prevalent. Drawing on field studies and experi-
ments, researchers gradually construct a body of evidence on how work
and organizations are changing as network technology becomes more
widely used. The process may sound straightforward, but in reality it is
often full of exciting twists. People use technology in surprising ways,
and effects often show up that contradict both theoretical predictions
and managerial expectations.
One major surprise emerged as soon as the first large-scale computer
network, known as the ARPANET, was begun in the late 1960s. The
ARPANET was developed for the Advanced Research Projects Agency
(ARPA), a part of the U.S. Department of Defense. ARPANET was in-
tended to link computer scientists at universities and other research
institutions to distant computers, thereby permitting efficient access to
machines unavailable at the home institutions. A facility called elec-
107 Computers, Networks, and Work

tronic mail, which enabled researchers to communicate with one an-

other, was considered a minor additional feature of the network.
Yet electronic mail rapidly became one of the most popular features
of the ARPANET. Computer scientists around the country used AR-
PANET to exchange ideas spontaneously and casually. Graduate stu-
dents discussed problems and shared skills with professors and other
students without regard to their physical location. Heads of research
projects used electronic mail to coordinate activities with project mem-
bers and to stay in touch with other research teams and funding agen-
cies. A network community quickly formed, filled with friends and
collaborators who rarely, if ever, met in person. Although some admin-
istrators objected to electronic mail because they did not consider it a
legitimate use of computer time, demand grew sharply for more and
better network connections.
Since then, many organizations have adopted internal networks that
link anywhere from a few to a few thousand employees. Some of these
organizational networks have also been connected to the Internet, the
successor to ARPANET. Electronic mail has continued to be one of the
most popular features of these computer networks.
Anyone who has a computer account on a networked system can use
electronic mail software to communicate with other users on the net-
work. Electronic mail transmits messages to a recipient's electronic
"mailbox." The sender can send a message simultaneously to several
mailboxes by sending the message to a group name or to a distribution
list. Electronic bulletin boards and electronic conferences are common
variants of group electronic mail; they too have names to identify their
topic or audience. Bulletin boards post messages in chronological order
as they are received. Computer conferences arrange messages by topic
and display grouped messages together.
The computer communication technology in most networked or-
ganizations today is fairly similar, but there exist large differences in
people's actual communication behavior that stem from policy choices
made by management. In some networked organizations, electronic
mail access is easy and open. Most employees have networked termi-
nals or computers on their desks, and anyone can send mail to anyone
else. Electronic mail costs are considered part of general overhead ex-
penses and are not charged to employees or to their departments. In
the open-network organizations we have studied, people typically send
108 Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler

and receive between twenty-five and one hundred messages a day and
belong to between ten and fifty electronic groups. These figures hold
across job categories, hierarchical position, age, and even amount of
computer experience.
In other networked organizations, managers have chosen to limit
access or charge costs directly to users, leading to much lower usage
rates. Paul Schreiber, a Newsday columnist, describes how his own or-
ganization changed from an open-access network to a limited-access
one. Management apparently believed that reporters were spending too
much time sending electronic mail; management therefore had the
newspaper's electronic mail software modified so that reporters could
still receive mail but could no longer send it. Editors, on the other
hand, could still send electronic mail to everyone. Clearly, technology
by itself does not impel change. Management choices and policies are
equally influential.
But even in organizations that have open access, anticipating the
effect of networks on communication has proved no easy task. Some of
the first researchers to study computer network communications
thought the technology would improve group decision making over
face-to-face discussion because computer messages were plain text.
They reasoned the electronic discussions would be more purely intel-
lectual, and so decision making would be less affected by people's social
skills and personal idiosyncrasies.
Research has revealed a more complicated picture. In an electronic
exchange, the social and contextual cues that usually regulate and
influence group dynamics are missing or attenuated. Electronic mes-
sages lack information regarding job titles, social importance, hierarchi-
cal position, race, age, and appearance. The context also is poorly
defined because formal and casual exchanges look essentially the same.
People may have outside information about senders, receivers, and
situation, but few cues exist in the computer interaction itself to re-
mind people of that knowledge.
In a series of experiments at Carnegie Mellon University, we com-
pared how small groups make decisions using computer conferences,
electronic mail, and face-to-face discussion. Using a network induced
the participants to talk more frankly and more equally. Instead of one
or two people doing most of the talking, as happens in many face-to-
109 Computers, Networks, and Work

• • FACE-TO-FACE DISCUSSION

I , I COMPUTER CONFERENCE (REAL TIME)

^ • 1 ELECTRONIC MAIL DISCUSSION

I I ANONYMOUS ELECTRONIC MAIL

Figure 6.1
Laboratory studies reveal some ways in which networks affect how people work
together. Ninety-four groups of subjects in five experiments were told to reach
consensus decisions on several questions. Each group made some decisions
electronically (through one or two network modes) and others face-to-face.
When networked, all groups took longer to make a decision (a). On the other
hand, they enjoyed more equal participation (b) and proposed more ideas (c).
The electronic modes of discussion seemed to encourage "flaming," impas-
sioned self-expression (d).

face groups, everyone had a more equal say. Furthermore, networked

groups generated more proposals for action than did traditional ones.
Open, free-ranging discourse has a dark side. The increased democ-
racy associated with electronic interactions in our experiments inter-
fered with decision making. We observed the three-person groups took
approximately four times as long to reach a decision electronically as
they did face-to-face. In one case, a group never succeeded in reaching
consensus, and we were ultimately forced to terminate the experiment.
Making it impossible for people to interrupt one another slowed deci-
sion making and increased conflict as a few members tried to dominate
110 Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler

control of the network. We also found that people tended to express

extreme opinions and vented anger more openly in an electronic face-
off than when they sat together and talked. Computer scientists using
the ARPANET have called this phenomenon "flaming."
We discovered that electronic communication can influence the ef-
fects of people's status. Social or job position normally is a powerful
regulator of group interaction. Group members typically defer to those
who have higher status and tend to follow their direction. Members'
speech and demeanor become more formal in the presence of people
who have high status. Higher-status people, in turn, talk more and
influence group discussion more than do lower-status people.
Given that electronic conversations attenuate contextual cues, we
expected that the effect of status differences within a group should also
be reduced. In an experiment conducted with Vitaly Dubrovsky of
Clarkson University and Beheruz Sethna of Lamar University, we asked
groups containing high- and low-status members to make decisions
both by electronic mail and face-to-face. The results confirmed that the
proportion of talk and influence of higher-status people decreased
when group members communicated by electronic mail.
Is this a good state of affairs? When higher-status members have less
expertise, more democracy could improve decision making. If higher-
status members truly are better qualified to make decisions, however,
the results of consensus decisions may be less good.
Shoshana Zuboff of Harvard Business School documented reduced
effects of status on a computer conference system in one firm. People
who regarded themselves as physically unattractive reported feeling
more lively and confident when they expressed themselves over the
network. Others who had soft voices or small stature reported that they
no longer had to struggle to be taken seriously in a meeting.
Researchers have advanced alternative explanations for the openness
and democracy of electronic talk. One hypothesis is that people who
like to use computers are childish or unruly, but this hypothesis does
not explain experimental results showing that the same people talk
more openly on a computer than when they are face-to-face. Another
hypothesis holds that text messages require strong language to get a
point across; this hypothesis explains flaming but not the reduction of
sodal and status differences. The most promising explanation of the
behavior of networked individuals is that when cues about social con-
/ 71 Computers, Networks, and Work

text are absent or weak, people ignore their social situation and cease
to worry about how others evaluate them. Hence, they devote less time
and effort to posturing and social niceties, and they may be more
honest.
Researchers have demonstrated decreased social posturing in studies
that ask people to describe their own behavior. In one of our experi-
ments, people were asked to complete a self-evaluation questionnaire
either by pencil and paper or via electronic mail. Those randomly
assigned to reply electronically reported significantly more undesirable
social behaviors, such as illegal drug use or petty crimes. John Greist
and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin found similar de-
creases in posturing when taking medical histories from clinical pa-
tients. People who responded to a computerized patient history
interview revealed more socially and physically undesirable behavior
than did those who answered the same questions asked by a physician.
These studies show that people are willing to reveal more about
undesirable symptoms and behavior to a computer, but are these re-
ports more truthful? An investigation of alcohol consumption con-
ducted by Jennifer J. Waterton and John C. Duffy of the University of
Edinburgh suggests an affirmative answer. In traditional surveys, people
report drinking only about one half as much alcohol as alcohol sales
figures would suggest. Waterton and Duffy compared computer inter-
views with personal interviews in a survey of alcohol consumption.
People who were randomly assigned to answer the computer survey
reported higher alcohol consumption than those who talked to the
human interviewer. The computer-derived reports of consumption ex-
trapolated more accurately to actual alcohol sales than did the face-to-
face reports.
These and other controlled studies of electronic talk suggest that such
communication is relatively impersonal, yet paradoxically it can make
people feel more comfortable about talking. People are less shy and
more playful in electronic discussions; they also express more opinions
and ideas and vent more emotion.
Because of these behavioral effects, organizations are discovering
applications for electronic group activities that nobody had antici-
pated. Computers can be valuable for counseling and conducting sur-
veys about sensitive topics, situations in which many people are
anxious and cover their true feelings and opinions. Networks are now
112 Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler

being used for applications ranging from electronic Alcoholics Anony-

mous support groups to electronic quality circles.
Just as the dynamics of electronic communications differ from those
conducted orally or by letters, so electronic groups are not just tradi-
tional groups whose members use computers. People in a networked
organization are likely to belong to a number of electronic groups that
span time zones and job categories. Some of these groups serve as
extensions of existing work groups, providing a convenient way for
members to communicate between face-to-face meetings. Other elec-
tronic groups gather together people who do not know one another
personally and who may in fact have never had the opportunity to
meet in person.
For example, Hewlett-Packard employs human-factors engineers who
work in widely scattered locations around the world. These engineers
may meet one another in person only once a year. An electronic con-
ference creates ongoing meetings in which they can frequently and
routinely discuss professional and company issues.
In some ways, electronic groups resemble nonelectronic social
groups. They support sustained interactions, develop their own norms
of behavior, and generate peer pressure. Electronic groups often have
more than one hundred members, however, and involve relationships
among people who do not know one another personally.
Employees whose organization is connected to the Internet or to a
commercial network can belong to electronic groups whose members
come from many different organizations. For example, Brian K. Reid
of Digital Equipment Corporation reports that some 37,000 organiza-
tions are connected to USENET, a loosely organized network that ex-
changes more than 1,500 electronic discussion groups, called
newsgroups. Reid estimates that 1.4 million people worldwide read at
least one newsgroup.
Networked communication is only beginning to affect the structure
of the workplace. The form of most current organizations has been
dictated by the constraints of the nonelectronic world. Interdependent
jobs must be situated in physical proximity. Formal command struc-
tures specify who reports to whom, who assigns tasks to whom, and
who has access to what information. These constraints reinforce the
centralization of authority and shape the degree of information shar-
773 Computers, Networks, and Work

O EMPLOYEE ZS. RETIREE

r ^:
r • °A* o • A A

° ^2^ °
• o
I ELECTRONIC GROUP
1
1
1 ELECTRONIC GROUP
'INITIAL STATE o >3 MONTHS LATER
B M ELECTRONIC GROUP
[ • • 3 MONTHS LATER o A
I CONVENTIONAL GROUP
•SMOOTHS LATER

14
• FACE-TO-FACE
1 2 | - | ELECTRONIC •—

10LSREJJRED m |J

J
I« . 1 II
J •• I I I I I I
3-
6 9 12
TIME (MONTHS)

Figure 6.2
Dynamic group structures emerge when people converse electronically. These
charts depict the behavior of two study groups, each containing a mix of
employees and retired workers. One group worked in person, the other over a
network. Members having the most information and social contacts appear near
the center of the charts. Over time, the electronic group becomes more socially
cohesive (a). Chart b compares the electronic group with the conventional
group three months into the project and shows that retirees in particular be-
come better integrated into the electronic group. Networks also encouraged
more people to take on leadership roles (c).
114 Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler

ing, the number of organizational levels, the amount of interconnec-

tivity, and the structure of social relationships.
Organizations that incorporate computer networks could become
more flexible and less hierarchical in structure. A field experiment
conducted by Tora K. Bikson of Rand Corporation and John D. Eveland
of Claremont Colleges supports the point. They formed two task forces
in a large utility firm, each assigned to analyze employee retirement
issues. Both groups contained forty members, half of whom had re-
cently retired from the company and half of whom were still employed
but eligible for retirement. The only difference between the two groups
was that one worked on networked computer facilities, whereas the
other did not.
Both task forces created subcommittees, but the networked group
created more of them and assigned people to more than one subcom-
mittee. The networked group also organized its subcommittees in a
complex, overlapping matrix structure, It added new subcommittees
during the course of its work, and it decided to continue meeting even
after its official one-year life span had ended. The networked task force
also permitted greater input from the retirees, who were no longer
located at the company. Although not every electronic group will be so
flexible, eliminating the constraints of face-to-face meetings evidently
facilitates trying out different forms of group organization.
Another effect of networking may be changed patterns of informa-
tion sharing in organizations. Conventional organizations have formal
systems of record keeping and of responsibilities for distributing infor-
mation. Much of the information within an organization consists of
personal experience that never appears in the formally authorized dis-
tribution system: the war stories told by service representatives (which
do not appear in service manuals), the folklore about how the experi-
mental apparatus really works (which does not appear in the journal
articles) or the gossip about how workers should behave (which is not
described in any personnel policy).
In the past, the spread of such personal information has been
strongly determined by physical proximity and social acquaintance. As
a result, distant or poorly connected employees have lacked access to
local expertise; this untapped knowledge could represent an important
informational resource in large organizations. Electronic groups pro-
Computers, Networks, and Work

Figure 6.3
Electronic links have the greatest effect on workers located at outlying sites.
Workers in field offices of Tandem Computers, Inc., whose headquarters are in
Cupertino, CA, have access to data files via a network. Circles indicate how
many times each office tapped into one file (consisting of employee-initiated
questions and answers about company products and services) over a one-year
period; the greater the usage, the larger the circle. Workers in distant or isolated
offices, where local expertise is relatively limited, made the most use of the
information provided through the network.

vide a forum for sharing such expertise independent of spatial and

social constraints.
One significant kind of information flow begins with the "Does
anybody know . . .?" message that appears frequently on computer
networks. A sender might broadcast an electronic request for informa-
tion to an entire organization, to a particular distribution list, or to a
bulletin board. Anyone who sees the message can reply. We studied
information inquiries in the network at Tandem Computers, Inc., in
Cupertino, California, a computer company that employs 10,500 work-
ers around the world. In a study we conducted with David Constant,
we found an average of about six does-anybody-know messages broad-
cast every day to one company-wide distribution list.
116 Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler

Information requests typically come from field engineers or sales

representatives who are soliciting personal experience or technical
knowledge that they cannot find in formal documents or in their own
workplace. At Tandem, about eight employees send electronic mail
replies to the average question. Fewer than 15 percent of the people
who answer a question are personally acquainted with the questioner
or are even located in the same city.
Question askers can electronically redistribute the answers they re-
ceive by putting them in a public computer file on the network. About
half of the Tandem questioners make their reply files publicly available
over the company network to other employees. Tandem takes this
sharing process one step further by maintaining an electronic archive
of question-and-reply files that is also accessible over the company
network. The firm has thereby created a repository of information and
working expertise that is endlessly accessible through space and time
(for example, the expertise remains available when an employee is
out of the office or he or she leaves the organization). A study by
Thomas Finholt in our research program found that this archive is
accessed more than one thousand times a month by employees, espe-
cially those located in field offices away from the geographic center of
the company.
The discretionary information sharing we discovered at Tandem and
at other networked organizations seems to run contrary to nonelec-
tronic behavior in organizations. The askers openly admit their igno-
rance to perhaps hundreds of even thousands of people. The repliers
respond to requests for help from people they do not know with no
expectations of any direct benefit to themselves.
One might wonder why people respond so readily to information
requests made by strangers. Part of the explanation is that networks
make the cost of responding extremely low in time and effort ex-
pended. Also, open-access networks favor the free flow of information.
Respondents seem to believe that sharing information enhances the
overall electronic community and leads to a richer information envi-
ronment. The result is a kind of electronic altruism quite different from
the fears that networks would weaken the social fabric of organizations.
The changes in communication made possible by networks may
substantially alter the relationship between an employee and his or her
organization, the structure of organizations, and the nature of manage-
777 Computers, Networks, and Work

ment. Senior managers and key professionals usually have strong social
and informational connections within their organizations and within
their broader professional communities. Conversely, employees who
reside on the organizational periphery by virtue of geographic location,
job requirements, or personal attributes have relatively few opportuni-
ties to make contact with other employees and colleagues.
Reducing the impediments to communication across both physical
and social distance is likely to affect peripheral employees more than
central ones. We, along with Charles Huff of St. Olaf College, studied
this possibility for city employees in Fort Collins, Colorado. Employees
who used electronic mail extensively reported more commitment to
their jobs and to their coworkers than did those who rarely used the
network. This correlation was particularly strong for shift workers, who
because of the nature of their work, had fewer opportunities to see their
colleagues than did regular day workers. As one policewoman told us,
"Working the night shift, it used to be that I would hear about promo-
tions after they happened, though I had a right to be included in the
discussion. Now I have a say in the decision making."
Organizations are traditionally built around two key concepts: hier-
archical decomposition of goals and tasks and the stability of employee
relationships over time. In the fully networked organization that may
become increasingly common in the future, task structures may be
much more flexible and dynamic. Hierarchy will not vanish, but it will
be augmented by distributed lattices of interconnections.
In today's organizations, executives generally know whom they man-
age and manage whom they know. In the future, however, managers of
some electronic project groups will face the challenge of working with
people they have never met. Allocating resources to projects and assign-
ing credit and blame for performance will become more complex.
People will often belong to many different groups and will be able to
reach out across the network to acquire resources without management
intervention or perhaps even without management knowledge.
A recent case in mathematics research hints at the nature of what
may lie ahead. Mathematicians at Bell Communications Research (Bell-
core) and at Digital Equipment sought to factor a large, theoretically
interesting number known as the ninth Fermat number. They broadcast
a message on the Internet to recruit researchers from universities, gov-
ernment laboratories, and corporations to assist them in their project.
118 Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler

The several hundred researchers who volunteered to help received—via

electronic mail—software and a piece of the problem to solve; they also
returned their solutions through electronic mail.
After results from all the volunteers were combined, the message
announcing the final results of the project contained a charming
admission:

We'd like to thank everyone who contributed computing cycles to this project,
but I can't: we only have records of the person at each site who installed and
managed the code. If you helped us, we'd be delighted to hear from you; please
send us your name as you would like it to appear in the final version of the
paper. (Broadcast message from Mark S. Manasse, June 15,1990)

Networking in most organizations today is limited to data communi-

cations, often for economic or financial applications such as electronic
data interchange, electronic funds transfer, or remote transaction proc-
essing. Most organizations have not yet begun to confront the oppor-
tunities and challenges afforded by connecting their employees
through networks.
Among those that have, managers have responded in a variety of
ways to changes that affect their authority and control. Some managers
have installed networks for efficiency reasons but ignored their poten-
tial for more profound changes. Some have restricted who can send
mail or have shut down electronic discussion groups. Others have
encouraged using the network for broadening participation and involv-
ing more people in the decision making process. The last actions push
responsibility down and through the organization and also produce
their own managerial issues.
A democratic organization requires competent, committed, responsi-
ble employees. It requires new ways of allocating credit. It increases
unpredictability, both for creative ideas and for inappropriate behavior.
Managers will have to come up with new kinds of worker incentives
and organizational structures to handle these changes.
The technology of networks is changing rapidly. Electronic mail that
includes graphics, pictures, sound, and video will eventually become
widely available. These advances will make it possible to reintroduce
some of the social context cues absent in current electronic communi-
cations. Even so, electronic interactions will never duplicate those con-
ducted face-to-face.
119 Computers, Networks, and Work

As more people have ready access to network communications, the

number and size of electronic groups will expand dramatically. It is up
to management to make and shape connections. The organization of
the future will depend significantly not just on how the technology of
networking evolves but also on how managers seize the opportunity it
presents for transforming the structure of work.
Integrating Global Organizations through
Task/Team Support Systems

Marvin Manheim

How can an organization use information technology to gain competi-

tive advantage in an era of globalization? By information technology,
we mean all aspects of information systems and telecommunications
(1ST). Many organizations must address this issue today. For the private
firm, competitive pressures are global in scope, even if the company
itself is still focused largely or exclusively on local or regional markets.
For the public sector organization, competition is also influenced by
global forces; cities and regions face major competition because of the
impacts of global competition on the firms located in the area or which
the city or region wishes to attract to that area.
The objective of this chapter is to stimulate discussion about the
critical directions that managers and researchers should pursue in de-
veloping and implementing effective information technology strate-
gies in a globally competing organization (GCO). What 1ST strategies
should a globally competing firm consider adopting? To answer this
question, we first identify a number of critical issues facing globally
competing organizations. Then, we establish a framework for screening
candidate IST-based strategies. Third, we use this framework to assess
possible strategies in terms of their effectiveness in meeting the critical
issues. This assessment leads us to identify some promising IST-based
strategies. Particularly promising are team-based strategies, using what
we call "Task/Team Support Systems."
This analysis is based on interviews with more than eighty com-
panies and organizations in the United States, Europe, and Japan
(Manheim, 1992, 1990; Manheim, Elam, and Keen, 1989; Mitsubishi
122 Marvin Manheim

Research, 1990. See also Biddle, 1990; Ives and Jarvenpaa, 1990, 1991;
Sethi and Olsen, 1991).

Globalization and Its Implications

It is clear that almost every sector of business and many private and
public activities are influenced by global forces. The nature of these
forces are well documented (Bartlett, 1986; Bartlett, Doz and Hedlund,
1990; Porter, 1986; Manheim, FJam and Keen, 1989; Ives and Jarven-
paa, 1990, 1991; Lamont, 1991; Levitt, 1990):

• Tightly linked global financial markets

• Global sourcing of inputs, marketing and distribution of products,
and manufacturing of components and final products
• Increased pressures for improved product quality and reduced prod-
uct price
• Evolution of businesses toward more comprehensive and continuous
global coordination and integration. For example, in some industries,
such as computers and consumer electronics, "flexible manufacturing"
means flexibility at the world scale: the ability to shift sourcing, pro-
duction, assembly, and distribution flexibly as market conditions, rela-
tive currency rates, labor resources, and other factors change.

These changes are becoming especially important in the context of

the creation of a single market in the European Community (EC) which
is providing a major opportunity for firms to restructure their produc-
tion, distribution, and marketing activities to achieve new competitive
advantages. For example, Nissan consolidated all of its automotive
parts distribution activities in Europe into a single distribution center
located in Amsterdam. This center is coordinating production and dis-
tribution of vehicles throughout Europe, including assembly plants in
Spain and England.
To compete successfully in this dynamically changing environment,
firms need to be able to address effectively several key issues:
• Cost-quality improvement through coordinated manufacturing, in-
cluding such coordination strategies as "just-in-time" and overall qual-
ity-improvement programs.
123 Integrating Gbbal Organizations through Task/Team Support Systems

• Cost-quality improvement through simultaneous engineering, using

integrated design teams, combining representatives from product de-
sign, engineering and manufacturing, and increasingly marketing and
other functions.
• Integration of the order cycle, which begins when the customer
places an order and ends with the delivery of the completed product to
the customer, in order to shorten cycle time and reduce inventories, so
as to be able to deliver the product to the customer as soon after order
placement as possible.
• Provision of quality after-sale customer support, to provide customers
with a high level of maintenance service, including spare parts avail-
ability and technically skilled in-service staff, and convenient access to
add-on products and services, such as training, documentation, and
product upgrades.
• Improving the product design process and shortening design cycle
time—the time it takes to conceive of a new product, design it, put it
into manufacturing, and deliver it to the market with a full support
network.
• Globally coordinated flexible manufacturing, to coordinate effec-
tively sourcing of components and subassemblies, distribution into
multiple markets, and efficient use of a network of global manufactur-
ing and assembly plants.
• Globally coordinated R&D, driven by the need for product develop-
ment for global markets (Levitt, 1990), and by the recognition that
unique research competencies exist in many different countries and
cultures (for example, de Meyer and Mizushima, 1990).

Critical Strategic Issues: People and Organizations

These strategic issues around key business tasks raise serious questions
about the formal and informal dimensions of the organizations in
which these processes take place. We briefly highlight the key issues
here and return to this topic in a later section.

Organization Structure and Coordination As globally competing or-

ganizations grow in scale, they search for the most effective form of
organization structure and coordination mechanisms. The emergence
of the European Single Market is a major factor in managerial thinking.
 Marvin Manheim

Clearly, to many managers, a unified market requires a single organiza-

tion to manage production, distribution, and marketing for the EC as
a whole. However, alternative forms are also being considered and no
single form is now dominating the others.

Fluid Organizations—Teams Increasingly, organizations are using in-

formal or semiformal teams. For example, in a globally competing
manufacturing organization, a design team may be constituted of ten
to three hundred people, from functions ranging through engineering,
manufacturing, packaging, distribution, marketing, R&D, and finance;
from five to thirty different locations, on two to five continents and in
two to twenty countries. Teams may be short-lived or may last for years,
may be formally organized, semiformal, informal, or even loose net-
works. Teams are fluid; many teams come and go as issues arise and are
resolved, or opportunities are perceived and seized (Mills, 1991).

Organizational Learning The need for continued learning is acute in

GCOs. As new teams are formed, individuals must be able to learn
rapidly what is needed to deal with a new set of issues. As new knowl-
edge is developed, it must be made available to other members of the
team and to individuals in other parts of the larger organization. While
responsibilities for maintaining formal assemblies of knowledge (e.g.,
libraries, databases) may lie in specific formal organization units, mak-
ing that knowledge available on an as-needed basis throughout the
larger organization is an important element of competitive advantage.
Clearly, the ultimate objective is to make a piece of information avail-
able to individuals who don't even know they need it!

Technology as a Competitive Weapon

The possible uses of information technology as a competitive weapon

are well known and continually debated (Benjamin et al., 1984; Busi-
ness Week, 1985; Cash et al., 1988; Earl, 1988; Keen, 1988,1991; Man-
heim, 1988; Manheim, Elam, and Keen, 1989; Strassman, 1985;
Synnott, 1987; Wiseman, 1988; Hopper, 1990). We find it useful to
assume that, under some circumstances, 1ST can help a firm achieve a
competitive advantage and to apply a simple framework to stimulate
development of candidate strategies and to assess strategy proposals.
125 Integrating Global Organizations through Task/Team Support Systems

Competitive Advantage or Competitive Necessity?

A sustainable competitive advantage means that an organization or a
region is more effective than any competitor for a substantial period of
time, say five to ten years. In the case of a firm, a sustainable competi-
tive advantage can be defined as "producing profits that are sig-
nificantly above the average for firms in the same industry."
A competitive necessity is some feature of an organization's strategy
that must be adopted if an organization is to remain at least equally
competitive with other leading organizations of the same type. (We
draw on demons and Row, 1987, 1988.)
Based on these distinctions of competitive advantage and competi-
tive necessity, we have hypothesized that an effective strategy requires
four basic elements:
1. Base: elements to build a sound foundation—the technology, or-
ganization, and human resource base to survive as a viable organization
and to lay a foundation for seeking competitive advantage.
2. Parity: elements to seek "parity/' that is, to maintain competitive
equality, based on an analysis of actions taking place in the industry
and emerging competitive forces; those actions that are a "competitive
necessity," to keep the organization at least comparable to its major
competitors.
3. Incremental initiatives: focused actions, which, by targeting specific
segments of the organization's markets, seek to achieve an incremental
lead over competitors. The lead may be three years, two years, or six
months. Competitors will likely respond and match these actions.
Therefore, it is necessary to have a continual process of moving forward
with next-step actions to keep ahead of competitors. Thus, a rolling,
incremental lead is sought in focused areas.
4. Breakthrough: actions that seek to achieve a breakthrough and
thereby a restructuring of the market and the firm's role in it such that
a sustainable advantage is achieved.

In this model, from a normative perspective, we hypothesize that the

conservative foundation of an organization's strategy should be devel-
oped by building upon a sound base and include those elements nec-
essary to maintain parity as well as elements that form an effective
program of rolling, incremental, focused initiatives. In addition, it is
126 Marvin Manheim

often desirable to include breakthrough elements that may have poten-

tial for achieving a sustainable competitive advantage.
From a perspective of evaluation of strategy proposals, we can also
use this framework to classify candidate strategy elements in terms of
their likely significance. Of course, this involves substantial, and sub-
stantive, judgments and assumptions.
In Manheim (1992) we apply this framework to analyze the strategic
opportunities around the order cycle in globally competing organiza-
tions. In this area, presently, much management attention is devoted
to building pipeline management systems (PLMS), which use electronic
data interchange (EDI) and other techniques to integrate information
flows among various trading partners in the supply chain. The need for
such PLMS is widely recognized by manufacturing and merchandizing
organizations, and many organizations are beginning to implement
such systems. (OECD, in process; Roure, 1990, COMPAT 90, 1990;
Bollo, Hanappe, and Stumm, 1991; demons and Row, 1988; Flaherty,
1986; Magad and Amos, 1989; Manheim and Mittman, 1988; Miyazawa
and Koike, 1991; Sokol, 1989; Tanja, 1988). Progress is slow, and it is
still difficult to implement such systems, nevertheless, the need is
widely recognized, and the knowledge about how to do it is wide-
spread. Therefore, we concluded that it is now a competitive necessity for
a company to have a world-class capability to manage the order cycle.
If a company fails to do this, it is likely that it will have higher inven-
tory, order processing, and related costs than its competitors and will
provide a lower level of service to its customers.
Where are the opportunities for competitive advantage if pipeline
management systems are only a competitive necessity? We believe that
the answer lies in thinking deeply about the organizational change
dimensions around EC 92, global competition in general, and the busi-
ness strategy issues identified earlier.
Earlier, we introduced the basic outline of our hypotheses: As a con-
sequence of the changes in manufacturing, merchandising, and distri-
bution, globally competing organizations (GCOs) in these sectors will
be restructuring their formal organizations within the European region
and on a worldwide basis. Regardless of the formal organization struc-
ture, however, the use of teams, both informal and formal ("commit-
tees") will be increasing substantially. We now explore these
hypotheses in greater detail.
127 Integrating Global Organizations through Task/Team Support Systems

Organization Structure and Coordination

As companies wrestle with how to organize for increasing global com-

petition, various organizational forms are emerging.

Major Organizational Forms

Bartlett and Ghoshal (1989) identify three major forces shaping GCOs:
the need for efficiency drives a firm for global integration; the need for
responsiveness to markets drives the firm to local differentiation; and
the need to have continual and rapid learning throughout the organ-
ization drives an organization to seek innovation on a worldwide ba-
sis. This results in their identification of several types of company
organizations.

Multinational A multinational manages a portfolio of multiple na-

tional entities (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1989, 14). Its key strategic capa-
bility is building a strong local presence through sensitivity and
responsiveness to national differences

Global A global company treats the world market as an integrated

whole, and products and strategies are developed to exploit an inte-
grated unitary market. The key strategic capability is the ability to build
cost advantages through centralized global-scale operations.

International In the international company, "the parent retains con-

siderable influence and control, but less than in a classic global com-
pany; the national units can adapt products and ideas coming from the
center, but have less independence and autonomy than multinational
subsidiaries" (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1989, 67ff).

Geographic versus Product Group

The influence of EC 92 has introduced additional complexities. On the
one hand, we do see an evolution from multinational to global product
groups. This is typified by Philips, Siemens, and others, which have
been evolving away from national organizations (the multinational
organization) to product groups on a worldwide basis: for example,
consumer electronics. Thus, each product group is an example of the
"global organization," as defined by Bartlett and Ghoshal (1989).
Marvin Manheim

On the other hand, we also see examples of evolution to a geo-

graphic, regional structure, especially under the influence of EC 92. To
many managers, a unified market requires a single organization to
manage production, distribution, and marketing for the EC as a whole.
Many Japanese companies—and some American and European compa-
nies as well—are putting into place a global structure with, typically, a
four-region organization: Europe, North America, Japan, and the rest of
the world. Each of these regions has significant authority and respon-
sibility to act independently, to respond to its particular market and
production conditions.
Tensions exist between these two forms. In the product group organi-
zation, there is still a need for some regional structures; after all, logis-
tics issues within Europe do not require day-to-day management
attention of the logistics managers in Asia. In the regional structures,
there still is need for some product breakdown, and the regions must
coordinate globally: development of new products, coordinated roll-
out and marketing strategies, and coordination of R&D are all major
issues in these new structures. As authority is being restructured and
decentralized to the regional level, new coordination mechanisms must
be established between regions.
In many companies, these two forces are not completely articulated.
In our interviews with Japanese companies, they have indicated move-
ment toward regional structures. However, in few cases have they
moved significant responsibility for the integration functions out of
Japan; of course, Honda is one major exception. Honda North America
has independent design and manufacturing responsibility, as well as
sales. In the case of Philips, it appears that in most product groups, the
power has been taken away from the national (country) organizations
and been placed in the global product groups, but the need for regional
structures has not yet been resolved. In the case of Proctor and Gamble,
a matrix structure was put in place, with strong power in the product
groups but nearly as strong power in geographic regions.

Organization Structure—Multiple Power Centers

Given this tension among alternative organization structures, which
will be dominant? Several researchers have observed that the organiza-
tion structure that is emerging in some leading companies is different
from any of these traditional organization forms. Bartlett and Ghoshal
129 Integrating Global Organizations through Task/Team Support Systems

argue that a new form of organization is emerging, which they call

transnational (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1989, 67 ff., 85 ff). Hedlund has
called a similar form of organization a hetarchical organization.
(Hedlund gives the Swedish firm, Ericcson, as an example; Hedlund and
Rolander, 1990, 33.) This type of organization is based on their percep-
tion that

One of the critical assets of a well-functioning MNC is its cadre of internation-

ally experienced personnel, well versed also in the intricacies of intra-nrm
communication. This together with the hardware and software of information
management, constitutes the nervous system of the firm—its perceptive appa-
ratus, information processing systems, and activators for response to opportu-
nities and problems....
It is obvious from the above that the most important part of structure is, not
the formal organization, but the less easily describable management systems,
communication processes, and the corporate culture. (Hedlund and Rolander,
1990, 33)

Drawing on the observations of both sets of researchers and our own

interviews and observations, we extend and modify the arguments of
these researchers to characterize the hetarchical organization as follows:
• Many centers, of different kinds, in different countries
• Different centers with different roles, many of which are specialized;
both domestic and foreign subsidiaries may have particular strategic
roles
• A formal hierarchical structure, for accountability, responsibility, and
authority; especially for budgeting and finance, and for management
of managers
• An informal power structure, in which multivalent power relation-
ships are the bases of power. The formal hierarchical structure is bal-
anced by a strong matrix thrust, where the matrix has more than two
dimensions, so that the mechanisms of coordination and integration
are primarily by persuasion, rather than by dictate.
• An environment in which firm culture is very important in estab-
lishing reference frames for negotiating agreements (Ohmae, 1989)
• Important power centers located outside the firm boundaries, in
strategic partners of various types (customers, suppliers, distributors,
etc.) (Johnston and Lawrence, 1988)
Marvin Manheim

• An integrated network forming the basic structural framework of the

transnational (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1989, 89), with:
• Dispersed assets, managed by various centers
• Specialized operations, conducted at different centers
• Interdependent relationships among centers
In this type of organization, the critical assets are:
• The personal networks of relationships
• Human resource management processes and systems
• Information channels of all types
• Information technology systems
• Processes of change management that can be effective in this multi-
valent decentralized environment

Hetarchic Organizations and EC 92

We hypothesize that, in the processes of putting in place new organi-
zation structures to deal with the single market, many GCOs will go
through two phases. At first, some GCOs will organize hierarchically by
regions while others will organize by product groups globally. Then,
GCOs will discover that extensive, informal, lateral linkages are im-
portant to retain flexibility and responsiveness in global competition,
and so they will transition, in a later stage, to explicit hetarchic
organizations.
This hypothesis is at least partially verified by one example, the case
of IBM in Europe (Hudson, 1991).
These days, it seems you need a computer to keep track of all the changes going
on at the big, problem-plagued European operations of International Business
Machines Corp. Take personal computers. Last July, with much publicity, an
order whizzed out from IBM Europe's headquarters here to decentralize manage-
ment of the European personal-computer business, moving key managers out
of the Paris headquarters and into the field.
Then last month, with market conditions getting tougher, that strategy was
revised. This time without publicity, the company ordered yet another reorgani-
zation, leaving some personal-computer management in Paris. "It's a correction;
it's an evolution" from the original order, says Renato Riverso, IBM Europe's
operations chief and second-ranking executive.
With the Armonk, N.Y., computer giant's worldwide profit unexpectedly tum-
bling in the first quarter, its top managers in Europe are back at the drawing
board, hunting for ways to boost sales and save money. While change has
become the norm at IBM around the globe since at least 1986, when John Akers
73/ Integrating Global Organizations through Task/Team Support Systems

became chairman, the latest round in Europe promises to be even more

dramatic.
With the Italian-born Mr. Riverso and IBM Europe chairman David E. McKin-
ney, an American, in command, the company's European operations are being
reshaped into a novel structure that could become a model for how a multina-
tional corporation should organize itself to do business in post-1992 Europe.
The European plan will also guide financial performance in a region that last
year supplied nearly half of the company's $6.02 billion net income and 37.5%
of its $69.02 billion revenue.
The planning and implementation of the IBM Europe reorganization began
more than a year ago. The blueprint was developed in a series of Paris manage-
ment meetings and calls for IBM's European operations to become over the next
five years or so more centralized in some respects and increasingly decentralized
in others.

A key element of this plan is improvement of the pipeline manage-

ment systems and other internal systems.

IBM's internal affairs—product warehouses, in-house computer systems, the

planning of advertising—are being centralized to save money and boost
efficiency.
For instance, the managers of IBM France, IBM Germany and other national
organizations currently each run their own, slightly different but intercon-
nected computer systems for billing, ordering and other company data. This
arrangement, Mr. Riverso explains, means that across Europe IBM is paying
8,000 employees, out of a 108,000-worker European payroll, to tend a vari-
egated, computerized management-information system with 150 to 170 data
centers. Mr. Riverso wants to decrease the number of centers to between just
three and five big ones over the next five years. (Hudson, 1991)

But, the approach being taken is not a uniform centralization strat-

egy, but rather a decentralization strategy for some functions.

In contrast, external affairs, the marketing operations that deal directly with
customers, are being decentralized so that sales decisions get made faster and
better locally, rather than by a slow-moving headquarters bureaucracy.
As part of this effort, IBM, beset by customer complaints of red tape at Paris
headquarters, is moving many key managers out of Paris and scattering them
around the Continent. (Hudson, 1991)

The result is a strategy that looks somewhat like a hetarchical strategy.

The result, if the program is successful, will produce a structure that simultane-
ously takes advantage of possible savings from a unified European Community
market and also avoids alienating local customers, who will still have parochial
tastes. That is the hope, at least, and the plan is getting some flattering reviews
even from a few IBM competitors.
132 Marvin Manneim

If we want to come to a unified Europe after 1992, business has to go this way
with decentralized marketing, observes Rolf Brillinger, chief executive of Ger-
many's Comparex Informationssysteme G.m.b.H., which competes with IBM in
selling mainframe computers. He adds, though, that he hasn't yet noticed any
changes in IBM's behavior in the market place as a result of the gradually
progressing reorganization
A glimpse of the planned new IBM Europe can be found in Richmond, Eng-
land, where about 300 IBM employees in a local sales office are acting as guinea
pigs for a Riverso-devised experiment in decentralized management. Under the
old hierarchical marketing system, which still prevails in most other IBM sales
offices around Europe, most of the contract bids that the Richmond sales force
presented to its big corporate customers had to go first to IBM's British head-
quarters for clearance. Then, by aggregate value of the bids, 30% to 40% were
kicked upstairs from there to Paris headquarters for approval.
The whole process, says Paul Aspin, manager of the office, often added days
or weeks to a bidding process—and sometimes cost the company a sale.
Under the experiment, however, Mr. Aspin has authority to make many of his
own decisions about structuring bids. He can hire consultants and software
houses to help him. Within broad limits, he can modify the terms of a sales
contract to please a customer. And his sales office is given a specific profit target
to aim for, rather than focusing like other IBM sales offices primarily on a rigid
revenue goal and an arbitrarily defined expense budget.
So far, the experiment has been a winner. Last year [when the trial began],
while much of the rest of IBM U.K.'s business floundered, profits at Mr. Aspin's
office were about 50% higher than the U.K. average—and about 20% better than
they would have been under the old system. The office's revenue, of [pounds
sterling] 100 million [$172 million], was about 10% higher than it otherwise
would have been, he estimates. (Hudson, 1991)

Clearly, the processes of organization change to deal with EC 92 and

globalization have only begun.

Teams

One hypothesis is that no formal organization structure can ever be

right—neither the global, nor the multinational, nor the international,
nor the product group, nor the regional structure. Rather, the hetarchi-
cal structure is the only one that can work in this dynamic environ-
ment. A key element in the hetarchical structure is the use of teams to
achieve coordination around critical issues, tasks, or opportunities.
Teams cut across the formal functional lines of the organization (e.g.,
Mills, 1991). Teams may be short-lived or may last for years. Teams may
be formally organized, or may be semiformal, informal, or even loose
133 Integrating Global Organizations through Task/Team Support Systems

networks. Teams are fluid; many teams come and go as issues arise and
are resolved, or opportunities are perceived and seized.
The working arrangements for teams and their members raise com-
plex issues (Galegher, Kraut, and Egido, 1990; Gabarro, 1990; Hackman,
1990; Larson and LaFasto, 1989). Regardless, teams are being used very
frequently and are major elements of an organization's strategy to deal
with the critical strategic issues identified previously. Teams provide the
capability to cut across formal barriers to communication and coordi-
nation and can offer an effective mechanism for rapid response. Teams
also serve, often, to give individuals greater freedom and opportunity
to be innovative and effective in dealing with the issue at hand.
Increasingly, teams are cutting across the boundaries of the firm
(Johnston and Lawrence, 1988). Often, teams will involve members
from other companies that are strategic partners: partners in a joint
venture, in an R&D activity, suppliers of critical components, or impor-
tant distribution partners.
The use of teams is found in all types of organizations, and especially
in the hetarchical organization.

Strategic Opportunities: Overview

This discussion of the organizational forces sets the stage for an assess-
ment of opportunities for using 1ST for competitive advantage. In Man-
heim (1992), we apply the conceptual framework of the multithrust
strategy to assess 1ST opportunities in GCOs. The line of reasoning
follows that of the pipeline management systems discussed previously.
From this analysis, we conclude that there are several promising direc-
tions. Particularly promising is that of teamwork support.

Teams: Opportunity for Competitive Advantage

Because of the organizational forces affecting GCOs discussed earlier,
team support systems are especially promising.

Example: Team Support Systems to Complement Pipeline Management

Systems We return to considering the order cycle. Managing the pipe-
line of materials flows illustrates the need for, and potential of, infor-
mation systems that support teams.
Consider a product group in which components and subassemblies
are sourced in eight countries on three continents, production takes
134 Marvin Manheim

place in five factories on two continents, and distribution of finished

product is global. Further, assume that in this product group—which
develops widgets, for example—there is some significant interchange of
material across continents.
A production line for widgets goes down in Cupertino, which usually
supplies widgets primarily for assembly in Ohio. This information is
reported, on an "exception" basis, to a logistics team working closely
with a production management team to coordinate the management
of the pipeline supporting this particular product group. The team
immediately goes into action: Where are widgets in transport anywhere
in the world? What using plants are they being shipped to? What are
the relative priorities of these shipments for different using plants? Are
there inventories anywhere that could be diverted to meet the need?
What are the opportunities for diversion of shipments in transit and
the consequences of those diversions? Can other steps be taken to
minimize the consequences of a proposed diversion?
This is a complex task: how can a production problem be overcome
by a combination of production and/or logistics actions, possibly on a
global basis? This is also a team problem: who needs to be involved in
finding out critical information, in developing possible courses of ac-
tion, in assessing their consequences, in making a decision where the
decision will probably require a negotiated agreement among a number
of individuals in several different countries and several different roles?
At present, this task is resolved using telephone, telex, fax, and pos-
sibly email. How could information technology support more rapid and
effective accomplishment of this task in the future?

Task/Team Support Systems We use the term task/team support system

to designate a system designed to support the team working on a
specific task.

A Task/Team Support System (T/TSS) is a system which provides full information

system support, for individual and collaborative work, for the members of a
team which shares a specific task or function, whether the individuals are
working at the same or different places, and at the same or different times. A
T/TSS in a globally competing organization is designed explicitly to support
work by team members who are scattered geographically across different time
zones and, often, different languages and cultures. (Manheim, 1992)

As illustrated by this hypothetical example, T/TSS are an important

complement to pipeline systems:
135 Integrating Global Organizations through Task/Team Support Systems

• Pipeline management systems have as their goal the routinizing of

operations of the order cycle. By themselves, they are not well suited to
handle group problem solving of the nonroutine issues.
• Task/team support systems can be designed to support the handling
of the nonroutine. They can be separate systems, or closely integrated
with pipeline systems but their functionality is very different.

Example: A Task/Team Support System for Global Sales Task/team sup-

port systems are particularly promising for team support to specific
tasks in a global company. Consider, for example, the problem of "team
selling": managing a coordinated sales process in which a number of
geographically scattered individuals participate.
The Rose Company (a fictitious name; the example is real) is a mul-
tinational logistics service provider with several hundred offices in
more than twenty-five countries. Rose uses a mainframe computer and
several regional minicomputers, integrated in a network, as the back-
bone of its pipeline management information system. A mixture of
leased and public lines are used for telecommunications of data. Most
offices are either online with the network or have dialup access over
public-access networks. In addition to MIS capabilities, an email system
is used widely throughout the company.
About a year ago, Rose senior management decided to have a more
focused and more globally coordinated sales effort. The strategy that
was implemented had these elements:

• Identification of a certain number (n) of target customers (actual or

future)
• Designation of a senior manager as the sales coordinator for each
customer
• Establishment of a bulletin board in the email system where com-
pany staff could post messages for each target customer
The operating process for team coordination included the following:
• Any time a Rose employee visits a target account, he/she is requested
to post an email message summarizing information acquired.
• At least once a month, the sales coordinator for that account reviews
the messages, prepares a summary, and sends out additional messages
with comments, suggestions, and queries to all Rose employees, world-
wide, concerned with marketing to that account.
136 Marvin Manheim

• A global sales coordinator overviews the process, assists in preparing

account summaries, and manages the various "conversations" from the
perspective of a "facilitator." (The account coordinators are generally at
high levels and have independent power bases, so they really can't be
"directed" to do something.)
This T/TSS is credited with providing important assistance in Rose's
recently gaining at least one major global account.
This use of an electronic bulletin board and messaging system is a
simple example of a T/TSS. It shows what can be done with the basic
technology widely available today, and appropriate management strat-
egy. More advanced technologies, such as Lotus Development Corpo-
ration's NOTES system, provide power to do substantially more.
(Manheim et al., 1992)

Task/Team Systems: An Opportunity for Competitive Advantage In

Hetarchkal Organizations As organizations become more hetarchical,
there will be a greater and greater premium placed on the ability to
coordinate laterally among individuals in multiple organizational
units. This capability will be especially important in organizations with
units scattered geographically across different time zones.
The T/TSS technology is new and emerging, and as yet few organiza-
tions have expertise in it. T/TSS leverages people skills; it is possible that
an organization may be able to combine the technology with human
resource development and management strategies that create together
a unique and sustainable competitive advantage. T/TSS will have the
potential of creating major opportunities for competitive advantage for
globally competing organizations
As an example, consider the emerging structure of the worldwide air
transportation industry. Major U.S. carriers such as United, American,
Delta, Northwest, and USAir are focused on building their positions in
the U.S. market and on extending from these positions into a global
market. Major European carriers, such as British Airways, KLM, and
others, are focused on extending their networks into North America
and into other regions as well. KLM has a partial ownership in North-
west Airlines. As this chapter is being written, British Airways (BA) is
buying a major stake (25 percent) in USAir.
The BA-USAir alliance is a good example of a hetarchical structure:
BA's strong staff in London and USAirt strong staff in the Washington,
137 Integrating Global Organizations through Task/Team Support Systems

D.C. area will each remain strong, independent power centers. There
are, and will continue to be, differences in expertise, responsibility, and
authority, and neither center will be in position to dictate to the other,
as in a traditional, hierarchical organization. Yet, to make this alliance
work, it will be essential that key teams in both organizations work
together very closely, in spite of the geographical distances separating
them.
For example, schedule planning in a single airline is a very difficult
task. Coordinating schedules in two very different airlines is even more
difficult. Yet, the primary objective of the alliance is for USAir to feed
domestic passengers to BA's global system, and vice-versa, so close and
coordinated scheduling is a key strategic issue. To accomplish this,
the schedule planning teams at both airlines, separated by the
Atlantic Ocean and five-hour time differences, must be able to work
collaboratively.

Designing A Task/Team Support System for a Specific Application

The BA-USAir example frames the problem: How can an organization
design a T/TSS for a specific team and task? There are a number of
software applications available from which a T/TSS could be built. (For
a typical list of such products, see Coleman, 1992.) These products
perform a wide range of functions, and few have the same mix of
features. There are many products claiming to be "groupware," or
"group decision support systems," or "workflow management systems,"
or "computer-supported cooperative work" systems, all widely used
terms.
Which of these solutions is most promising from a management
perspective? A clear concept of the needs in a specific situation is
necessary in order to weed out those systems offerings that are irrele-
vant or inappropriate, and to determine what offerings, if any, will
meet significant business needs.
In developing a strategy for using T/TSS, these issues need to be
considered:

Need to Clearly Relate System Design to Strategic or Other Business

Objectives Because no single best system exists today, the strategic
business purposes must clearly determine the selection of system sup-
port. That is, a T/TSS should be designed to achieve relevant and im-
portant business objectives. Clearly, there are situations in which
138 Marvin Manheim

an organization may wish to implement a basic set of computer-sup-

ported cooperative work (CSCW) capabilities without specific objec-
tives of a strategic or task-spedfic nature. We believe, however, that
such efforts run a higher probability of failure than efforts that have
dear business objectives and are focused, at least initially, on critical
issues and processes.

Importance of Consideration of Social Processes Design The strategic

business objective involves the desire to create new team behaviors or
change existing team behaviors (see Sproull and Kiesler, chap. 6).
Therefore, careful consideration needs to be given to the sodal proc-
esses that exist in the target team and those that are desired. Where a
team or approach to the subject task exists, that behavior needs to be
studied and understood in order to understand the strengths and weak-
nesses of the processes of operation (Manheim, 1989; Gabarro, 1990;
Galegher, Kraut, and Egido, 1990).

Importance of Implementation of Management Strategy Where there

is a proposed change in an organization, there is likely to be resistance.
In the case of T/TSS, there is a significant likdihood that resistance to
change takes the form of simply not bothering to use the T/TSS capa-
bilities. Therefore, there is a need to anticipate and plan for potential
resistance to the introduction of such new technologies.

Utilization of an Explicit Methodology for TTSS Development and Imple-

mentation The basic platform for TTSS involves personal computers
(or other terminals or workstations) and a networking infrastructure on
a local area network (LAN) and wide area network (WAN) basis. At the
most basic levd, the network consists of the dialup public access net-
work, but more elaborate networks are often appropriate (whether pro-
vided by the organization itself or outside vendors). The task of
dedding what T/TSS applications to develop, and in what way, requires
an explidt dedsion:

• In some organizations, the application developments are left up to

the users and are done on a local, team-specific basis. However, it is still
important to have initial, pilot applications developed by a core team
to gain user attention and involvement in the process of developing
specific T/TSS.
139 Integrating Global Organizations through Task/Team Support Systems

• In other organizations, development of T/TSS is controlled centrally.

• In many organizations, a mixed strategy is appropriate: users are free
to develop their own T/TSS applications, but centralized support teams
develop critical applications and integrated T/TSS that require substan-
tial development efforts.

In many cases, an explicit methodology will be useful. Such a meth-

odology should include steps such as the following:

1. Explicitly articulate strategic objectives. If the objectives are not

clear, it may be necessary to initiate the process with a business strategy
process (it is not unusual for major strategy questions to arise out of
what appears, initially, to be a simple information systems project).
2. Examine the existing business processes. If appropriate, consider
redesigning those processes to be more consistent with the strategy
objectives.
3. Identify critical tasks to support those business processes. Assess how
they are done now, and how it would be desirable for the team to
perform them in the future.
4. Design specific T/TSS functions to implement support for the tasks
as redesigned. In the process, it is likely that further redesign of tasks
and of business processes will be perceived as desirable.
5. Assess the organizational issues around process, task, and T/TSS
change implementation (Manheim, 1989); develop an implementation
plan that includes managing change as well as implementing T/TSS
software functionalities.
6. During and after implementation, periodically assess what has been
done and its effects, in both technology and human dimensions.
As needed, recycle, revising strategy, process, tasks, and/or T/TSS as
appropriate.

Conclusions

What can an organization do to gain competitive advantage? Develop

task/team support systems focused on strategically important, critical
business tasks.
What can an organization do to implement T/TSS effectively?
140 Marvin Manheim

• Focus on learning how to combine human resource and information

technology strategies to provide coordinated support to task-specific
teams, such as product design, customer service, logistics, or production
coordination teams. In general, the direction for seeking competitive
advantage will require exploiting information technology and human
resources, including organization design, in new ways. Particular em-
phasis should be placed on T/TSS and related information technologies
and on teams and network-building processes.
• Focus on developing expertise in T/TSS: experiment within your
organization. Such T/TSS can be very valuable in internal operations.
The best way to learn about T/TSS in order to develop services and
marketing strategies is to use them.

Acknowledgments

Research support from the following is gratefully acknowledged: the

Strategic Informatics Research Program and the companies supporting
it—British Airways, Consolidated Freightways, Consolidated Railroad
Corporation, Harper Group, IBM, Omron Co. Ltd., and Yellow Freight
Co.; and the William A. Patterson chair at the Transportation Center,
Northwestern University. Portions of the field work underlying this
research were supported by the Japan Foreign Trade Council, Tokyo; by
the Center for U.S.-Japan Relations, Northwestern University; by the
International Center for Information Technologies, Washington, D.C.,
the City of Amsterdam, the Netherlands National Physical Planning
Agency, the Province of North Holland, the Amsterdam Chamber of
Commerce, Mitsubishi Research Institute, and Cambridge Systematica
Inc.
This chapter benefited from numerous conversations and joint activi-
ties with Louis Busuttil, British Airways; James Drogan, IBM; David
Anderson, Andersen Consulting; Dirk Goedhart, Philips B.V.; Peter
Keen, ICIT; Eric Clemons, Wharton School; Benjamin Mittman, North-
western University; Joyce Elam, University of Texas; Shinroku Tsuji,
Kobe City University of Commerce; Moriaki Tsuchiya, Tokyo Univer-
sity; John Robinson, Harper Group; Frank LeClercq, Amsterdam City
Planning Department; Gary Biddle, American Standard Corporation;
141 Integrating Global Organizations through Task/Team Support Systems

Jacques Roure, SEMA Group; and Tatsuro Ichihara, Fumio Tateishi, and
Nobuo Tateishi, Omron Corporation.
I gratefully acknowledge the benefits of the research support of the
sponsors and the collaborations of colleagues, but I alone am responsi-
ble for any errors or biases presented here.
 Cross-Cultural Communication and CSCW

Hiroshi Ishii

Culture has been likened to an iceberg: nine-tenths of it lies beneath the surface,
out of our immediate awareness.
—Sharon Ruhly, "Orientations to Intercultural Communication" (in Fuji
Xerox, 1984)

Groupware

Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) emerged in the mid-

1980s as an identifiable research field focused on the role of computer
technology in group work1. CSCW examines how people work together
in groups and how computer and communication technology can sup-
port them. CSCW attracts researchers, including myself, from a variety
of fields—computer science, telecommunications, cognitive science,
anthropology, ethnography, and management science (Greif, 1988;
Galegher, Kraut, and Egido, 1990; Grudin, 1991; Greenberg, 1991).
"Groupware" was originally coined by Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz
as the term for software intended to support and augment group work.
Groupware became a buzzword in the computer industry, suggesting a
technology breaking away from its original confinement to an individ-
ual task. Familiar groupware examples include electronic mail, bulletin
boards, computer conferencing, group schedulers, group authoring
tools, and window/screen-sharing software (Johansen, 1988; Schrage,
1990; Ellis, Gibbs, and Rein, 1991).
Although groupware was a software term, recently it has been used
in a wider sense to describe multiuser systems including computer
hardware and communication networks. Workstation-based desktop
144 Himshi Ishii

video conference systems such as TeamWorkStation (Ishii and Miyake,

1991) are an example of groupware in this wider sense.
Groupware is intended to create a shared workspace that supports
dynamic collaboration in a work group over space and time constraints.
To gain some collective benefits of groupware use, the groupware must
be accepted by a majority of work group members as a common tool.
Groupware must overcome this hurdle of critical mass at first. People
do a lot of their work alone, without computers, or using different tools
on different computer systems, and have developed their own work
practices for these situations. In order to have new groupware accepted,
continuity with existing individual work environments is the key issue
because users work in either individual or collaborative modes and
frequently move back and forth.

The Iceberg and Human Communication

Recently I have had the opportunity to work in Western academic

societies such as ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), SIGCHI
(Special Interest Group on Computer and Human Interaction), and the
program committees of such conferences as CSCW, and ECSCW (Euro-
pean CSCW). Participating in these events has helped me to become
aware of the importance of "culture" in the design of computer-sup-
ported communication media. These experiences can be compared to
the sudden awakening from a deep sleep.
As I became personally aware of the differences between American
and Japanese social protocols, I began to understand more deeply my
own cultural background. I think of my re-awakening to the cultural
component in my own thoughts and beliefs as a kind of counter-cul-
ture shock. I found that most communication difficulties come from
cultural gaps among people. The same code can be interpreted in a
variety of ways, depending on the under-sea part of the iceberg, the
framework for interpreting words, gestures, and expressions that is part
of membership in a culture (figure 8.1). Japanese and Americans and
others have fundamentally different decoders at the cultural level, and
communication difficulties may result when that fact isn't taken into
account. I came to understand that the tools we are designing for
CSCW are better seen as cultural tools than computer tools.
 Cross-Cultural Communication and CSCW

Messages

Figure 8.1
Human communication model (adapted from Fuji Xerox, 1984 with permis-
sion)

HHI

Through many discussions, I, along with many foreign researchers,

realized that the research into human interfaces, communication, and
CSCW shares common goals—to understand the nature of cross-cul-
tural communication and to design systems to facilitate the formula-
tion and communication of ideas using computer technology. People
who are trying to make computers easier to use are wrestling with one
aspect of the same problem faced by groupware designers. We know a
great deal about how our communication and computing technologies
work, and we are beginning to learn how people use these tools in their
intellectual work. We are also beginning to understand that questions
about how people use tools together are cultural matters, and a few of
us suspect that these technical issues might contribute to dealing with
the broader human issues of cross-cultural communication. The ability
of telecommunication and computer-based technologies to overcome
time and space constraints seems to be an essential foundation for tools
to promote international collaboration in a variety of fields. We are
building on that foundation.
Human interface has long been interpreted as an interface between an
individual user and a computer (so called human-computer interaction,
or HCI). Research into ways to improve human-computer interaction
had mainly focused on communication issues between the individual
user and a single computer, such as screen layout, icon design, data
Hiroshi Ishii

visualization, pointing devices, and so forth (figure 8.2). However, the

expansion of CSCW research and the spread of the groupware concept
have had the effect of shifting our focus on human interface from HCI
to "organizational interface" (Malone, 1988) or "human-human inter-
action (HHI)" (Ishii, 1990; Endo, 1992). "Multiuser interface" is a no-
tion originating from this HHI view that subsumes the familiar concept
of "user interface" (Ishii and Arita, 1991; Ishii, 1992). Multiuser inter-
face stresses that the interface is for groups working together in a shared
workspace. The new directions in designing CSCW tools for truly wide-
spread adoption have had the effect of shifting our focus on human
interfaces from HCI to human-human interaction mediated by com-
puter and communication technologies (figure 8.3).
The telecommunications infrastructure for delivering powerful infor-
mation tools to large numbers of people is being built today. Now that
the technology has advanced this far, it is time to devote more effort to
the human side of the system.
We do not interact with computers but through computers. Operating
a computer is not a goal in itself for the vast majority of people; to most
of the population, the greatest potential of computers lies in their
capabilities as media for human-human interaction. For example, mak-
ing a document using word processor software increases your ability to
share the ideas with other people by sending the document to them
through the mail or as an interoffice memo. If you can send the docu-
ment electronically, instantly, anywhere, amplifying the power of the
media again amplifies the power of the process. Word processing is
just a microstep of higher cooperative workflow in an organizational
context.

Human-computer
interface

User

Computer Software Software

Hardware Hardware 1 Traditional
^Nej^jk'^ /communication
"Electronic Communication"
Figure 8.2
Traditional view of personal computing environment
Cross-Cultural Communication and CSCW

Human-human interface
(Multiuser interface)
Cooperative work
(Group work) Groupware

interpersonal
w communication

Figure 8.3
New view of interpersonal computing environment

Communication has also long been traditionally interpreted in terms

of electronic communication based on the OSI (Open Systems Inter-
connect) seven-layers model, which is widely known by engineers in
the telecommunication world, but doesn't make much sense to nonen-
gineers. Hie OSI model deals with incompatibilities between different
hardware and software by creating standard formats for exchanging
data at different layers, each of which has a set of protocols for medi-
ating between foreign systems. The way data is encoded for transmis-
sion is one layer, the way information is transported across a network
is another layer, and the way information is presented on screens is yet
another layer, and so forth. Engineers have worked to provide high-
speed, broadband, reliable communication networks using a variety of
hard technologies based on that layer model.
They have created the foundation for doing things with groups of
people that haven't been possible before. In this OSI framework, how-
ever, the subjects of communication are not human beings but the
computers or programs. This is not what I pursue. I much prefer to
explore the notion of interpersonal communication because I believe
the subjects of communication should be us, the people of the
world. Designing CSCW tools shifts my focus of attention from the
electronic communication level to the interpersonal communication
level (figure 8.3).
Through the design of the TeamWorkStation, I realized that the no-
tion of human interface is equivalent to the notion of communication
at a higher level and that cultural gaps among people lead to commu-
 Hiroshilshii

nication difficulties. Therefore, I believe that international collaboration

is required for human interface research and CSCW to investigate the
nature of cross-cultural communication and the possibility of cross-cul-
tural groupware. Specifically, how can we go about designing modern
communication systems that will help people overcome the cultural
barriers to communication?

Groupware?

Groupware consists of the computer and communication system that

supports a group of people working together. In designing computer-
based groupware it is important to capture the structure of social proc-
ess in a group and embed it into the system. However, it is very difficult
to build any general and standard model of human communication
because protocols can be extremely different at a deep level from one
community to another community. (Because of that, I designed Team-
WorkStation as a transparent medium without embedding specific pro-
tocols.) The following two examples illustrate the difficulty of
developing cross-cultural groupware.

The Decision-making Process and Nemawashf

As Walls also discusses (chap. 9), Japanese companies reach decisions in
a way that is very different from most American decision-making proc-
esses. Decision making in Japan is a collective process involving many
people. The person pushing a plan spends a lot of energy to gain
consensus before the formal decision making. Before the proposal
document is sent around, he or she explains the plan to everyone
concerned at informal meetings and through personal contact. The
originator of the plan tries to get the tacit agreement of others, and this
effort decreases the possibility that the plan will not be supported.
Getting a consensus beforehand is key to success. This kind of ground-
work is called nemawashi in Japanese, which means that all the people
who approve the plan at all levels have the feeling of participation in
formulating it, and this makes it possible to implement the plan more
smoothly (Nittetsu, 1987).
In American companies, responsibility and authority are clearly
defined, and the person in charge usually can decide whatever comes
1 4 9 Cross-Cultural Communication and CSCW

within his or her immediate authority. Without moving into a discus-

sion of which model is better, I simply wish to note that major differ-
ences exist between social processes associated with executive decision
making in Japan and in the U.S. Decision making in these countries is
based on different cultural principles and social processes. In the near
future, we must begin to integrate deeper understanding of these prin-
ciples and feed the results into CSCW system design.
For example, computer-mediated communication systems often in-
clude a public bulletin-board-like area where a group can discuss and
debate an issue, along with a second, more private means of sending
personal communications from any individual to any other individual
or group of individuals (electronic mail, also known as email). Note
how Japanese and American decision making teams might use the same
system in somewhat different ways. Electronic nemawashi would mean
that a lot of the communication would take place invisibly, in many
email messages, behind the scenes of the public conferencing areas;
American decision making might involve more or less similar behind-
the-scenes communication, but a lot of the debating and decision
making might take place on stage, in the public area.
GDSS (group decision support systems) is an active research field.
There are a variety of theories of decision making, and the tools de-
signed for GDSS are based on these theories. As always, the theories
carry a lot of cultural assumptions and the tools impose constraints on
the group of users. Therefore GDSS imported from another culture can
easily fail. Understanding these social and cultural differences is a start-
ing point toward the design of next generation groupware that can
support cross-cultural collaboration. Of course, these brief examples are
only generalizations. There are always exceptions, but I have found
these generalizations to hold true to a significant extent. They require
further study by social scientists and information system designers
working together.

Face-to-Face Meetings
The style of meetings in America and Japan offers another illustration
of the role of cultural differences in decision making (Fuji Xerox, 1984).
Participants in American meetings try to contribute to the content of
the meeting. American managers expect participants to take personal
Hiroshi Ishii

responsibility and make an active effort. People are often very assertive.
On the other hand, participants in Japanese meetings try to achieve
harmony with others. They defer to others and often wait for others to
draw them out. Japanese may be satisfied with sharing information and
getting a feel for others' views even if they can not get a concrete result
such as a decision or solution to a problem. Japanese do not like to
debate over issues and ideas. Direct attacks on the ideas of others, it is
felt, may prevent the achievement of harmony and mutual under-
standing, a very deeply held cultural value. Japanese find it difficult to
criticize the idea of another because it can be interpreted as an attack
on the personality of the person whose idea was criticized.
Americans seem to place emphasis on the exchange of words and
specific explanations of ideas. However, Japanese communication de-
pends very strongly on the context of the discussion. Facial expres-
sions, postures, and tacit understandings only hinted at in a few words
are very important.
In my own experience in CHI and CSCW conferences, I found that
turn taking is most difficult for me to learn to adapt to in discussions
with Americans. Situation-oriented, nonverbal cues for turn taking in
Japanese meetings are much clearer to me. In Japan it is very rude to
interrupt someone who is speaking. We have been taught to be patient
and to listen until the person is finished speaking. In America, however,
people must interrupt others in order to take a turn. Otherwise, there
is less a chance of being able to express one's ideas.
In face-to-face meetings, nonnative speakers of English always feel
strong time pressure to understand and speak in real time. For me as a
nonnative speaker, email is a more satisfactory medium of communi-
cation because email allows me to take time to read and compose the
messages. Under the strong time pressure of face-to-face conversation,
it is very difficult to concentrate on the discussion for hours.
Email is a narrow-band communication medium based on low tech-
nology compared to desktop video conference systems that are be-
coming available. Email uses flat text to express information. No
multimedia. However, its asynchronous feature provides great benefits
to nonnative speakers. I believe this is just one of many ways commu-
nication technology can play a positive role in encouraging cross-cul-
tural communication.
151 Cross-Cultural Communication and CSCW

Conclusion

Each community has its own style of communication, and the world is
full of communities that differ in fundamental ways. However, we live
together on the same planet and we must collaborate internationally
to solve conflicts. I work in scientific research together with many
friends with different cultural backgrounds. We cooperate and compete
and discuss problems of mutual interest. Yet we know very little about
the dynamics of cross-cultural communication and little about the
unique cultural biases operant in the way that we communicate and
make decisions. We need to understand each other better for that. We
should use all the tools at our disposal to pay more attention to under-
standing the differences among us. And then we should start to think
about how to overcome this gap with or without technology. Although
I am not overly optimistic about what CSCW technology can do to
overcome this gap, I expect the next generation of groupware will be
designed to take these cross-cultural issues into consideration.

Acknowledgments

I thank Howard Rheingold for encouraging me to write an earlier ver-

sion of this essay and for his valuable comments on the draft. I extend
my appreciation to Linda Harasim, Robert Jacobson, Jan Walls, Bobbi
Smith, Michael Hayward, Cyndia Pilkington, Andrew Feenberg, and
many other participants of the GAN online discussion for their stimu-
lating comments. Finally, I thank Yutaka Saeki, Shun Tutiya, Naomi
Miyake, and Takaya Endo for the stimulating discussions on our com-
mon interests: socially distributed cognition and CSCW.
p Global Networking for Local Development:
Task Focus and Relationship Focus in
Cross-Cultural Communication

Ian Walls

The general topic of this book is globalizing computer networks, but an

effective understanding of the social and cultural dimensions of glo-
balization presupposes an understanding of the nature of social net-
works. The hypothesis presented in this chapter is: for most people,
online networks may be best suited for functioning as task-focused
sodotechnical systems, which offer information, ideas, or other forms
of enrichment to users whose stable relationship-focused affiliations are
not online. Understanding the main issues of this discussion requires
clarification of certain critical terms. We may want to begin, therefore,
with an effort to clarify what we mean to mean (with apologies to Lewis
Caroll) by such terms as group, society, community, system, network, strong-
tie and weak-tie relationships. It will be necessary to give full considera-
tion to the most fundamental notion common to all networks:
relationship.

Croups, Tasks, and Relationships

It is usually safe to begin a serious study by quoting a Nobel prize

winner. Nobel laureate Amo Penzias notes: "In the middle of a recent
discussion of the future direction of Bell Labs' research, a friend re-
marked, 'The reason we are all here is to make money for the stockhold-
ers."' Penzias was taken aback by that observation. "Is that really why
my colleagues are so deeply involved in what they are doing? Clearly,
the building we occupy, the equipment we use, and the salaries we earn
all come to us from somebody who expects to make money—otherwise
none of it would exist. But on further reflection I realized that 'the
fan Walls

reason we are all here' doesn't tell the whole story" (1989, 219). He
sensed the omission of an important ingredient in such a top-down
view. For most of us, he observes, "the reason we choose to be here"
turns out to be the opportunity to work with others, doing something
we think is important.
In one breath Penzias touches upon the three primary aspects of
human social activity: the task-focused aspect ("the reason"), the rela-
tionship aspect ("we"), and the space-sharing aspect ("are all here"). If
we say "human relationships consist of individuals who share space,
interests, or goals," we might imply any of the following assumptions:

1. Individuals are related primarily through shared space.

Example: urban next-door neighbors
2. Individuals are related primarily through shared interests.
Example: bridge club members
3. Individuals are related primarily through shared goals.
Example: task force members
4. Individuals are related primarily through shared space and interests.
Example: community center activity participants
5. Individuals are related primarily through shared space and goals.
Example: condominium association members
6. Individuals are related primarily through shared interests and goals.
Example: PeaceNet members
7. Individuals are related through shared space, interests, and goals.
Example: agricultural co-op members

On first thought, we might assume that an online relationship does

not involve assumptions 1, 4, 5, and 7, since there is no requirement
for physical proximity for face-to-face interaction. This argument is
unconvincing for anyone who has been kept offline by a busy signal or
has had to wait in line to get inside a busy host computing facility. So
online networks are characterized by people who share time, space,
interests and/or task focus—they do not necessarily share the same time
or share body space, but online groups do share virtually the same
elements that face-to-face groups share.
For analysis it is helpful to view groups as types of systems. A system,
described most succinctly and abstractly, is any number of elements in
/ 55 Global Networking for Local Development

some form of relationship with each other. A system may be primarily

service oriented such as a telecommunications network; or production
oriented such as a factory; or it may be biological such as a respiratory
system; or it may be meteorological such as a weather system, or astro-
nomical such as our solar system (cf. Boulding, 1985). A system whose
members are linked together by technologies is called a sociotechnical
system (cf. Pasmore and Sherwood, 1978).
An online group, then, is a sociotechnical system whose elements are
related for a specific purpose or set of purposes, whether their own, or
someone else's. A group may be a part of a larger group, as a work group
or task force within a company or community. Its members are there
sometimes only because the group contributes to their goals, some-
times only because they contribute to the group's; ideally, they should
be there for both reasons, in which case we could describe their rela-
tionship as synergistic.
For sociologists, the term "community" usually refers to Ferdinand
Toennies' famous ideal type called gemeinschaft in German, while "so-
ciety" equates to his gesellschaft (Toennies, 1965). Toennies' gemein-
schaft is a natural grouping of people based on kinship and
neighborhood, shared culture, and folkways—a tribe or a peasant vil-
lage would be a classic example. His gesellschaft refers to impersonal
contractual and legal relationships, based more upon mutual need to
achieve specific tasks or general goals than on blood relationships
(kinship) or proxemic relationships (neighborhood). The modern city
or state, therefore, is seen as a society rather than a community.
Community has also been defined by contrasting "a social relation-
ship of solidarity between individuals based on affection, kinship, or
membership of a community such as a family or group of friends" with
one based upon the "division of labour and contractual relations be-
tween isolated individuals consulting only their own self-interest" (Bul-
lock and Stallybrass, 1977, 256).
Daly and Cobb, Jr. (1989) suggest a very useful approach to under-
standing society and community by focusing on the relationship be-
tween them, rather than simply juxtaposing them in binary
opposition. They view community as one form of society, although "a
society should not be called a community unless (1) there is extensive
participation by its members in the decisions by which its life is gov-
erned, (2) the society as a whole takes responsibility for the members,
Jan Walls

and (3) this responsibility includes respect for the diverse individuality
of these members" (p. 172). Community, then, must be seen as emerg-
ing from the mutual commitment, mutual involvement, mutual re-
sponsibility, and mutual respect between a society and its individual
members.
An interesting cross-cultural illustration of the above contrast is
found in Ronald Dore's distinction between two types of business firm:
the company law model, typified by Western capitalist corporations,
and the community model commonly found in Japan. In the company
law model, the firm is primarily defined as the property of the share-
holders whose rights are paramount, where management is the trusted
agent of the shareholders, and where management hires workers. In the
community model, the firm is seen as a social unit made up of all the
people who work full-time in it (not "for it"), whose shareholders are,
like customers and suppliers and local authorities, one group of outsid-
ers who have to be satisfied if the firm is to prosper, and whose man-
agement and workers see each others' long-term benefits as being
interdependent Pore, 1987, 53-55). So, in Tokyo, by any measure a
"modern city or state," we see that a corporation is characterized by
relationship patterns and stability of membership that characterize
traditional communities.

Relationship-Focused Communities and Task-Focused Croups

Groups, then, may be seen as subsystems of larger social systems who
come together for specific purposes. One may be "in a group, but not
of it," while one is usually "in and of" one's community. One may
participate in groups within one's own community, but the strategies
of task achievement by that group, which we might call a strong-tie
group, will be expected to make frequent reference to the common
relationship pattern of the superordinate community, and may take
longer to achieve a task than a weak-tie group of the same size. (For a
thorough examination of the weak-tie concept, see Granovetter 1973.)
The functional difference between relationship-focused and task-
focused group performance is well illustrated by the difference in time
required for negotiation of a new contract by a typical Japanese nego-
tiation team and a typical American negotiation team. The Japanese
team will be expected to make frequent reference back to the superor-
dinate community and its enduring relationship patterns prior to mak-
Global Networking for Local Development

Task focus —> Contract relationship —> FIRM GOALS,

I I FLEXIBLE RELATIONSHIPS
Task group —> Common task
I I
Relationship focus —> Community relationships —> FLEXIBLE GOALS,
I I FIRM RELATIONSHIPS
Task group —> Common task
S O C 1 E T Y
Figure 9.1
Goals and relationships in task groups and communities

ing any significant commitment. The American team, having been

authorized to negotiate a deal, knows that its business relationships are
denned and limited mostly by contracts and may be altered in order to
respond to newly emergent opportunities. The Japanese, therefore, de-
scribe their own negotiation-to-delivery process as "slow-slow—>fast-
fast," knowing that once agreement has been reached, action can
proceed swiftly because everyone in the community will have been
aware of, and probably will have agreed to, the approaching commit-
ment before it has been signed. They describe the American process as
"fast-fast—>slow-slow," implying that after the negotiators have signed
the quick contract, they will then have to spend time engaging in
retroactive nemawashi (preparatory consensus seeking). From a Japa-
nese perspective, in other words, the American mode appears to regard
relationships as a function of task achievement.
Figure 9.1 shows schematically how individuals may view their op-
tions for relating to other individuals for cooperative goal attainment
in task-focused (contract-related) societies and in relationship-focused
communities.
Communication may serve either as a means to achieve firm goals
through flexible social relationships or as a means to maintain firm
relationships by achieving flexible goals—that is, goals chosen or
modified so as to contribute to the long-term relationships of the
community. Therefore, we may say that the former is the dominant
function of communication in gesellschaft, weak-tie groups, and the
latter is the dominant function in strong-tie communities and their
primary groups. Both functions, it must be stressed, exist simultane-
ously in societies as well as in communities, since it is axiomatic that
any act of communication will have both content and relationship
Jan Walls

dimensions (Watzlawick, Bavelas, and Jackson, 1967, chap. 2). The dif-
ference between them can only be in relative emphasis on one aspect
over the other. Thus in primary groups and communities, the relation-
ship aspect of a communication act may be expected to play a more
important role than it would in secondary groups. The interesting
apparent exception, of course, is the urbanite secondary group whose
primary purpose is to serve emotional or relationship-focused ends.
It has been argued that the goal-oriented function of task-focused
groups, and by implication the content aspect of communication, has
been overemphasized in industrial-commercial, gesellschaft societies.
Leiss (1989) argues that "our society has split the process of caring that
was united in traditional socialization networks. Caring for others out-
side the domain of the nuclear family, in terms of basic needs, has been
relegated increasingly to public agencies. At the same time the forma-
tion of a sense of personal identity and well-being has been detached
from the network of caring relationships and routed instead through
the market-place—which . . . cannot successfully perform this func-
tion" (p. 123). Caring for someone, in other words, may refer either to
a concern felt for their well-being or to a service performed on their
behalf but not necessarily to both. This division of caring into concern
felt and service performed is more characteristic of industrial-commer-
cial gesellschaft societies than of community relationships in gemein-
schaft societies. On the relationship between market-responsive
dynamism and community-focused stability, the best argument for a
multicentric society is perhaps found in Alberto Ramos (1981).

The Value of Having Both Task and Relationship Focuses

Relationship-focused groups are characterized by intimacy, long-term
responsibility of members for each other, and stability of membership
with holistic relationships. They are not easily entered into and not
easily left behind under normal circumstances. But relationship-fo-
cused groups may also exhibit another characteristic—stagnation, un-
less their members and their internal relationships are invigorated by
external linkages to other groups, involving the exchange of goods and
technologies as well as information.
Task-focused groups, on the other hand, are characterized by respect
for the individuality of their members, by task-oriented responsibility
of members, and by mobility of membership with particularistic, rather
159 Global Networking for Local Development

than holistic, relationships. They are more easily entered into and are
left behind with less remorse when better opportunities emerge outside
the group. But task-focused groups also run the risk of disintegrating
due to the lack of long-term commitment to internal relationships on
the part of members.
The ideal society, therefore, will consist of an optimal blend of rela-
tionship-focused communities as well as numerous task-focused groups
that exist primarily to serve the longer-term interests of stable commu-
nities. The diversity and mobility of task-focused groups, in other
words, are useful primarily as sources of information, ideas, and other
exchanges needed to energize and revitalize stable communities.
It would seem, then, that online groups (mediated by computer
networks) are ideally suited to play the role of task-focused groups that
supplement and enhance the performance of groups with broader man-
dates, including primary, relationship-focused communities, and by so
doing they may also enhance the quality of the relationships within
real communities. They can do this by allowing quick, easy access to
the ideas, information, organizational strategies, technologies, and so
forth, required to keep stable communities dynamic.

Intra-, Inter-, and Cross-Cultural Communication

What will happen when members of relationship-focused communities

from different language-cultures come together to cooperate in task-
focused groups online? Assuming that they share a common language,
the major obstacles to effective online communication and cooperation
will be described as "cultural," that is to say, different visions or expec-
tations as to how elements should relate to one another (see also Ishii,
chap. 8).

Intracultural Communication
Intracultural communication is the exchange of information between
elements in the same language-culture system. I use language and cul-
ture as a single, hyphenated concept because one cannot be understood
properly outside the context of the other. Linguistic knowledge without
cultural knowledge may result in using perfect pronunciation and
flawless grammar to say the wrong thing. For communication to be
intracultural, people communicating within the same language-culture
Ian Walk

system must not only use the same pronunciation (the face-to-face
equivalent to spelling online) and grammar but also must reveal similar
attitudes about the relationships between themselves—hierarchicaUy
between senior and junior positions, and between insiders and outsid-
ers. In fact, it is quite possible to gain a better understanding of intracul-
tural communication through making a cross-cultural study of
interpersonal communication in different societies, comparing the dif-
ferences between the two.
Within task-focused societies such as Canada and the United States,
there may be great diversity among subcultures, including even subcul-
tures characterized by relationship-focused communities. One would
be ill-advised, for example, to generalize about Canadian culture with-
out considering the diversity among Anglo-, Franco- and Aboriginal
Canadians. Within relationship-focused societies, on the other hand,
there may also be an abundance of task-focused groups whose sole
purpose is to strengthen or enrich the primary relationship-focused
community.

Intercultural Communication
Intercultural communication takes place when members of different lan-
guage-culture systems exchange information, and each is aware of the
expectations of the other concerning the relationships of the commu-
nicators. Intercultural communication, then, may be thought of as
taking place through a "metacultural" mindset on the part of the par-
ticipants. It may take place, for example, between French and English
Canadians, at least one of whom is bilingual, and both of whom are
knowledgeable about the culture of the other. One who is sensitive to
and competent in intercultural communication may be seen as having
achieved "intercultural personhood."

Cross-Cultural Communication
Cross-cultural communication takes place when at least one of the
parties trying to exchange information is unaware of, or chooses to
disregard, a significant difference in expectations concerning the
relationships between the communicators. When a person from a
task-focused society does not understand why a person from a relation-
ship-focused society resists overtures to become less formal and more
personal early in a new relationship, the communication may be de-
7 61 Global Networking for Local Development

scribed as cross-cultural rather than intercultural. As a result of recent

advances in transportation and telecommunication technologies, cross-
cultural communication has become a part of the lives of more people
than ever before. Unfortunately, it also means that more people than
ever before have the opportunity to engage in a dialogue that will
amount to asking the wrong questions in anticipation of irrelevant
answers. Education and practice are the only remedies.

Perspective Enrichment The Virtue of Cross-Cultural Networking for

Intercultural Communication
Every dynamically stable community has one characteristic of a
healthy investment portfolio: it maintains optimal diversity, resisting
the urge to put all its eggs into one basket. Acquisition and retention
of diverse alternatives for balancing dependence, independence, and
interdependence among its members is one of the most important
survival strategies for any society. Consider for a moment the case of
Japan.
The Japanese have always been known as a group-focused people,
even as a closed society. Yet the whole history of Japanese civilization
has been one of continuous, if not continual, communication with
foreign peoples, first Koreans and Chinese, later with more remote
peoples. These foreign, cross-cultural relationships have almost always
been task-focused relationships whose purpose has been to enrich their
primary domestic community relationships. The result of practicing
both uchi (inner) and soto (outer) modes of distinguishing-while-relat-
ing with others has often brought them the best of two worlds: stability
and dynamism.
The specific benefits to Japan of international exchange for domestic
enrichment (writing, watercolor painting, digital watches, automobiles,
VCRs, computers, to name just a few) may be formulated into a syn-
drome, which I call the "Japan syndrome"—import, adopt, domesti-
cate, improve. Japanese have been doing this for centuries, with an
interesting result: they have not become any less Japanese, but have
become more effectively Japanese. Through stable, enduring, affec-
tive, strong-tie uchi relationships, they enjoy relative stability; through
flexible, effective, weak-tie soto relationships, they achieve dynamic
renewal. The result comes close to the systemic ideal of dynamic
stability.
162 Ian Walls

At this point the moral argument may be raised that people linked
in relationship-focused communities may tend to exploit those with
whom they relate only through task-focused relationships. I do not
deny that this happens. In fact there are abundant historical precedents
for such exploitative relationships, even in the most egalitarian of
societies. I wish only to suggest that simultaneous participation in
relationship-focused and task-focused networks characterizes relation-
ships within and between dynamically stable systems and does not
require exploitative relations.

Task-Focused Networks for Relationship-Focused Communities: Cross-Cultural

Applications for Intercultural Networks

This section introduces and discusses the notion that online networks
probably are best thought of as "virtual groups" and "virtual commu-
nities," networked sources of information, ideas or other forms of en-
richment for users who belong to "real" groups and communities for
whom face-to-face relationships are primary.

Task Focus or Relationship Focus? Not Either/Or, but Both/And

As noted above, every act of communication simultaneously has both
a content dimension and a relationship dimension. By way of analogy,
it is also possible to hypothesize that every social group has both a goal
dimension and a relationship dimension.
The chapter began by suggesting that human relationships consist of
individuals who share space, interests, or goals, and that similar, or at
least parallel, conditions prevail between face-to-face and online rela-
tionships. The seventh example of the various permutations was "Indi-
viduals . . . related through shared space, interests, and goals," and the
example suggested was agricultural co-op members. This would be a
classic instance of a stable community face-to-face relationship. If one
or all the members of this face-to-face agricultural co-op community
joined an international co-op online network, offering and receiving
information and ideas with other co-op community members around
the world for each other's benefit, this would constitute a good example
of optimal networking across cultures. It would be a functional alliance
of face-to-face communities linked through task-focused online net-
working across geographical, political, and cultural boundaries. The
163 Global Networking for Local Development

result would also be synergistic, since through the productive use of

information and ideas, the whole would be greater than the mere sum
of its parts. It could also be described as responding to a need to "link
globally, act locally."
As is the case in most synergistic networks, the capacity to think and
act independently, or in accordance with one's own community tradi-
tions, is not only not threatened but may in fact become enhanced
if the newly accessed information or idea is imported, adopted, domes-
ticated, and improved. The American jogger is allowed to enjoy do-
ing her or his American thing even more by using the Japanese
Walkman, which was originally accessed through international com-
mercial distribution networks. The Chinese peasant's life is enriched
through gaining advance knowledge of crop-threatening changes
in weather through local broadcast of information that came from
international meteorological information networks. In both cases, do-
mestic intracultural goals are achieved through maintaining interna-
tional, intercultural relationships. Through optimal association in
task-focused networks, in other words, relationship-focused groups
may become empowered to function more effectively as dynamically
stable communities.
This is not to say that task-focused online networks cannot perform
subversive functions—only that they need not. The facsimile transmis-
sion into and throughout China of foreign news coverage of the post-
Tiananmen crackdown was perceived as subversive by the Chinese
government, who claimed that the treasured relationship of unity be-
tween the Party and the people was being threatened. On the other
hand, the same facsimile machines have allowed for the more effective
transmission of graphics and handwritten Chinese language docu-
ments that enhance the attainment of goals that are shared at all levels
of Chinese society.

Optimal Networking: Globalization without Homogenlzatlon

One theory that enjoys favor among communication scholars is called
convergence theory, and states that if two or more individuals share
information with one another, then over time they will tend to con-
verge toward one another, leading to a state of greater uniformity (Kin-
caid, 1988). Empirical tests have supported the theory. Does this mean,
then, that cross-cultural networking, through facilitating information
Jan Walls

exchange, will inevitably lead to homogenization of cultural diversity?

Eventually, perhaps, but not necessarily in a headlong, careening rush
toward entropic uniformity. Critical, conscientious choices are made by
people who may wish to preserve relationship patterns that they find
satisfying, while at the same time opting for access to the knowledge
and information that circulates through communities around them.
With the globalized movement of factories, fishing fleets, and re-
newable and nonrenewable resources, it is in the interest of every
relationship-focused local community to participate in task-focused
international and intercultural networks.
Relationship-focused communities, characterized by a notion of
stewardship over their shared physical space, can put goal-focused com-
puter networks to good use by seeking manipulative knowledge (useful,
action-oriented information, cf. Rifkin, 1987, 241-242) to be put to use
in their relationship-focused communities. An online international
network, therefore, may perform the valuable function of serving and
preserving the interests of face-to-face communities.
There is no reason why local autonomy may not be respected along
with global responsibility when it comes to "managing the global com-
mons" (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987).
It is to everyone's advantage that humanity maintain a healthy diver-
sity of sociocultural as well as economic, political, and technological
strategies for managing their portion of the global commons. Acknowl-
edging the virtue of diversity, however, implies and requires a healthy
respect for divergent strategies of conceiving and expressing the nature
of elements and relationships that characterize their part of the com-
mons. It is therefore in our overall short- and long-term interest to
participate in the globalization of communication networks, not in-
stead of developing local ways, but precisely to gain a more enlight-
ened, critical understanding of the virtue of "doing it our way." We
may, in other words, commit ourselves to globalizing without necessar-
ily homogenizing.
Sociologists in the West have observed that a new type of social
relationship is emerging, generated by the electronic media. This has
been referred to as "para-social interaction" (Goonasekera, 1990, 37).
Through telecommunications, it becomes possible to interact within
virtual communities of virtual networks that exist in a complementary
relationship to one's own social networks in real communities.
Global Networking for Local Development

The key term here is complementary, implying "not instead of, but in
addition to/' This is one of the beauties of using virtual networks to
support the goals and relationships of real communities. To paraphrase
the American sociologist W. I. Thomas (1966), "If people define com-
munities as real, they may be real in their consequences." On the other
hand, if we define community as virtual, it may also become real in its
consequences.
Information Security: At Risk?

Michael Kirby and Catherine A. Murray

"We are at risk." The United States National Research Council began its
report Computers at Risk (1991) with these words . The report goes on:
Increasingly, America depends on computers. They control power delivery, com-
munications, aviation and financial services. They are used to store vital infor-
mation, from medical records to business plans, to criminal records. Although
we trust them, they are vulnerable—to the effects of poor design and in-
sufficient quality control, to accident, and perhaps most alarmingly, to deliber-
ate attack. The modern thief can steal more with a computer than with a gun.
Tomorrow's terrorist may be able to do more damage with a keyboard than with
a bomb. To date we have been remarkably lucky. . . . Unfortunately there is
reason to believe that our luck will soon run o u t . . . . 1

Across the Pacific, the Japan Information Processing Development

Center (October 1991) has argued:

The development of network technology has enabled mutual connection of

information systems across national borders, creating a borderless society in
information processing. As a result, it is now possible to access any part of the
world in the same amount of time, a social framework everyone acknowledges
to be very efficient and convenient. On the other hand, the consequences of
failures in information systems increase in proportion to the degree of network
expansion. For this reason unless all countries uniformly adopt the same level of
minimum security measures, social stability cannot be maintained in an age of global
information. . .. The influence of security problems occurring in less protected
systems can now extend even to sufficiently protected systems if they are
connected via networks. This means that weak parts need to be eliminated from
the whole. Today, actions taken locally can have only limited effectiveness in
the field of information system security. (We have now reached a junction when all
countries must collaborate in the study of information security in the global age.)2
[emphasis added]
168 Michael Kirby and Catherine Murray

To all of that, many international observers would say amen. The

need for an effective international regime of information security ap-
pears to be simple and self-evident. It is urgent and necessary. Indeed,
the establishment of security measures is seriously overdue if one takes
into account the enormous expansion of network technology that has
already occurred.3
The thesis of this chapter is that we are at risk indeed. But the risk
derives from something far more fundamental than the vulnerability
of computer and information systems. The risk derives instead from
the frequent incapacity of democratic policy processes in international
and national institutions to keep pace with the social implications of
technology.
Many political, institutional, and cultural obstacles can conspire
against the achievement of international harmonization.4 One need
look no further than international airline travel for a case of melan-
choly failure.5
The need for a compatible international regime for security of infor-
mation systems appears even more urgent than the search for an effec-
tive regime for air liability. The interactions of data communication are
even more pervasive. The ramifications reach more directly into the
lives of virtually every one of us. You do not have to travel to be caught
up in the problem, although if you do, you are. The perils of loss and
damage to life and property are even greater than in air mishaps. While
we have survived all these years with a hodge-podge of improvizations
in air liability rules, it is unlikely that we can get by for much longer
without an appropriate agreement on international policy for the secu-
rity of general information networks.

Of CD Guidelines on Privacy

If there is any glimmer of hope, it arises from the comparative success

of earlier international precedents in harmonizing informatics policy.
The OECD Guidelines on Privacy were adopted and became effective in
September 1980. The guidelines have proved most useful in the devel-
opment of laws and policies in a number of OECD (Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development) countries, with legal tradi-
tions as diverse as those of Japan and Australia.
169 Information Security: At Risk?

It is important to remember that the OECD's exercise on privacy did

not commence in a vacuum. The Universal Declaration of Human
Rights had included, in Article 12, a provision that:
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy... Everyone
has the right to the protection of law against such interference or attacks.6

This principle was picked up by the European Convention on Human

Rights and by the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights.7
The advent of computers presented a new problem for the privacy
principle in Article 12 or (as it is now often called) data protection and
data security. First, a number of the Scandinavian countries separately,
then the Nordic Council and later the Council of Europe, produced
drafts that sought to isolate the basic principles of privacy protection
in the computer age. The principles were refined and reflected a largely
chronological approach to the movement of data through a system.
They governed the collection of the data, quality of the data once
collected, the use of the data, the security applicable to the data, the
rights of the individuals and others affected to have access to the data.
The Council of Europe developed conventions that were open to its
member countries. However, useful as the principles collected in those
conventions were, they tended to be European in orientation and to
reflect hardware provisions that were not always congenial to applica-
tion outside of Europe.8
The choice then faced by the international community was a familiar
one: fusion or fission. Fusion on the one hand would suggest sharpen-
ing the explicit legal obligations within the smaller subgroups of the
communities principally affected, such as the European Community
(EC). Indeed, directives are presently under consideration that, in ex-
plicit ways, will enlarge the obligations of member countries of the EC
for the protection of privacy. The alternative path—fission—was to
spread the basic, minimum principles to a wider world. UNESCO and
the United Nations exhibited interest in privacy protection. Although
some claimed that privacy was a luxury of developed societies, others
pointed out that basic human rights were universal and as important
to persons in Africa and Asia affected as to those in Europe and North
America.
Michael Kirby and Catherine Murray

Distracted by other concerns and racked by institutional frictions,

UNESCO and the UN system have proved less effective in pursuing this
issue than the OECD. A body of intercontinental membership, the
OECD connects the principal developed countries of the world, extend-
ing from Europe and North America to Japan, Australia, and New
Zealand in the Pacific. Reaching consensus within the OECD on the
value-loaded issue of privacy protection was a much greater challenge
than achieving a similar objective within Europe, with its largely shared
traditions and common economic interests.
Not surprisingly, various tensions emerged within the original OECD
Group on Privacy. The Europeans, with fresh memories of the misuse
of personal data by the secret police of totalitarian regimes, were per-
haps more alert to the practical dangers against which safeguards were
needed. The Anglophone countries, led by the United States, were more
sympathetic to the importance of free expression and the free flow
of ideas. The economic interests of the Americans reinforced their
philosophical concerns that controls for privacy protection were actu-
ally disguised efforts of some European countries designed to protect
local information technology industries rather than human values in
privacy.
Notwithstanding these and other differences, agreement was finally
struck. The Council of the OECD recommended to member countries
that they should take into account in their domestic legislation the
principles contained in the guidelines. It also recommended that they
should endeavour to avoid creating, " . . . in the name of privacy pro-
tection, unjustified obstacles to transborder flows of personal data."9
The most influential section of the Guidelines on Privacy is part 2,
"Basic Principles of National Application," which has affected a great
deal of domestic policy-making and law-making. These basic principles
were deliberately noncoercive in form. They did not envisage a binding
treaty. The hope was that, by getting the basics right, we would lay
down a system of voluntary compliance that, by good example, would
permeate the laws and policies of member countries of the OECD. Has
that hope been realized? In Australia and Japan, the OECD privacy
guidelines have had noticeable, although gradual, effect on the devel-
opment of national policies.
In Australia, the OECD guidelines were adopted, at the federal level,
by the Privacy Act of 1989. That act applies to specified information
171 Information Security: At Rhk?

systems under federal regulation, such as in the federal public service

and credit reporting agencies. Australia was rather slow in acceding to
the OECD Guidelines on Privacy because consultations with the states
were thought to be necessary. Under the Australian Constitution, the
states share certain law-making responsibilities with respect to privacy
concerns. These consultations took some years.
The federal government's first effort to implement the guidelines in
Australia was linked to a proposal to establish a universal identification
card, with the engaging name of the "Australia Card." Defeat of that
legislation in the Australian Senate actually caused a double dissolu-
tion10 of the Australian Federal Parliament. When the government was
returned, the legislation was represented. However, subsequently it was
abandoned when huge public protests belatedly developed about the
proposed universal identifier card. In Australia no one has to carry a
passport or ID card. It was then that the government proceeded with
the separate privacy legislation. The information privacy principles set
out in the Australian Privacy Act follow very substantially the OECD
guidelines.
A not dissimilar development occurred in Japan, although free of the
federal complications that bedevil lawmaking in Australia and the
United States. According to Professor Horibe, the word "privacy" was
rarely used in Japan, at least before the latter half of the 1950s.11 No
precise translation of the concept, from its development in Anglo-
American law and other Western law, could readily be achieved in the
Japanese language. However, the idea gained attention after 1964 fol-
lowing a novel by Yukio Mishima concerning the private life of a
political candidate.12 By the 1970s, calls were being made for effective
legal protection of privacy. A Personal Data Protection Bill was intro-
duced into the Diet in March 1975 by the opposition. But no legislation
was introduced by the government, and none was enacted. In August
1980, by which time the OECD guidelines were completed and await-
ing approval by the Council of the OECD, Professor Horibe wrote a
book, The Contemporary Privacy.13 In it he proposed legislation, both
nationally and locally, on the model of the OECD Guidelines. He has
expressed the view that the recommendation of this international or-
ganization had "great impact" on the Japanese government.
In January 1981, the Administrative Management Agency set up a
study committee that reported in July 1982. The agency proposed five
7 72 Michael Kirby and Catherine Murray

fundamental principles for privacy protection, derived from the OECD

guidelines.
There was no immediate legislative action at the national level, al-
though some local governments enacted ordinances on the model of
the report.14 As in Australia, so in Japan. The national government,
beset with many other problems, took a great deal of time to consider
the proposal for privacy legislation. A further study group was estab-
lished. Eventually, however, a bill was produced in April 1988 that was
approved by both houses of the Diet. The Personal Data Protection Act
of 1988 came into force on 1 October 1989. The act provided for a
further delay in the introduction of the facility for disclosure and
correction of personal data.
During Diet deliberations of the bill, attention was drawn to the ne-
glect of the regulation of privacy in the private sector. The government
gave a commitment that it would advance promptly its investigations
in that regard. The Ministry for International Trade and Industry (MITI)
in April 1989 issued a document setting out guidance on personal data,
notably in consumer credit.15 MITI adopted policies calling on industry
associations to investigate the implications of guidelines on privacy in
the private sector. Professor Horibe comments that:

The MITI policy will play a very important role . . . because MITI implemented
the Report of the Personal Data Protection Subcommittee by issuing circular
notices... and promulgating the 'Rule on the Register concerning the Measures
etc. for the Protection of Computer Processed Personal Data' in the Official
Gazette on July 7, 1989.16

In addition, guidelines have been subsequently published in Japan

on personal data in financial institutions and on the protection of
such data in local government. These are also based on the OECD
guidelines.17
The result of the foregoing is a very clear demonstration of the ripple
effect of the OECD privacy guidelines. The process of national adoption
is, in fact, largely the same. Careful national deliberation and wide-
spread consultation begins. Eventual legislation regulating the national
public sector is passed. Later, specific provisions in relation to credit
reference systems are incorporated. Now there are moves to extend the
principles into the information systems of the private sector but to do
so, at least at first, by guidelines rather than explicit, legal sanction.
Information Security: At Risk?

This is exactly what the OECD Council and the Expert Group on
Privacy had in mind. The intent was to give a common intellectual
framework to the policymakers and lawmakers of member countries.
Even without formal sanction attached either to adoption or to enforce-
ment in domestic jurisdictions, the privacy guidelines have proved to
be an important international statement of accepted standards. Within
the OECD, only Turkey has yet to enact privacy laws. The guidelines
have, moreover, bridged the different legal traditions between Euro-
pean and common-law countries. Legislative response to the concern
of privacy protection in European countries has typically produced
generalist data protection agencies, while those in the common-law
tradition have typically established limited and specific remedies for
particular problems pragmatically defined.18 The machinery for en-
forcement varies. Inclusion of references to the privacy of legal persons
or specific application to transborder data flow also varies. But what is
common is a serious concern about the social aspects of the new tech-
nology and, particularly, adoption of the "golden rule"—the right of
access—at the heart of the intent of the guidelines.
However beneficial an educative and persuasive force, the privacy
guidelines have no self-executing authority in a court of law. Thus, no
citizen in one community can protest in the courts of another that the
protection of personal data had not been complied with by relying for
proof on the guidelines. Conferring justiciable rights upon citizens of
(and possibly citizens in) either member countries needs a future step
in the development of law.
A significant contribution to harmonization of national laws, the
OECD privacy guidelines may make the later adoption of enforceable
international treaties easier and more likely. Concurrent moves in the
United Nations and the European Community, among others, are proof
of some ripple effect beyond the twenty-four members of the OECD.
The fact that we are still a long way short of unilateral or mutually
enforceable international law, let alone an international tribunal to
which parties with a transborder dispute about personal data privacy
can have access, is not a reason to underestimate the value of OECD
guidelines. It is, however, an indication of the limitations of the guide-
lines in domestic forums, where there is an international element in a
dispute; and the continuing risk that, pending the development of such
international law, countries may be tempted to react in ways that might
/ 74 Michael Kirby and Catherine Murray

be considered inimical to the free flow of information. Such steps may

be taken in order (a) to protect what they perceive as their legitimate
interest in the privacy of their citizens and residents; (b) to retaliate
against what is seen as foreign indifference to that interest; and (c) to
ensure, at least in certain cases, that a loss of highly personal informa-
tion will not occur, taking that information beyond effective local
legislative control.
The privacy guidelines illustrate what can be done in the field of
information security at the international level. But they also illustrate
the relatively slow pace at which changes are introduced and the chal-
lenges remaining.

Information Security: New OECD Initiatives

Following the completion of the work on the privacy guidelines, the

OECD's activities in informatics policy abated. But a major new prob-
lem was looming on the horizon: computer-related crime. Computer
crime challenges the adequacy of the territorial principle and points up
a need to achieve extraterritorial jurisdiction, a need to harmonize
substantive criminal law; and the problem of direct penetration of
information systems. Important changes in substantive and procedural
law to cope with penetration into systems clearly call for harmoniza-
tion on a wider scale beyond the frontiers of Western Europe.
The Equity Funding case, for example, illustrated the faith which
citizens and business people blindly place in the product of informa-
tion systems.19 Directors of an insurance company stored 56,000 false
life insurance policies with a sales value of $30 million in a computer.
When the accounts were closed, these false policies were found to rep-
resent two-thirds of the value of the company's portfolio. The data from
the computer printout of the Equity Funding Corporation had simply
been accepted at face value by lenders dealing with the company.
Similarly, in 1981, a survey conducted by the Local Government
Audit Commission in the United Kingdom showed that 21 percent of
the 320 firms covered stated that they had been victims of computer
fraud in the previous five years.20 In Sweden, all cases of embezzlement
between 1981 and 1983 were analyzed. More than 10 percent involved
computer-related fraud.21 A private study in the United Kingdom in
Information Security: At Risk?

1984 found average losses of £31,000 in the field of computer fraud

from manipulation of computers. Similar results were found in the
Federal Republic of Germany.22
Under the stimulus of these and other developments, the OECD
issued an analysis of legal policy on computer-related crime in 1986.23
It contained guidelines for national legislatures and suggested common
denominators for the approaches that should be taken in view of the
international character of many computer-related offenses.
Similar steps were also under consideration in the Commission of the
European Communities.24 Eventually the Council of Europe's Commit-
tee on Crime Problems published the results of its research. A report
issued in 1990, as guidelines for national legislatures laid out what it
described as a "minimum list" and an "optional list" of data offences
that should be covered by local law.25 Most helpfully, the report con-
tained a review of the initiatives of a number of national legislatures,
including the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. It also
contained an analysis of the particular problems presented by the in-
ternational aspects of computer-related criminality involving trans-
frontier activities. The report concluded:

Computer-related criminality involving a transfrontier situation is becoming

increasingly important. Because of the nature of computers, there is an increas-
ing potential for storing, moving, using and manipulating data by contact from
long range, and the ability to communicate and to transmit rapidly large quan-
tities of data between computer systems over a long distance.. .. The offence
may be committed partly in one jurisdiction and partly in another, or even
partly in a third one, initiated from practically any place in the world. Obstacles
such as distance, border control or necessity of physical presence are no longer
relevant.26

A forum on the vulnerability of international financial information

held in Toronto, Canada in February 1990 triggered a newfound sense
of urgency. Cases of serious harm caused by the manipulation of infor-
mation systems "[sjometimes with fraudulent intent, sometimes with-
out intent to secure personal gain but with reckless indifference to the
consequences of the conduct involved" were reported.27
The forum on financial information further recorded invasions of
systems by viruses with arresting names such as "Internet worm,"
"world peace virus," "the Jerusalem virus," the "AIDS Trojan horse," the
"Italian bouncing ball virus" and so forth.28 Participants noted:
 Michael Kirby and Catherine Murray

Already cases of damage to innocent users of information technology systems

have been prosecuted in the courts. The possibility of significant increases in
such cases must be faced squarely. Laws, security practices and investigative
techniques must be improved to deter would-be offenders, to detect those who
offend, to secure their conviction and punishment and to provide for fair
apportionment of liability for the losses which occur from their actions
and from error in the process. Whilst action on the level of individual jurisdic-
tions is proceeding in all of the countries represented at the forum, at different
levels of detail and different speeds, and whilst some international coopera-
tion has been achieved (notably in UNCITRIAL . . . OECD, the Council of
Europe, etc.) there is no international agency with a specific mission to examine
and advise on the harmonization of laws and practices in all of the regions
represented.

Because of its intercontinental membership and activities, its eco-

nomic mission, and its proven track record in facilitating international
consensus on principles relating to information technology and
transborder data flows, the OECD seemed to forum participants to be a
suitable venue for the further exploration of some of the computer
offense-related concerns.29
Perhaps stimulated by this vote of confidence, the Committee for
Information, Computer and Communications Policy (ICCP) of the
OECD eventually established an ad hoc group of experts to prepare
guidelines for the security of information systems. That group held its
first meeting at OECD headquarters in Paris in January 1991 and elected
the Honorable Michael Kirby as chairman. Despite a long tradition of
strict confidentiality in its deliberations, the Expert Group on Informa-
tion Security has involved intensive participation of industry repre-
sentatives and a series of informal consultations within national
administrations and other national experts. The guidelines were com-
pleted in June 1992 by the expert group and will be presented for
adoption by the Council of the OECD in 1993.

Of CD Project on Information Security

The vision set out in successive OECD drafts of Information Security

Principles follows the format of the successful Privacy Guidelines sig-
nificantly. The guidelines are preceded by a review of the necessity for
an international approach to this issue. They include recommendations
that steps be taken nationally to reflect the principles promulgated in
/ 77 Information Security: At Risk?

them and internationally to secure harmonization of the applicable

rules.
The information security principles are grounded, as most earlier
studies on the subject are, upon the need to ensure that the informa-
tion system respects the three identified chief components of informa-
tion security. These are:
1. Availability—the applicable data must be present, accessible, or at-
tainable and immediately capable of use for a purpose by persons
authorized to access it.
2. Confidentiality—the data should not be made available or disclosed
to persons who are unauthorized to have access to such data.
3. Integrity—the data once accessed must not be altered or destroyed
in any unauthorized manner.
This tripartite division of the concept of security in the context of
information systems is very well established in the literature.30 More
recently, however, a number of writers have suggested that there are
further aspects that must be incorporated into an effective information
security system. Two such criteria are:
1. Authenticity—assuring the genuineness of the data
2. Utility—its usefulness once accessed31
Work to expand or redefine these essential concepts of data security
is at the heart of the OECD group and has not yet been done by any
international intergovernmental agency elsewhere. Four other core
"principles" are under consideration.

1. Awareness—means should be readily available for those entitled to

be informed about the existence and extent of the measures that have
been put in place for the security of information systems. This is fun-
damental so that a person whose data is stored in the system can decide
whether the protection of confidentiality and privacy (as well as intel-
lectual property and other rights) are adequate.
2. Proportionality—the measures for security should be proportionate
to the degree of reliance on the data and the magnitude, possibility, and
implications of any breaches of security. No completely secure system
can be devised. Even the best encryption codes can usually be broken.
Michael Kirby and Catherine Murray

The greatest perils are those of human error and failure. The measures
put in place should be proportional to the needs for security. Such
measures should keep in mind issues such as cost effectiveness. An
undue obsession with security for its own sake should be avoided.
3. Balance—it is essential, in free societies, to realize that measures for
secrecy, restriction and security are necessarily in competition with the
free flow of information. The legitimate entitlement of the community
and of other individuals to the benefits of the free flow of information
must be balanced against the claims of the government, corporations,
and individuals to the enforcement of data security.
4. Accountability—there should be an identifiable person who is re-
sponsible for the enforcement of the applicable security principles and
accountable for derogations from them.

Several other key issues are under consideration by the group. These
include:

• The desirability of promoting international harmonization of techni-

cal, administrative, and other standards
• The need to clearly allocate risks and liability
• The need to provide for jurisdictional competence in multijurisdic-
tional cases
• The need to provide for mutual assistance and improvement of ex-
tradition laws for transborder crimes
• The need to provide penal measures for deliberate or reckless inter-
ference in information systems.

Both initiatives of the OECD to harmonize informatics policy must be

judged in the context of the overall strategy and mission of that organi-
zation in the current world economic and political ferment. That mis-
sion was most recently expressed in the communique issued by
the council of the OECD twenty-four member countries on June 5,
1991. The basic values of "pluralistic democracy, respect for human
rights and market oriented economies" shared by the OECD countries
were affirmed.32
179 Information Security: At Risk?

To these ends, the ministers stressed the need for OECD and non-
member countries alike "to formulate coherent policies in the fields of
economics, environment, social affairs and technology that are mutu-
ally reinforcing in support of broadly based sustainable development."
In addition, "close policy cooperation [to] help to provide a sound
global economic environment" was identified as a top priority for
strengthening international economic cooperation.
The ministers called on the OECD to further "develop and deepen its
work on structural issues and, where appropriate . . . , in those issues
which lie beyond the ambit of current international negotiations, con-
sider the feasibility of elaborating operational arrangements."
Specifically, the ministers noted that technology is increasingly
underpinning national economic performance and demonstrating
"need for governments better to coordinate and ensure coherence
amongst domestic policies in these fields." With a view "to reducing
divergencies which cause frictions in these policy areas," the ministers
asked the OECD to explore the need to improve existing "multilateral
instruments and . . . to develop additional 'rules of the game'" in an
appendix.
The work of the Expert Group on Security of Information Systems
must be understood in this context. The group derives legitimacy not
just from the delegation of the ICCP Committee that set it up but also
from the overall strategy of the Ministerial Council of the OECD at a
time of rapid economic and political change in the world.

Other Initiatives

The OECD is not alone in its endeavors on information security. In the

field of data protection, the Council of the European Communities has
established a working party. Their report Oune 1991) was steering
toward an EC strategic framework for the security of information sys-
tems.33 Their object is to identify user requirements, the needs of sup-
pliers and service providers, and to develop standardization, evaluation
and certification, and technological and operational advances in the
security of information systems.34 The action plan is intended to com-
plement "evolving European and international standardization activi-
ties in this field."35
 Michael Kirby and Catherine Murray

Many of the participants in the EC exercise also took part in the work
of the OECD group. That group was also aware of the activities within
the government of the United States to secure common national stan-
dards for computer and communications security.36 So far, work within
governmental agencies has been related largely to the protection of
national security or to meeting one major element of security: vital
confidentiality. But the National Research Council report has acknowl-
edged that U.S. programs ". . . have paid little attention to the other
two major computer security requirements, integrity (guarding against
improper data modification and/or destruction) and availability (ena-
bling timely use of systems and the data they hold)." These require-
ments are important to government system users, and they are
particularly and increasingly important to users of commercial systems.
More wide-reaching and flexible guidance than that offered by the
so-called Orange Book published by the National Security Agency is
needed, according to the NRC, and it should be guidance that stimu-
lates the production of more robust trustworthy systems at all levels of
production."37
Several other initiatives of governmental agencies and academic
scholars have been designed to isolate, in a theoretical and practical
way, the basic objectives to be achieved for security and the means of
securing them.
One of the most important of the practical analyses studied by OECD
experts was that employed by Japan's Min to develop computer sys-
tems security standards. The point made by the MITI analyses is that
measures taken for the security of information systems have largely
concentrated on protection against loss or damage caused by natural
disasters and by systems structures to date. Yet the rate of computer-
related crime in Japan is low. Perhaps for that reason, security awareness
of Japanese systems managers is described as generally low. The object
of the MITI standards is prevention—to improve knowledge, to encour-
age a proper conceptualization of the issue, and to meet new chal-
lenges, such as those presented by computer viruses.
Japan's first security standards were laid down by MITI in 1977. They
have been revised in 1984 and again in 1991. These standards do not,
as such, have legal force in Japan, but could serve as a basis for procure-
ment of IT (Information Technology) product systems by government
Information Security: At Risk?

organs or corporations. As well as the general standards of MITI, there

are particular standards laid down in Japan by the Ministry of Posts and
Telecommunications, the National Police Agency, the Ministry of
Autonomy, and other bodies.
The MITI standards are organized into facility, technical, and operat-
ing categories. They are put forward primarily to stimulate action that
will prevent breaches of security. Obviously, prevention is preferable to
the post facto provision of punishment of offenders or remedies for
those who suffer loss. Ultimately, however, the law will have to provide
avenues for criminal and civil redress. In Japan, criminal and other laws
have been partly revised and enacted from June 1987 to provide for
punishment in the case of illegal production and destruction of elec-
tromagnetic records, willful disruption of another party's business
through electronic means, and property crimes.38 Property crimes are
denned to include the illegal acquisition of profit by providing false
data or illegal commands to a computer to produce forged records
regarding the acquisition of, or change of, property rights or by provid-
ing the described forged data for a third party's clerical use. Two pro-
posed crimes excluded from this amendment to Japanese law and left
for future study are illegal acquisition and/or transfer of data processed
and stored by computers and unauthorized use of a computer.

The intent of the OECD Guidelines on Information Security is to pro-

vide a similar voluntary framework for harmonization of domestic
policies as the remarkably successful privacy guidelines. Effective,
compatible legislation to deter, detect, and redress illegitimate intru-
sions into data security is urgently needed throughout the interna-
tional community.
The task for developing an international regime to respond to the
vulnerability of information systems is complex and far from complete.
We must keep the institutional and cultural impediments to achieving
policy consensus clearly in our sights. We should learn from failures to
achieve international consensus in analogous areas like airline regula-
tion, where globalization of technology equally presents the inter-
national community of nation-states with an urgent need to find
Michael Kirby and Catherine Murray

common rules. We must reflect the various concerns of national

administrations and experts so that we produce the best policy possible
given the state of the technological art.
The OECD has, in the past, provided an important contribution to
the development of law and policy relevant to the age of informatics.
Hopefully, the Guidelines on Information Security will enjoy similar
success.
/// Applications
Building a Global Network: The WBSI
Experience

Andrew Feenberg

Human communication on computer networks is an evolving technol-

ogy rich in possibilities. Computer companies have not always been
leaders in exploring these possibilities, many of which were first
identified by playful or curious users who came up with unexpected
applications.
The French Minitel network is one of the most successful instances
of such informal innovation. The designers of the network did not
anticipate the popularity of messaging, which was introduced by hack-
ers and grew explosively, at one point generating nearly half the reve-
nues of the system.1
A similar story is told by Quarterman (chap. 3 of this volume) about
the Internet, host to millions of scholars and researchers around the
world. No one planned this development, which grew up more or less
spontaneously around programs with a different mission.
Users thus played an unusually active role in the early development
of computer-mediated communication, and their contribution is likely
to be decisive for its future (see Harasim, chap. 2). They have shifted
the emphasis from strictly utilitarian applications toward enhancing
human contact and understanding on a planetary scale.
This chapter discusses one of the earliest educational experiments in
international networking. In 1982 the La Jolla, California-based West-
ern Behavioral Sciences Institute (WBSI) opened the first educational
program employing the computer as its chief communications me-
dium. During nearly ten years of activity, hundreds of highly placed
executives from all over the world worked in its online courses with
prominent university faculty. Together these users invented a new ap-
186 Andrew Feenberg

plication of the computer that continues to influence our under-

standing of its potential. The history of this remarkable experiment
follows.

The WBSI Experience

Planning for The School of Management and Strategic Studies began in

late 1981 under the leadership of Richard Farson, president of WBSI.2
At the time, CMC was still an untested educational technology, with
the exception of some informal experimentation on Control Data's
Plato system and a course in writing offered on The Source, an online
service, in 1981.
The school targeted high-level executives who could not afford long
absences from their jobs. The electronic delivery system provided these
executives with an exciting initiation to computers through a commu-
nications application suited to their skills and interests.
Courses were focused on such issues as technology and development,
the global economic and social environment, and systems thinking.
These subjects were chosen because of their particular relevance to
leadership in a rapidly changing and ever more complex world. Profes-
sors from major universities were recruited, primarily in the "soft"
social sciences. Most of them found computer conferencing to be an
effective educational medium. Over the years many participants have
testified to the value of what they learned at WBSI.
The initial format consisted of a two-year program: four six-month
sessions online, each composed of thematically related month-long
courses with a running commentary by a communications specialist.
Each six-month session was introduced by a week of face-to-face semi-
nars in La Jolla. During that week participants met the faculty for the
coming term and learned to use the computer. The cost was set at nearly
$25,000 for the two years.
The plans were ambitious and innovative, but the experiment got off
to a rough start. The first session began in January 1982 with a stellar
group of eight participants, including a Los Angeles City Councilman,
a director of the Venezuelan national oil company, the presidents of
several small high-tech companies, and vice presidents from some
larger mainline firms. But all told, more faculty and staff than students
attended the initial face-to-face seminar.
187 Building a Gbbal Network: The WBSI Experience

The real problems began when the participants returned home. Since
no one had ever been taught on a computer network before, there were
no models. The first courses consisted of either professorial monologues
that made interesting reading but were unsatisfactory as computer
conferences or telegraphic questions followed by days of inactivity
while the teachers waited for responses. Meanwhile, various technical
problems inhibited the participants from joining in the conversation,
such as it was.
Recall that these were the early days of the personal computer. We
used modified Apple IIE's with 48K of RAM and 300 baud Hayes mo-
dems—donated by Dennis Hayes who was himself a participant—to
access the Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES) network at
the New Jersey Institute of Technology. EIES offered an early experi-
mental version of the sort of communication service later popularized
by The Source and CompuServe. This setup was so complex, it took a
full page of instructions just to sign on and many more pages to list the
basic EIES commands.
Somehow, we got through that first term. We were fortunate in hav-
ing sympathetic technical support staff who patiently instructed the
participants online or over the phone whenever they needed help.
Pedagogical questions were addressed in a closed faculty conference in
intense and sometimes contentious discussions that finally yielded an
innovative interactive teaching style appropriate to the medium.
By the second term, the group had more than doubled in size and
there was hope of developing a viable program. Eventually over 150
participants from twenty-six countries were active, with a comparable
number of faculty and staff at least nominally available online. WBSI
was off and running.
The school quickly evolved in unexpected ways. Several clients—for
example, Digital Equipment Corporation and the United States Army-
sent many new participants each year in an attempt to broaden their
intellectual reach. Where else could they hope to find professors from
Harvard, Yale, and the University of California, a Jonas Salk, a Carl
Rogers, and a Stewart Brand, all available in an information-age setting?
WBSI became a kind of academic supplement to the training depart-
ments of these organizations.
As time went on, WBSI discovered that it was engaged not just in
providing an educational program but more fundamentally in building
a new type of virtual community. The bonds between participants were
188 Andrew Feenberg

so strong that most continued on as alumni members at the end of the

course and returned to La Jolla year after year.
What was the attraction? The WBSI network was composed of an odd
mix of businesspeople, executives, military officers, research adminis-
trators, and scholarship participants from the public sector. They
formed a new kind of international club with a high premium placed
on frank, intelligent talk.
The members' offline activities, their politics, and their ideas about
lire were often very different, but all of them enjoyed exchanging ideas
with each other and the faculty. CMC made it possible for them to stay
together in spirit while separated by continents.
Using laptop computers, participants could even connect with the
group while traveling, and enrich the discussion with reports from
remote parts of the world. Members stationed abroad were sometimes
among the most active, for example, our correspondent in a remote
corner of the Arabian penninsula who had few companions in his
desert station.
The common language was English; native speakers were forgiving of
foreign participants' minor errors. The presence of these foreigners
made an enormous difference. One cannot easily imagine the impact
of Colombians and Japanese on discussions of drug policy or trade.
Certain kinds of cliches became impossible. The usual rhetoric, inspired
by television journalism, gave way to the authority of local experience.
Serious reflection became possible as we gained insight into the mean-
ing of events for participants.3
WBSI went through many crises as the years passed, but the partici-
pants themselves helped us to survive and grow. In the end, the loss
of several important sources of support and the continuing recession
were too much for the institute's fragile finances. It finally closed in
November 1991.
In the remainder of this chapter, I discuss some of the things this
experience taught us about community building, pedagogy, and soft-
ware design. These lessons may perhaps help others attempting to build
similar networks in the future.

Building a Community

Online groups need not form a community to work effectively together

so long as the members have well-defined roles in performing a shared
189 Building a Global Network: The WBSI Experience

task. But both roles and tasks were unclear at WBSI. Although officially
a non-degree-granting educational program, for many participants it
was more of a club or a subscriber-written magazine than a school. In
such a group, nothing short of personal loyalty could hold the partici-
pants together and sustain the educational activity in which they were
nominally engaged. Thus WBSI had to become a vigorous community
to survive at all.
How did a community emerge out of this diverse collection of strong
personalities scattered over the globe? WBSI attempted to aeate a warm
personal atmosphere at the face-to-face seminars; however, these efforts
may have been less important than certain unintended consequences
of the program design. In fact, without wanting to, we put the partici-
pants through a shared ordeal that brought them together more closely
than anything we could have planned.
In most cases, the participants first encountered either computers or
CMC through WBSI. Important people though they were, our training
program placed them all in the embarrassing position of children on
the first day of school. Soon they formed a brave band of technological
adventurers with a whole new vocabulary to describe the complexities,
frustrations, and excitement of communication by computer.
This frontier solidarity was amplified by our initial problems with
delivering the courses. We had always bragged about the experimental
character of the program; now the participants were finding out just
how experimental it really was. But because they were prepared, they
tried to help rather than withdraw in disappointment. And once they
became deeply involved in saving the program, they naturally iden-
tified strongly with it and each other. It was really "their" program, a
fact that constituted the group as such and assigned it a common
mission.
To facilitate participant involvement, WBSI created a so-called meta-
conference in which everyone was invited to offer suggestions and to
communicate about anything that did not fit into the regular con-
ferences. This type of free discussion conference has become com-
monplace in online educational programs. Often called the "cafe
conference," it has a wide variety of uses, from debating current events
to dealing with personal problems or complaining about the program
itself. The cafe conference is an important transmission belt for an
emerging online culture. Participants feel fully represented as human
190 Andrew Feenberg

beings on a system that welcomes them in this way, rather than exclud-
ing all but their professional contributions.
In 1985, a group of WBSI participants formed a private conference
for more intimate personal discussion and support, a sort of online
encounter group. There they could talk freely about life events that
affected them deeply. One participant, for example, lost his job as vice
president of a large firm, and his situation was discussed for several
weeks. Another died of cancer, joining his friends online till the end.
Participants learned to understand better the dilemmas of foreign
members of the group whose personal and national crises were often
intertwined. This was particularly true of our Colombian participants
whose lives were tragically altered by the civil strife in their country.
The "COM" or "community" group, as it was called, was led at first
by a professional psychologist expert in working with encounter
groups. He found that the participants were more supportive of each
other but revealed less of themselves than was customary in a face-to-
face setting. He concluded that this was because of their commitment
to remaining together, unlike the casual acquaintances involved in a
brief encounter. In a very real sense, WBSI had invented a new social
form. The experiment was so successful that other COM groups were
formed, and this feature was added to the program. It too became an
important factor in WBSI's transformation into a community.
How far can we generalize from these experiences? Certain aspects of
the WBSI community probably cannot easily be repeated by other
institutions. Computers are no longer such romantic symbols of the
technological frontier, and no one today has to begin an online pro-
gram with the problems we had in 1982. Nevertheless, several features
of the experiment are generalizable: the use of conferences for free
discussion and personal interchange, and the excitement of interna-
tional networking, a still unfamiliar and innovative computer applica-
tion. Programs that engage their participants as persons rather than
organizing them around specific tasks ought to be able to generate the
sense of ownership necessary to community through similar means.

Inventing a Pedagogy

It is a well-established principle of psychology that people learn a domi-

nant role, such as teaching, primarily through playing the correlated
191 Building a Global Network: The WBSI Experience

subordinate role, that is, learning. But since most online teachers have
had no prior conferencing experience, they need preparation before
facing what Roxanne Hiltz calls a "virtual classroom" (Hiltz, 1986).
Skilled teachers rely implicitly on a host of small social techniques
that are unavailable on a computer network. The new online teacher
feels like someone who has never been in a classroom before and is
suddenly shoved into a room full of students and told to sink or swim.
Where should I stand? Why are they waving their hands at me? How
do I know if they understand what I am saying? How long do I wait for
an answer to my questions? When does the class begin and end? Early
public mistakes in such basic matters are bound to be embarrassing and
diminish the teacher's authority.
WBSI's first attempts at online teaching were disastrous. Great teach-
ers were helpless in front of a class of sympathetic but sceptical students
scattered between Caracas, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. One
teacher offered elaborate presentations that resembled written lectures.
While interesting, these had the undesirable effect of reducing the
participants to silence. In a face-to-face classroom, teachers can deter-
mine from subtle clues whether students' silence signifies fascination
or daydreaming. But silence on a computer network is unfathomable;
it is intensely disturbing to address the electronic void. Hence the
"communication anxiety" of conferencing participants, especially
those with leadership roles (Feenberg, 1989).
Those who experimented with nondirective techiques had even more
disappointing results. No one seemed to understand their all too brief
questions, and so they too faced a wall of silence. Later we understood
that it takes far more nerve to admit confusion and ask for clarification
in a written medium than face-to-face. Days passed as the students and
faculty wondered, each in their respective corners, what was going on.
The lack of tacit cues such as raised eyebrows or puzzled looks proved
fatal to this teaching style in the online environment.
With the encouragement of our consultants, Peter and Trudy
Johnson-Lenz, I experimented with introductory comments several
screens in length designed to lay down explicit ground rules for discus-
sion, and then posed problems and asked questions illustrated by spe-
cific examples. This approach brought in the participants. Once they
were talking, the WBSI faculty made further discoveries.
Andrew Feenberg

Conferencing participants are uncomfortable unless they can act as

if they were substituting writing for speech in some more familiar
setting. They must treat the conference as a meeting, a discussion
group, even a cocktail party in order to establish shared expectations.
Without a reassuring communication model, they are fearful of writing
the wrong thing and withdraw into the perfect silence of a blank screen
(Feenberg, 1989). With this in mind, faculty imposed a framework of
norms and expectations modeled on a college seminar.
To reproduce the seminar environment, one needs online equiva-
lents for such things as opening the discussion with a short orientation
session, calling on individuals to speak, assigning work to be delivered
in class, getting a sense of the group's wishes, and distributing short
readings for discussion and comment.
Just as students are discouraged when their comments are ignored in
the classroom, so they react negatively when their online messages get
no response. Most faculty accepted responsibility for replying to every
otherwise unanswered message, as they would in a classroom.
CMC courses are necessarily based on classroom discussion since
students quickly lose interest in lengthy online lectures that would be
more appropriately printed and distributed by mail. Teachers and par-
ticipants learned to input texts of medium length, no more than a page
or two, asking questions, responding, commenting on the subject at
hand. One hundred to two hundred such texts would compose a typi-
cal month-long seminar at WBSI.
As in a regular classroom, the teacher is responsible for provoking
and leading discussion. Accordingly, he or she must design an agenda
and supply a comment every few days to sustain the interaction. How-
ever, strict enforcement of the agenda discourages participation. This
points to the central problem and opportunity of teaching in the vir-
tual classroom.
Computer conferences tend to diverge toward multiple monologue
unless an active moderator works to keep participants on the subject.
But the subject may not be as focused as in a face-to-face setting. Often
it consists of several loosely related matters brought up simultaneously
in a multithreaded discussion. Each strand represents a participant's
personal path into the conference. To arrest the free flow of such a
conversation with frequent calls to order is likely to produce only vexed
withdrawal.
193 Building a Global Network: The WBSI Experience

Instead of trying to control conversation negatively, the teacher-

moderator must periodically offer what are called "weaving comments"
to identify the common threads holding the discussion together and
giving it unity. Such comments enable participants to move beyond
monologic personal viewpoints toward true dialogue and synthesis.
Weaving comments also help the group to achieve a sense of accom-
plishment and direction and supply it with a code for framing its
history by establishing a shared boundary between past, present, and
future. In advanced courses, teachers may assign this task to the stu-
dents themselves (Harasim, 1991), but, in any case, someone must
perform it. Weaving, I believe, is the key to online pedagogy.
Once we had made these basic discoveries, we tried to share them
with new teachers in a "moderating conference" where those who had
already taught on the network could prepare the newcomers. For a
while I led these conferences. Although we called it training, it actually
consisted of giving faculty practice participating in a discussion led by
someone else before they faced a virtual classroom.
Among the faculty I trained in this way were dozens of brilliant
scholars, most of whom, I am convinced, had never had a serious
pedagogical discussion before in their lives. No doubt they had never
needed to discuss the theory of an activity that came to them as
naturally as classroom teaching. But, confronted with the challenge of
an entirely new setting, they enjoyed debating pedagogical issues.
Extensive experience and discussion yielded pedagogical lessons that
formed the "lore" of the WBSI school, passed down from one group of
teachers to the next. Although some of these lessons would be less
relevant to online technical education than to our type of program, any
institution that introduces educational CMC should develop a base of
practical knowledge among its faculty and encourage its transmission.

Designing an Educational Interface

Computer conferencing was invented to overcome certain limitations

of electronic mail (or email). Email substitutes electronic transmission
for the delivery of pieces of paper, but it conserves the person-to-person
communication model of ordinary postal service. The postal model
depends in important respects on the use of paper as a medium. When
information is delivered in the form of sealed printed matter, a personal
194 Andrew Feenberg

addressee must break the seal and dispose of the information locally,
for example, by filing or forwarding it.
In principle, CMC can dispense with this social structure. The sender
transmits his or her message to a host computer where it is deposited
in a virtual file shared by all the members of the group, whatever their
location. Where users of the host computer all see the same files, one
has a bulletin board useful primarily for information exchange on a
relatively small scale. Private, topically designated discussion spaces are
defined for those with a shared interest on larger systems handling a
wider variety of participants and tasks. This structure supports continu-
ous small-group communication over long periods. Hence the name,
computer conferencing.
The change from email seems technically trivial, but one should not
underestimate the originality of designers such as Murray Turoff and
Jacques Vallee who first broke with the postal model and began finally
to realize the computer's potential in group communication.
Despite abandoning the person-to-person structure of email, early
conferencing systems shared many of its other features. Rationalistic
assumptions blinded designers to the specificity of group needs. They
believed that they could understand and organize communication logi-
cally, on a priori grounds, rather than sociologically, in terms of the
realities of actual experience. They took it for granted that users would
want to write on the computer equivalent of a blank page, a contextless
void. Designers sought the one best way to organize a generic commu-
nication process and referred to all messages by such neutral names
as topic, item, or comment. It is true that this was a plausible approach
in the early days of CMC, given the limitations of the available
equipment.
However, most online groups need a familiar framework adapted to
their culture and tasks. They are repelled by what might be called
contextual deprivation. This problem was masked at first by the fact
that experienced computer users, who were the first to try out the new
systems, recognized the computer itself as a sufficient context for their
interactions. But decontextualization was invariably perceived as con-
fusing and unfriendly by ordinary users, such as the participants in the
WBSI school.
The radical difference in outlook between the computing profession-
als who design programs and the ordinary people who use them shows
7 95 Building a Global Network: The WB5I Experience

up in other ways as well. Under the influence of their engineering

culture, software designers create powerful programs that are difficult
for these users to master.4 But outside engineering itself, simplicity, not
power, is a sine qua non of successful communications software.
The WBSI experience foreshadowed the type of user resistance that
has slowed the progress of educational CMC. Since most educational
organizations cannot create their own conferencing system from
scratch, they must either impose some engineer's conception of com-
munication on their members or take the risks of trying to adapt an
existing system to their own needs. The easier it is for participants to
withdraw from the program, the more important it becomes to make
the necessary adaptations.
WBSI's first technical director, Darrell Icenogle, addressed this prob-
lem by adding an extra layer of simplified commands tailored to our
users and sheltering them from the engineering culture embodied in
the underlying CMC program. This final command shell ran on the
users' terminals. It served both as communications and word-process-
ing software and as an interface to the conferencing system running on
the host.
Our discoveries in this domain came in two stages.
In 1983, at the invitation of the Department of Commerce, WBSI
organized a six-month computer conference on productivity in the
American economy for fifty chief executive officers of Fortune 500
companies. Portable computers were donated by the Kaypro Corpora-
tion, a pioneer in that field, and modems by Dennis Hayes. We as-
sumed, correctly, that if executives were difficult to get online, CEOs
would represent a worst-case scenario.
To solve this problem we built a radically simplified terminal inter-
face for EIES based on a software product called MIST developed by the
Johnson-Lenzes. This program automated the sign-on procedure and
included a local wordprocessor with prompted, single-key up- and
downloading from the terminal. These features made it possible to
abbreviate training without losing the audience. Most of the CEOs were
actually able to participate in the program.
Soon the WBSI school had its own interface to EIES called, at first,
the "Onion" and later "Passkey." This interface, designed to run on PCs
donated by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), was in continuous
use in one form or another throughout the later history of the school.
196 Andrew Feenberg

It proved extremely helpful in bringing international participants into

the program as we could incorporate a wide choice of local sign-on
procedures into the terminal program and spare our members some
fairly complex technical labor.
In 1987, DEC asked WBSI to evaluate VAX Notes, its own recently
released computer conferencing program. DEC also funded the devel-
opment of a prototype terminal interface for VAX Notes based on
Passkey. The result was the Social Factors Project which culminated in
the transfer of the WBSI management school from EIES to computers
running VAX Notes at the institute.
The aim of the project was to develop a framework for understanding
the transformation of the computer from a tool for individual users into
a medium of group activity. Computer conferencing, we argued, requires
electronic social environments every bit as complex as the buildings in
which face-to-face encounters take place. There is no generic answer to
the question of where to put walls, doors, and corridors. Architects and
interior designers must devise solutions corresponding to the antici-
pated needs of each type of user. So too, designers of CMC systems must
anticipate the group requirements of the users of their products. The
software's social architecture effects the success of online group com-
munication just as the location of chairs, tables, blackboards, and po-
diums effects face-to-face interaction (Feenberg and Bellman, 1990).
We recommended that DEC develop an advanced conferencing sys-
tem in which a common interface on the terminal and the host would
replace the usual clumsy process of connecting two separate programs.
Users would hardly be aware of where they were on this "client/server"
system. An integrated hypertext or videotex program would archive
incoming material for easy retrieval. Conference moderators such as
teachers would enjoy special facilities for organizing their work and
tracking participants. Network managers would be able to download
programs, directories, and assignments to groups of users at remote
locations, periodically retailoring their communications software as the
conferencing schedule advanced (Feenberg, 1986).
The interface was to be tailorable to group-specific tasks and needs,
such as project management, information exchange, and distance edu-
cation. Given our expertise in the latter, we concretized these ideas with
specifications for an educational version of VAX Notes. We identified
features that would be particularly important for this task, such as a
197 Building a Global Network: The WBSI Experience

simplified form-making functionality for quickly composing tests, ac-

cess to mathematical symbols, and so on. We contrasted such features
with others that might prove more important for groups engaged in
other activities, arguing that in each case the most important function-
alities should be "foregrounded" in the menus of the terminal program
while the rest would be available to sophisticated users in the back-
ground on the host.
DEC did eventually make an experimental in-house version of Pass-
key incorporating videotex but, surprisingly, their program was slow,
clumsy and difficult to use (Blackburn and Mason, 1991). The old
culture apparently overwhelmed the new.
Despite this disappointment, our ideas were not entirely stillborn.
Whether inspired by Passkey or independent in conception, a number
of similar interfaces have been developed over the last few years, and
new versions of EIES and Portacom, two early conferencing systems,
were recently released with built-in terminal interfaces. Lotus Notes, a
new and very powerful business system, was designed from the start to
have such an interface. It can fairly be said today that no conferencing
system should be considered state-of-the-art without this component.

Conclusion

Traditionally, correspondence courses and night schools have been

stepchildren of the academy, despised junior partners of undergraduate
residential education. This situation is changing today as lifelong learn-
ing becomes a reality for many white collar employees. The effects are
also felt by distance education, which has always served a large propor-
tion of adults.
These social trends have improved the climate for networking experi-
ments (Eurich, 1990). As WBSI demonstrated, CMC can create a new
kind of planetary classroom in which students and teachers from all
over the world will be able to meet and exchange ideas. Distance
education need no longer languish in the shadow of conventional
college teaching. Given imagination and support, the learning society
will emerge as a global computer network.
 Computer Conferencing and the
New Europe

Robin Mason

Context

Powerful forces lie behind the current drive to unite, or at least inte-
grate, various European countries into a single community. Although
economic considerations are undoubtedly central, the growing aware-
ness that nation-states are interdependent at levels far beyond the eco-
nomic, is playing a significant part in the many initiatives drawing
Europeans closer together. National political considerations may be the
major factors in resisting unification, but undoubtedly a basic lack of
understanding of the cultural differences among the various European
countries is also a significant deterrent.
Technological advances in communications are directly related to the
dynamics of this phenomenon of globalization.

A major factor is that telecommunications in particular, and information tech-

nologies in general, are no respecters of national political borders. An event in
one country can have immediate impact in another, because of the speed with
which information flows, and because of the dramatic form in which it can be
presented. Events, issues and problems can no longer be contained within a
country or a region; if significant, they become global events, global issues, or
global problems. (Robinson, 1991)

The liberating power of communications was forcefully underlined

by the recent dramatic events in Central and Eastern Europe—email
messages describing events and emotions were available on the net-
works all over the world. It is no longer possible for governments to
retain control over the dissemination of information. In fact, wide-
spread dissemination of information, through education and training,
200 Robin Mason

is one of the cornerstones of the Commission of the European Com-

munities program:

We at the Commission are convinced that the combined activities of training,

learning and education are probably the key factors for the future of Europe,
both in economic growth as well as the improvement in the quality of life.
(Majo, 1991)

Telecommunications technologies are seen by the commission as the

key to increasing the amount of education and information dissemina-
tion while keeping the costs realistic. Both terrestrial and satellite com-
munication systems that support electronic mail and computer
conferencing, and host computer-based training programs, expert sys-
tems, and a vast range of databases, are providing the foundations for
networking education, industry, and local communities. Three main
needs can be met by the development on a European scale of a telecom-
munications network.

1. Development of intercultural understanding

2. Updating training facilities for small and medium-sized enterprises
3. Meeting the demand for lifelong education

The most obvious inhibiting factor to a European-wide education

and training program is the extent of linguistic and cultural diversity
among the participants. The search for pedagogical techniques, for
technological solutions, and for program strategies to cope with this
diversity is a major part of present research and development work.
Providing real interaction between different cultures is just one of the
strategic ways of using an electronic network.
Meeting the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)—
for professional updating, for exchange of information, and for access
to new technologies—is also paramount to the development of eco-
nomic strength and competitiveness in Europe. A computer network
can not only link small organizations together but also provide access
to a central database of information and training facilities.
Finally, although distance education has for a long time been more
accepted and legitimated in Europe than in North America, the call for
lifelong education and the increasingly frequent need to update tech-
nical training have promoted telecommunications to the forefront of
201 Computer Conferencing and the New Europe

pan-European educational programs because of the convenience,

flexibility, and cost benefit compared to traditional face-to-face training
programs.
The purpose of this chapter is to examine the ways in which elec-
tronic networking applications have met the challenge of the European
context and contributed to the development of a "European village." A
wide range of networking examples are mentioned as they illuminate
particular European issues; this general discussion is followed by a
detailed case study of one project that shows these issues in context.

The Role of the Commission of the European Communities

The spread of electronic networks across Western Europe is very un-

even, mainly due to the policies of individual governments in relation
both to telecommunications and to education and training. France and
the United Kingdom are undoubtedly the most advanced:

French telecommunications policy has resulted in the most advanced infra-

structure, based on the TRANSPAC packet switched system, whilst the UK's
deregulation policy has increased the availability of terminal equipment (e.g.,
modems and fax) and hence access to commercial and educational networks.
The other European nations are slowly catching up, but in most countries,
access to networks is still rigidly controlled and hence too expensive for general
education. (McLure and Heap, 1990)

However, the Commission of the European Communities (EC) has

had a major impact on the growth of networks throughout Europe, not
only through its support of economic harmonization and technical
standardization but also through its funding of a variety of research and
development programs involving electronic networking. Two of their
many programs that have implications for the development of net-
works are COMETT and DELTA. COMETT is a program that fosters
collaboration between universities and industry to improve the level of
training and to give it a European dimension. DELTA focuses on the
development of European learning through technological advance. It
funds projects that aim to give tangible results for Europe as a whole,
"as regards increased reelings of solidarity, the strengthening of cul-
tural, social and intellectual diversity, reduction in the inequalities of
opportunity and the removal of language barriers" (Rebel, 1990). In
202 Robin Mason

terms of networking, three environments are promoted for develop-

ment: the corporate training situation, the institutional education set-
ting, and the home environment.

The Added Value of Electronic Networks

The proliferation of network applications with a pan-European dimen-

sion demonstrates a certain acceptance that there is educational and
European "added value," relative to the costs, in using telecommunica-
tions-based strategies. The benefits found from a wide range of projects
can be summarized in five categories.
1. Promoting cultural awareness
2. Supporting language learning
3. Providing efficient and flexible education and training
4. Facilitating business partnerships and community projects
5. Enabling research and development on advanced technologies

Cultural Awareness
As with cross-national exchanges of all nonelectronic sorts, many net-
working applications have as a major objective the fostering of inter-
cultural understanding and awareness. What telecommunications adds
to other intercultural programs is speed of exchange:
The instant response that is possible when using Email makes it a motivating
force for many students. Moreover, being able to write for a real audience is a
powerful stimulus that can transform the attitude of a class and develop stu-
dents' ability to write well... Furthermore, the value of the opportunity simply
to make friends should not be underestimated, since in the process a great deal
of information about social and cultural background can be exchanged.
(Milligan, 1991)

Milligan is referring to an Anglo-Dutch email project for primary

school children, sponsored by Shell and organized by the National
Council for Educational Technology (NCET) in the United Kingdom.
Another provider of intercultural electronic services is Campus 2000,
which offers the most extensive online facilities to educational institu-
tions in the United Kingdom. In addition to a wide variety of databases,
Campus 2000 provides group mailing facilities for schools as well as the
conferencing system, Caucus. It has actively fostered links with Euro-
203 Computer Conferencing and the New Europe

pean schools and teaching institutions and provides links to thousands

of users with compatible email systems in Europe and other parts of the
world. For example, it has been connected by a gateway link to Edutel,
the teacher information service supplied by the French Education Min-
istry; thirty-six schools in both France and the United Kingdom took
part in six curriculum-based projects during 1991. Similarly provision
has been made for up to one hundred German schools to have direct
access to Campus 2000 to take part in a program of collaborative
communication projects. The aim of its European Studies Project is to
provide an environment in which pupils can work together on joint
projects with an international dimension and cooperate in research on
contemporary European issues.
The system is used for pen pal exchanges between students wanting
to practice their use of foreign languages, but group events also take
place. For example, two schools in England and a school in Germany
launched a new activity based on the Campus Satellite Education Proj-
ect. Pupils aged thirteen simultaneously viewed a selection of news
broadcasts on the ASTRA satellite in German and English. For two
hours a rapid exchange of electronic mail took place from both sites in
response to what was viewed. The organizer of the event from England
commented that he believed communicating with Campus 2000 pro-
vided exciting new links across international borders and had the po-
tential to provide genuine sources for foreign language material. He also
felt its greatest contribution was in helping to establish more informed
and more enlightened Europeans.
PLUTO is a loose cooperation of individuals and institutions in-
volved with teaching and teacher training in Europe and engaging
electronically in exchange of ideas, experiences, and educational mate-
rial related to the classroom in many subjects. The participants are
faculty members at teacher training colleges or universities, student
teachers, classroom teachers and their students at general and special
schools, and, trainers for in-service training institutions of private en-
terprises. At present they have email connections with participants
from over fourteen European countries and are making many contacts
into Eastern Europe. One of the goals of the project is the development
of European cooperation:

It is clear that the future of the world depends more than ever upon global
cooperation. It is also clear that the proper use of the technologies now available
204 Robin Mason

to us will do much to foster that cooperation. It seems vital, therefore, that we

move as rapidly as possible to a situation in which pupils in any one country
regard it as entirely normal that, as a part of their week-by-week classroom
activity, they should be working alongside (in an electronic sense) their peers
from other countries. Already, there are very few technical barriers to such
cooperation; the barriers that exist are as much fiscal, political and perhaps
psychological as anything. (Gwyn, 1991)

Although the project has only an email and file transfer capability,
the aim has been to move beyond pen pal activity to create a setting in
which classes could collaborate in joint European projects based on
shared databases, spreadsheet, and desktop publishing activities.
One of the major problems faced by all pan-European networking
projects at the primary and secondary school level is the difference in
curricula among the various countries. Furthermore, there is a remark-
ably small window of "common time" in which schools in two or three
countries are available for joint projects (due to different holiday, ex-
amination, and term times). Yet many evaluations of interschool net-
working projects conclude that the first criteria for success is that the
networking element be fully integrated into the classroom activity;
otherwise, it is soon perceived as a time-consuming, frustrating, addi-
tional extra.

CMC between two classrooms is a complex business—in effect team teaching at

a distance—and requires extensive and detailed planning between the teachers
concerned. (Somekh, 1989)

This issue is discussed in greater depth in the case study at the end of
the chapter.

Language Learning
The benefits that electronic interaction brings to language learning
are related to the opportunity to use the foreign language in context,
often with native speakers. Experience shows that students using com-
puter conferencing in second-language learning spend more time writ-
ing and are encouraged to be more creative than their traditional
counterparts (Smith, 1990). The need for foreign language skills in the
European context is of such importance that many computer language
projects have been instituted both in the educational and business
environments.
205 Computer Conferencing and the New Europe

A report commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Education on the

use of telecommunications applications in secondary schools in Europe
concludes:

Of the more than 67 projects that we studied for our research, almost all
involved computer-mediated communication, mostly for second-language
practice or for improving cultural awareness. A few of the projects were associ-
ated with well-known U.S.-based projects and networks, but most are European
in origin. (Collis, 1991b)

Collis goes on to describe the European Schools Project, originating

from Amsterdam, which organizes "teletrips," each involving schools
in more than one country, and based on local research projects gener-
ally organized around language and geography.
Campus 2000 facilitates many language-learning exchanges and pro-
vides access to the FELINE database's modern languages section which
consists of carefully selected authentic texts taken from French, Ger-
man, and Spanish satellite TV news broadcasts. Each text is accompa-
nied by exercises at an appropriate level, and can be retrieved for
printing out complete with all diacritics.
Berlitz has also begun using computer conferencing in its language
teaching for the corporate market. On the basis of earlier trials, it is now
planning a European Electronic Language School to continue the use
of computer networking in European-wide language and personnel
development programs.
Email, conferencing, and fax are the main tools in another European
language project originating from Preston College in the United King-
dom and including five other countries. The networking facilities will
be used not only for students to practice language skills but also for
teachers to develop joint teaching material. One of the problems en-
countered in previous exchanges, where students actually visit the
country of their second language, was the incompatibility of syllabuses
and teaching methods. By using jointly written material and a commu-
nications medium to develop ideas and discuss differences, it is hoped
to facilitate educational exchange programs across various European
countries.

Efficient and Flexible Education and Training

It is now recognized in this "information age" that continuous training
and updating of the workforce is a necessity and, therefore, that tradi-
206 Robin Mason

tional face-to-face teaching solutions cannot meet this need either

in quantity or quality. Many information technologies require tele-
communications, and hence it makes pedagogical sense to use tele-
communications for training in this field. Using computer confer-
encing and electronic mail in the training process brings still further
benefits.

• Flexibility as to time and place of training, enabling remote or local

access to training materials
• Active and interactive opportunities for the learner, so that distance
learning can be as exciting and collaborative as face-to-face training
• Efficient use of specialized teachers and tutors, putting at the learners'
disposal, the know-how and the expertise wherever they exist

JANUS is a DELTA project to develop an interactive satellite link with

voice and data communications for European distance education and
training. Site-to-site transmission will be handled by satellite, while
local area networks and telephone systems will continue to deliver the
data to the individual student's home. One of the goals of the project
is to support joint authoring of courses by members of the European
Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU). However:

Another goal is for students and faculty members at universities belonging to

JANUS to be able to access the network through ordinary CMC connections,
even from their home PCs using ordinary modems and existing public data
(terrestrial) networks. JANUS has as its task the planning of such a network,
which could develop into a "European Electronic University Network." (Collis,
1991a)

The 1992 European regulations regarding higher education require

teaching institutions to make their courses available to potential stu-
dents from any EC country. The JANUS network will make it possible
for distance teaching universities to support their courses across Europe
via computer conferencing, synchronous voice transactions, and data
transfer. Trials of the network will begin in 1992.
EPOS is another DELTA project involving a consortium of European
national telephone and telecommunications utilities interested in de-
veloping an open learning service, initially for the in-service training
of their employees. Their aim is to promote an online training system
that is accepted by trainees and caters to the enormous differences in
207 Computer Conferencing and the New Europe

approach to education and training throughout European countries. In

addition to looking at broadband technologies available with ISDN, the
project has considered computer conferencing. The project leader from
the Italian telephone company, SIP, says:

For several years now the scientific community has been making intensive use
of electronic mailing and conferencing systems for its daily work. All that is
required to apply this technology to the world of distance learning is some
relatively simple development work to improve the user friendliness of existing
academic systems. This means nothing more than achieving the quality of the
best commercial products. (Walker, 1991)

A third European networking project, called COSYS, aims to design

and implement a production and delivery system for open and flexible
education and training materials. The rationale behind the project is
that there is currently too much fragmentation among course produc-
ers, publishers, and course providers. None have the resources to invest
in the production of high-quality multimedia courseware for a Euro-
pean market. Production solely for national markets is of limited com-
mercial interest, and cooperation between public and private providers
seems necessary to meet the diversified needs of the European training
market. The advent of desktop publishing has meant that most course
material is available on disk. However, the main impediment to the
reuse, updating and repackaging of this material is the lack of standardi-
zation of the computer-based tools. This project, therefore, will use
hypermedia systems to make available multimedia course material—ar-
ticles, extracts, graphics, video, and other raw teaching material—elec-
tronically through email, computer conferencing, online databases,
and high-speed connection through ISDN. Users of the system—train-
ers and other course providers—can browse through the system and get
an overview of existing course material within a given learning domain
and then pick and mix different modules and categories of course
material according to the actual educational situation: in a classroom,
on-the-job distance learning, self-study material, training of trainers, or
in-house training.
All three of these projects are investigating in different ways the
provision of networked training and education across European bor-
ders. All three are tackling the problem denned by Collis in her state-
of-the-art report on telecommunications-based training in Europe:
208 Robin Mason

In Europe, cross-national means not only cross-regulatory, but also cross-lan-

guage and cross-cultural, involving layers of important considerations with
respect to the cost-effectiveness of broad-scale training. (Collis, 1991a)

These particular projects have now moved beyond the pilot, experi-
mental stage and on to implementation and validation.

Facilitating Business Partnerships and Community Projects

One of the most established uses of widespread electronic networks is
undoubtedly the opportunity to coordinate joint projects with partners
in various countries and time zones. Multinational corporations, such
as Digital Equipment Corporation, have been using their in-house con-
ferencing system for some time to manage projects both within the
company and in some cases with clients and other experts. In the
context of Europe, networks are also used to facilitate finding part-
ners for joint projects, both in the commercial and noncommercial
sectors.
EuroKomis a conferencing and file transfer service designed to sup-
port research teams, businesses, and government organizations in their
communications requirements. The host for the system is situated in
Dublin and is based on a version of PortaCom, one of the most com-
monly used conferencing systems in Europe. It was originally estab-
lished by the EC to support the research participants of its various
development programs, coordinating and managing projects that have
multinational and multi-institutional users. Although the explosion of
networking in Europe in the last two years has changed the balance,
EuroKom was probably the most heavily used conferencing system
operating in Europe.
In many ways, the most exciting and innovative uses of European
networking spring from the community sector. Manchester, England, is
the first of a growing number of "networked cities" being sponsored by
local, national, and EC funding. By establishing a computer informa-
tion and communications service, Manchester offers local businesses
and community organizations cheap, easy access to powerful computer
facilities as well as a gateway to European partnerships. Manchester is
part of a consortium of nearly a dozen European cities aiming to set up
similar facilities. Some have a definite community bias; others are pri-
marily aimed at business, particularly SMEs. The one in Crete, for
209 Computer Conferencing and the New Europe

example, wants to facilitate small farmers' access to pricing fluctuations

in the vegetable market in other European countries.
Many established nonelectronic networks have begun to put parts of
their services online. One example is the IRIS network, set up in 1988
by the EC to facilitate the vocational training of women. Two years later
a bulletin board was established for the service, allowing members of
the network to post information announcing training programs, call-
ing for cooperative partners and exchanges, or requesting further par-
ticulars of courses. Similarly, BC-Net is a business cooperation network
set up to bring together potential partners for European businesses
interested in transnational cooperation. BC-Net advisers analyze, with
the aid of a coding system, the cooperation opportunities proposed by
enterprises, forward them to the central unit in Brussels to carry out the
matching operation, handle the replies from Brussels, and occasionally
participate in the negotiations leading to business cooperation agree-
ments. This network makes it possible to help SMEs participate more
easily in EC-funded research programs while smoothing the difficulties
standing in the way of cooperation between firms in different member
states. This service is now being made available on the Manchester
host.
GeoNet, with a truly international user base, originates in Germany.
Its email and information system is one of the largest in Europe,
although it is not run by a large corporation. Systems are operated
by independent companies that collaborate through the GeoMail
Association.
Using the GeoNet backbone is a consortium of Electronic Village
Halls. This concept of "telecottages" was originally developed in Scan-
danavian countries to provide isolated village communities with access
to data processing, telecommunications, and computer-based training.
Instead of linking individual households to the network, advanced
technology facilities are concentrated within a teleservice center, which
is thus at the disposal of the entire local community to be used in a
number of different business and community activities. As similar fa-
cilities are being set up in other European countries—Germany, Greece,
the United Kingdom, and Ireland—the sites are linked through a gate-
way so that local groups have access to a much larger community. New
sites get advice on how established sites overcame various problems,
and ideas and experience are swapped through the mailbox facility.
Robin Mason

Poptel, which operates on GeoNet from a London base, provides

electronic networking for the noncommercial and nongovernmental
community. One active group on its system includes the various mem-
bers of the European trade union institutes. Another small but growing
use is that by the cooperative movement, known as the Industrial
Common Ownership Movement. Exchange of information and coordi-
nation of projects are the primary benefits, although communication
with the former East Germany and Poland is also a benefit as it is
presently easier through GeoNet than by telephone. Although the bul-
letin board facilities on GeoNet are theoretically comparable to those
of a conferencing system (ability to comment on messages and divide
topics into separate conference areas), it is interesting that the kind of
interaction typical of most GeoNet messages is businesslike, practical,
and hard-edged. The sort of chatty, discursive conversations charac-
teristic of most conferencing interactions never developed on GeoNet.
Several aspects of the use of networking by the private, community-
based sector are worthy of note. First of all, one of the main deterrents
to further use of electronic networking in this area is the technology
itself. Communications software is still too difficult for the naive and
isolated user; the computer jargon of most manuals and support staff is
off-putting, and the logging on procedures are considered tortuous.
Second, leaders of these community-based projects are aware of the
importance of influencing the development of telecommunciations
policy on a European scale. The needs of the private, noncommercial
sector are, in many respects, quite different from those of the business
and education lobbies which tend to dominate policy making and
funding allocations. Despite the rhetoric, business approaches are in-
herently competitive, not collaborative. They tend to judge computer
networks on their ability to save money (on travel or fax), or to adver-
tise their products, or to access information. The community uses of
networks are fundamentally more collaborative, more interactive and
hence more in line with the basic structure of networking. The uses that
community-based projects make of networks are, perhaps, more imagi-
native and truly innovative (see Rheingold, chap. 4). The networking
needs of the nonprofit sector must be given due weight by policymak-
ers, as ultimately these applications could be the most enduring uses of
electronic interactivity (see Kapor and Weitzner, chap. 18).
211 Computer Conferencing and the New Europe

Research and Development on Advanced Technologies

Networked projects are the focus of considerable research and develop-
ment work in Europe. How can networking be exploited for teaching
advanced technology, while at the same time appealing to trainees
from different cultures in SMEs? As computer and telecommunication
technologies have penetrated both the manufacturing and service sec-
tor at a growing rate in Europe, certain high-tech sectors have begun to
experience skill shortages that threaten Europe's economic competi-
tiveness. Many of the DELTA and COMETT research projects have test-
ing and validation phases, during which various advanced learning
technologies are implemented in pilot settings. Several projects attempt
to assess the adequateness of particular technologies for different mar-
ket segments and include cross-cultural comparisons. By setting up
experimental test-situations in which trainers and technologists can
pilot new techniques, the EC will be able to participate in the evolution
of telecommunications strategies for teaching and training.
EuroPACE, a consortium of industrial and university partners, offers
a unique distance-learning environment in Europe by means of satellite
transmission. Presenters, who are experts in state-of-the-art technolo-
gies, offer short courses that are delivered to nearly two hundred indus-
trial and academic receiving sites and viewed asynchronously by groups
of mainly European company professionals and managers as well as
university staff and postgraduate students. Although all participants
and lecturers have access to the computer conferencing system PACE-
COM, the most extensive use of the system is for coordination among
the managers of the various receiving sites. However, the conferencing
system provides more successful support for the live events that
EuroPACE also transmits on its satellite channel:

It has been argued that asynchronous and text-based computer-mediated inter-

activity fits better into a multi-lingual environment than audio-based interac-
tivity . . . The use of PACECOM for teacher-learner communication during our
monthly live programs has increased during the last year. Most users seem to
prefer to address the teachers through PACECOM, rather than putting the
questions by telephone, directly to the teachers in the studio. The choice is free.
(Nipper, 1991)

Two projects from the DELTA exploratory phase (1989/90) also used
computer conferencing along with other telecommunications media to
carry out research on cross-national learning environments. The OLE
212 Robin Mason

project (Organizational Learning in Enterprises) set up a multimedia

virtual classroom, using existing technology to simulate an ISDN net-
work between workers in shoe production factories in Denmark and
Portugal. The project combined slow-scan television image exchange
through a picture telephone with a computer conferencing system and
local PC support. The major findings of the project related to the
problems of collaborative teaching in multisite settings. The second
project, OLEW (Open Learning Experimental Workshop) aimed to test
the main features of an open learning educational environment for the
skilled and professional market, using computer and video conferenc-
ing to link various European sites.
The second phase of the DELTA program is under way. Partners in
each project must represent at least two member states and usually
include universities, SMEs, large industrial partners, and government
agencies. "The stimulation of this sort of large-scale initiative is provid-
ing a substantial impetus to the investigation of telecomunications-
based possibilities for learning and training" (Collis, 1991a).
Although many more European networking projects could be listed
in this way, a more useful approach is to look in detail at one particular
example and to draw out the lessons from a well-documented and
evaluated application.

ELNET Case Study

The Centre for Electronic Communications and Open Support Systems

in Education is based at the Southampton Institute in the United King-
dom. It was supported by the U.K. Department of Education and
Science to research the educational application of electronic communi-
cations technologies and to support teachers in implementing new and
emerging computer-based systems within their curriculum. The U.K.
Department of Employment funded CECOMM to run a three-year proj-
ect establishing an electronic network of educational establishments in
the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. ELNET, the European Busi-
ness and Languages Learning Network, was therefore set up among
institutes of higher education in the three countries to carry out group
activities within the principal curriculum areas of business and lan-
guage studies. The aims of the project were:
213 Computer Conferencing and the New Europe

• To develop strategies for learning in multicultural groups

and secondarily,

• To develop a low-cost, telecommunications-based European distrib-

uted communications infrastructure
• To investigate the organizational impact of cross-cultural learning
groups
• To develop techniques and models for managing distributed learning
systems

Fifteen colleges in the three countries were matched to engage in

cross-institutional collaboration.

"Virtual College" Design

ELNET initially saw its role as obtaining agreements from the various
colleges to work in learning partnerships where each of the pairs would
design the curriculum strategies, lead the interaction, and provide the
content and other resources. In short, the ELNET team would act as
facilitators and network providers only. Although this approach worked
well with some colleges, it broke down completely with others:

It became evident that the learning partnership approach restricted the use of
the medium. This is because as students and tutors became familiar with the
medium it became clear that anybody could talk to anybody. (Davies, Davies,
and Jennings, 1992)

As the project progressed, this devolvement of responsibility for

teaching to the colleges was seen as only one way of using ELNET. A
clear demand for the centralized provision of learning experiences and
resources emerged. One of the reasons involved the difficulties over
partner availability during vacations, term times, work placements,
national holidays and so forth. Another reason related to the limited
view of single conferencing "classrooms"—in fact, students made valu-
able contacts across the partnerships, and even outside the ELNET
network altogether (as Caucus has distributed nodes in the United
States and Japan).
The ELNET team therefore reappraised its approach at the midpoint
of the project and decided to take a more interventionist approach,
offering content in addition to infrastructure. They set up a conference
Robin Mason

called Eurodesk, an intensive, mutJlingual, competitive simulation

game. Working in teams, students responded to a barrage of news items
in three languages (some of it spurious), simulating a news wire service.
They had to collate the information and write a report to an imagined
American business partner. This required each group to collect the news
items each day, translate them, work out the key emphasis of each one,
combine and compare them with earlier items, prioritize according to
significance, and produce recommendations and a summary of the
items. ELNET also developed a teaching simulation called EcoEurope,
which involved environmental issues, this time requiring teams from
two countries.

Technological Infrastructure
Part of the ELNET project was the development of the conferencing
system, Caucus, into an easily accessed, multilingual, distributed host.
In fact, these technological goals of the project were much easier to
achieve than its social and pedagogical ones. Caucus is now available
in English, French, and German, with transmission of multilingual
character sets across public data networks. Conferences are distributed
between French and U.K. hosts (a German host proved impossible to
set up within the time frame) with updating procedures at regular
intervals. Local dialup facilities were established in all three countries,
ensuring low-cost access.
One technical shortcoming remains to be resolved, although it is not
specific to ELNET (see Shapard, chap. 15, for a discussion of the ASCII
problem for Asian languages): the full sets of French and German
characters cannot easily be generated and do not appear on all com-
puter screens and printers:

It is appreciated that this is a thorny issue, dating back to the establishment of

the ASCII norm, which has plagued IT specialists ever since they began to deal
with language teachers. However, it is a problem which needs a solution, as
language teachers can still argue against the use of technology because 'the
students will never learn to spell correctly'. It is hoped that the introduction of
the ISO norm and the use of a graphical interface will overcome this problem
once and for all. (Davies, 1992)

Davies also highlights the difficulties involved in developing lan-

guage interfaces for conferencing systems; namely, that it requires the
right mix of skills bridging at least three disciplines flanguages, infor-
215 Computer Conferencing and the New Europe

mation technology, and communications) to find appropriate transla-

tions for a host of unfamiliar lexical terms.

Organizational Issues
Integrating networking technology into existing educational institu-
tions was identified as a major challenge by the ELNET team from the
start. The implications for each institution in taking part in the ELNET
project consisted of at least four distinct activities:

1. Designation of tutors and technology

2. Identification of multilingual student groups in the curriculum area
3. Negotiation of curricula, topics, and teaching methods with partners
abroad
4. Allocation of time to learn to use and teach via the technology

With little or no special funding to the institutions for hardware,

tutors' additional time, or telephone costs, the project was founded
almost entirely upon good will. In the case of the U.K., decisions about
resource allocation are made at the institutional level. Furthermore,
U.K. tutors adopt a fairly flexible attitude to demands of their work,
such that additional duties are generally undertaken without expecta-
tion of extra payment. In France, these decisions are taken at a regional
level. Conditions of employment are such that tutors' duties are clearly
laid out, and any additional work must be handled by additional fund-
ing. Thus, despite wholehearted commitment of the institution to the
project, progress was dependent on different elements within the edu-
cational system.
Nevertheless, learning groups were established across the fifteen
sites, although the time taken to work through institutional differences
meant that less was achieved by the groups than was originally
envisaged.
Access to machines by the various students in the project brings out
another aspect of the cultural difficulties facing international electronic
networking. The attitude toward the provision of IT resources in U.K.
schools has moved beyond the idea of an exclusive preserve of IT
teachers to one of open access. Consequently, U.K. students used EL-
NET at their convenience in open access rooms. Female students in
particular were enthusiastic users, developing networks with other users
216 Robin Mason

on the system. The situation in France is completely opposite: IT is seen

as a specialty to be strictly controlled by IT experts. Equipment is kept
locked up, access is difficult to arrange and is always mediated by a
tutor. Messages were not input by students, therefore, but by tutors or
occasionally by IT specialists. The situation in German colleges lies
somewhere between these extremes. IT equipment is located in special-
ized rooms and is controlled, but not as strictly as in French schools.
German messages were input by individual students or by a student
leader of the team. However, the enthusiasm, dedication, and focus of
the Germans resulted in their overall input equalling that of the U.K.
students—despite the fact that they joined the system nearly one year
after the students of the other two countries! The French input
amounted to only about 15 percent overall, while the Germans deluged
the system when entry for them was finally arranged, and they over-
whelmed the others with questions, information, and enthusiastic
interactions.

Curriculum Integration
Integrating conferencing activities into the ongoing curriculum of the
classroom is the sine qua non of successful educational networking (see
also Riel, chap. 13 and Teles, chap. 16). This integration proved fraught
with difficulties in the European context where not only are curricula
very different but teaching methods are as well. French colleges were
unable to make any changes to the strict and stringent studies curricu-
lum laid down by the Ministry of Education. They managed to partici-
pate in the multidisciplinary approach of ELNET only by each separate
tutor (of physics, geography, economics, and languages) dealing with a
common subject (for example, nuclear energy). The two simulation
games run by ELNET were impossible for the French to partake in, as
they simply did not fit into the rigid categories of French timetables
and subject areas. German schools also have a fairly controlled curricu-
lum but are not nearly so inflexible as their French counterparts. One
German school managed most of their participation in ELNET after
normal school hours, for example. Fortunately, the U.K. colleges had
much greater flexibility regarding curriculum covered, methods of
teaching, and scheduling in the school year. Consequently the U.K.
colleges could bend to the stricter demands of the other two countries.
217 Computer Conferencing and the New Europe

Finally, both German and French attitudes toward the social chat con-
ference were uniformly hostile; their orientation was entirely toward
work-based conferences. The cafe conference was therefore inhabited
primarily by U.K. students.
Despite this lack of compatibility, or perhaps because of it, one of
the positive outcomes noted by tutors in the project was the impact
of ELNET on curriculum integration. For instance, French teachers
gathered together for the first time to discuss common curricula and
discovered areas of overlap in their teaching. Opening up discussion
about teaching methods across national borders was also stimulating
for tutors.

Language Learning
The major advantage of the computer conferencing system as a tool for
language learning is the opportunity it provides for communication in
a natural context with native language speakers. ELNET aimed to foster
cross-cultural group learning through a student-centered approach.
Some of the best examples of authentic communication took place within
the less tightly structured conferences—those where the students were allowed
to respond in their own way once the theme had been introduced. (Davies,
1992)

However, it was also apparent that only students with adequate lan-
guage skills benefited from this approach. Consequently a number of
teacher-directed activities were initiated, such as the Eurodesk simula-
tion. Where teachers accompanied this by a tightly managed series of
classroom activities taking place simultaneously offline, it was highly
successful.
The project identified a major obstacle to further cross-cultural lan-
guage learning projects, whether online or not: the lack of good second
language learning among most U.K. students.

It is quite clear from my observations of the conferences taking place within

ELNET that most UK students are at an enormous linguistic disadvantage com-
pared to their French and German partners, especially the latter. This was
underlined by comments and observations by teachers in all three countries.
Only those UK students who are studying languages at A-level appear to be
deriving the maximum benefit from ELNET. All other UK students appear to be
floundering in waters that are far too deep for them. (Davies, 1992)
218 Robin Mason

Most U.K. students required a structured, teacher-directed approach;

otherwise all partners resorted to English as the lingua franca. German
students of the equivalent U.K. level spend three to four times as many
hours learning English as U.K. students spend in foreign language
learning. Additionally both French and German students are exposed
to considerably more English through films, music, and other aspects
of popular culture, and their need to learn English is more motivating
than the reverse is for U.K. students. Nevertheless, computer network-
ing was shown to be a valuable tool in foreign language learning; its
application to the European context merely needs refining in light of
the ELNET experience.

Summary of ELNET Outcomes

An obvious but nonetheless interesting outcome of the ELNET evalu-

ation was that the technology was perceived by the users to be a non-
issue. Students' experience of computer networking was positive and
easily acquired. Another finding common to many networking appli-
cations was that the length of time needed to implement conferencing
and produce a working, educational system far exceeded the expecta-
tions of the planners. Many of the tutors commented that after two
years of use, they were only just beginning to get a feel for how to
exploit it. Although users were generally positive about the ELNET
experience, the organizational and pedagogical problems are major
areas of concern for future projects of this kind. Face-to-face teaching
institutions are not organized to work laterally across other institutions
nor, for that matter, to work asynchronously. Furthermore, the time
overlap, when all the ELNET colleges were available for online work
throughout the school year, was only six weeks (from January to mid-
February). At all other times, only subsets of groupings were interact-
ing. Finally, the time, effort, and energy required on the part of tutors
to devise and sustain an intercultural online program was so significant
that it really cannot be contemplated without solid institutional sup-
port and funding. At the end of the three-year project, the funds for
sustaining the program at these schools had not been found. The lack
of resources at this level of educational provision in all three countries
led the ELNET team to conclude that, on the whole, this was the right
219 Computer Conferencing and the New Europe

technology in the wrong market. The development of computer con-

ferencing at a technical level is ahead of the curriculum and institu-
tional implications of its use.

Conclusions

The sheer number of networking applications that span European bor-

ders denotes success at one level. Electronic networking is clearly meet-
ing some of the communications needs of Europeans as they attempt
to integrate in corporate, educational, and community sectors. The
ELNET case study sets in a particular context both the positive aspects
of European networking—the opportunity to bridge linguistic, cultural
and educational differences—as well as the negative aspects—the prac-
tical, financial, and pedagogical problems.
Despite all this apparent activity, the present use of computer net-
working in Europe is not a runaway success story. The technical side of
the process—setting up suitable equipment, logging on, and acquiring
familiarity with online commands and procedures—is still a significant
hurdle for most users and a major deterrent to those who are isolated
without technical support. Second, the network infrastructure is still far
from adequate outside universities and large corporations and is very
expensive, even in Western Europe. An online course offered today
across Europe in which students were expected to log on from their
homes over telephone lines would probably have a very small market.
Finally, and most significantly, the actual take-up, sustained use, and
quality of interaction in many of the interactive online systems falls
considerably short of the potential of the medium. The evaluation
report on a computer conferencing network for graduate students and
tutors across the five Nordic countries concluded:

To learn how to use a new media [sic] is one matter. To learn how to integrate
it into day-to-day practices, is quite another. (Rasmussen, Bang, and Lundby,
1991)

Do all these examples amount to the development of a ''European

village''? The fact that people are communicating across European bor-
ders does not constitute a new community. The European village is still
a long way off, and given the rise of nationalism and ethnic differences
elsewhere in the world, the efforts to promote such a vision are working
220 Robin Mason

against the tide. Nevertheless, these networking activities are sig-

nificant in themselves, representing a will to understand and commu-
nicate and a desire to think beyond national borders. A fair conclusion,
then, is that individual projects are positive steps on the long march
toward a new, integrated Europe.
 73 Global Education through Learning Circles

Margaret Riel

The goal of global education is to promote multicultural sensitivity and

understanding of interdependent systems that operate in today's world
Ciye, 1991). Global education helps students to see that social prob-
lems, cultural issues, or economic relationships aren't constrained by
national boundaries.
Global education is not a new curriculum topic but a new approach
to interdisciplinary study across the curriculum. This process of educa-
tion requires a vision that comes from other domains. The aims of
global education are to help students see the complexity of the world
through the eyes and minds of people whose viewpoint is very different
than their own; to help students and teachers employ a systems ap-
proach to thinking about cause and effect in an international arena;
and to encourage learning and teaching about the history and culture
of all people. This approach seeks to promote a sense of global history,
an awareness of common human aspirations in a diverse world, and the
will and ability to tackle the great problems and issues facing all the
inhabitants of our planet.

Change In the Role of Teaching and Learning

A call for global education is a response to the changes in society and

requires an accompanying change in the classroom. But change in the
classroom will not occur unless teachers act as agents rather than as
objects of change. The global approach to education requires a change
in the role of the teacher and the learner. Most notably it involves
222 Margaret Riel

increased opportunities for collaborative problem solving, both for

teachers and students.
Teachers are currently isolated from their peers and from learning
opportunities because they spend most of their working time alone in
classrooms. The isolation of the teacher becomes reflected in a view of
learning as a process that takes place in the minds of students working
quietly at their desks. It is difficult to imagine how teachers working
alone in their classrooms are going to be able to provide students with
a worldwide perspective in a rapidly changing world.
Efforts to restructure schools address change in the role of the
teachers. They frequently recommend the development of school-site
management teams or restructuring teams composed of teachers,
administrators, parents, and community leaders. These efforts provide
teachers the experience of working in teams. These school-based teams
are playing an important part in changing schools, but their effective-
ness can be extended by increasing ties beyond the school setting. If we
want teachers to provide students with a global perspective, then it is
critically important to find ways to strengthen teachers' links to world
events and to global issues. Participation in a Networld (see Harasim,
chap. 2) is one way to accomplish this.

The Use of Communication Technology in the Classroom

Communication technology offers tools for promoting the global edu-

cation of students and teachers. Through international collaboration
on educational tasks, students can begin to appreciate the complexity
of issues and the consequences of actions. Teachers, working with their
peers in other countries, have a very wide range of instructional re-
sources to draw on for designing learning environments. With good
educational planning, communication technology can serve both as a
way to educate students and provide an ongoing learning context for
teachers that accomplishes the goals of global education.
When teachers and students engage in cooperative learning activities
mediated by computer networking, the power and speed of human
learning is extended by their collective knowledge and rich set of
experiences. Computer telecommunication provides a human context
for learning. These human networks—the connections established be-
223 Global Education through Learning Circles

tween people who are distant in time and space—can extend learning
in a social and global world.
The social skills needed to work in groups with distant partners do
not develop with the same speed as communication technology. Most
networks are arranged around a conference or party model (see Rhein-
gold, chap. 4) where individuals enter a shared electronic space that is
rich with possibilities. But it remains a difficult task to find or create a
project that meets the needs of a particular group of students. Student
and teacher time are valuable but limited resources that constrain the
search for educational activities on free-accesss networks.
Knowing how to plan, organize, and complete projects with distant
partners is far from trivial. Studies of network projects have found an
extremely low success rate (1-2 percent) among projects that are intro-
duced by individuals on open structure, free-access networks (Staple-
ton, 1992). Open computer access to people in distant locations does
not, in itself, stimulate creative thinking or integration of ideas. Infor-
mal or unfocused discussions on networks are time consuming and
offer little in terms of lasting educational change. But careful planning
has lead to some success in constructing new learning environments
for students (see also Mason, chap. 12 and Teles, chap. 16).

Global Education through Learning Circles

Learning circles are small electronic communities that form to accom-

plish specific goals (Riel, 1992). Students and teachers from a small
number of classrooms located around the world form a learning circle
to work together for a specified period of time to accomplish a common
goal. The AT&T Learning Network is organized into learning circles
because this task-oriented grouping provides an effective way to inte-
grate communication technology, classroom curriculum, and the aims
of global education. Teachers and students who share academic inter-
ests but represent different geographic or cultural perspectives are
grouped together.
Six to nine classes form a learning circle. Students in these classes
design and organize curriculum-based activities using computer tele-
communications. Learning circles on the Learning Network help stu-
dents share written information with distant peers in much the same
way as "circle time" or "sharing days" are used in primary grades to help
224 Margaret Riel

young students share verbal information with local peers. Students

conduct research on society's problems and global issues; compare his-
torical, geographic, and environmental concerns; and share local news,
events, and opinions with their peers.
Learning circles in the educational community, like "quality circles"
in the business community, involve participatory management by
teachers. No one teacher controls a learning circle. It is a collective
construction by the participants.
Curriculum-based educational projects are the central focus of learn-
ing circles with technology playing an essential but not highly visible
role. Instead the emphasis is on community-based research shared with
global partners as a way to make the impersonal and complex global
issues concrete and personal. Research that takes students into the
community looking for local clues of global patterns encourages cross-
curricular study, involves community members in school learning, and
helps students learn more about their own local community through
contrast with others.
Each classroom group in a learning circle helps create the circle
publication at the end of the session that summarizes the completed
work. This publication process helps students review and evaluate the
exchanges they had with students in other locations. The choices they
make about what to include in their final report and how to organize
the information helps them to organize what they learned.

Phases of a Learning Circle

Learning Circle interaction is structured by phases with goals and tasks

facilitating cooperative planning among the participants. Six phases
guide the interaction from the time the circle begins to the time it ends.

1. Getting ready: The first phase involves receiving and reviewing the
materials, and testing the communication software. A 24-hour help line
is available to assist in solving any connection problems.
2. Opening the circle: The second phase begins with a circle news
message welcoming participants to their learning circle and introduc-
ing the circle participants. Introductory activities are organized to help
teachers and students learn more about each other and the schools and
communities represented. Some introductory activities involve sending
materials through the postal mail as well as online.
225 Global Education through Learning Circles

3. Planning circle projects: Each class in a learning circle has the op-
portunity to sponsor a learning circle project centered on their curricu-
lum or interests. Sponsoring a project requires planning, requesting,
collecting, and analyzing information from other students, focused on
a topic or issue chosen to fit with the classroom curriculum.
4. Exchanging student work: Students send their work on each of the
projects sponsored by the other classes in a reciprocal teacher and
learner relationship. Students become reporters, authors, poets, or re-
searchers responding to the requests of other schools. Often a class is
divided into several small groups, and each group is responsible for
responding to one of the other class projects.
5. Organizing the circle publication: Students review and evaluate the
learning experience and organize the information received from their
peers into a summary that becomes part of the circle publication. Each
school distributes their summaries either online or through postal mail
to all the other classes. The circle coordinator also sends a cover page,
opening letter, list of schools, and table of contents.
6. Closing the circle: In the final week of the circle, students assemble
their circle publication. The project summaries received from each of
the schools are combined with material provided by the circle coordi-
nator and then published at each school. Students and teachers say
goodbye to their online partners and the session ends.

Global Education in the Local Context

Hanvey (1977) established five interdisciplinary goals for global educa-

tion. Using examples of student work drawn from learning circle inter-
actions, I illustrate how these goals are being accomplished through
collaborative work via computer telecommunications.

1. Perspective consciousness: An awareness of and appreciation for

other images of the world.
2. State of the planet awareness: An in-depth understanding of global
issues and events.
3. Cross-cultural awareness: A general understanding of the defining
characteristics of world cultures and an emphasis on understanding
similarities and differences.
226 Margaret Riel

4. Systemic awareness: A familiarity with the nature of systems and an

introduction to the complex and international system in which gov-
ernmental and nongovernmental actors are linked in patterns of inter-
dependence and dependence in a variety of issue areas.
5. Options for participation: A review of strategies for participation in
issue areas in local, national, and international settings.

Perspective Consciousness

Definitions of self come from understanding the self in relationship to

others. Learning circles on the AT&T Learning Network challenge stu-
dents to find ways to define themselves for others who live in distant
regions, often with very different social and cultural characteristics. In
"Classroom Surveys," with questions about themselves, their school,
their community, in the preparation of "welcome packs" sent by postal
mail students, and in circle projects, students are asked to reflect on
what sets them apart as special and what they share in common with
their peers in distant locations. These activities help students think
about symbolic representations and their meanings. Statues, flags, mu-
sic, natural formations, clothing styles, foods, preferences, and images
are used to represent what one group holds as important about them-
selves and their world.
These comparisons expose students to variable patterns of everyday
life resulting from different cultural adaptations to geographic and
climatic conditions. Both similarities and differences encourage stu-
dents to be more conscious of who they are and why they live the way
they do. For example:

Students discovered that their peers in the desert terrain of Cobber Pedy, Aus-
tralia, live in underground homes to escape the heat of the sun. These dugout
homes are neither heated nor cooled as the earth provides a constant pleasant
living temperature. Living in the ground, rather than on top of it, creates
different types of harmony with the environment. For example, underground
creatures, like snakes, sometimes block air passageways.

As students considered these differences, they gained a richer under-

standing of the choices that are involved in their own life patterns.

• Alaskan students described the "setting" of the sun in the fall and
attending school in the everyday of night.
227 Global Education through Learning Circles

• Students in the southern hemisphere sent revisions of Christmas

carols that describe holidays in the bright summer season sun.
• Messages arrive from Japan written on a day that has not yet arrived.

These experiences help students locate themselves in a global envi-

ronment and develop an understanding of how their unique location
on the earth is related to their experiences of day, night, seasons, and
time.
Learning circle interaction also makes it possible for students who
need more time to express their ideas or have language handicaps to
interact in a way that does not emphasize their difficulties. Students
from a lock-up juvenile detention center worked on projects with stu-
dents from a private college-preparatory school. The quality of the
finished work from these different groups was comparable, but the
social supports for those creating the work were very different. The
presentation of self can be very strong in this different format as is
evident in these two examples, one from a deaf student and the other
from a student in a school where all of the students are on probation.
These students challenge others to think about identity in different
ways.

To my circle friends,

MY FEELINGS ABOUT BEING DEAF IN THE HEARING WORLD

It's not easy being deaf in the hearing world because there are many
problems that you may confront. For example, some deaf people are
treated as if they were different or not normal. Sometimes a hearing
person who doesn't know about deafness acts as if we, as deaf people, are
not very intelligent. For example, some hearing people expect us to be
mute and only use sign language. They may think that we are very
helpless and are not able to lead good lives when we become adults.
I sometimes am confronted by others who never saw a deaf person speak-
ing. They would crowd around me and ask me a lot of questions. I've been
asked if I knew how to swim or ride a bicycle! It is kind of weird when I
am asked if I do things that most kids do. Especially if I think of myself
as a normal, ordinary kid who does everything but hear.
Most deaf kids can tell if a hearing person likes them or is pretending to
like them out of pity. We don't need pity if we are normal. It won't work
Margaret Riel

if you try to pretend to like a deaf person out of pity because they soon
won't want to be friends with you. We are somebody! A lot of deaf people
have gone on to become teachers, lawyers, actors, actresses, authors,
professors and so forth. We are human just like hearing people because
we make mistakes and learn from them. There are deaf people who prefer
to sign; there are deaf people who prefer to talk just like me. I am a
hearing person who cannot hear. I don't think of myself as a deaf person.

In fact I never did.

April

Desperate

Willy Ridgley
Thomas E. Mathews Community School
Marysville, CA

Starved for destination,

A beggar man by trade.
A desperate man needs more
Than someone else to blame.
Friendless,
It appears he hides behind his tears.
The things he's lost,
The things he will never have at all.
The forgotten man wanders
Misplaced in the world.
Obscurity is all that he sees and can recall.
He's all alone.
The destitute find meaning
In a different way of life.
The doorways that they dwell in
Are shelter for in the night
The shining crystal possessions
Are set out for his display.
His only purpose is to find food
To get him through the day.

All these contrasts challenge the unexamined assumptions that stu-

dents hold about their world. This exchange of images and symbols
helps students and teachers begin to understand both the similarities
and differences among people in different places.
229 Global Education through Learning Circles

State-of-the-Planet Awareness

Teaching is creating an environment that enables students to teach

themselves (Bredo, 1989). Research on peer tutoring suggests that
teaching something to someone else is a very good learning strategy. In
the reciprocal teaching and learning design of learning circles, each
class of students and their teacher sponsors, or teaches, one of the
projects in a learning circle. The other classes participate in, and learn
from, their involvement in these sponsored projects.
Many of these projects are organized to help students learn more
about the state of our planet. In fact, student-designed surveys of the
most important social problems of our time almost always place envi-
ronmental problems at the top of the list. For example:

• Students in British Columbia sponsored the "Environmental Investi-

gator" as their section of their collective newspaper, The Global Grape-
vine. They asked the eight schools in their learning circle for essays or
poetry centered on local environmental issues. They sent out and pub-
lished the results of their survey on the environment and invited stu-
dents in other locations to send questions related to the environment
to a column called "Ask Dr. Enviro." For the answers to some questions,
these elementary students took a trip to the nearby middle school to
get help from the science teacher.
• A discussion of the whaling industry among classrooms in several
American schools proved to be more complex since some of the dis-
cussants depend on whales as their primary source of food. Eskimo
children's description of the excitement of the village and their coop-
eration in the sharing of the food after a successful harpooning expe-
dition contrasted sharply with California children's descriptions of the
show tricks of Shamu, at Seaworld, and those who call for an end to the
killing of whales.
• Students in one elementary class in Canada sponsored a project
called "Weather Patterns and the Greenhouse Effect." Their teacher
worked with them to integrate weather and pollution data they re-
quested and received from across the United States and in Australia.
The teacher reported that her students realized the importance of their
work when they had completed the summary and shared it with their
peers in their circle publication.
230 Margaret Riel

• Students in Belgium sponsored a research project on waste caused by

excessive packaging of goods. Students collected and compared the
packaging of many different types of products and assessed the best and
worst examples in different countries.

Working across classrooms gave students who do not live near an

ocean or mountains or rivers or plains an opportunity to find out from
peers in these locations the-nature or scale of environmental problems.
As demonstrated in these examples, communication can provide mul-
tiple perspectives not often found within a single classroom.

Cross-Cultural Awareness

Students develop ethnocentric positions when they are not exposed to

differences. They also assume that other people should be like them-
selves. To achieve aoss-cultural awareness, they need to learn how
people who may look very similar are different and how people who
look very different are similar. Local communities and neighborhoods
offer a limited range of variability. Interaction in learning circles offers
additional experiences. Consider these examples:

When students in Louisiana received the class photo from their partners in New
York, the students turned to the computer and wrote, "Great to see the pictures
of you all, but where are the brothers?????"

The teacher reported that the students were very surprised to see that
the students they were working with in that school were all white. The
students' surprise indicates a fairly common event in computer com-
munication—people assume similarity of the other until evidence to
the contrary is received. Developing contrasting examples can make it
easier for groups that normally avoid one another to learn about the
other.
There is also a sharing of information on how to solve problems that
arise from cultural clash, as illustrated in this next example.
The students from a German classroom described an inaeasing number of
students from different ethnic backgrounds who were entering their schools
with resulting cultural conflicts. The relationships among students were becom-
ing a serious problem in their schools. These German students, relying on
American television as their source of knowledge, asked their circle partners to
tell them how schools in the United States managed to achieve such a high
degree of successful integration of minorities.
231 Global Education through Learning Circles

They found that schools located in different states had very different
responses. Each class shared very different views on the amount of
racism that existed in their community. Some accepted the charac-
terization and described the importance of valuing the unique contri-
bution of everyone. Most of the schools indicated that the problem was
very difficult and far from solved but offered some advice on how to
work together.
Students in Alaska were surprised by the active interest that members of their
learning circle expressed about all aspects of their lives. They had initially felt
isolated and timid about participating, but their teacher reported that with each
question they answered, the students developed a stronger identity and pride
in their own cultural background.

The Alaskan students invited the elders of the community to come

to their class and help them answer questions about their Eskimo way
of life. In this way, the interest of others helped the students define
themselves.

Elementary students in Puerto Rico sponsored a writing project on health with

a global focus. They asked students in other locations to interview school nurses
about health problems that were a concern in their school. They wanted to
know if students in other schools shared some of the same health problems.

The information exchanged provided students with a way to com-

pare problems that face different groups of students.
Obvious visual markers of race, ethnicity, gender, age, or physical
appearance are not initially available in computer messages. The ab-
sence of these markers reduces the tendency to form stereotypes. In-
stead, the "voice" created in the text creates an impression of the writer.
Well-dressed students in a suburban neighborhood school and students
with purple spiked hair, tattoos, or torn clothes who are unlikely to be
able to work together comfortably in the same physical space have
worked closely together on the Learning Network. Helping students to
share their ideas across cultural boundaries while physically remaining
in a comfortable space may increase their sensitivity to common hu-
man conditions.

Systemic Awareness

Gaining an understanding about the systemic relationships in our

world is a challenge we all face. Dramatic events, like the invasion of a
Margaret Riel

small country in the Persian Gulf or race riots in South Central Los
Angeles, create worldwide focus on actions within larger systems of
meaning. What is the meaning of these events for people in different
locations, and how are shared meanings constructed? Distant and in-
ternational links do not, in and of themselves, create deeper or more
insightful understanding, but the thoughts and ideas of those in other
places can provide valuable clues as we try to piece together the mean-
ing of events. This awareness is more likely to develop among high
school students who are being encouraged to see past scud missiles, gas
masks, or beatings.

In 1989 when East Germans began to flee their country through Poland to
relocate in West Germany, students in the United States were sending surveys
to their German peers in their learning circle to better understand their views
of this new development. These students were exchanging information on the
problem when the course of history began moving so fast that it was difficult
to follow. The students in West Berlin sent daily messages to their circle trying
to make sense of each new development and the consequence it would have for
world democracy. In this circle, the work on projects was suspended as the
participants in all classes tried to deal with events that were taking place and
what the fall of the Berlin Wall would mean for a new world order.

The complexity of society's problems and their specific relationship

to social and cultural systems becomes an object for study as students
try to understand one another's surveys or responses. Consider this
example from Japan.

Students in Japan wanted to know more about parent-child relationships in

different locations. They constructed a parent-child survey with many questions
about activities in the family and attitudes of children and parents.

This project led to discussions of the meaning that the notions of

dependent and independent have in different cultural systems. Japa-
nese students described themselves as highly dependent on their moth-
ers for all their daily needs making it possible for them to devote
maximum time to their studies. Independence in this frame was to be
without this level of support and traditionally in Japan had negative
connotations. For students in the United States, to be overly dependent
on parents was understood as immaturity, and independence or self-re-
liance was a more highly valued characteristic. In Japan, dependence
was related in a positive way to the cultural value of group conscious-
ness, whereas in the United States, independence was related to indi-
233 Global Education through Learning Circles

viduality and self-sufficiency. But both systems are changing, and the
students in the different locations were actively trying to understand
the differences.
Systemic change can also be the result of new technology and differ-
ent social organizations.
A school in West Germany located in a farming district sponsored a project on
the plight of small farmers. They were surprised to find that students who lived
on small farms in Illinois were facing many of the same extreme conditions that
faced German farmers.

By comparing the state of the small farms in both countries they were
able to understand some of the economic and political forces that were
related to the change in farming practices.

During the war in the Persian Gulf, elementary students from Saudi Arabia were
trying to explain to their peers that while they did not agree with what Sadam
Hussein did, they did not think he was a "bad man." They also related the fear
that comes from the sound of missile attacks and the fear of being separated
from their parents.

Either by looking at a world event from different perspectives or by

examining parallel causes for local events, the students in these exam-
ples gained an understanding of the interrelationships among different
systems. The network provides one way to extend learning beyond our
short history to a better understanding of our place in a world system
and a search for answers within complex economic, political, environ-
mental, cultural, and social systems.

Options for Participation

Schools are in a very sensitive position with respect to political activ-

ism. Teachers are responsible for educating, not indoctrinating, chil-
dren. Teachers need to present students with strategies for participating
in issues in local, national, and international settings without promot-
ing particular political positions. The purpose of global education is to
promote certain attitudes in students: an awareness of the world
around them, a certain openness to alternative perspectives, a pride in
self that isn't dependent on putting down others. When students be-
come involved in real problems, they begin to realize that even the
actions of one person can have consequences for the whole social
Margaret Riel

system. Many issues that students discuss in school are political, but the
development of plans for social action will be determined by the school
community. For example, a logging community may be intolerant of a
school-sponsored writing campaign to save the spotted owl, while an-
other community may accept this as a valuable learning experience.
Students have become involved in beginning school-based recycling
programs, in joining environmental organizations and programs for
cleaning up oceans, lakes, and parks, and in promoting issues of health
and safety. For example:
Secondary level students in Germany sponsored a project on nuclear energy and
nuclear accidents. They sent a survey asking students to find the answers to
questions about the location of the nearest nuclear power plants, and if students
knew how safe they were from plane accidents, bombs, or earthquakes. They
also wanted to know what agencies organized protests against the use of the
nuclear energy.

While this project did not suggest that students take a particular
political action, it did make students aware of worldwide concern over
the risks of nuclear energy.

Students in a New York school chose to explore drug abuse by teenagers. Student
opinion in this New York school was against serving alcohol at parties. Their
Australian peers wanted to know "How do you have fun at a party without
alcohol?" The New York students responded by citing the high risks associated
with alcohol, particularly the number of accidents that involved drinking teen-
agers. Their own survey of the high school students at each of their learning
circle schools showed that between 80 percent and 100 percent have driven or
ridden in cars with drivers under the influence of alcohol.

The finding that so many students, even those who were discussing
the problems of drinking and driving, find themselves in cars without
sober drivers is frightening. Involving student teams in the design of
better transportation systems for teenagers is one way that students
might be able to participate in changing our society.
Learning circles provide teachers with the necessary direction and
support to explore creative ways of integrating communication tech-
nology with school curriculum and community programs. The project
approach to exploring and solving real problems that characterizes
learning circle activities encourages the integration of different subjects
helping to place knowledge and skill in the context of their use in the
adult community. Knowledge that is constructed as a consequence of
235 Global Education through Learning Circles

interaction with the community leaders, teachers, and classmates is

likely to be retained long after information memorized from books is
forgotten.

The Learning Network and the Professional Development of Teachers

The projects and learning circle publications document student learn-

ing. But what effect does this participation have on teachers? Teachers
often work in a vacuum. With little opportunity to share good teaching
ideas, they can neither demonstrate their skill nor learn from others.
When a class sponsors an activity, the classroom project has a new
audience. Teachers and students in other places are not only invited to
look into the classroom to see what takes place, but also to walk in, sit
down, and become the learners. The teacher also receives similar invi-
tations from other classes to step out of the role of teacher and join with
students from all over the world as a learner.
When teachers involved in learning circles were asked to list the most
important educational benefit of their participation, they placed their
own professional development as more significant than the enhance-
ment of student learning. This finding validates the critical role of
teachers as the source of any educational change (Cuban, 1986; Bredo,
1989; Winn and Coleman, 1989; LaFrenz and Friedman, 1989). As
Cuban (1986) describes, teachers stand at the threshold of classrooms,
making decisions about what innovations enter the classroom and how
they are used with students. His research on the influence of past
technological innovations (radio, television, and films) leads him to
question the role technology plays in changing education. Change
does not lie with communication technology itself. It is the teachers
and the strategies they use to incorporate collaborative learning into
their educational practices that make a difference. Students involved in
computer network projects do not need to be tied to the computer.
Students creating new inventions, canvassing the environment, or
completing surveys at their desks may all be involved in learning ac-
tivities that are linked by computers but are not dominated by them.
There are no forms of technology that can revolutionize the class-
room while bypassing the teacher. If there is change, it will be in the
way teachers and students create the context of a classroom and the
interaction that takes place among the people who make up the life of
236 Margaret Riel

a classroom. Global education will have to address teacher education as

well as student education before it will be an important component in
classroom instruction.
LaFrenz and Freidman (1989), responding to the visions proposed by
educational leaders, call for more programs that will affect teacher
training and support. Computer networking provides a multipurpose
tool. What makes computer networking unique is that it provides a way
for teachers to gain a global perspective at the same time as they create
learning contexts for their students. In this way teachers and students
are involved in a global learning experience.

Global Networking

Our experiences with learning circles show that computer networking

offers a strategy for joining teachers and students where everyone is
simultaneously teacher and learner. Education is not a spontaneous
activity. It must be carefully designed, planned, and executed. If com-
puter communication services promise schools the technology without
any resources for educational activities, then the institutional and so-
cial circumstances that keep teachers operating in a professional vac-
uum will not be changed. One of the reasons that Dewey's progressive
ideas failed to take hold is they were costly in terms of teacher time and
energy. How can teachers working alone be expected to recreate, year
after year, an exciting new environment for students' learning?
Computer networking offers the possibility of developing a stimulat-
ing, cooperative context for teachers and students. But it is the quality
of the dialogue on the network and not the speed of the technology
that will be the crucial factor.
Technology Transfer in Global
Networking: Capacity Building in
Africa and Latin America

Beryl Bellman, Alex Tindimubona, and Armando Arias, Jr.

Computer communication networks are rapidly extending to most

areas of the world. These involve a combination of networks ranging
from public, academic, governmental, and military data packet switch-
ing systems to Fido PC-based networks. Scientists and other scholars,
within and outside of academia, communicate with colleagues interna-
tionally to both network with each other and to conduct computer-sup-
ported coUaborative work. Such projects range from the sharing of
information to actual coordination of research efforts establishing "vir-
tual laboratories." The use of electronic mail and computer conferenc-
ing is an accepted delivery system for various academic programs in
postsecondary and continuing education at universities in the United
States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Recently several net-
working projects have been advocated for Africa, Eastern Europe, and
Russia. In this chapter we discuss the formation of an academic com-
puter communications network between several institutions in the
United States and Latin America and how this model is being used to
help develop a network for Africa with which it will interface.
In the educational environment these technologies are useful in a
variety of ways, ranging from methods to augment and supplement
regular coursework to distance education applications. The use of com-
puter conferencing and electronic mail introduces writing across the
curriculum and teaches essential computer concepts as an integral part
of every course. Students engage each other and the faculty in discus-
sion group-like conferences, which improve critical thinking and pro-
mote learning. When used in distance education, conferencing lessens
the distance of the student from the professor and other students in the
course.
238 Beryl Bellman, Alex Tindimubona, and Armando Arias, Jr.

Students log on to a host computer either at their own university or

by accessing a data packet switching network. Students read or down-
load all waiting items in one or more computer conferences for the
class. They then respond by writing their comments on what was read,
very often after having taken time to reflect and do research for their
electronic class contributions. These mediated or "virtual" classrooms
differ from face-to-face classes in that students are required to be much
more active and to interact not only with the faculty member teaching
the class but also with the other students enrolled. In this way, online
education is less competitive than traditional methods and is more of
a collaborative learning experience (Hiltz, 1990; Harasim, 1990).
In 1985, Arias, Jr. and Bellman established the Binational English and
Spanish Telecommunications Network (BESTNET). At that time, they
used computer conferencing and electronic mail as an interactive com-
ponent to bilingual video lectures or telecourses. Arias, Jr. and Bellman
were initially concerned with how to improve student feedback to
instructional television courses that were microwaved to a satellite
campus of San Diego State University about 125 miles away, adjacent
to the Mexican border. Students were greatly dissatisfied with the video
courses, often feeling like second-class students compared with those
taking the same course on the main campus.
The study Ivory Towers and Silicon Basements (FIPSE, 1986) made three
recommendations in regard to equity for nontraditional learners: (1)
careful consideration of issues related to equity should be part of any
plan for introducing computing into the curriculum; (2) access to com-
puting means recognizing that different students have different needs
and that some programs should be tailored accordingly; and (3) pro-
grams that enable students to overcome isolation and passivity in their
learning experiences do the most to promote equal educational oppor-
tunities and experiences. The BESTNET project addressed each of these
recommendations in its focus on providing new interactive technolo-
gies to nontraditional and minority learners. The project was unique in
its focus on tailoring both the program and the software to meet the
particular needs and requirements of students. By fostering electronic
discussions within course conferences and in tutorials, study groups,
and electronic office hours, the project helped students overcome the
isolation and passivity that hinders academic performance. The univer-
sity attempted to provide student feedback by allowing students to
239 Technology Transfer in Global Networking

telephone the instructor during class to ask questions. However, only a

few students took advantage of asking questions in this manner, and
the majority of students continued to feel alienated. We also deter-
mined that questions asked in lecture classes were often more relevant
to course management than to content. We introduced computer con-
ferencing as a method for holding student discussion groups or lab
sessions, and electronic mail was a means for the faculty member to
answer personal questions in the form of online office hours. In this
manner, all students were required to interact with the professor and
with each other about the content of the lectures and text.
Our project originally involved production of a series of Spanish
language/English translation distance-education video courses in the
sciences, mathematics, and computer/information fields. In our evalu-
ation of the project, we learned that students were particularly respon-
sive to the computer conferencing interactions and did not need as
much formal presentation of lecture materials by video as we had
originally believed. As a result, we began to rely more heavily on
computer conferencing interactions for both the presentation and dis-
cussion of materials and used video and other materials to supplement
or present information for those discussions. Because we found confer-
encing to be as effective as the dominant or stand-alone form of course
delivery, we explored applications of computer conferencing in differ-
ent kinds of courses.
We are now involved with three kinds of courses delivered by com-
puter. The first form is one in which students do not see the instructor
but communicate with him or her in computer conferences or virtual
classrooms, during synchronous online office hours utilizing the com-
puter phone or chat utility, and with private electronic mail messages.
In the second format, faculty make formal video lecture presentations
to complement the discussions in computer conferences. In the third
course format, faculty members conduct part of the course online and
also have face-to-face interaction with the students. These courses are
team-taught among several institutions. Students participate online
with faculty and students at other campuses, with the elected option of
a local faculty member offering a section of the course on his or her
campus.
The virtual classroom studies of Hiltz (Kerr and Hiltz, 1982; Hiltz,
1990,1993), our BESTNET studies (Arias, Jr. and Bellman, 1990a, 1990b,
240 Beryl Bellman, Alex Tindimubona, and Armando Arias, Jr.

1987; Bellman, 1988) and reports on educational conferencing in

Europe (Adrianson, 1985; and Adrianson and Hjelmquist, 1985) report
no significant difference in performance among students taught in
face-to-face and computer conferencing based courses, which supports
the viability of this method for distance learning programs. These
studies also found that computer conferencing worked particularly well
in minority student education. This is a consequence of the self-paced
timing of instruction, the ability of students to receive immediate feed-
back about their errors, and the ability to ask questions in a more
anonymous communicative setting.
Hiltz and Turoff (1978) described how computer conferencing is es-
pecially viable for the handicapped. In addition to the obvious benefit
of having students interact from more available and manageable physi-
cal environments, the students do not suffer from prejudices experi-
enced in regular classrooms. Students are evaluated solely on the basis
of their academic performance. All physical handicaps are invisible to
the medium, and students are treated as full members of the class
without having to experience discrimination because of physical ap-
pearance, speech impairments, or other factors that often inhibit their
participation in face-to-face classroom situations.
The same studies also demonstrated that female learners do very well
with the medium. In face-to-face interactions, women are often forced
into a facilitation role and many times lose turns to speak in conversa-
tion with men because of implicit sexism in interactions (Lakoff, 1975).
In computer-mediated discourse, women are able to express themselves
much more easily and fully without being interrupted or ignored
(Harasim, 1986).
This ability of the medium to encourage more assertive involvement
in the education process among traditionally more apprehensive and
passive learners was demonstrated in a BESTNET course taught at a rural
satellite campus of San Diego State University, situated in a community
on the U.S./Mexico border and serving mostly adult Latino students.
The instructor wanted to determine if the use of anonymous pen names
for students in the conferences would elicit more candid comments
about the poems and essays required in his course on modern American
literature. He conducted the course via a host computer at the Western
Behavioral Sciences Institute, which provided both topics and reply
branches in the conferences.
Technology Transfer in Global Networking

Each student was assigned a topic with its own reply branch. In this
way, students commented upon the class assignments and also upon
what each other had written. The computer conference was used to
supplement to face-to-face lectures and class discussions. The class elic-
ited several hundred comments, which ranged from detailed commen-
taries on the assigned texts to debates among the students over the
interpretations. One of the male students was particularly outspoken
about the homosexual references of several of the authors. The majority
of those in the class were adult Hispanic women, who, in the context
of the anonymity provided both through the medium and their pen
names, engaged him in heated debate. By the end of the course, several
of the women students had become very assertive and had no inhibi-
tions against openly debating his ideas. When the students met in class
face-to-face they did not engage in heated debate, nor was any attempt
made to criticize the ideas and comments of anyone in the class, yet
the debate and active discussion flowed on the computer conference.
Although the class began with no one knowing anyone else's identity,
the students soon began to share their computer pen names with
friends. Within the first two weeks, either through direct revelation or
secondhand gossip, all computer identities became known. Conse-
quently, the use of anonymous identities was a valuable pedagogical
resource for initiating the discussion, but it was the anonymity pro-
vided by the text-based medium that sustained it and promoted the
strong assertive remarks.
In 1992 the BESTNET project involved over three thousand students
and faculty accounts from over a dozen institutions in the United States
and Mexico. BESTNET faculty, using a combination of user interviews
and content analyses of conferences for various types of courses and
collaborative research projects, have reported the following findings:

1. The technology greatly augments regular classroom instruction and

is a viable technology for off-campus or distance education.
2. Computer conferencing is a viable interactive component of vide-
otaped or live instructional television courses providing individualized
attention to student needs and requirements that cannot be obtained
using traditional methods of audio and video feedback.
3. Computer conferencing supports a socratic method of instruction
whereby students are active in the learning process rather than being
242 Beryl Bellman, Alex Tindimubona, and Armando Arias, Jr.

passive recipients. The anonymity of the technology promotes discus-

sion that is often inhibited by concern for negative faculty and/or
student face-to-face feedback.
4. Computer conferencing promotes participation and learning in tra-
ditionally apprehensive learners. In traditional classroom situations,
many students are often reluctant to interact with anyone other than
their instructors, whereas computer communications promotes stu-
dent-to-student interaction. The technology is particularly useful for
facilitating group discussion and criticism in virtually all areas of the
curriculum.
5. The technology facilitates writing across the curriculum and greatly
improves editorial and logical skills. It is particularly viable for reaching
linguistically and culturally diverse learners.
6. Computer-naive students learned with equal facility as those more
sophisticated with the technology. Social science and humanities stu-
dents having no more than basic word-processing skills learned and
accepted the technology at an equivalent level with students taking
advanced computer science courses.
7. Computer communications tends to improve literacy even when a
liberal attitude is taken toward grammar, syntax, and spelling. Writing
skills improve with active participation in computer conferences.
8. The medium promotes more critical than hostile competitive
discussion.

The Internationalization ofBESTNET

Recently, BESTNET was extended to include students and faculty at

several sites in Latin America and Canada, and is in the process of
involving universities in Kenya and Zimbabwe, working in conjunction
with Southern African FidoNets. This was accomplished by developing
the distributed computer conferencing and videotex network over the
Internet/NSF-NET, which interconnects over 700,000 host computers at
university campuses in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia. At
the present time, there are no Internet nodes in sub-Saharan Africa and
only a few in Latin America. However, to implement the project imme-
diately, the network was developed by utilizing public or government-
owned data networks currently operating in Africa and Latin America.
243 Technology Transfer in Global Networking

These networks permit the networking of computers in the selected

countries in both Africa and Latin America, which then transmit to the
California State University systemwide computer communications net-
work (CSU-NET), which operates a public data network gateway into its
system. CSU-NET is the largest internal, academic, regional network on
the Internet. Once connected, international users are able to access a
variety of databases and other services available both on BESTNET and
elsewhere on the Internet, including the National Science Foundation
supercomputer network.
BESTNET involves a distributed set of mini and mainframe comput-
ers that are interconnected using the Internet and national X.25 net-
works. In this manner each of the countries involved has a mainframe
in their local area for electronic mail, conferencing, and database ac-
cess. This is significant as it facilitates both the transfer of technology
to the countries involved and local capacity building in technical and
programmatic areas.

The Need for Networking In the Developing World

The relationship between information processing and communication

on the one hand and modern economic and social development on the
other is widely recognized among the African countries. The efficient
and effective exchange of information among researchers, educators,
administrators, industrialists, and policymakers is crucial for the con-
version of research results into useful products of economic and social
value.
At the research level, interaction and communication with peers and
potential users of research results are necessary for the stimulation,
self-confidence, relevance, and effectiveness of scientists. Modern
scientific research relies heavily on the ability to communicate; gather
reliable data; have access to widely dispersed data and information
(including analysis); collaborate on projects; hold discussions, meet-
ings, seminars, and conferences; and repackage and disseminate the
results. The pace and complexity of modern research have greatly in-
creased the communication needs of researchers, scientists, educators,
and their institutions. Scientists isolated are scientists unable to articu-
late their purposes and needs; such scientists scon become obsolete.
244 Beryl Bellman, Alex Tindimubona, and Armando Arias, Jr.

The provision of appropriate information systems and services for this

group of information generators therefore becomes apparent.
The dissemination of information to other user groups has to be
designed and implemented carefully. Sometimes the information has
to be repackaged or consolidated before delivery to specific target audi-
ences. For example, published results of scientific and technological
research in fields such as agriculture, health, the environment, and
economics must be repackaged to be understood by administrators,
policymakers, extension workers, and other intermediaries as well as by
the such final users as farmers and the community at large. This calls
for innovative and appropriate methods, media, and techniques, such
as print and nonprint forms, audiovisual, or even oral according to the
prevailing conditions and/or traditions.
The phenomenal improvements in information processing and com-
munication capability brought about by rapid, convergent develop-
ments in computer and telecommunication technologies are well
recognized in Africa. This enhanced awareness of potential opportuni-
ties is indicated by visible efforts in many African countries to create
and sustain the enabling institutional and human environment for
utilizing these new capabilities. A recent study group of the Board of
Science and Technology in Development of the National Academy of
Sciences was impressed to find virtually all the modern information
technologies already in use in some African institutions. These tech-
nologies encompass desktop publishing, CD-ROM and other databases,
electronic mail and computer conferencing, as well as telefax. The
population of microcomputers is significant and growing rapidly. In
Kenya we estimate that from about two hundred computers in 1980,
there were close to ten thousand units in 1990 in educational, business,
NGO (nongovernmental organizations), and governmental environ-
ments. There are numerous international projects and systems, espe-
cially in international business, banking, and transportation, located
on the continent as well as relevant rural and grassroots projects.
A growing number of X.25 networks are being established in Africa.
Where these networks do not exist, there is another system that still
permits computer communications interaction between African faculty
and students among themselves and with faculty and students in the
United States and Latin America. This system is called FidoNet, a mi-
cro-to-micro based store-and-forward system. It permits users to call up
245 Technology Transfer in Global Networking

a distant computer using a telephone and modem or packet radio and

modem to a computer that is attached to a telephone and/or packet
radio receiver. The user is able to send information to the computer,
which is then forwarded to other microcomputers during low-cost non-
prime time telephone rates. The information is then transmitted to
other microcomputers in the same fashion until it reaches a computer
networked to an X.25 network or the Internet. At that point the infor-
mation is directly transmitted to the targeted host. In this manner
electronic mail can be transmitted to all sites within a few hours.
FidoNets are viable only for electronic mail, not for computer confer-
encing. However, they do permit interaction to take place, and there
are currently a number of FidoNet electronic mail conference/group
mail discussions occurring in Southern Africa and in Latin America.

The Problem of the Last Mile

Despite strong interest in Africa for computer networking, there is a

serious problem often referred to as "the last mile." This is a combina-
tion of national governmental policies that restrict transborder flows of
information and local level politics within and between institutions
that restrict usage either by refusing access to the technology or by
making access too difficult for easy use.
Over the last few years several African countries have initiated na-
tional X.25 packet data networks (PDN) and require all data transmis-
sion to utilize the service by making direct dialup illegal. These national
PDNs require a large initial payment and then charge for each packet
sent and received. In 1991 Kenya officially instituted its PDN, KENPAC,
with nodes in Kisumu, Mombasa, Nairobi, Nakuru, and Nyeri. Both
dedicated and dialup access is available. The availability of this service
marks a significant change in governmental policy from ten years ago
when computers were treated in several agencies with some suspicion
and concern that they would inhibit employment in several sectors.
The PDN charges are still prohibitive for many organizations in
Kenya. They include a large initial deposit, a monthly fee, and charges
for packets sent and received. The costs of international connections
are so expensive that they are restrictive except for banks and a few
other private, for-profit enterprises. Nevertheless, there is a growing
demand in the nonprofit, academic and research communities for com-
246 Beryl Bellman, Alex Tindimubona, and Armando Arias, ]r.

purer networks. Recently a group of Kenyan expatriates in the United

States, Canada, and Britain organized an international chapter of the
Kenya Computer Institute to develop plans for a trans-Kenya computer
network. They created a listserve or electronic mail distribution list on
the Internet and BITNET and opened several conferences on BESTNET
(called KCI-NET).
Initially this group wanted to develop a network in concert with
efforts to strengthen NGO information management and communica-
tions in Africa. The purpose of the Kenya-based network includes (1)
information sharing among NGOs in cooperation with African govern-
ments to network both urban and rural organizations; (2) improving
the quality of communication lines in Africa, which includes efforts
such as Panaftel (the Pan African Telecommunications Network) that is
attempting to develop microwave links throughout the continent as
modeled on links established between Kenya and Ethiopia in the early
1980s; and (3) developing the role of government and public institu-
tions in networking. This involves integrating universities as well as
other governmental groups into a network. The group is also addressing
various governments' concerns that information flow across national
boundaries is a national security issue.
In an effort to test both the political and technical feasibility of
African networking, a FidoNet-based project called EASANET was devel-
oped with nodes in Nairobi, Kampala, Dar es Salaam, Lusaka, and
Harare. EASANET is an experimental project to practice and experience
issues involved in networking. The project is more concerned with
making traffic possible than with the content of what is transmitted.
The transmissions are either by direct dialup on the Fido network or by
data packet radio, as is the case in Harare. The most developed Fido
network in Africa is run out of South Africa and is known as UNINET,
which networks to institutions inside South Africa, Botswana, Swazi-
land, Lesotho, and Zimbabwe. Both UNINET and EASANET connect to
GreenNet in England and to the Internet for international electronic
mail access.
In the late 1980s PADIS, the Pan African Documentation and Infor-
mation System of the United Nations, set up a series of nodes in
selected countries that had dialup access to a central node in Ethopia.
The latter has a dedicated 24-hour lease line to the United States. The
network was used only infrequently, however, and only the Ethiopian
247 Technology Transfer in Global Networking

node has been operational. In 1991 the American Association for the
Advancement of Sciences in conjunction with PADIS sponsored a work-
shop on the need for a trans-African network. The recommendations
were to establish subregional networks and especially to address the
necessity of "getting out of the African region" and not just communi-
cating within Africa. The workshop also stressed the importance of
links that are not just lease lines to the United States. Some argue that
such connections are simply extensions of neo-colonial policies as they
do not build local capacity nor lead to the transfer of technologies.

The AFRINET Project

The BESTNET project is now being extended to Africa to establish a

distributed educational, scientific, and social development research net-
work that networks a number of African universities and scientific
research organizations with each other and with international aca-
demic and scientific institutions. The BESTNET model is to develop a
series of interconnected widely distributed nodes on a global basis.
These nodes are connected using a combination of PDNs that have
gateways into each other. In this manner, the entire distributed net-
work of computers is essentially transparent to the user. The user need
only log onto his or her own local node, and interconnections are
automatically made to distant nodes to access conferences and data-
bases. Each participating node is a central part of the network. Thus, in
a distributed system it is something of an oxymoron to talk about
"distance education" or "distance collaborative work," as there is no
real center. This system promotes both the transfer of technology and
local capacity building. Rather than serving as a neo-colonial link to
any developed country, the network is diffuse and belongs to all mem-
bers. There is a shared sense of responsibility and a genuine attitude of
mutual benefit.
The creation of AFRINET as a distributed African link to BESTNET
networks international scientists in a series of conferences dealing with
issues ranging from biotechnology, food systems, cooperative develop-
ment, business and public administration management, biomedical
research, to the social sciences and humanities, while concomitantly
developing a virtual exchange of students and faculty for academic
programs.1 Although these conferences may supplement some of the
online courses, they are independent of them and promote collabora-
248 Beryl Bellman, Alex Tmdimubona, and Armando Arias, Jr.

tive and conjoint research efforts among the international participants.

Using videotex, we are establishing a number of scientific databases of
African research materials that are distributed among several African
nodes as well as developing others on international nodes that pertain
to African scientific research and academic interests. We also network
social and community development groups online and organize both
academic and commercial uses of the network. In this manner we are
building a sustainable network combining academic, social develop-
ment, and commercial interests and support.

Networking the AAS and BE5TNET in AFRINET

At the present there are no Internet nodes in sub-Saharan Africa. Thus,

to immediately implement the project, we are developing the network
by encapsulating DECNET for X.25 networks currently operating in
Africa. These public data networks permit the networking of computers
in the selected Latin American and African countries, which then trans-
mit to the California State University systemwide computer communi-
cations network—CSUNET and permits interconnection into the
distributed BESTNET network with gateways into the Internet with its
array of network libraries, databases, and services.
It is thus possible to interconnect VAX computers, for example, at the
University of Zimbabwe in Harare with those at the African Academy
of Sciences in conjunction with the University of Kenya in Nairobi. We
also are working to provide nodes to university and related scientific
laboratories in other African countries where local telephone capabili-
ties and national policies allow. This permits much needed computer-
mediated interactions between African scientists in such areas as pest
research, marine biology and fisheries research, biomedical sciences,
natural products development, agronomy, community development,
and science/social science policy.
Using the international X.25 connection into CSUNET, these scien-
tists also interact with colleagues in the United States, Latin America,
and Europe who are involved in the BESTNET network, and have a
direct gateway into international scientific and library databases. Con-
comitantly, international scholars can have access to African and Latin
American researchers and their respective databases stored as distrib-
uted nodes on host systems in those countries. BESTNET thus promotes
24 9 Technology Transfer in Gbbal Networking

computer<ommunications-supported collaborative work and research

among scientists and with international scholars outside of each
continent.
In addition, students and faculty from Latin American and African
universities interact with their counterparts in the United States, Can-
ada, and Europe who are already taking part in BESTNET. There is an
ongoing virtual exchange of faculty and students in different countries
as preliminary to onsite exchanges already being developed by the
California State University and the other university systems in BEST-
NET. In addition, other courses are cotaught by faculty across inter-
national boundaries, and students are in continual contact with col-
leagues and research issues in otherwise impossible ways. Students take
courses in biological, natural, social, and communications sciences at
their local nodes. These course conferences are open to students en-
rolled at all institutions. They do so by signing on to their local univer-
sity hosts that are connected to the Internet or, initially in Africa, by
computers connected to it through the CSUNET gateways. The lists of
conferences that appear on their computer screens are distributed
among the international universities. However, students enter any
given conference from their local node and interconnect to the distant
node where it is housed. Thus, from the user's point of view the distrib-
uted network appears seamless.

Distributed Global Nets

Our project is a fully distributed computer communications network,

which is encapsulated as an independent system over the NSF-NET/In-
ternet with gateways to KENPAC, ZIMPAK (in Zimbabwe), and other
African X.25 networks. The ease of functionality in our distributed
conferencing, videotex, mail, and computer phone greatly facilitates
the use of computer communications for both scientific research and
international distant education programs between African and interna-
tional institutions.

Developing South-South Communications with Latin America

The situation in Latin America is more advanced, as there are X.25

systems in most countries and also a growing number of Internet
250 Beryl Bellman, Alex Tindimubona, and Armando Arias, Jr.

nodes. Initially we are building international south-to-south networks

of universities and research institutes using whatever modes of commu-
nication are currently available. This involves the use of X.25 DPNs in
Africa and Latin America connecting as distributed nodes in the BEST-
NET TCP/IP Internet-based network through gateways in the California
State University CSUNET network. In the case of countries that do not
have either Internet, X.25, or other DPNs, we are using FidoNet micro-
to-micro store-and-forward connections. Fidos are being successfully
used in East and Southern Africa for conference-based discussions using
email distribution lists similar in structure to listserves on the Internet
and BITNET. We are currently developing in concert with the California
State University statewide nursing program a series of distance educa-
tion programs in the allied health fields with Southern African univer-
sities in Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, and South Africa,
which are to be delivered using FidoNet interactions with conferences
in our BESTNET network. These courses involve interactions with a
number of Latin America universities that are using computer confer-
encing on distributed nodes in BESTNET. In conjunction with projects
sponsored at the Latin American Scholarship Program at American Uni-
versities (LASPAU) at Harvard, BESTNET nodes are being established at
universities in Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. Comments in the
conferences will be ported to Africa as email on the FidoNet, and con-
comitantly the latter mail is entered as batch comments into relevant
conferences. This promotes interactive dialogue across international
boundaries. In addition we are involving scientists in Africa and Mexico
conducting research in insect sciences in a series of conferences and
joint databases called PESTNET. This involves the insect physiology
research database at the University of California at Davis working in
collaboration with the Mayan sustainability project of UC-Riverside in
Merida and the Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan.
In addition, BESTNET is being used to coordinate efforts between
oceanographic research institutes in Mexico at the Universidad
Autonoma de Baja California with researchers in Africa in RECOSCIX,
Regional Committee on Scientific Information Exchange. This project
is associated with the UNESCO International Oceanographic Council.
It provides computer communications database access and email dis-
cussions for marine science and fisheries in the Western Indian Ocean.
It has twelve collaborating institutions in Eastern Africa and islands
251 Technology Transfer in Global Networking

from Somalia to Mozambique. The project cunently operates a user

dialup node into Belgium from the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Insti-
tute (KEMFRI) in Mombasa, Kenya and then distributes information on
paper. The project has been accessing BESTNET for over a year, and is
to be a distributed node in Kenya.

Addressing Information Needs in Development

BESTNET is organized according to priorities specifically outlined in the

IDRC (International Development Research Council) manual Sharing
Knowledge for Development, which contains objectives identified as criti-
cal for successful communications programs in the African context. We
have taken these into account in the development of our larger global
project. The objectives include the following:
1. To improve the effective utilization and sharing of existing knowl-
edge and resources at the local, national, and regional levels. In our
project we are working directly with universities and research institutes
in Latin America and Africa, designing a large distributed network to
link them together. The design requires that where possible each insti-
tution have its own node or direct access to one at the regional or na-
tional level. This permits participating countries to have a direct role in
the network rather than having to rely on outside donors for support.
2. To design and implement information systems and services that
are relevant to the local environment and that address specific needs
and problems. In our network we assist in the development of local
computer conferences and databases on each node that pertain to the
immediate needs of the area and region. These conferences and data-
bases are then distributed to be accessible from any one of the other
nodes in the network. In this manner, we are developing computer
conferences and databases that are both national and international
(Latin America, United States, and Africa) dealing with such conjoint
interests as oceanographic and fisheries research, agriculture and pest
research, and more.
3. To improve sharing and data transfer at the national and regional
levels by promoting standards, compatibility and use of methodologies,
technologies, and tools adapted to the environment. We have designed
a system that can handle multiple standards. Where possible the net-
work runs on the Internet, and where the Internet does not exist we
252 Beryl Bellman, Alex Tindimubona, and Armando Arias, Jr.

utilize X.25, X.28 and X.400 standards that are interfaced to the In-
ternet by gateways in the United States. This permits a global distrib-
uted network of interconnected nodes over a variety of standards. In
addition, although the network runs on a DECNET platform, we have
developed a multilingual front end to the system that permits connec-
tion to and from the network and other services on different kinds of
vendor hosts.
4. To improve the indigenous capacity to plan, develop, and imple-
ment national and regional information policy. By organizing a distrib-
uted global network we promote the indigenous local-level capacities
in these areas. We are promoting the development of Internet nodes in
both Africa and Latin America where possible and working in collabo-
ration with public packet data networks by providing gateways into the
Internet. Our network works in a distributed manner, which intercon-
nects nodes in a number of institutions in the countries involved. The
distribution of nodes leads to the transfer of technology to those coun-
tries and building of local capacity in both technical and programmatic
areas.
5. To secure long-term commitment for sustainable information pro-
grams. The implementation of the project involves local level support
and design in concert with indigenous information policies. Conse-
quently, the project is organized in accord with a developmental model
that incorporates local information needs and perceived goals. This
promotes local long-term commitment by both the institutions and
governments involved.
6. To stimulate greater use of local technical expertise in information
handling by promoting South-South cooperation within Africa and
also Latin America. The transfer of technology and the technical and
programmatic capacity building in both Latin America and Africa in
the project is a major step in the formation of such South-South coop-
eration, including both exchanges of educational programs and col-
laborative research.
7. To build human resources in information sciences through needs-
based training at all levels and, particularly, training of managers and
trainers to strengthen the multiplier effect. The promotion of the "vir-
tual exchange of students and faculty" among participating institutions
includes courses in information sciences, telecommunications, and re-
lated disciplines. The courses involve an exchange in which faculty
253 Technology Transfer in Global Networking

collaborate in the instruction and students engage each other across

institutions.
8. To improve the capacity of people involved in the provision of
information to act as agents of change. By building local-level capacity
in information technologies in conjunction with programs involved
with agricultural, health, education, and economic development, the
information technologists and communication specialists in Africa and
Latin America are directly involved as change agents.
9. To promote a two-way flow of communication so that rural and
urban poor people participate in an interactive dialogue on issues af-
fecting them. The formation of a global communication network di-
rectly involves the development of programs in each country that are
targeted throughout the society. These programs are designed to reach
both urban and rural sectors by providing new educational opportuni-
ties in allied and primary health care, agriculture, pest control, and
courses across a range of academic disciplines. These courses and proj-
ects are fully interactive and provide as part of their design the means
for an interactive dialogue on issues affecting the participants. This
includes the delivery of the baccalaureate, masters, and certificate pro-
grams in allied health to six Latin American and five southern African
countries, to programs ranging from public administration to social
sciences and humanities.
10. To improve the capacity of local scientists and technologists to
obtain relevant information and bring about a more effective transfer
of technology at the grass roots level. The project directly involves the
formation of "virtual labs" for computer-communications-supported
collaborative work. These include not only the use of electronic mail
and computer conferencing to improve communication between scien-
tists but also the use of a variety of computer communication technolo-
gies to promote conjoint research. Videotex-structured distributed
databases, electronic libraries and reserves permit the transfer of articles
and papers to international sites, and access to the range of Internet
services including the supercomputer backbone.

The Future of Global Networks

New networks are being established in the emerging nations of Eastern

and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. By 1994 EARN and
254 Beryl Bellman, Alex Tindimubona, and Armando Arias, Jr.

Internet nodes will be available in Hungary, Rumania, Czechoslovakia,

and Poland in Europe, and there are plans to establish Internet nodes
throughout Russia, including a trans-Siberian research network from St.
Petersburg. On June 18,1992, the first Joint Russian Research Network
Workshop was held at the P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute of the Rus-
sian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. The objectives of the meeting
included the sharing of information, experiences, and research network
proposals; the formalization of a "Russian Research Networks Organiz-
ing Team"; and the preparation of the basis for a business plan for
Russian research networks for 1993. The BESTNET model has been
selected for the plan, involving the use of networks for the global
virtual exchange of students and faculty between universities, the es-
tablishment of virtual labs for collaborative and coordinated research
among dispersed scholars in both academic and research institute set-
tings and efforts to network the economic development experiments
and projects for the sharing of information and collaborative work.
Islands in the (Data)Stream: Language,
Character Codes, and Electronic
Isolation in Japan

Jeffrey Shapard

Once upon a time long ago, Japan was naturally secluded from most of
the world by vast distances of land and sea. The only way in, or out,
was to sail treacherous seas. The flow of trade and ideas and informa-
tion and communication, what there was of it, was a difficult process.
Then came the Portuguese and the Dutch in the early seventeenth
century with their missionaries and their merchants. So destabilizing
was their influence that the powers that were, the Tokugawa Shogunate,
limited the access of these westerners by allowing them to sail only into
the port of Nagasaki and to reside only on a small artificial island called
Dejima, constructed for this purpose and linked to the rest of Japan by
a narrow bridge. From 1641 until 1856, when Admiral Perry and his
fleet of warships put an end to this policy of national seclusion in a
chain of events that toppled the Tokugawa Shogunate, opened Japan
to the world, and opened the world to Japan, tiny Dejima was the only
window between Japan and the world. Its residents could not wander
off the island to mingle with the rest of Japan, and only a small handful
of Japanese were able to go to Dejima (Kodansha, 1983).
In a way that resonates strangely with history, the Japanese language
and the prevalence of character codes incompatible with international
standards results in a new kind of natural seclusion today for the
individuals on the pasocom tsuushin (personal computer communi-
cations) islands of Japan, as well as for the researchers on the
JUNET/WIDE archipelago. This chapter gives an overview of language
and character codes in electronic networking in Japan, discusses a case
illustrating problems faced and solutions taken, and proposes direc-
tions for further research and development. The Dejima Syndrome in
the Japan context is used as an example.
256 Jeffrey Shapard

Differences in languages and the character codes needed to support

them are important issues of global scope that must be addressed more
widely, and which must result in broader thinking throughout the
field of computer networking. Narrow vision, one-byte seven-bit ASCII
biases, the assumptions about character coding that arise from
them, inadequate international standards, and local solutions that dis-
regard what international standards there are and that pay no heed
to the ramifications for others—all these are serious related prob-
lems that inhibit, rather than enhance, increased connectivity and
communications.

Setting Sail: The Japanese Writing System

The origins of modern Japanese remain a matter of some academic

controversy, pulled between linguistic reconstruction through analysis
(Miller, 1972) and desires for mystical uniqueness as an isolate (Kin-
daichi, 1979). Whatever the real story of its origins, the Japanese lan-
guage does not come from China, although its writing system does.
The anthropological linguist Edward Sapir (Sapir, 1921; Mandel-
baum, 1970) noted that language and culture are two sides of the same
coin. The Japanese language illustrates the dynamic borrowing by Japa-
nese of useful aspects of foreign cultures, from the Chinese han ideo-
graph character writing system itself, which came to Japan with
wandering Chinese and Korean traders and Buddhist priests a couple
millennia ago, and the new lexical items (words) it allowed to be
created, to the variety of localized lexical items from other languages
borrowed along with the concepts and things they describe. Kanji (the
Japanese form of han ideographs) and the supplemental scripts derived
from them have become an integral aspect of Japanese culture.
Modern Japanese writing typically involves a combination of the
following:
• Kanji (Japanese form of han ideographs) for most of the core lexical
items, with several readings possible for many of them, on-yomi if based
on original Chinese readings, of which there may be several, and kun-
yomi if based on native Japanese lexicon
• Hiragana (cursive syllabic characters) for grammatical functions and
inflections, and for native Japanese words done more easily than in
kanji
257 Language, Character Codes, and Electronic Isolation in Japan

• Katakana (block syllabic characters) for sounds and for words bor-
rowed from other languages
• Little hiragana and katakana as furigana alongide kanji to help the
reader figure out which readings are being used
• Romaji (roman characters) sprinkled about for effect
• Arabic numerals (0-9) and various other symbols for punctuation,
footnoting, listing, currency symbols, and so on
Despite the "Nihongo boom" (an increased interest in the Japanese
language) over the last ten years, most likely as a result of Japan's
emergence as a world economic power, perhaps no more than a million
people outside Japan speak or, especially, read and write Japanese, and
fewer than 1 percent of these are Japanese expatriates or emigrants. At
the end of 1991, there were 620,000 Japanese living abroad, most of
them in North America (258,300), South America (130,600), Western
Europe (109,700), Asia (83,900), and sparsely populated Oceania
(21,400) (KKC, 1991). Japanese is, therefore, a very big local language.

Treacherous Waters: Platforms, Standards, and Other Characters

Kanji and the complex nature of the Japanese writing system have been
a major challenge in Japanese computing and computer networking
and have slowed down development in ways not faced by those who
can get by just fine with the smaller set of 94 printable characters of the
total 128 characters denned as part of the seven bits of the one-byte
American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) (Lung
and Nakamura, 1991). Even by using the full eight bits of a one-
byte character code, the resulting 256 possible combinations still fall
far short of the 7,000 or so needed for modern Japanese. But ASCII
seven-bit biases, especially in English-speaking countries where so
much research and development in computers and networking have
come from, are in the very kernel of most computer operating system
environments.
By 1983, the Japanese Industrial Standards bureau QIS) had defined
a Japanese character set that contained 6,877 two-byte characters: 6,353
kanji in two levels (2,965 kanji arranged by pronunciation in level one
and 3,388 kanji arranged by radical in level two), 86 katakana, 83
hiragana, 10 numerals, 52 English characters, 147 symbols, 66 Russian
Jeffrey Shapard

characters, 48 Greek characters, and 32 line elements (Lunde, 1990).

Each byte contains seven bits, with the high bit undefined. The original
JIS C6226 code was expanded in 1985 as JIS X0208 and JIS X0202
(equivalent to ISO2022) to include more kanji and to be closer to the
ISO (International Standards Organization) standard. Since ASCII is
often used along with kanji, JIS X0202 defines escape sequences used
for shifting between one-byte seven-bit ASCII and two-byte seven-bit
JIS X0208 kanji characters. As a result of some of the problems faced by
mainframe operating systems where two-byte codes were too difficult
to implement, there is also JIS X0201, which defines one-byte codes for
katakana (Murai and Kato, 1987). In late 1990, JIS defined a supplemen-
tal character set called JIS X0212 to include another 5,801 kanji, 21
symbols and diacritics, and 245 diacritic-marked roman characters,
bringing the total defined kanji character codes to 12,156, although
computer manufacturers have yet to implement them (Lunde, 1992).
However, while the JIS character codes gave a useful common refer-
ence, computer makers and software developers in Japan had their own
needs and created their own variations. For example, Nihon DEC (Digi-
tal Equipment Corporation Japan) developed DEC kanji code, based on
JIS C6226 in organization but using two-byte, eight-bit codes rather
than two-byte seven-bit codes. Later, a group of UNIX systems develop-
ers got together in a task force and advisory committee convened by
AT&T International (now UNIX Systems Laboratories) to develop an
enhanced UNIX code (EUC) for kanji. They ended up accepting a
proposal based on DEC kanji code, that is, a two-byte, eight-bit ap-
proach rather than the JIS two-byte, seven-bit standard (Burkley,
1989a). Meanwhile, as ihepasocom (personal computer) revolution hit,
ASCII Corporation in collaboration with Microsoft developed yet an-
other kanji code: Shift-JIS or MS-Kanji, with a combination of a one-
byte 8-bit code compatible with JIS X0201 and a two-byte 8-bit kanji
code compatible with nothing else, differing in basic organization from
both JIS and EUC. Kanji character code development for personal com-
puters was influenced by processing speed considerations, and it seems
to have been overlooked that these underpowered little toys would ever
need to be connected and have to talk to real computers either as
"intelligent terminals" or as peers on a network. To top it all off,
Shift-JIS is also the system kanji code on the millions of inexpensive
portable Japanese language waapuro (word processors) that have
2S9 Language, Character Codes, and Electronic Isolation in \apan

flooded the market in recent years, combining with personal computers

to make the most incompatible character code also the most wide-
spread in Japan.
So, today, in addition to the two-byte, seven-bit JIS C6226 and JIS
X0208/X0202 kanji codes, various two-byte, eight-bit proprietary vari-
ants in the mainframe and minicomputer environment, and the two-
byte, eight-bit EUC in the UNIX environment, there is also the
mixed-byte, eight-bit Shift-JIS on millions of pasocom and waapuro.
And these are treacherous waters for network sailors.

Archipelagos and Islands: Isolation and Parallel Realms

There is a contrast between the significant international connectivity

of the Japanese academic network realm of the JUNET/WIDE archipel-
ago and the nearly absolute isolationism of the islands in the pasocom
tsuushin realm. They are in parallel, but each seems to have little
interest in or awareness of the other. While JUNET/WIDE researchers
continue to pioneer the application of international standards in the
Japanese context, pasocom tsuushin system developers continue to
reinvent the wheel in nonstandard ways and develop local solutions
incompatible with international standards.
The most significant networks in Japan in terms of size, connectivity,
and global networking are JUNET (Japan UNIX Network) and WIDE.
They are closely related. JUNET, which began in 1984 with dialup
UUCP (UNIX-to-UNIX Copy) test links between two public universities
and one private university (Murai, 1990), now connects over three
thousand computers in more than three hundred organizations (Frey
and Adams, 1990) and is growing rapidly. The WIDE (Widely Integrated
Distributed Network) Internet is an infrastructure network that pro-
vides IP (Internet Protocol) connections to sites at member organiza-
tions, operates the JUNET backbone, and provides Japan's primary IP
connectivity with the rest of the research world. WIDE evolved out of
a project team assembled in late 1986 "to design the future JUNET," and
is oriented toward internetworking, open systems, and global connec-
tivity (Murai, 1989; 1990).
The main function of JUNET is communications. Member organiza-
tions connect to backbone sites to exchange electronic mail and Net-
News. Electronic mail addresses and headers strictly follow de facto
Jeffrey Shapard

international Internet standards. JUNET NetNews includes over 120

Japanese language newsgroups in the fj.* category (Lunde, 1992), as
well as over a thousand of the worldwide USENET newsgroups in Eng-
lish. The official kanji code of JUNET is JIS X0202 (equivalent to
ISO2022), which is based on JIS X0208. As a two-byte, seven-bit char-
acter code it can pass through the narrow straits of the seven-bit ASCII
world most of the time. Although the total number of people outside
Japan who read and write Japanese may be minuscule in comparison
to the domestic population, the designers of JUNET wanted connectiv-
ity both in Japanese as well as in English and other languages. Global
connectivity is a basic operating principle of JUNET/WIDE.
When JUNET began, international communications had to be in
English or romanized Japanese. This played a role in Japan's reputation
as a "black hole" of information, with so much flowing in and so little
flowing out. Jun Murai has described how network design and develop-
ment are not just a matter of link protocols and addressing but an
approach to the "total computing environment," which in the case of
JUNET also involved kanji support in a windowed user interface to the
messaging systems. Once Japanese researchers could communicate eas-
ily with each other in Japanese through JUNET, then the amount of
public traffic, as well as JUNET membership, also increased dramatically
and has continued to grow. A non-Japanese participant complained at
a conference that the increased public NetNews traffic in the fj.* cate-
gory was all in Japanese. Jun Murai replied, "Ah, but we have done our
part in making it accessible. Learning Japanese is still up to you" (Murai,
1989). Fair enough.
Until 1984, individuals who wanted to use their personal computers
for telecommunications had to go to systems abroad, such as the infor-
mation utilities CompuServe and The Source (now defunct) in the
United States. The only way to get to these systems, other than direct
international dialup, was through KDD's (Kokusai Denshin Denwa, an
international telecommunications monopoly in Japan) Venus-P public
X.25 data network. Nevertheless, despite the high costs for individuals,
and despite the fact that telecommunicating with others through U.S.
systems meant telecommunicating in English rather than in Japanese,
pasocom tsuushin had captured the imagination and enthusiasm of a
segment of the growing market of personal computer users, and it
began to take off.
261 Language, Character Codes, and Electronic Isolation in Japan

By the end of 1984, there were more than a half dozen bulletin board
services (BBSs) operated by individuals and hobbyist clubs. All but a
couple were in English (Shapard, 1991). In the years since, grass-roots
BBSs in Japan have boomed. Today there are well over a thousand
public access personal computer BBSs in Japan, and all but a dozen or
so are in Japanese (MBM, 1991). Most personal BBSs in Japan are iso-
lated islands in the datastream, where the only access is direct access,
but a few networked exceptions exist, such as the small but active
FidoNet-Japan group (Yamada, 1990) and other efforts based on unique
locally developed automatic "porting" mechanisms (e.g., Electronic
Networking Forum, 1991). The kanji character code of the little islands
dotting the seas of the Japan BBS realm is Shift-JIS, the kanji character
code of Japanese personal computers.
From 1985, multiuser commercial subscription or usage fee systems
began to emerge in the electronic seas of the large Tokyo and Kanto
plain market, where 30 percent of the total population of Japan lives.
Some of the earliest, largest, and still active, are ASCIInet (1985), oper-
ated by the people who brought us Nihongo MS-DOS and Shift-JIS
kanji, JALNET (1985) of Japan Air Lines, EYE-Net (1985) of the Fujimic
media group, PC-VAN (1986) of NEC, and Nifty-Serve (1987) of Fujitsu.
PC-VAN and Nifty-Serve each claim user memberships in excess of
300,000 and compete for market dominance. Meanwhile, outside of
Tokyo and in collaboration with local government and local business,
regional online systems such as COARA (1985) in Oita Prefecture
(Kyushu) have emerged to serve local communities. All of these larger
systems have active online communities and extensive public data
network connections, with members coming in from other parts of
Japan and the world. But the only access is direct access, and even this
can be a problem as a result of the seven-bit biases of not just a few
so-called international public data networks in the world beyond Japan.
Off in the research lab, with a high-resolution graphics terminal on
your desk, a powerful UNIX workstation nearby, and the rest of the
world just a TELNET command away (for direct access) through high-
speed IP links, it is easy to lose track of the very different context and
environment of users of personal computers and 2400bps modems.
Likewise, people who are just learning how to turn their machines on
and off (and are in near total befuddlement with the "techno-
esoterotica" of modem commands and serial parameters that confront
262 Jeffrey Shapard

them before they can even get to a local BBS or commercial information
utility) are busier looking for something simple that works than taking
much interest in solutions that adhere to international standards for
greater connectivity. They are still trying to get their oars in the water
and get that most basic connectivity of direct access.

Isolation in Tokyo Bay: The Case of TWICS

TWICS started as one of the first half-dozen pioneer BBSs in Japan in

1984, evolved into one of the first public multiuser systems in 1985,
and became one of the first commercial operations in 1986 as an elec-
tronic mail and conferencing service (Shapard, 1986; Shapard, 1990;
Quarterman, 1990). TWICS has been a settled island in the electronic
seas of Japan for a long time, globally accessible through international
public data networks since 1986, and networked through intersystem
mail since 1987. But despite a certain international notoriety as one of
the few systems in Japan so accessible, TWICS still has only a small
population of a little over 700 members who remain isolated from most
of their Japanese neighbors while at the same time enjoying connectiv-
ity with much of the rest of the world online. Language and character
codes have played a role.

The Nature of the Community and Its Communication Needs

Most of the early members of TWICS were also active members of
systems abroad, which they accessed directly through international
public data networks. So, while they lived and worked in Japan, they
were also members of what was then a fairly small community of
people using pasocom tsuushin internationally. TWICS has always had
a multicultural population, from the system operators to the members
who used the system. There is no cultural majority, although the largest
segment of the population is Japanese (Shapard, 1990).
The early TWICS members perceived themselves as part of a larger
international community of those people who had to spend much time
going out through international public data networks to various sys-
tems abroad. Eventually, this changed into a perception more like that
of the JUNET members, where they were able to share information and
ideas with people elsewhere in the world from the convenience of a
local "home" system as part of the world of electronic mail networks.
263 Language, Character Codes, and Electronic Isolation in Japan

JUNET originally served researchers in the same field but in different

organizations in Japan and gave them a channel to professional col-
leagues elsewhere. The initial focus was international as much as it was
domestic.
However, like other pasocom tsuushin system users in Japan, TWICS
members primarily come online as individuals, rather than as part of a
site or organizational membership. Unlike JUNET, the host computer
functioning as the community or "home" mailbox server was not lo-
cated within the domain of an organization that most of the members
shared while not online.
The first domestic applications of pasocom tsuushin in Japan were to
provide locally that which had only been available overseas, that is,
communications facilities and databases. And, having this locally
meant having it in Japanese, the local language. Since almost everyone
who could read and write Japanese, and who had personal computers
and software that supported kanji, were Japanese living in Japan,
the initial focus was absolutely local and domestic. TWICS, with its
use of English and its multicultural community, has been a notable
exception.
The social and communications needs of the TWICS community
members are as various as the membership is eclectic. Some members
use the system primarily for professional purposes, especially for com-
munications with people abroad. In this they are like the users of
JUNET, of which TWICS (twics.co.jp) is also a member. The researchers
on JUNET are members of the larger world academic and research
community, and their communications are basically professional in
nature, transcending national boundaries. Some members of TWICS
join primarily as a result of personal social needs, like those of other
pasocom tsuushin systems in Japan. Their purpose is to pursue personal
interests and meet new people. Public access BBSs and commercial
online services provide them with a wider scope and new ways to meet
people they would otherwise not have the chance to meet.
In the middle are the open community areas, the public topics and
conferences open to all TWICS members. A lot of crossover happens as
those with primarily professional needs benefit as well from the local
relationships they develop and those who came online for personal
social needs benefit from increased professional relationships as the
world online opens up to them.
Jeffrey Shapard

Attempts to get Japanese language communications started in public

areas on TWICS have largely failed, mainly because the Japanese mem-
bers prefer to use English, or, rather, prefer not to be "segregated"
according to language. The most extensive Japanese language commu-
nications on TWICS have been through the use of rornaji, which can
be done with ASCII characters and therefore supported by any terminal.
Writing and reading Japanese through rornaji, however, is "unnatural"
to Japanese speakers, something akin to English speakers writing and
reading in phonetic script. One TWICS member, a mathematician, told
me about some statistics he had run during his graduate school days for
a linguist doing a study (unpublished) on the readability of Japanese
with different scripts (Yoneda, 1986). The use of only kana or rornaji,
rather than the usual kanji/kana combination, resulted in readability
rates not all that much different from those of Japanese reading Eng-
lish, a foreign language.
Language segmentation leads to isolation, and communities require
a shared common language. In the case of TWICS, with its multicultu-
ral community and their international communication needs, this
shared common language has been English. TWICS is at the same time
a part of the larger global community of people interconnected through
the matrix, as well as a tiny English language island isolated from the
communities of the nearby islands of the Japanese language pasocom
tsuushin seas.

The Influences of Language, Character Codes, and Environment

JUNET researchers required international connectivity from the begin-
ning. While they may be using English internationally and kanji do-
mestically, it all has to travel through the same channels. Japanese
researchers and others abroad need kanji as well, even if they are lo-
cated in some seven-bit ASCII environment. So, JUNET adopted kanji
character code standards compatible with international standards. The
developers of JUNET had the need as well as the means to get past the
original limitations of their computing environment and the local-
solution directions of their domestic computer industry.
Personal computer users, on the other hand, also wanted kanji in
their interfaces and online communications, but they were stuck with
Shift-JIS. As with so much else in the personal computer field, Japanese
265 Language, Character Codes, and Electronic Isolation in Japan

BBSs and then larger commercial systems evolved without paying

much attention to developments for other kinds of machines and
environments. When the host systems were home-rolled BBSs running
on personal computers, the total Japanese language environment was
based on Shift-JIS, the only game in town as far as they were concerned.
This has caused more than a few problems along the way, as the larger
commercial and regional systems run not on MS-DOS personal comput-
ers but on larger multiuser systems. So, while their own internal system
kanji codes were EUC or other JIS variations, their interfaces had to be
Shift-JIS. And they have often continued this right down into the heart
of their messaging systems and databases, thereby rendering them-
selves into character code isolation.
Although TWICS has from the beginning supported Japanese in vari-
ous forms, global access requires the lowest common denominator in
terms of assumptions about the kinds of character codes supported by
the personal computers and terminal software of the member users, and
this means one-byte, seven-bit ASCII and the use of English, the most
widespread global language, as the system default language. An early
design principle was "global access with local flavor." Global access
meant access with no assumptions about the user equipment, and
therefore a reliance on international standards such as English and
ASCII. Local flavor meant Japanese place names and style. The paradox
is that, despite the names, if things are in ASCII or English, then they
are not Japanese.
Hie computing environment, and the influence on kanji character
codes resulting from the design philosophies of their makers, has also
had a strong influence on the use of kanji on TWICS, or the lack
thereof, as the system evolved through several platforms. Short of get-
ting all the Japanese computer makers and software developers to agree
on a single, common, kanji character code, and one that is compatible
with international standards, which in turn must be designed to recog-
nize the needs of languages like Japanese, the short-term solutions
involve filters between the different kanji codes. There are three ways
to go about doing this.

Kanfl Filter Solution 1—on the Personal Computer One approach to

the filter solution is to use terminal software on personal computers
that handles the interactive filtering at that end of the connection.
266 Jeffrey Shapard

This is the most efficient solution, as most personal computers are

underutilized in the first place when used as mere terminals. However,
it makes assumptions about the terminal equipment on the user side
and introduces unfair biases for Japanese language users. Many of the
more popular Japanese terminal programs, especially those for the
ubiquitous NEC PC-9801 series, only support a limited number of kanji
character filters, and for some reason, EUC/DEC Kanji and JIS
X0208/X0202 are often not supported. Also, a lot of people use conven-
ient and low-cost Japanese language waapuro for telecommunications,
which have even fewer options.

Kanji Filter Solution 2—on the Host Computer The second solution is
to put interactive filter mechanisms on the host side, generally in the
terminal drivers or some other interactive filter.
This can be done fairly easily with UNIX terminal drivers, and most
UNIX systems in Japan now support interactive kanji filtering in their
terminal drivers, although the manufacturers do it in different ways. It
is a different story with operating systems like VMS.
The first time TWICS went to Nihon DEC with this problem in 1986,
their reply was to offer the source code and a license to change it. In
1988, TWICS went back to Nihon DEC again to argue that their support
of interactive kanji character code filtering in the VMS terminal driver
would help increase their market share in business use and to propose
a solution (Rikitake, 1988). The reply was that such solutions did not
fit into DEC's own global strategies, regardless of how big the lucrative
Japanese market was with all those people sailing Japanese pasocom
and waapuro in their local and incompatible seas of Shift-JIS.

Kanji Filter Solution 3—FHe-to-File The third solution is to forget

about interactive kanji filtering altogether and use kanji file filters in-
stead. In addition to the kanji character code file filters provided by
Nihon DEC for Nihon VMS, for example, there are several others avail-
able as shareware to solve this problem (Lunde, 1992). They are gener-
ally written in such a way that they can be compiled and run on various
platforms, including those that do not have other Japanese language
support, and thereby allow any host system to handle kanji messages
and file exchange.
267 Language, Character Codes, and Electronic Isolation in japan

If someone with a personal computer wants to send a message in

Japanese and their own machine and software only support Shift-JIS,
they use an editor or word-processing program to write the message and
save it in a file. Then, they connect it to the host system or server and
transfer the file through a file transfer protocol like Kermit or XMODEM
or ZMODEM. After that, they run it through the filter utility on the host
system to convert it to a kanji code that will work. For example, they
convert it to JIS X0208/X0202 if it is going through a seven-bit data
path, or to someone on JUNET, or in a Japanese language newsgroup
on USENET. Finally, they send it or post it. It can be a little bit easier to
display kanji messages, as the filters can direct their output to the
terminal screen, but it still requires a couple extra steps.
In addition to the "native" EUC/DEC Kanji code of the VMS system,
TWICS also has EUC/DEC and Shift-JIS in jCaucus, over 120 Japanese
language USENET newsgroups with JIS X0208/X0202, and links with
others systems where either EUC/DEC or JIS X0208/X0202 must be
used, depending on the site. It is small wonder the networkers in Japan
stick to the most familiar kanji codes of their own favorite electronic
island. The more is not the merrier.

Global Directions: Building Bridges for the Future

The issues raised in this chapter regarding multibyte character codes are
not unique to Japan, but are shared by other people in East Asia who
have writing systems derived from Chinese nan ideographs. Chinese
speakers use hanzi (Chinese form of nan ideographs) of various sorts in
the People's Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan, Hong Kong, and else-
where. Korean speakers use a combination of some hanja (Korean form
of nan ideographs) along with their own phonetic alphabet hangul,
derived from hanja in shape but similar to Arabic or Hebrew in the
method of indicating syllables. And Japanese speakers use a combina-
tion of kanji (Japanese form of nan ideographs) along with their own
syllabic kana scripts, katakana and hiragana (described earlier), as well
as some romaji (roman characters like the English alphabet) and Arabic
numbers.
The classical Chinese nan character set, with is origins over 4,000
years ago and its often complicated fonts for up to 50,000 ideographs,
268 Jeffrey Shapard

has evolved into several variations today for writing and computing
(Burkley, 1989b):

People's Republic of China

• Up to 7,500 hanzi (with simplified 6,763 hanzi)

• GB 2312 two-byte code
• Input through phonetic conversion and radical composition

Taiwan

• Up to 15,000 hanzi (PRC simplification not recognized)

• Proposed three-byte code
• Input through phonetic conversion and radical composition

Korea

• Up to 4,000 hanja (for formal writing)

• Up to 40 hangul
• Ministry of Education two-byte code
• Input through hangul composition and hangul to hanja conversion

Japan

• Up to 7,500 kanji (with 1,945 taught in school)

• Up to 100 kana in addition to romaji and Arabic numbers
• Various two-byte codes
• Input through kana to kanji conversion or romaji tokana/kanji
conversion

One-byte character codes are clearly inadequate to accommodate the

needs of the speakers of East Asian and most other languages with
writing systems derived from origins other than those of European
languages today. The 128 basic one-byte, seven-bit ASCII codes are only
useful for English and languages that use the same character set, with
no additional diacritics such as accent marks and so on (see Mason,
chap. 12, regarding problems in networking with French and German
character sets). Enhancements that add support for another 128 char-
269 Language, Character Codes, and Electronic Isolation in Japan

acters through the use of the full eight-bits of a one-byte code remain
local, not international, solutions, as they will display differently in
other contexts.
Two-byte character code solutions, such as those proposed by ANSI
(Unicode), ISO (ISO2022), and various computers makers like DEC, are
also the subject of great controversy and debate (Burkley, 1989b; Shel-
don, 1991), even with their potential room for 65,536 character codes.
The problems are both technical as well as political.
The primary technical problem with two-byte character codes is that
up to 40 percent of the 65,536 possible spaces are lost by setting aside
all codes that include CO and CI sequences that could result in a
character being interpreted as a control code (Sheldon, 1991), a prob-
lem illustrated by Japanese Shift-JIS. There is just not enough space
then left to include all the various hanji of Chinese, the hanja and
hangul of Korean, and the kanji and kana of Japanese as separate
language character code areas. People trying to use these languages
together would need to switch in and out of different language charac-
ter code modes, and additional codes would be needed to indicate the
language mode of a series of text. One proposed solution to this prob-
lem is to unify the nan characters into one basic set where they overlap,
and then support the local variations in separate areas. Other solu-
tions involve using more bytes in the basic character code, such as the
three-byte code proposed in Taiwan, or a four-byte code such as
ISO10646, which would support over four billion spaces. And this is
where the politics come in.
The Chinese agree to a two-byte international standard with a unified
set of han characters, but the Koreans and the Japanese have problems
with it (Sheldon, 1991). Language and culture are closely related, and
writing systems that have been in use for nearly two thousand years
can take on a rather mystical quality regardless of the origin. Despite
the ancient Chinese origins of Japanese kanji, the Japanese consider
their kanji to be Japanese, and not just a subset of han characters. And
they resent the assumption that they should continue to work with
compromises forced onto them for compatibility with the short-sighted
vision and narrow assumptions of a field that is only now beginning to
recognize that ASCII is not enough for the world.
270 Jeffrey Shapard

Conclusion

In conclusion, as we sail the electronic seas and explore, settle, and

develop the virtual world online, we face many of the same issues that
our ancestors have faced in the past as their cultures collided with those
of others, and as they discovered whole civilizations built upon vastly
different assumptions. We can learn from parallels in history and les-
sons gained through research in various fields and disciplines as we
design the new environments in which we work and communicate. Or
else we can stumble along in the blindness of our own narrow biases
and wonder why this technology leaves us isolated from others rather
than living up to its promise of greater connectivity.
 Cognitive Apprenticeship on
Global Networks
Lucio Teles

Apprenticeship is a time-honored way for novices to learn various skills

ranging from carpentry to medicine and law (Rogoff, 1984). When the
skills to be learned are cognitive in nature, the process is called cogni-
tive apprenticeship (Collins, Brown, and Newman, 1989).
Cognitive apprenticeship has, throughout history, benefited from
"learning technologies." The printing press, for example, allowed ap-
prentices to access knowledge contained in books instead of relying
exclusively on masters and peers for oral transmission of knowledge
(Ong, 1982). More recently, computer-mediated communication has
introduced new opportunities for cognitive apprenticeship in online
environments (Levin, 1990; Harasim et al., 1994).
Online apprenticeship, also called teleapprenticeship (Levin, 1990), refers
to apprenticeship mediated by access to masters and peers on computer
networks. The learner accesses the online learning environment, which
is characterized by five attributes: one-to-many and many-to-many
communication; asynchronidty or time independence; place inde-
pendence; text-based presentation, and computer mediation (Harasim,
1990, see also Harasim, chap. 3). In this environment, online appren-
tices can build and share knowledge through goal-oriented learning
interactions with peers, experts, and mentors, and through full-time
access to specialized sources of information. Adoption of computer
networks by educational institutions has led to the development of
online environments to support science, English, history, geography,
and many other subject areas.
This chapter focuses on apprenticeship techniques in global network
environments. Two approaches to online apprenticeship are illustrated:
online mentorship and peer collaboration in global networks, which are
272 Lucio Teles

supported by various apprenticeship techniques, such as scaffolding,

fading, and exploration, which will be discussed.
When conducted over global networks, the process of apprenticeship
raises operational as well as content issues. Operational issues refer to the
logistics of setting up the learning interaction, that is, learner's access
to the network, the coordination of different school terms, holidays,
and so forth. Content issues refer to cross-cultural communication mat-
ters such as interaction between people with different cultures, habits,
and history. In global networks subject areas such as history, geography,
languages, and others are permeated by cultural views. It is the work of
the educational designer and moderator of online environments to
make the best use of these differences for learning purposes. Designers
of learning environments have to take into account issues of cross-cul-
tural communication for learning to be enabled on a global scale.

Cognitive Apprenticeship and Learning Environments

Much current educational research is concerned with how learning

takes place and which factors can enhance cognition, in order to un-
derstand how this process can be facilitated. The sociohistorical school,
an approach which influences much of the work on this area, postu-
lates that learning is both an individual, self-directed activity as well as
a social endeavor (Brown and Palincsar, 1989). The implication for
educational practice is that collaboration and group interaction should
be actively supported to promote learning. Individual learning can be
combined with coaching, peer interaction, and collaborative work to
encourage social learning interactions with instructors, peers, mentors,
and experts.
The "places" where learners and their instructors, mentors, or peers
interact are called learning environments (Collins, Brown, and New-
man, 1989). These environments are shaped by participants according
to various approaches to instructional design, moderating, and self-
paced learning. When designing or evaluating learning environments,
four dimensions and their respective characteristics should be consid-
ered: content, methods, sequence, and sociology. If careful attention is
given to these dimensions, an "ideal learning environment" can be
attained (ibid.).
For learners, the sodal component of the learning activity is devel-
oped through the coaching or help offered by people who know the
273 Cognitive Apprenticeship on Global Networks

target skill (masters or experts) or are in the process of learning (peers).

Individual learning combined with the support of knowledgeable oth-
ers through the processess of modeling, observation, and successive
approximations is called apprenticeship.
Collins, Brown, & Newman (1989) identify the dimensions and char-
acteristics of ideal learning environments to support cognitive appren-
ticeship (table 16.1). Learning environments may combine these
characteristics in different ways, based on various assumptions, needs,
and teaching approaches. All combinations and designs aim at facilitat-
ing mastery of cognitive skills.
These characteristics are important design factors supporting knowl-
edge building in online learning environments. Although learning is
mediated by the computer, the process itself is composed of human
interactions that must be detailed and provide collaborative instances.
A carefully designed environment that provides instances of collabora-
tion, coaching, scaffolding, reflection, and exploration is essential to
supporting online apprenticeship.
Online apprenticeship provides a variety of learning tools to indi-
viduals willing to work within the constraints and the potentials of
computer-mediated communication. When combined with a carefully
designed environment, global networks can offer new learning options.
Two frequently used approaches to online apprenticeship are: mentor-
ship and peer collaboration.

Online Mentorship and Peer Collaboration

In apprenticeship through mentorship, a professional or a knowledge-

able person shares knowledge with apprentices of the trade. Appren-

Table 16.1
Characteristics of ideal learning environments
Content Methods Sequence Sociology
Domain knowledge Modeling Increasing complexity Situated learning
Heuristics strategies Coaching Increasing diversity Culture of expert practice
Control strategies Scaffolding Global before local skills Intrinsic motivation
Learning strategies Fading Exploiting cooperation
Articulation Exploiting competition
Reflection
Exploration
Source: Collins, Brown, and Newman, 1989, 476
274 Lucio Teles

ticeship can also be facilitated through a process of peer collaboration.

Peer collaboration can occur in various formats: one-to-one, structured
group collaboration, or unstructured group collaboration. In the one-
to-one collaboration format, two peers support each other's learning
needs. In structured group collaboration, learners are given a task to
perform online and have to collaborate to achieve the final results.
Finally, in unstructured peer collaboration, apprentices raise issues in
online environments and obtain valuable feedback from people knowl-
edgeable in the subject area.

Domain Knowledge and Knowledge-Building Strategies

Domain knowledge refers to the content area that the learner is address-
ing. The conceptual and factual knowledge as well as the procedures for
problem solving in the target area are part of the domain knowledge.
Learners use a variety of heuristics, control, and learning strategies to
master domain knowledge (Collins, Brown and Newman, 1989). Many
subject areas such as writing, history, languages, and geography can be
successfully taught online.
In the domain knowledge of poetry, the apprentice needs to know
words, syntax, and grammar as a prerequisite for poetry writing. Know-
ing these required skills, the apprentice can then learn how to write
short stories and poems. The development of skills for creative writing
implies learning how to successively construct effective and correct
sentences, paragraphs, and verses and how to revise to achieve clarity.
At the same time apprentices model other poets.
Many literature and creative writing classrooms in Canada are net-
worked to provide students with access to online mentors (writers,
poets, English professors). Using the computers and modems in the
school lab, students submit their poems or stories on the network to
obtain feedback from the mentor.
In one case the online mentor for creative writing is based in Van-
couver, Canada, and the students are located in different cities and
towns in North America. The mentor is a professional writer, newspaper
columnist, and English professor. A student submitted a poem, written
for a class assignment, seeking stylistic improvements. The mentor
responded with suggestions for changes. A learning interaction was
initiated with the initial submission and posterior feedback given by
the mentor.
275 Cognitive Apprenticeship on Global Networks

The complete revision/rewriting process to obtain the final copy

(submission, feedback, individual work; resubmission, new feedback,
individual work, and so forth) took place over one month. The result
is a poem improved in its rhythm, prose, and images. Through tran-
scripts of the online interaction, the successive stages of improvement
can be tracked. Supported by the mentor's coaching (comments) and
scaffolding (feedback or concrete suggestions for improvements), the
student revises and rewrites the poem. The two versions are reproduced
below. The parts changed by the student are in boldface:

Original Version of the Poem Final Revised Version

(December 14,1991) (January 21, 1992)

Red is the colour of sunsets, Red is the colour of sunsets,

and of glittering garnets and of glittering garnets
as they fall through slender slipping through slender
fingers fingers
with scarlet nails, to land with scarlet nails, to land
on to the snow-covered ground. on snow-covered ground.
It is the sound It is the sound
of slow, quiet blues of slow, quiet blues
in a smoke-filled room; in a smoke-filled room,
the intense beat of the bass the intense beat of the bass
reflected in a woman's sultry mirrored in a sultry woman's
face, face,
red lipstick against pale skin. red lipstick against pale skin.
A volcano's eruption, A man's distraction;
fire, destruction. his heart/s frustration.
The birth of a passion The birth of a passion
hatred or love hatred or love
the rush of hot blood the rush of hot blood
through a young poet's head. through a young poet's head.
A velvet dress is red A velvet dress is red
against a lover's cheek against a lover's cheek
the desire to speak the desire to speak
of things forbidden. of things forbidden.

In a final message to the learner, the mentor writes:

I think the poem is much improved and much more powerful. The rhymes and
near-rhymes (distraction/frustration/passion) work well. The tone is more con-
trolled, so the impact of the last four lines is all the greater. Over all the poem
has grown and strengthened through your revision. Good stuff!
276 Lucio Teles

The apprentice had access to various techniques to master the do-

main knowledge of creative writing, including scaffolding, reflection,
and exploration.

Scaffolding

Scaffolding refers to the intellectual support provided to the learner in

the form of comments, suggestions, feedback, and observations. As the
learner progresses, the mentor fades until mastery is achieved by the
apprentice:

This idea [of scaffolding] can be illustrated in diverse domains of informal

learning, where individual skills originate in cooperative activity through a
scaffolding process. Inititally in the learning of language or other skills, the
teacher carries the greatest responsibility in the activity, erecting a scaffold for
the child's limited skills. As the child's learning and development progress in a
given domain, the scaffold gradually diminishes, the roles of learner and teacher
become increasingly equal, and the point is finally reached where the child or
learner is able to do alone what formerly could be done only in collaboration
with the teacher. (Greenfield, 1984)

The creative writing student received feedback to improve the poem.

Part of a mentor's message to the student is reproduced below as an
example of scaffolding:

. . . you've chosen an irregular rhyme scheme and meter, and I'm not sure why.
You have some straightforward rhymes like "bass/face" but also some near-
rhymes like eruption/destruction, love/blood. I can accept an inconsistent
rhyme scheme, even if it's arbitrary, but here I feel a little lost. Similarly, your
lines scan unevenly—which is fine, except that sometimes your meter is quite
regular and we expect to stay with its rhythms.
. . . Look again at the whole poem, and see what you might change in the early
part that would enhance the impact of the last 4 lines.

Scaffolding can come in a variety of formats, depending on the

subject area, apprentice's needs, and types of resources one has access
to. It aims at providing the learner with the necessary support to master
a particular learning task.

Reflection

Asynchronous communication, that is, the opportunity to interact

with others on one's own time, gives the learner the flexibility to re-
search or to use metacognitive strategies to address issues raised by
277 Cognitive Apprenticeship on Global Networks

peers or mentors and to have the time to research and to reflect before
responding. This is different from a face-to-face learning interaction
when an immediate response is expected. Asynchronicity facilitates
reflection, an important cognitive skill in apprenticeship.
The learner reflects on the feedback received from the mentor and
successively shapes and reshapes the poem. The mentor critically reads
each revised version and gives support in the form of comments and
suggestions. This continuous support facilitates the learner's reflection
to achieve mastery of a skill. A question asked by the apprentice illus-
trates the reflective character of the interaction:

I think I'm going to make "mirrored in a woman's seductive face" into "mir-
rored in a sultry woman's face" because seductive and sultry just aren't the same
thing to me, and in this case I really mean sultry. What do you think?

Exploration

Exploration involves getting students into a problem-solving situation

where they might have to play the role of an expert (Collins, Brown
and Newman, 1989). Exploration occurs in many ways. In the example
that follows, schools set up a program called "Writers' Link" whereby
grade 4 students write short stories and submit them to online peers for
revisions. A group of three to five students in the same classroom work
together to review the submitted story and to give feedback to the
writer. Three "editors" read a short story and sent the following message
to the writer:

Dear Chris:
We really liked your ending because it expressed your feeling's about your
rabbit. We also think that you shouldn't use floppy so much and instead you
could use words like soft, droopy, bendable, etc. We also think you should try
changing the opening sentence and try not to list things so much. Next time
try making your paragraph a little longer. When my group read about your
rabbit we felt your rabbit was very special to you.
From your editors: Kelly, Lindsay, and Brad

In performing the role of editor, the students must carefully read the
story to assess its merits and weaknesses. With the support of the
teacher, the editors identify a number of aspects of the story that should
be improved and others that deserve praise. Through this process they,
too, learn about revisions and sentence structure.
278 Lucio Teles

Sequencing Instruction

Well-designed and sequenced learning tasks are important components

in the mastering of a particular skill. In online courses taught at Simon
Fraser University, undergraduate and graduate students take on tasks
relating to mastery of the content, including skills in presentation and
analysis. In the sequencing of instruction, students first read the re-
quired texts and then are asked to discuss and analyze the underlying
concepts. Once students learn the concepts under the moderation of
the instructor, they take on the role of instructor and each moderates
one online course session. The instructor monitors the discussion and
exchanges personal messages with the moderator to clarify issues and
to help in the moderation of the course session. In this way students
first observe the instructor's performance as an online instructor and
then assume responsibility for teaching a particular course topic online,
and in this process, learn about the theme itself.
By moving from less to more complex learning tasks, the student
increasingly assumes the responsibilities and tasks of a praticing re-
searcher. The learner is also exposed to an increased diversity (Collins,
Brown, and Newman, 1989) as she or he interacts with peers. In this
way, the apprentice learns about conceptual issues in research method-
ologies and then applies them to the discussion of various research
projects developed by colleagues in the final course sessions. Such
sequencing allows for mastering of research skills and gives the learner
the step-by-step support needed for knowledge building.

Peer Collaboration for Expert Practice

Peer collaboration refers to the process of cooperatively sharing knowl-

edge with colleagues. Harasim (1990) describes the many-to-many com-
munication attribute of computer conferencing as a feature that
facilitates group work and peer interaction:

Collaborative or group learning in the face-to-face classroom refers to instruc-

tional methods whereby students are encouraged or required to work together
on academic tasks . . . Educational research identifies peer interaction among
students as a critical variable in learning and cognitive development at all
educational levels, (p. 43)
279 Cognitive Apprenticeship on Global Networks

Curriculum design and implementation consititutes an important

part of the time and the resources schools allocate to teacher profes-
sional development. Peer collaboration on global networks can be used
to support curriculum design and implementation. The following case
focuses on a teacher who used peer discussion on global networks for
professional development in course design.

Cross-Cultural Awareness Case Study

A social studies teacher in British Columbia, Canada, designed a new
curriculum for his grade 9 class. In the design of the new curriculum,
the teacher wanted to emphasize cultural awareness through direct
contact and used global networks to provide his students with the
opportunity to interact with peers in Japanese schools. He contacted a
teacher in Japan on a computer network who was interested in partici-
pating and whose students could communicate in English. Global net-
works facilitated the teaching of cross-cultural awareness through peer
communication between the two cultures: teacher/students in Canada
and teacher/students in Japan. (While the common language was Eng-
lish, some messages were in Japanese; Canadian counterparts also
learned a few words and sentences in Japanese.)
The peer cross-cultural communication program for curriculum de-
velopment between Japan and Canada lasted five weeks. During that
period eighty-four messages were exchanged, including eleven mes-
sages between the two teachers.
Several operational issues had to be considered. These included
finding an international peer, preparing/negotiating the program with
the partner or peer, becoming aware of different school deadlines and
holidays, and identifying areas of mutual interest. As a result of the
program both the teachers and the students benefited. The Canadian
teacher learned how to design and implement a cultural awareness
program for grade 9 social studies curriculum via global networks.
Three major ways were identified in which the cross-cultural experience
enriched teacher development for curriculum design:

1. I learned how to set up a peer cross-cultural communication program via

electronic mail;
2. I learned about the Japanese culture through direct exposure to people in
Japan; and,
280 Lucio Teles

3. I improved my knowledge of the Japanese language in the process of teach-

ing my students basic Japanese words and in translating some of the messages
sent by the Japanese.

Students experienced an innovative learning experience that moti-

vated them to actively participate.
Another example of the use of networking for professional develop-
ment is the model of the Ask-an-Expert conference, a meeting place for
teachers to exchange ideas for classroom teaching (Teles and Duxbury,
1991). Teachers enter questions or comments about a topic and an
"expert" in that area quickly replies. For example, one teacher posted
this message:

I am teaching a unit on buoyancy to a Gr. 6/7 class. So far we have compared

the buoyancy of objects in salt water and fresh water. Could anyone recommend
any other safer, readily available solutions which would make interesting com-
parisons with fresh water? Is there anything which makes objects in fresh water
even less buoyant? Just exactly how does one explain density to kids at this age?

This teacher received two responses to the question. The first was:

Well, you might try Vodka. It is less buoyant than water, and its buoyancy is the
standard measure of its alcohol content.

And a second, lengthier one:

May I add to previous suggestion. An old chestnut was to take a jar or beaker of
methanol (spirit duplicating fluid) and put an ice cube in it. It sinks! I suppose
you could do some interesting things by using a solution of alcohol and water
that would change the behaviour of objects very nearly at neutral buoyancy.
The other suggestion I would have would be to place an eyedropper that has
enough water in it to barely float in a tall bottle. Cover the bottle with some
rubber dam or a balloon fragment that leaves a little air space. When you hold
the balloon on with an elastic band or some tape you can now push down on
the balloon to increase the pressure on the surface of the water and this pressure
increase is transmitted through the water to the bit of water in the eyedropper
and it pushes upward and compresses the air in the dropper. The dropper is now
not buoyant and it sinks to the bottom.

This support for knowledge building in teacher professional develop-

ment for classroom teaching shows a "culture of expert practice"
among teachers who share knowledge with their peers. The Ask-an-Ex-
pert conference exemplifies the kind of peer interaction and collabora-
tion that takes place in network environments.
281 Cognitive Apprenticeship on Global Networks

Conclusions

Online apprenticeship is a new learning option. Apprentices access

global network environments to learn a variety of skills and to share
knowledge through access to mentors, peers, and experts.
The design of the environment is an important consideration that
can affect apprenticeship in different ways. When apprentices interact
and learn online, they develop cognitive processes such as exploration,
reflection, and knowledge sharing. In the process of learning they
benefit from various techniques such as coaching, scaffolding, and
accessing to peers and experts.
Various apprenticeship techniques that have been used traditionally
are now being used in network environments. Apprenticeship tech-
niques, when applied in network environments, are to a great degree
the product of well-designed learning interactions to support the learn-
ing of particular skills. In the active interaction (Harasim, 1990) be-
tween the learner and a peer, mentor, expert, or instructors lies the key
to the success of these techniques in network environments.
Global networks introduce new opportunities and issues for learning
on a global scale that have to be addressed by designers of online
environments. There is a need for a pedagogy of global networks and
research on the many issues raised by learning in cross-cultural envi-
ronments. A body of knowledge is being built in this area of appren-
ticeship and online learning environments. The best teaching strategies
and learning options are still being explored. This new knowledge will
add valuable information to learning in network environments on a
global scale.
Computer Networks and the Emergence
of Global Civil Society
Howard Frederick

WHEN IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS it becomes possible to

dissolve the communication frontiers that have divided peoples one
from another and to assume among the Powers of the Earth the inter-
dependent and balanced communication relations to which the Devel-
opment of Technology has entitled them.
WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, that all human com-
municators are created equally, endowed with certain Unalienable
Rights, among them the right to hold opinions without interference
and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any
media and regardless of frontiers. This Right to Communicate includes
the right to be informed as well as to inform, the right to reply as well
as to listen, the right to listen or to ignore, the right to be addressed as
well as to speak, and the right to use communication resources to satisfy
human social, economic, and cultural needs.
THAT TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS, a global computer communications
network has now arisen benefitting the Common Good of Humankind
by loosing the bonds of the marketplace and the strictures of govern-
ment on the media of communications and allowing that part of hu-
man endeavor known as global civil society to communicate outside
the barriers imposed by commercial or governmental interests.

These are possible opening lines of what might be called a Charter of

Communication Interdependence of the global nongovernmental move-
ments for peace, human rights, and environmental preservation. The
growth of such global interdependent communication relations has
been greatly accelerated by the advent of decentralizing communica-
Howard Frederick

tion technologies such as computer networking. Global civil society as

represented by the "NGO movement" (nongovernmental organiza-
tions) now represents a force in international relations, one that cir-
cumvents hegemony of markets and of governments. This chapter
outlines the concepts of global civil society and the NGO movement,
describes the obstacles that they face from governments and transna-
tional corporations, and sketches the emergence of the Association for
Progressive Communications network as an illustration of this world-
wide phenomenon.

"Community" used to be limited to face-to-face dialogue among people

in the same physical space, a dialogue that reflected mutual concerns
and a common culture. For thousands of years, people had little need
for long-distance communication because they lived very close to one
another. The medieval peasant's entire life was spent within a radius of
no more twenty-five miles from the place of birth. Even at the begin-
ning of our century, the average person still lived in the countryside
and knew of the world only through travelers' tales.
Today, of course, communications technologies have woven parts of
the world together into an electronic web. No longer is community or
dialogue restricted to a geographical place. With the advent of the fax
machine, telephones, international publications, and computers, per-
sonal and professional relationships can be maintained irrespective of
time and place. Communication relationships are no longer restricted
to place, but are distributed through space. Today we are all members
of many global "nonplace" communities (see Harasim's discussion of
Networlds in chap. 2 and Rheingold's portrayal of virtual communities
in chap. 4).
In the last decade there has emerged a new kind of global commu-
nity, one that has increasingly become a force in international rela-
tions. We speak of the emergence of global civil society, that part of our
collective lives that is neither market nor government but is so often
inundated by them. Still somewhat inarticulate and flexing its muscles,
global civil society is best seen in the worldwide NGO movement,
nongovernmental organizations, and citizens advocacy groups uniting
to fight planetary problems whose scale confound local or even na-
tional solutions. Previously isolated from one another, NGOs are flex-
285 Networks and Emergence of Cfobal Civil Society

ing their muscles at the United Nations and other world forums as their
power and capacity to communicate increase.
The concept of civil society arose with John Locke, the English phi-
losopher and political theorist. It implied a defense of human society
at the national level against the power of the state and the inequalities
of the marketplace. For Locke, civil society was that part of civiliza-
tion—from the family and the church to cultural life and education—
that was outside of the control of government or market but was
increasingly marginalized by them. Locke saw the importance of social
movements to protect the public sphere from these commercial and
governmental interests.
From the industrial age to the present, mercantilist and power-politi-
cal interests have pushed dvil society to the edge. In most countries,
civil society even lacked its own channels of communication. It was
speechless and powerless, isolated behind the artifice of national
boundaries, rarely able to reach out and gain strength in contact with
counterparts around the world. What we now call the NGO movement
began in the middle of the last century with a trickle of organizations
and has now become a flood of activity. NGOs today encompass pri-
vate citizens and national interest groups from all spheres of human
endeavor. Their huge increase in number and power is due in no
small measure to the development of globe-girdling communications
technologies.
Dutch social theorist Cees J. Hamelink (1991a, 5-8; 1991b) sees a new
phenomenon emerging on the scenes-global civil society, best articu-
lated by the NGO movement. New communications technologies now
facilitate communication among and between national civil societies,
especially within the fields of human rights, consumer protection,
peace, gender equality, racial justice, and environmental protection.
From Earth Summit to GATT, from the United Nations General Assem-
bly to the Commission on Human Rights, NGOs have become the most
important embodiment of this new force in international relations.
The development of communications technologies has vastly trans-
formed the capacity of global civil society to build coalitions and net-
works. In times past, communication transaction clusters formed
among nation-states, colonial empires, regional economies and alli-
ances—for example, medieval Europe, the Arab world, China and Ja-
pan, West African kingdoms, the Caribbean slave and sugar economies.
286 Howard Frederick

Today, new and equally powerful forces have emerged on the world
stage—the rain forest protection movement, the human rights move-
ment, the campaign against the arms trade, alternative news agencies,
and planetary computer networks.
These decentralizing and democratizing qualities of new computer
technologies are also benefiting a growing global movement for the
common good. The promise of democracy is fulfilled when citizens can
rise above personal, even national, self-interest and aspire to common
good solutions to problems that plague the entire planet. The global
commons is not just those parts of the planet outside national jurisdic-
tions, such as the air, oceans, outer space, and Antarctica (International
Journalism Institute, 1987, 18). It is also a common striving to reach
certain transcendent goals. In times past, those goals included abolition
of slavery, laws against child labor, and universal suffrage. Today's
planetary challenge is environmentally, socially and economically sus-
tainable development. People must reduce sharply the burden they
impose on the carrying capacity of the Earth's ecosystems.

The continued growth and influence of this global civil society faces
two fundamental problems: increasing monopolization of global infor-
mation and communication by transnational corporations and the in-
creasing disparities between the world's info-rich and info-poor
populations. Global computer networking makes an electronic end run
around the first problem and provides an appropriate technological
solution to overcome the second.
Hamelink observed that the very powers that obstructed civil society
at the national level—markets and governments—also controlled most
of the communication flows at the global level. Government monopo-
lies still control a huge share of the world's air waves and telecommu-
nications flows. Even worse, a handful of immense corporations now
dominate the world's mass media. If present trends continue, Bagdikian
predicts that by the turn of the century "five to ten corporate giants will
control most of the world's important newspapers, magazines, books,
broadcast stations, movies, recordings and videocassettes" (1989, 805).
Telecommunications infrastructures and data networks must also be
included in this gloomy account.
Why is this happening? The most fundamental reason is that fully
integrated corporate control of media production and distribution
287 Networks and Emergence of Global CMI Society

reaps vast profits and creates huge corporate empires. Already more
than two-thirds of the U.S. work force is now engaged in information-
related jobs (U.S. Department of State, 1988, 1.). Almost half the gross
national product of the fourteen most industrialized countries, and
one-quarter of all international trade, comes from services (Jussawalla,
1985,11). Telecommunications services grew by 800 percent worldwide
in the 1980s. According to UNESCO, the total world information and
communication economy in 1986 was $1,185 billion, about 8 to 9
percent of total world output, of which $515 billion was in the United
States (UNESCO, 1990, 83). Growth in this sector is accelerating, and it
is no surprise that a few large corporations now predominate in the
world's information flow. While there are more than one hundred news
agencies around the world, only five—Associated Press, United Press
International, Reuters, Agence France Presse, and TASS—control about
96 percent of the world's news flows (Mowlana, 1986, 28).1 Corpora-
tions such as Sears, IBM, H&R Block, and Lockheed control the bulk of
the videotex information markets in the United States.
In addition to transnational control of information, global civil soci-
ety and the NGO movements confront the increasing gap between the
world's info-rich and info-poor populations. In virtually every medium,
the disparities are dramatic.

• An estimated 95 percent of all computers are in the developed

countries.
• While developing countries have three-quarters of the world's popu-
lation, they can manage only 30 percent of the world's newspaper
output.
• About 65 percent of the world's population experiences an acute
book shortage.
• Readers of the New York Times consume more newsprint each Sunday
than the average African does in one year.
• The only third world country to meet UNESCO's basic media stan-
dards for per capita numbers of newspapers, radio, and cinema is Cuba.
• Only seventeen countries in the world had a gross national product
larger than total U. S. advertising expenditures.
• The United States and the Commonwealth of Independent States,
with only 15 percent of the world's population, use more than 50
288 Howard Frederick

percent of the geostationary orbit. The third world uses less than 10
percent.
• Ten developed countries, with 20 percent of the world's population,
accounted for almost three-quarters of all telephone lines. The United
States had as many telephone lines as all of Asia; the Netherlands, as
many as all of Africa; Italy, as many as all of Latin America; Tokyo as
many as all of Africa (Frederick, 1993, 75).

Even within the United States we have the info-rich and the info-
poor. From the streets of Manhattan to the barrios of Los Angeles, from
the homeless to the immigrant populations, from Appalachia to the
inner cities, there are millions upon millions of our fellow Americans
who cannot read or type, do not consume newsprint, cannot afford a
book. For example, white children are 2.5 times as likely to have home
computers as African-American and Hispanic children (Information
Rich vs. Poor, 4).

To counter these twin trends that threaten to engulf civil society with
commercialization and control, there has arisen a worldwide metanet-
work of highly decentralized technologies—computers, fax machines,
amateur radio, packet data satellites, VCRs, video cameras, and the like.
They are decentralized in the sense that they democratize information
flow, break down hierarchies of power, and make communication from
top and bottom just as easy as from horizon to horizon. For the first
time in history, the forces of peace and environmental preservation
have acquired the communication tools and intelligence-gathering
technologies previously the province of the military, government, and
transnational corporations. Many people, organizations, and technolo-
gies are responsible for this development, but one organization has
distinguished itself by specializing in the communication needs of the
global NGO movement.
The history of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC)
dates back to 1984, when Ark Communications Institute, the Center for
Innovative Diplomacy, Community Data Processing, and the Founda-
tion for the Arts of Peace—all located in the San Francisco Bay Area near
Silicon Valley, California—joined forces to create what was then called
PeaceNet, the world's first computer network dedicated exclusively to
serving the needs of the movements for peace, human rights, and social
289 Networks and Emergence of Global CMI Society

justice. In 1987, PeaceNet became a division of the San Francisco-based

Tides Foundation, and the Institute for Global Communications (IGC)
was formed to direct and support its activities.
Parallel to this, with seed money from Apple Computer and the San
Francisco Foundation, in 1984 the Farallones Institute created EcoNet
to advance the cause of planetary environmental protection and sus-
tainability. Farallones transferred EcoNet to the newly formed Institute
for Global Communications in 1987. ConflictNet, dedicated to serving
nonviolent conflict resolution, dispute mediation, and arbitration,
joined IGC in 1990. Together, these three networks—PeaceNet, EcoNet,
and ConflictNet—make up what we now refer to as the IGC networks,
the largest computer system in the world dedicated to peace, human
rights, and environmental preservation.
Inspired by the technological success of establishing these networks
in the United States, the Institute for Global Communications began
collaborating with a similar network in England, GreenNet. To raise
funds, rock stars Little Steven and Peter Gabriel performed two "Hurri-
cane Irene" concerts in Tokyo in December 1986. Thus it can be said
that the idea of a global network for peace, human rights, and the
environment was born in Peter Gabriel's New York hotel room in 1987
when the money was distributed and the original charter was drafted
on a laptop computer.
With this impetus, in 1987 GreenNet and the IGC Networks joined
together seamlessly, demonstrating that transnational electronic com-
munications could serve these communities. This transatlantic link was
so successful that, with the support of the MacArthur, Ford, and Gen-
eral Service foundations and the United Nations Development Pro-
gram, IGC helped to establish five more networks in Sweden, Canada,
Brazil, Nicaragua, and Australia. This led in 1990 to the founding of the
Association for Progressive Communications (APC) to coordinate this
global operation. Today, more than 15,000 subscribers in ninety coun-
tries are fully interconnected through low-cost personal computers.
These groups constitute a veritable honor roll of nongovernmental
organizations working in these fields.

APC members are fond of saying that they "dial locally and act glob-
ally." Today there are APC partner networks in the United States, Nica-
ragua, Brazil, Russia, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden,
*b
291 Networks and Emergence of Global Civil Society

and Germany and affiliated systems in Uruguay, Costa Rica, Czechoslo-

vakia, Bolivia, Kenya, and many other countries (see figure 17.1 APC
Network Topology). The APC even has an affiliated network in Cuba
and can boast of providing the first free flow of information between
the United States and Cuba in thirty years. Dozens of FidoNet systems
connect with the APC through gateways located at the main nodes.
APC's largest computer, known as "cdp" or Community Data Process-
ing, is located in Silicon Valley, California.
The APC networks can now set up complete electronic mail and
conferencing systems on small, inexpensive microcomputers for be-
tween $5,000 and $15,000 with software developed since 1984 and
available to partner systems at no charge. Individual users typically
make a local phone call to connect to their host machine, which stores
up mail and conference postings until contacted by a partner computer
in the network, typically about every two hours. Aside from its low cost,
this technological configuration is appropriate for countries whose tele-
communications infrastructure is still poor. The file transfer protocols
used between the computers have a high level of resiliency to line noise
and satellite delays, and, if an interruption does occur, they are able to
resume a transfer right at the point it was interrupted. This is particu-
larly important for transporting large binary files, when the chances of
losing the connection over poor quality telephone lines is significant.
Within the APC, main nodes at London (GreenNet), Stockholm
(NordNet), Toronto (Web), and San Francisco (IGC networks) bring the
communication flow in from regional nodes. Messages are then ex-
changed and distributed around the world so that a message from
Australia can end up on a screen in Estonia in two to four hours.
Messages can be sent through these machines to outbound fax and
telex machines, to commercial hosts such as Dialcom and GeoNet,
and to academic networks such as Janet, BITNET, EARN, and
USENET/UUCP. The entire APC system is tunneled on to the Internet
through the IGC networks, which are a full Internet host (igc.org). The
price is low by any standard; in the United States hourly connect
charges range as low as $3 per hour.
Simply put, electronic mail (or email) connects two correspondents
through a computer and a modem to a host computer. One user, let's
say a peace researcher in Finland, uses her computer to dial into a local
data network (analogous to the telephone network but for data traffic
Howard Frederick

instead of voice). She either types in a message or uploads a prepared

text into her host computer—in this case, NordNet in Stockholm.
Within a short time that message is transferred via high-speed moderns
through the telephone lines to the host system of her correspondent, a
university peace studies professor in Hawaii. His host system is the
PeaceNet computer in California. At his convenience, he connects to
his host and downloads the message. This miraculous feat, near instan-
taneous communication across half the globe, costs each user only the
price of a local phone call plus a small transmission charge.
Unlike systems used by the large commercial services, the APC net-
works are highly decentralized and preserve local autonomy. One mi-
crocomputer serves a geographical region and is in turn connected with
other nodes. The local node collects the international mail, bundles
and compresses it, then sends it to the appropriate partner system for
distribution using a special high-speed connection.
In addition to email, the APC networks also oversee about nine
hundred electronic conferences—basically a collective mailbox open to
all users—on subjects from AIDS to Zimbabwe. It is here that people can
publicize events, prepare joint proposals, disseminate vital informa-
tion, and find the latest data. APC conferences carry a number of
important alternative news sources, including Inter Press Service (the
third world's largest news agency); Environmental News Service (Van-
couver), the United Nations Information Centre news service; Agenda
Latinoamericana de Informaci6n (Ecuador, in Spanish); Alternet (Wash-
ington, D. C); New Liberation News Service (Cambridge, Massachu-
setts); Pacific News Service (San Francisco, California); and World
Perspectives Shortwave Monitoring Service (Madison, Wisconsin).

The first large-scale impact of these decentralizing technologies on in-

ternational politics occurred in 1989. When the Chinese government
massacred its citizens near Tiananmen Square, Chinese students trans-
mitted detailed, vivid reports instantly by fax, telephone, and computer
networks to activists throughout the world. They organized protest
meetings, fundraising, speaking tours, and political appeals. Their im-
pact was so immense and immediate that the Chinese government
tried to cut telephone links to the exterior and started to monitor the
USENET computer conferences where much of this was taking place
(Quarterman, 1990, xxiii-xxiv).
293 Networks and Emergence of Global CM! Society

During the attempted coup in the Soviet Union in August 1990, the
APC partners used telephone circuits to circumvent official control.
While the usual link with Moscow is over international phone lines,
APC technicians also rigged a link over a more tortuous route. Soviet
news dispatches gathered in Moscow and Leningrad were sent by local
phone calls to the Baltic states, then to NordNet Sweden, and then to
the London-based GreenNet, which maintains an open link with the
rest of the APC.
Another example is the 1991 Gulf War, when computer networks
such as PeaceNet and its partner networks in the APC exploded with
activity. While mainstream channels of communication were blocked
by Pentagon censorship, the APC networks were carrying accurate re-
ports of the effects of the Gulf War on the third world, Israel, and the
Arab countries, and news of the worldwide antiwar movement. For a
movement caught off guard, amazingly smooth coordination took
place rapidly across the country and the world. Competing groups
agreed on common platforms, set synchronized action dates, and
planned large-scale events across vast distances. Computer users seized
the technology and made it work.
In 1992, the Association for Progressive Communications, through
its Brazilian partner network Alternex, played a major role in providing
communications services for environmentalists, nongovernmental or-
ganizations, and citizen activists before, during, and after the 1992
United Nations Conference on Environment and Development
(UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro. The largest United Nations conference in
history, UNCED was the first global gathering on the environment
since 1972. It was also the first global summit to take place fully within
the age of the NGO and computer technologies. APC maintained over
thirty electronic conferences on UNCED documents, agendas, reports,
discussion and debate, and even distributed da zi boo, or "electronic
wall newspapers," from the conference. APC's information sharing al-
lowed the United Nations process to be accessible to citizens around
the world, thus providing broader citizen participation in a heads-of-
state summit than was ever possible before.
Around the globe, other APC networks are working on issues of
peace, social justice, and environmental protection. In Australia, the
members of the Pegasus network are working to hook up the affluent
18 percent of the electorate that votes Green. In the United States,
Howard Frederick

EcoNet is helping high school students monitor water quality in local

rivers. One such experiment involved fifty students along the Rouge
River in Michigan. When in 1991 neo-Nazi skinheads ransacked a
Dresden neighborhood populated by foreigners, users of the German
partner network ComLink posted news of the event. Soon Dresden
newspapers were flooded with faxes from APC users around the world
deploring the action. All in all, tens of thousands of messages a day pass
back and forth within the "APC village," and the number grows every
day.

The partner networks of the Association for Progressive Communica-

tions have built a truly global network dedicated to the free and bal-
anced flow of information. The APC charter mandates its partners to
serve people working toward "peace, the prevention of warfare, elimi-
nation of militarism, protection of the environment, furtherance of
human rights and the rights of peoples, achievement of social and
economic justice, elimination of poverty, promotion of sustainable and
equitable development, advancement of participatory democracy, and
nonviolent conflict resolution."
The APC networks are trying to circumvent the information monop-
olies to construct a truly alternative information infrastructure for the
challenges that lie ahead. By providing a low-cost, appropriate solution
for nongovernmental organizations and poor countries, they are at-
tempting to civilize and democratize cyberspace. They also provide an
appropriate way to bridge the gap between the info-rich and the info-
poor.
The world is truly moving into a "new order." The age of democracy
may have had its beginnings in the French and the American revolu-
tions, but only today is it finally reaching the hearts and minds of
sympathetic populations around the world. This "preferred" world or-
der of democratic change depends heavily on the efficiency of commu-
nication systems.
Perhaps the most durable impact of the APC networks is their pro-
motion of that illusive phenomenon known as "world public opinion."
One way that we can confirm the ascendance of global civil society is
to examine the accumulating evidence for world public opinion, a
cosmopolitan convergence of interactively communicating national
civil societies. The 1980 MacBride Report observed that world public
295 Networks and Emergence of Cbbal CMI Society

opinion was "still in the process of formation, and thus fragile, hetero-
geneous, easily abused" (International Commission for the Study of
Communication Problems, 1980, 198). As we approach the third mil-
lennium, communications technologies such as the APC networks are
transforming international relations. They have greatly accelerated the
rise of global civil society and the NGO movement. Not only do they
report violations and victories of human rights but they are also dem-
onstrating that communication and information are central to human rights
and to the emergence of democratic, decentralized, planet-loving
movements.
IY Visions for the Future
Social and Industrial Policy for Public
Networks: Visions for the Future

Mitchell Kapor and Daniel Weitzner

Utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares about the "wired world"

surround us in the popular, academic, and commercial media. We be-
lieve that new computer-infused communications technologies and the
digital media that ride atop them hold tremendous potential to enrich
our collective cultural, political, and social lives and to enhance demo-
cratic values in our society. However, policymakers face major chal-
lenges in the articulation, development, and implementation of public
policies that ensure that the potential of digital media is realized.
The benefits of new electronic media will remain accessible only to a
limited community of users until steps are taken to realize the promise
of what we call the International Public Network. The IPN is not a
single network but an interconnected confederation of numerous net-
works, all of which serve different needs and are optimized for their
own particular uses. Since it is unlikely that any single network design
could meet the needs of all users, standards must be developed that
enable these diverse networks to interconnect and interoperate seam-
lessly from a user's perspective. The proper balance between diversity
and homogeneity, global access, and local character must be sought.
The IPN is the vision of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF),
which was founded on a shared conviction that a new public interest
advocacy organization was needed to educate the public about the
democratic potential of new computer and communications technolo-
gies.1 As a political advocacy organization, we work to develop and
implement public policies to maximize civil liberties and competitive-
ness in the electronic social environments being created by new com-
puter and communications technologies. Our primary mission is to
300 Mitchell Kapor and Daniel Weitzner

ensure that the new electronic highways emerging from the conver-
gence of telephone, cable, broadcast, and other communications tech-
nologies enhance First and Fourth Amendment rights and other laws
that protect freedom of speech and limit the scope of searches and
seizures, encourage new entrepreneurial activity, and are open and
accessible to all segments of society.
As an organization that is also concerned with the culture that devel-
ops around new communications media, we hope to encourage and
publicize creative and community-building uses of computer-based
communications. In our quest to "civilize cyberspace," we hope to
become an organized voice for the burgeoning community of nation-
ally and internationally networked computer users. It is our aim to be
a forum and, where possible, serve as a "testbed" for innovative elec-
tronic communications activities. In order to help realize the potential
of these new media, we are bringing the early adopters of these tech-
nologies into the political process, because we believe that those who
take the first steps in using the technology have a unique perspective
to offer to policymakers.

Framing a Policy Approach to the International Public Network

While we are convinced that the future holds tremendous promise for
new communications media, the public policy strategy we have
adopted proceeds in small, incremental steps. What we call the Inter-
national Public Network will not be created in a single step: neither by
a massive infusion of public funds, nor with the private capital of a few
tycoons, such as those who built the railroads or the great shipping
empires. Rather it will emerge from the process of the convergence of
diverse networks reaching all over the world. Over time, the Interna-
tional Public Network will form the main channels for commerce,
learning, education, and entertainment in our global society. Other
media, such as the global postal system, broadcast TV and radio, and
telephone service are ubiquitously available in many parts of the world.
Our aim should be to ensure the same level of ubiquity for new elec-
tronic media.
The public policy and research agenda outlined here is a series of
practical, inaemental steps that should help to create an environment
conducive to innovation and expanded access to networking applica-
301 Social and Industrial Policy for Public Networks

tions. These are platform-building steps, which will not yield applica-
tions directly but will open up the Net and promote the development
of services that meet the needs of an increasingly diverse community
of users. Much attention has been devoted to the need for technical
standards that enable interconnection and interoperability of heteroge-
neous networks. Though there is still much work to be done in this
area, we will not address it here. Rather, our intention is to explore
some of the legal, economic, and organizational infrastructure arrange-
ments required to create an international public networking environ-
ment suitable for a diversity of uses and users.
In particular, we will use changes in the Internet as case studies for
solving problems likely to occur in other public networking environ-
ments around the world. The Internet is a worldwide network of net-
works that reaches dozens of countries, includes nearly a million
distinct computers, and serves many millions of users (see Quarterman,
chap. 3). Conceived twenty years ago in the United States, and spon-
sored originally by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (AREA) of
the U.S. Department of Defense, the Internet (originally, ARPANET) has
grown exponentially and now serves not only the research and educa-
tion community but substantial sectors of industry and growing sectors
of the public as well.
The Internet is a heterogeneous computing and communications
environment tied together by common technical protocols. It offers a
type of "thick" connectivity in which users are linked by full-time,
high-speed connections. Because of its thickness, the Internet can serve
as a kind of petri dish of technological and social experimentation and
innovation. Popular applications on the Internet include electronic
mail, computer conferencing, access to online information repositories,
remote login to distant computers, and a host of emerging applications
in the area of personal communications and information retrieval. The
Internet is thick compared to the thin, intermittent, low-speed capabili-
ties of the public, switched, voice telephone network when used by
personal computer users with their modems reaching out to commer-
cial online services and bulletin boards.
From the recent history of public data networking, we have gleaned
some basic lessons, several of which we will discuss here. First, in order
to promote free expression and the open exchange of ideas, public data
networks should be operated under a policy of common carriage. That
302 Mitchell Kapor and Daniel Weitzner

is to say, all messages will be carried regardless of content. Any harm

that results from the message is the responsibility of the author, not the
carrier. Second, government funding of and policies toward public net-
works can be used to promote a healthy competitive marketplace for
networking services. Third, networks should be designed and operated
to accommodate traffic off all kinds, commercial and noncommercial.
Mixed-use networks provide more value to all users.

Protect Free Expression by Promoting Common-Carriage Regimes

Computer networks can only fulfill their promise as innovative com-

munications media in an environment that encourages free and open
expression. In some countries, legal principles of free speech protect
freedom of expression in traditional media such as the printed word,
and radio and television. But once communication moves to new elec-
tronic media or crosses international boarders, the legal mechanisms
for safeguarding free speech fall away. There is no international legal
authority that will protect free expression on transnational networks,
nor do most domestic free speech protections fully extend to electronic
media.
Common carriage is a centuries-old Anglo-American legal doctrine
that has been evolved to promote open, efficient operation of earlier
communications and transportation infrastructures such as turnpike,
ferries, railroads, telephones, and telegraphs. A common carrier—the
railroad operator, telephone company, or telegraph facility—has the
duty to carry all traffic without regard to the content. So a railroad
company cannot refuse to carry a package because it happens to be
an odd color, nor can a telegraph operator refuse to transmit a mes-
sage because it contains statements that the company finds politically
objectionable.
Discrimination as to content is a violation of the common carrier's
legal duty to the customer. Extension of such a duty to network opera-
tors is vital to ensure that all messages, without regard to content or
identity of the sender, are delivered to their destination. Absent this
protection, the communications carrier can become a private censor of
all communications across its network.
Common carriers also have a duty to interconnect with other carriers.
To promote economic efficiency and guard against the development of
303 Social and Industrial Policy for Public Networks

monopolies, carriers such as railroads, telegraphs, and telephone com-

panies have been required to interchange traffic with competing carri-
ers to provide customers with the most efficient routing of their
packages (whether they be box cars or digital messages). Many network
providers have interconnected on a voluntary basis without waiting for
government regulatory fiat. These kinds of voluntary interconnection
arrangements are to be encouraged. But in any case, interconnection is
vital to the development of a networking environment that is easily
accessible and serves the needs of a growing number of users.
The need for common carriage arises because, in the United States,
the constitutional right of free speech can only be claimed when
government action infringes on speech rights. Private communication
carriers, therefore, are free to restrict the content of—censor—any mes-
sages that they carry, unless there is some statutory or contractual
protection for the sender. (There is some legal authority that publicly
regulated communication carriers, such as the Regional Bell Operating
Companies, are subject to the First Amendment. However, the founda-
tions of this position are uncertain even for basic voice telephone
service and have been found inapplicable for advanced data communi-
cation services.)
So, in the United States, common carriage is a critical legal tool for
ensuring open access to electronic media.2 Internationally, many coun-
tries used to rely on state-owned PTTs (Post Telegraph and Telephone)
for telecommunication services, where the principles of common car-
riage would be inapplicable. But as many PTTs are privatized and de-
regulated, some new policy framework will be necessary to ensure
unimpeded access to media. As is a legal device drawn from the Anglo-
American legal system, common carriage may not be appropriate to the
legal systems of other countries. However, it does provide important
guidance as to the goals of open communications policy.

Encourage the Growth of Interconnected, Market-Based, Network Communications

Services

The tremendous popularity of the Internet has already demonstrated

the value of public data networks in the higher education and research
community. The success and ever growing use of the WELL, Com-
puServe, PeaceNet, EcoNet, and Prodigy combined with the 40,000 plus
304 Mitchell Kapor and Daniel Weitzner

bulletin board services and the worldwide FidoNet system show the
popularity of networking in other communities. However, the socio-
economic profile of users of these services is still relatively narrow and
elite. The majority of Internet users still come from highly educated
backgrounds, and the members of CompuServe and Prodigy are over-
whelmingly white, upper-middle-class men.
Despite current usage patterns, network-based communication serv-
ices could have value beyond the currently limited universe of users. As
these services become more useful, less expensive, and more accessible,
the community of users may well grow. Just as other communications
tools—the printed book, the written word, telephones, and televi-
sions—were adopted only slowly, from the top down, the same pattern
can be expected with networking. We can and should adopt policies
and promote technologies that help make networked information re-
sources accessible to an ever-broadening community of users.
The ongoing growth and change of the Internet offers many valuable
lessons for access-expanding strategies. Started as a network that was
only intended to serve the specialized needs of a small community of
researchers in the late 1960s, the Internet has grown into global elec-
tronic environment that supports millions of active users. In the 1960s,
the average fifth grader, for example, had no need to use the ARPANET
to access remote computing power. But in the 1990s, students at the
elementary school level can benefit from having access to libraries and
other online educational resources around the country.

Commercial Network Service Providers Expand Access

In the Internet world, and in the case of other network communities
such as the Well and the IGC networks (PeaceNet, EcoNet, and Conflict-
Net), commercial communications providers have played a key role in
extending the reach of networked resources. Commercial Internet
providers have become a critical means by which more and more indi-
viduals and small organizations gain Internet access. For very low fees,
various providers offer full dialup access to a full range of Internet
resources. Similarly, networks such as the WELL are built up from com-
mercially provided public packet networks that are accessible from local
dialup sites all over the world. So to enable broader network access, we
should seek to implement policies and technologies that support com-
mercial, interconnected network services.
305 Social and Industrial Policy for Public Networks

In the early history of the Internet, organizations that needed net-

work access relied exclusively on connections offered by the federal
sponsors of the Internet. At its birth, when it was known as ARPANET,
little was known about how to build large public data networks. Federal
research support played a critical role providing network access and in
the development of public networking technologies. Since network
technology was still in a precompetitive stage, direct government pro-
vision of Internet services was a reasonable and productive means by
which to supply connectivity to institutions that needed it.
However, as current networking technology has stabilized, many
private sector sources—including members of the Commercial Internet
Exchange—are now able to offer Internet access as well. By offering
low-cost connections and individualized service, private network serv-
ice providers have made Internet access available to many who do not
receive direct government sponsorship. Therefore, active government
involvement in providing network access services can be ended.
As in the long-distance telephone market or the rail service, carriers
will have to enter into cooperative agreements to be sure that an
Internet customer on one carrier's service can send and receive data
from customers on other services. Even with the backbone in existence,
a significant amount of interregional traffic bypasses the backbone
as part of bilateral arrangements between various regional networks.
The Internet community has a long-established tradition of promoting
interconnection and developing and adhering to international stan-
dards. There is every reason to believe that this pattern of coopera-
tion will continue in the Internet community and in other network
environments
The Commercial Internet Exchange, a trade association of commer-
cial Internet providers, has shown that interconnection arrangements
can be created, even between otherwise competing providers. Internet
connectivity is now a commodity service that can be purchased on the
open market just like other carriage services such as long-distance tele-
phone service, shipping, air freight, or overnight mail.
In addition to funding patterns, architectural growing pains also
hindered the development of a decentralized, commercially based In-
ternet. When the upgraded National Science Foundation Network
(NSFNET) of the mid-1980s was experiencing growing pains and per-
formance degradation, building a high-speed backbone was a reason-
306 Mitchell Kapor and Daniel Weitzner

able response on the part of the NSF. The data transmission technology
at the heart of the backbone was in experimental stages; so, a govern-
ment-funded backbone was appropriate to help develop this technol-
ogy. But now, five years later, the building blocks of the backbone are
available off the shelf and can easily be interconnected without direct
government intervention.

Target Government Support Directly to Users, Not Government-

Selected Carriers
One concrete step that can be taken to encourage the growth and
development of commercial Internet services is to change the current
pattern of network funding. Government agencies that have responsi-
bility to connect institutions to the Internet should give the subsidy
directly to the target institution, rather than making payments to back-
bone and regional network providers. The target institution can then
take this money and purchase Internet connectivity from a variety of
service providers.
Unlike several years ago, the time is now ripe for this kind of funding
strategy because Internet services have become commodity services.
Just like long-distance telephone service, or trucking, or overnight mail,
an institution or individual that needs such services can find a variety
of service options available in the market. This strategy will have the
dual effect of promoting the development and diversification of In-
ternet service offerings and giving consumers an expanded choice of
service offerings.

Research Agenda: Standard Financial Settlement Practices for

Interconnecting Networks
For interconnected, commercial networking services to flourish, settle-
ment mechanisms will have to be developed that enable intercon-
nected networks to share the cost of carrying each others traffic fairly.
Early interconnections between various public data networks have been
based on flat-fee or no-fee arrangements, but these are not lasting solu-
tions. Commercial network providers can only be expected to intercon-
nect with other networks if they are assured that uneven traffic flows
between networks will not financially disadvantage one party. Such
arrangements are commonplace in the international postal system and
307 Social and Industrial Policy for Public Networks

the international voice telecommunications infrastructure. All coun-

tries that participate in international post and telecommunications
conventions agree to certain settlement arrangements that facilitate
international participation in these communications networks while
insulating individual participants from undue financial burdens.

Allow Mixed Commercial and Noncommercial Use of Networks

The NREN Implementation Plan

Growth in the U.S. portion of the Internet has encouraged the U. S.
government to implement the new National Research and Education
Network (NREN) with policies and technologies that support both com-
mercial and research and education traffic.3 The more information that
is accessible over the Internet, the greater its value to its users. But the
potential of the Internet as an information dissemination medium for
both public and private institutions has only just begun to be explored.
As part of legislation that created the NREN, the U.S. Congress man-
dated that network services should be provided in a "manner which
fosters and maintains competition within the telecommunications in-
dustry and promotes the development of interconnected high-speed
data networks by the private sector."4
Under the NSF's management, the use of the Internet by commercial
organizations has been wildly successful. Nearly 60 percent of all regis-
tered computing sites on the Internet are commercial organizations.
Within two years this number is expected to grow to nearly 90 percent.
It is not surprising, in light of this rapid change in the Internet envi-
ronment, that even with the best intentions on the part of NSF, some
problems occurred along the way. New policies based on a careful look
at the market today can create a thriving commercial environment on
the Internet.
Millions of scientists, students, government workers, and even the
occasional Congressional staffer rely on the Internet as a primary com-
puter and communications tool. Researchers exchange scientific in-
formation, students further their education, government workers
communicate with others working on publicly funded projects. Some
of us even use the Internet to stay in touch with political developments
(see Frederick, chap. 17).
308 Mitchell Kapor and Daniel Weitzner

Eliminate "Acceptable Use Policies" that Restrict the Flow of

Information on Public Networks
As part of its current management of the NSFNET backbone (one part
of the Internet), the National Science Foundation has set a series of
"acceptable use policies" (AUP) that define the type of traffic that can
be carried over the NSFNET backbone. The major AUP restriction re-
quires that all data carried over the NSF backbone be "in support of
research and education."
This restriction frustrates two important NREN goals by precluding
widespread offering of commercial electronic information services and
discouraging commercial organizations from making full use of the
Internet.
Public policies that allow both noncommercial and commercial in-
formation providers to offer their services over the NREN will enhance
the productivity and creativity of researchers, educators, students, and
other NREN users. This lesson can be applied fruitfully to other net-
works as well.

The Need for Service Classifications

Allowing public networks to support both commercial and noncom-
mercial traffic is a necessary step toward realizing the potential of such
networks as popular communications media, but this alone is not
enough. In order to promote diversity of communications, older public
infrastructures have developed techniques to support a variety of finan-
cial arrangements for their users. Postal services allow senders the
choice of first class mail or overnight service in the case of urgent
messages. Postcards are cheap but offer less privacy and diminished
communication content. Parcel post is available for heavy loads that
are sent in less of a rush. When acknowledgment of receipt of a message
is required, certified mail is available. Telecommunications users also
have a variety of options available when they use voice telephone
service. Collect calls, person-to-person calls, and 800 and 900 numbers
all represent a variety of financial arrangements available to meet dif-
ferent needs.
Some mail services are subsidized, or cross-subsidized, for public pol-
icy reasons. Nonprofit institutions benefit from special rates in recog-
nition of the public service they perform. Libraries get low rates, as does
anyone who mails books and is willing to wait a while for delivery.
309 Social and Industrial Policy for Public Networks

Finally, members of the U.S. Congress get tree mail to their constitu-
ents. In sum, service classifications are vital policy tools to promote
infrastructure access for a wide variety of users.
All of these different classes of services make their respective commu-
nications infrastructures accessible to a wider number of users and meet
a diversity of communications needs. Stranded travellers would find the
telephone network useless and frustrating if the collect call or tele-
phone credit card system was not in place. Charitable and political
organizations would have a harder time communicating their message
in print without special bulk-rate privileges. Market forces can be relied
on to deliver some amount of service flexibility. But there will always
be a need for direct or indirect subsidy to ensure that the communica-
tions infrastructure serves the needs of all segments of society.
The next stage of the development of the Internet can be used as a
test-bed for these service classification schemes. In order to introduce
service classifications on packet-based networks such as the Internet,
new routing technology is required to sort out traffic of different
classes. Current high-speed networks are based on data communica-
tions architectures that originated in the private networking world. For
TCP/IP and other data networking technologies, the main concern was
fast, efficient routing, not billing. The next generation of network
routers must have the ability to expedite packets (or frames or cells)
tagged with higher-priority classifications and defer delivery of lower-
class messages until excess bandwidth is available.

Conclusion

The bulk of this discussion has centered around issues raised in U.S.
policy arenas, but we believe that the lessons learned may well have
broader application. Of necessity each country will have to retain sig-
nificant local control over its own electronic communications environ-
ment. Furthermore, we do not believe that the policies of any one
country should come to dominate the field. Yet, we must recognize that
with respect to the International Public Network, the policies made by
one local jurisdiction—whether it is a dry, country, or regional group-
ing—may affect all who use the network.
Many of us have dramatic visions of the future of networking around
the globe. Yet no set of policies will achieve those visions in one giant
310 Mitchell Kapor and Daniel Weitzner

step. In this chapter we have outlined a series of incremental steps that

can be taken toward our longer-term goals. Government policy has a
continued role to play as networks grow nationally and internationally.
We should all work toward policies that promote free expression, en-
sure access to a wide range of users, and take full advantage of competi-
tive market forces to bring innovative, affordable services to users.
Co-Emulation: The Case for a Global
Hypernetwork Society

Shumpei Kumon and Izumi Aizu

As we enter a new phase of modernization, the information age, many

of the ways in which we live, work, and interact will undergo profound
change. Increasingly the problems facing global society demand that
we begin to act in ways that are more harmonious and sustainable with
regard to the environment in which we live. The best way for Japan and
other nations of the world to deal with this new phase in our coUective
history is to mutually emulate, that is, to co-emulate, those civiliza-
tional components that each lacks and that best respond to the de-
mands that we will jointly face.
A new form of organization that we propose to call "intelprises" will
engage, collaboratively and competitively, in the "wisdom game/' a
new type of social game1 that aims to enhance the intellectual influence
of its players. Intelprises will also act as agents for co-emulation be-
tween the individualism-based Western branches and the contextual-
ism-based Eastern branches of modern civilization. In other words,
co-emulation will be the main content of the wisdom game. Co-emu-
lation offers a strategy for the transition to post-modern civilization
that will take place in the twenty-first century.
We propose to call the next generation of networks "hypernetworks."
In the technological context hypernetworks will provide more band-
width and capability to handle a wide range of media, forming the
information infrastructure to support the global activities of not only
industrial enterprises in the wealth game but also intelprises in the
wisdom game. In the sociological context they present a new social
system that people join in order to share useful information, knowl-
edge, and even wisdom and in which the dominant form of social
312 Shumpei Kumon and Izumi Aizu

interaction is persuasion/inducement. Global hypernetworks in this

sociological sense will be the arena for the wisdom game.

From Networks Today to Hypernetworks Tomorrow

The term hypemetwork was first coined by Torn Ono, the voluntary
''general manager" of COARA (Communication of Oita Amateur Re-
search Association), one of the most active PC. networks in Japan, in
the fall of 1989. Foreseeing the convergence of text-based communica-
tion and multi- and hypermedia computer technology, Ono and other
COARA members used hypemetwork as a keyword to describe this
near-future network technology and its social, economic, and cultural
implications (Rheingold, 1992).
COARA evolved in 1985 in Oita (Kyushu) to develop the region into
an economically autonomous area that does not have to rely on cen-
tralized Tokyo and the national government for guidance, leadership,
or economic opportunities (Hiramatsu, 1990). In 1989, the local gov-
ernment installed the world's first free X.25 public packet network. Its
goal was to provide uniform low-cost access to COARA and gateways to
national and international information systems from throughout Oita
prefecture.
Discussion during early online debates about hypernetworks cen-
tered on technology. Using text-based systems as a starting point,
COARA members looked at trends in the development of computer and
communication technology and proposed that hypernetworks be com-
puter-mediated communication networks able to cany hypermedia,
that is, nonsequentially structured text with multimedia handling ca-
pabilities (Nielsen, 1990).
In subsequent online discussions and two face-to-face conferences
(March, 1990 and February, 1992), Kumon proposed to broaden the
original technology-based definition to include wider sociological con-
cepts. In earlier joint U. S.-Japan research efforts, Kumon had defined
modem Japanese and East Asian society as a "network society." He used
the term network to emphasize the complex web of human-to-human
relationships that typify Japanese and other East Asian societies and re-
ferred to interaction between people, especially that emphasizing per-
suasion and inducement, as "human networking." He also attempted
to define the next stage in the development of modem industrial
313 Co-Emulation: A Global Hypernetwork Society

society in a generic sense as "network society" (Kumon, 1992). In this

usage, the term network refers to telecommunications and computer
systems as well as to persuasion-oriented ways of human interaction.
The two different connotations of network society, sociological and
technical/economic, needed to be denned, and the interrelationship
between the two needed to be analyzed. The concept of the hypernet-
work does this by representing a new type of society, based on the
conventional Japanese or East Asian type of interaction, but sig-
nificantly transformed as a result of the highly advanced technological
innovations. Just as the term network is widely used to represent both
technological and sociological concepts, this chapter uses the concept
of hypernetwork in a way that has both technological and sociological
connotations.

Informatization in Historical Perspective

Since the late 1970s, the massive penetration of information technol-

ogy in general societal activities has heightened the awareness of
change. We propose that the concept of hypernetworks can provide a
new analytical framework to help understand this change.
The key word in this context is "informatization." This term is often
used in a narrow sense to refer to the new wave of innovation in
industrial technology. But there are two other waves that are rising at
the same time: a wave of social evolution that is carrying us beyond
industrialization and a wave of integrative change that is carrying us
beyond modern civilization. It is thus possible to categorize the
changes now in progress into at least three types: economic, sociologi-
cal, and civilizational. We suggest using informatization in a broader
sense encompassing all of these changes.

Informatization as an Economic Transition

Modern industrial society, which has passed through the age of light
industry (the nineteenth-century system) and the age of heavy industry
(the twentieth-century system) is now entering its third development
stage with the advent of the age of the information industry—the
twenty-first-century system (figure 19.1). This is the first meaning of
informatization.
Shumpei Kumon and Izumi Aizu

Information industry
(21st-century system)
Heavy industry
Light industry (20th-century system)
(19th-century
system)

1775 1875 1975

Figure 19.1
Three economic systems in modern industrial society

The nineteenth-century system began in the late 1770s, when it first

became possible to produce iron in large quantities. Iron was used to
build machines for production and transportation of consumer goods.
Operating under the principle of free competition, small capitalists
used hired labor and machines in their factories to produce consumer
goods for sale as market commodities. Trade in these commodities
involved the exchange of ownership rights.
The twentieth-century system began to evolve in the late 1870s when
it became possible to utilize oil and electrical energy in large quantities.
The development of internal combustion engines and electric motors
that could be used in automobiles and electrical appliances brought
machinery to households in the form of consumer durables. The new
industries of this age were operated by large organizations that used
huge amounts of capital. The competition between large enterprises
took an oligopolistic form. These enterprises tended increasingly to
lease or rent production equipment rather than purchase them out-
right. Trade was based increasingly on the right of use rather than the
right of ownership.
We are now entering the third stage of industrial development, the
twenty-first-century system of industrialization. The main driving force
in this new period of industrialization is neither matter nor energy but
information and knowledge. Information and knowledge have been
recognized as vital factors of production, and they are increasingly
being used as products in trade. The principle focus of trade in the
twenty-first-century marketplace will not be the right to own or use
goods but rather the services, especially information-processing serv-
ices, that are produced using goods, especially machinery. Just as the
315 Co-Emulation: A Global Hypemetwork Society

twentieth-century system was characterized by the paradigm of mass

production and consumption, the twenty-first-century system will be
characterized by a new production/consumption paradigm in which
products are customized or rapidly modified to cater to small groups of
consumers. Just as steamships, railways, and other transportation sys-
tems enabled the rapid growth of markets in the 19th and twentieth-
century systems, telecommunications networks and the media that
they carry—hypernetworks—will allow the effective transfer of infor-
mation essential to the functioning of the twenty-first-century system.
Instead of large bureaucratic organizations in the twentieth-century,
network-type systems in which large numbers of small teams can coop-
erate and compete on the basis of loose and flexible bonds may be most
effective in this context. Several authors have noticed this change and
have attempted to clarify its nature. Malone, Yates, and Benjamin
(1988) point out that, as information technology prevails, existing
social systems such as markets and hierarchies will be replaced by what
might be called electronic markets and electronic hierarchies. They
predict that, in the information age, the proportion of economic activ-
ity coordinated by markets will increase vis-a-vis activity coordinated
by hierarchies. Ken-ichi Imai (1992), upon examining the future of
Japan's industrial organizations, concluded that today's keiretsu-type
organizations2 will be replaced by "network industrial organizations."
These are neither markets nor hierarchies but social systems that stand
between market and hierarchy. Bressand (1989) describes a "Networld"
vision that electronic networks (infrastructure) and a common set of
social/human networks (infostructure) will be combined to help create
an interconnected global society that will bring people and organiza-
tions into closer contact beyond mere economy.

Informatization as a Sociological Transition

The second meaning of informatization is sociological and we use the

concept of "games" to identify social behaviors. Having passed through
phases of militarization and industrialization, modern civilization itself
is about to enter the third phase of modernization (see figure 19.2).
Here, a new social "game" will be developed that will in part or entirely
displace the "prestige game" played by states and will complement the
"wealth game" played by industrial enterprises.
316 Shumpei Kumon and Izumi Aizu

Informatization
I Intelprises
Wisdom game,
Industrialization jr
Enterprises /
Wealth garne^*- ^C^
Militarization ^^^^ /
Sovereign states ^^V /
Prestige g a m e ^ X ^ / /

1600 1700 1800 1900 2000 2100

Figure 19.2
Three phases of modern civilization

The starting point for the first phase of modernization, militarization,

can be traced to the collapse of the world empires that had created
premodern civilization and the consequent emergence of autonomous
territorial powers, or feudal lords, who achieved independence on the
periphery of those empires. This was later followed by a revolution in
military and maritime technology, which paved the way for the forma-
tion of the modern sovereign states in which the concept of sovereignty
is held sacred. These sovereign states together formed a global societal
system known as the international society in which they have competi-
tively pursued the capability to dominate other actors (other states or
their own people) by means of threat and coercion. One may say that
these modern sovereign states are players in the prestige game.
The second phase of modernization can be described as the process
of industrialization that resulted from the technological innovations of
the industrial revolution. The modern industrial enterprises that
formed the nucleus of the industrialization process held the concept of
private ownership sacred. Together, these enterprises formed a global
societal system known as the world market in which they have com-
petitively pursued maximization of their wealth, that is, the capabUity
to control other actors by means of exchange and exploitation. These
enterprises are players in the wealth game. Although the social legiti-
macy of private ownership and wealth creation through free competi-
tion in the marketplace has not been lost, people are expressing doubts
about the social inequalities and environmental damage that they
cause.
317 Co-Emulation: A Global Hypernetwork Society

Today a new social game is emerging on a global scale based on still

another form of social interaction: persuasion and inducement through
information and knowledge sharing. We can see the rise of a third type
of mutually competitive social organization that attempts to enhance
its intellectual power based on the concept of what we call information
rights. Such new organizations, which we call intelprises, are engaged
in a new social game, the wisdom game, in a new global societal system
that might be called the global network.
In short, based on the waves of informatization, the process of mod-
ernization is about to move from the nationalist pursuit of prestige and
the capitalist pursuit of wealth to a new phase based on competition to
acquire wisdom or intellectual power of influence. The wisdom game,
however, will not completely replace the other two games, especially
the wealth game. In its early stage of development the wisdom game
will be played together with the wealth game in a complementary and
collaborative way. That is to say, we are living in an age of transition
which has profound consequences for industrialized countries: the
transition from the era of the prestige-and-wealth game to the era of
the wealth-and-wisdom game.

Informatization as a CMIIzatlonal Transition

We have described the flow of social evolution within the context of

modern civilization, but ultimately it is possible that this process will
lead to the creation of post-modern civilization that transcends modern
civilization. Given ever increasing concerns about the state of the
global environment as well as about population and starvation prob-
lems, people are beginning to realize that the operationalization of
industrial society should be transformed into new, more sustainable
ways.
Post-modern civilization is likely to place a high value on inclusive-
ness and collaboration and on harmony with and adaptation to the
external environment. It is also likely to be oriented toward continuity
and stability rather than progress and development. In addition to
competition in the free market, collaboration within groups of people
or over networks will also play a major role in the social interaction. As
discussed by Sproull and Kiesler in chapter 6, and Manheim in chapter
7, technological innovations, particularly in the field of information
318 Shumpei Kumon and Izumi Aizu

and communication, can support these collaborative activities on a

local, national, and global scale. As the value system of modern civili-
zation, based on the beliefs of development and growth, confronts ever
increasing global problems, the need to find a new set of values ori-
ented toward sustainability and harmonious symbiosis with the envi-
ronment becomes apparent. The wisdom game will work as an agent of
such a civilizational change.

How the Hypernetwork Society Will Be Shaped

To illustrate how hypernetwork society will be shaped, we outline some

of the core elements and processes that we foresee: information rights,
the social framework; intelprise, the new organizational structure; and
groupmedia, the enabling technology.

Information Rights
To borrow from Albert Bressand's terminology (1989), the emergence of
hypernetwork society will require not only physical/technical infra-
structure but also a wide range of new social agreements binding the
infostructure that is the social/human network. We propose that the
core of such infostructure will be "information rights," a new concept
of human rights that will supplement, and in part replace, property
rights that have been widely accepted in modern industrial society.
People have three basic types of rights related to information proc-
essing and transmission. First, both as individuals and as members of a
group, people need the right of information-processing autonomy. In
other words, individuals should be acknowledged as having the right
to reject the attempts of others to intervene in or influence, without
permission, their own decision making process. This includes acts of
interference such as censorship, being sent "junk" email, or being
affected by the actions of a computer virus or system "cracker." We call
this the "information autonomy/security right." Second, individuals
and groups should be assured that any new information that they
create or discover in the process of information handling naturally
belongs to them. They should be acknowledged as the "instigators" of
that new information and as having the right to demand that others
give due credit or ask for their permission when they want to transmit
that information to a third party. This we name the "information
319 Co-Emulation: A Global Hypernetwork Society

title/priority right." Third, individuals and groups should be acknowl-

edged as having certain control rights over the gathering, processing,
and use of information concerning oneself (or one's group) and hence
the right to demand that others tell them what information they have
about them and to prevent others from using it in ways that they do
not like. For this, we want to use the term "information control/privacy
right."
In the information society, not only intellectual property rights but
also these more fundamental information rights must be firmly and
globally established. At the same time, these rights need to be properly
limited, since no social right can be absolute (and many of them stand
in conflict with one another). It is particularly important to define and
limit these information rights if we want to facilitate dissemination of
the newly acquired technologies for information processing and tele-
communication.
In modern society, property rights have been duly established as well
as limited so that the ownership of most types of assets, both tangible
and intangible, can be transferred to others. This social convention is
embodied in the concept of the commodity, an asset that its owner
promises is ready to be sold to others when a certain set of conditions
(usually conditions of price) are met. Such arrangements have facili-
tated and accelerated the worldwide process of market exchanges. Simi-
larly, to accelerate the global process of information and knowledge
sharing, we must delineate information rights as soon as possible. A
new concept of information, comparable to commodities in the case of
goods and services, will emerge: information ready to be shared with
others when a certain condition is met. One might call the kind of
information that belongs to this category "the sharables."
Sharables in the wisdom game are given away or disseminated. They
have value but not in the traditional economic sense. It is the wisdom
content of the sharable that gives it value, and this value is realized
when it is shared and understood. This compares to commodities that
realize their value when they are sold.

Intelprise as the Main Actor in the Wisdom Came

As we described in the context of social systems and game theory, we
are entering the age of the wisdom game from the age of the wealth
game. Hypernetworks represent the basic information infrastructure of
320 Shumpei Kumon and Izumi Aizu

this new social structure, substantively changing the way people live,
work, learn, and interact.
A new form of collaborative organization called the intelprise will
emerge in this context, physically supported by groupmedia, in part
supplementing and in part replacing the labor and capital-based or-
ganization called enterprise. The activities of the intelprise will be based
on the notion of information rights. Just as industrial enterprises oper-
ate under the principle of property rights, thereby securing the free flow
of the exchange of goods and services that these enterprises manufac-
ture or provide, intelprises in the hypemetwork society will operate
under the guiding principle of information rights to secure the free flow
and sharing of information that these intelprises create and dissemi-
nate over advanced communications networks or hypernetworks.
Intelprises are neither enterprises nor states; they are a new type of
network organization, one that uses persuasion and inducement rather
than the methods of threat and coercion typified by sovereign states or
exchange and exploitation typified by enterprises. Just as industrial
firms accumulate wealth first by producing specific commodities and
then selling them in the marketplace to make profits, the intelprises, as
players of the wisdom game, will accumulate wisdom first by creating
specific information and knowledge, or sharables, such as new theories,
ideologies, policies, works of art, or alternative lifestyles, and then by
disseminating them in the global network thereby gaining and increas-
ing their supporting cast of believers.
Just as freedom of production and sales is of critical importance to
industrial firms, freedom of research and dissemination will be of vital
importance to intelprises. In the industrial society, the place where
exchange of goods and services takes place is the world market. What
is the proper name for the place where sharing of information occurs
in the hypemetwork society? As a type of social system, we would like
to call it the "global intelprise."
It is shortsighted, of course, to expect that the enterprises and com-
petition of the wealth game will vanish in the hypemetwork society.
Rather, just as cooperative operations exist between states and enter-
prises, various forms of cooperation between enterprises and intelprises
may be developed. National governments, for example, secured the
military stability of nations so that enterprises inside could concentrate
on production and marketing of goods without worrying about the
321 Co-Emulation: A Global Hypemetwork Society

outside forces. likewise, enterprises in the early hypemetwork society

may support intelprises financially so that intelprises can concentrate
on creation and dissemination of sharables without worrying about
their financial stability. Intelprises, in turn, may support research and
development activities as well as the marketing efforts of enterprises.
Furthermore, just as state activities or relationships between states
may be shifting from those of military nature to an economic nature,
it is possible to predict that industrial activities by enterprises to pro-
duce and sell goods and services may be less mediated by the market-
place, and facilitated more by global networks. Instead of open tree
markets, persuasion-based networks, then, will become the major field
of information sharing.

Groupmedia as Enabling Technology

The core technologies for the hypemetwork society are those of infor-
mation processing and transmission. More specifically, a convergence
of CMC (computer-mediated communication), and groupware, or
CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work), that together form
"groupmedia" (Institute for Networking Design, 1992), will be neces-
sary to enable the emergence of the hypemetwork society. Groupmedia
will allow individuals to form new groups that share mutual interests,
not necessarily within the same organization or the same geographic
locale but in the scope of a larger communication network. The em-
powering nature of this technology has been well covered in other
chapters in this book, particularly Frederick (chap. 17), Bellman, Tin-
dimubona, and Arias, Jr. (chap. 14), and Ishii (chap. 8). Howard
Frederick's discussion of the emerging global civil society is not only a
good example of how groupmedia empowers small groups and indi-
viduals, but it also illustrates how it does so in ways that are oriented
more toward sustainability and environmental protection than devel-
opment and growth.
Groupmedia will become the major means in the formation of net-
works, supporting intelprises and promoting the wisdom game in the
hypemetwork society. We and others foresee conventional text-based
communication evolving into an integrated hypermedia communica-
tion system, incorporating image transmission and sharing capabilities
without sacrificing its interactive nature. This will allow people to
Shumpei Kumon and Izumi Aizu

exchange values and emotions in addition to knowledge and informa-

tion, thereby enriching the content and context of communications.
The heart of group communication exists in the quality of interac-
tion. Thanks to its interactive nature, group communication will create
new social groups that would otherwise never be possible. (For a de-
tailed discussion of the characteristics and potential of these new
groups, see Harasim, chap. 2 and Rheingold, chap. 4). We expect these
new social groups and communities to provide the key structure for
intelprises in the hypernetwork society.
Second, by providing powerful means for joint research, coauthoring,
scheduling, project management, conferencing, decision making, and
so on, groupware will become an essential tool in organizations, both
in enterprises and intelprises. It may also provide the kind of highly
creative environment that allows interactive sharing of knowledge and
the thinking process. In order for groupware or CSCW to be widely
accepted, as Hiroshi Ishii explains in chapter 8, we must understand
more about the CW side, that is, how people cooperate to work, par-
ticularly among people with different behavioral or cultural patterns.
This is particularly important as groupmedia will be used in a global
context within the hypernetwork society.
The third area of groupmedia is a new mode of information process-
ing that is currently evolving. As John Quarterman describes in chapter
3, the Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) already provides a massive
information index stored across the vast computer resources over the
Internet. The vision of the future that Apple Corporation exhibited
with "Knowledge Navigator"3 (Sculley, 1987), involves the use of the
computer to determine where the information you need is located, as
well as to access this information and rapidly manipulate, reorganize,
and display it as you wish. The "Knowledge Navigator" is just one of
many examples of how information may be processed in the near
future. Thus in the hypernetwork society, new forms of network
configuration like Internet and WAIS are expected to emerge. That is,
rather than requiring that individual users initiate each communica-
tion activity, an autonomous network system over a wide range of
networks can be established to facilitate easier exchange of information
and messages. Networks thus become a major means of communica-
tion in the society.
323 Co-Emulation: A Global Hypemetwork Society

Once the International Public Network that Mitchell Kapor and

Daniel Weitzner refer to in chapter 18, Personal ISDN (Barlow, 1992),
or other high-bandwidth transmission media become a reality, these
kinds of services should be widely available.

Co-Emulation in the Global Hypemetwork Society

This chapter has thus far proposed that in the global hypemetwork
society, new network technologies represented by groupmedia will help
create intelprises. These intelprises will promote the wealth/wisdom
game to make a new era of civilization, postmodern civilization, possi-
ble. What, then, is the strategy or principle to guide the participation
of these players in the new game? We call it "co-emulation."

New Guiding Principles for the Global Network Society

Policy debates about U.S.-Japan relations on both sides of the Pacific are
actually questions about the way the whole world will operate in the
future.
Japan appears to be considerably behind the United States in various
fields of information technology. Will Japan be able to fill the gap so
that it can provide the technological basis for the new production/con-
sumption paradigm that is emerging ? Or will the United States develop
its own paradigm based on its lead in information technology? A third
possibility, one explored in this chapter, is that the new paradigm will
best be realized by the cooperation and convergence of the two indus-
trial systems typified by the United States and Japan. We call this
process "co-emulation" among civilizations (or among different
branches of a civilization).
At this juncture it is useful to distinguish "civilization" from "cul-
ture." Biologists distinguish phenotypes, namely, forms and behaviors
of living systems from their genotypes. The latter plays the role of a
blueprint for the formation and development of the former. With re-
spect to social systems, culture and civilization can be similarly defined.
We define culture as a subconsciously shared mindset of assumptions
and values that guides choice among available civilizational features;
the term civilization is understood to refer to a consciously shared
apparatus of ideas (ideology/religion), knowledge (science and technol-
ogy), rules and institutions, and goods and services.
Shumpei Kumon and Izumi Aizu

Thus there is no way to directly observe culture. Culture can only be

inferred from civilizational features as phenotypes of social systems. We
can neither change existing culture nor introduce new cultural ele-
ments in any direct way. This implies that there is no way to co-emulate
culture. Co-emulation can take place only at the civilizational level.
Chances are, however, that a specific civilizational feature, say, a new
form of management transplanted from another society, might stand
in conflict with existing culture and be eventually rejected. Neverthe-
less, we believe that some degree of freedom exists in the congruence
between culture and civilization and that that is why co-emulation of
civilization can work, at least to a significant extent.

"Japanese" Ways to Contribute to Global Problems

A convenient, though simplified, view of Japanese society involves a
three-level structure of sub-, mid-, and supra strata (in other words,
people, basic organizations, and interorganizational relations). De-
pending on which stratum one focuses on, Japan can be characterized
as either "a contextualistic society," "an Ie society,"4 or "a network
society" (Kumon, 1992). At each level, Japanese society is very much
oriented in a manner that closely reflects the networks that we see
emerging with the information age. While most Japanese have a sense
of an individual psychological self, and they are capable of behaving as
actors, this self is strongly conditioned by a contextualist culture firmly
embedded in group-oriented social relations.
How well or badly do these traits of Japanese society fit with the
processes of informatization? Let us emphasize that the traits of Japan's
social systems, especially of networks, are not necessarily unique to
Japan. There are Americans who argue that most of the traits of Japa-
nese management were widely shared by American business corpora-
tions at least until the early 1960s. Joyce Rothschild-Whitt talks of
"collectivist organizations," such as cooperatives and communes that
mushroomed in the United States during the 1970s, as displaying traits
that most Japanese believe to be unique to Japanese organizations
(Rothschild-Whitt, 1984).
The ever-increasing importance of groups of people, linked by tech-
nology, acting as the prime movers in the development of modern
society and civilization, indicates that networks as social systems will
play increasingly significant roles all over the world and acquire en-
325 Co-Emulation A Global Hypemetwork Society

hanced sodal legitimacy. This also suggests that at least some of the
social systemic principles underlying Japanese society can not only
be better understood in a positive sense but also be accepted and
even emulated. It is not so difficult to imagine a universal applicability
for Japanese-style consensus making, based more on shared emotion—
that is, warm sympathy-^than on allegedly cool, rational reason, and
for Japanese-style management of a network organization based on
collectively shared goals, decentralized mutual acts, and spontaneous
coordination.
However, there are negative aspects that hinder Japanese in their
attempts to be more acceptable and responsible members of the global
community. For example, as Walls noted in chapter 9, human networks
in Japan tend to be closed and selfish in the sense that they select
"homogeneous" members who share their basic world outlook and val-
ues; their goals are often defined narrowly in terms of their members'
welfare only. Computer networking in Japan—one of the base tech-
nologies of the hypemetwork society—also tend to be closed in isolated
"islands" as Jeffrey Shapard has analyzed in detail in chapter 15.

Conclusion: Global Co-Emulation

How can these deficiencies be overcome? On Japan's part, one possible
direction is through a serious and active introduction of the institu-
tions and even cultures of the developed Western nations, to make
Japan more westernized so that Japan and the West can more readily
interact. However, opinion in Japan is divided about how far such
homogenization is possible (or desirable).
Another course would be to go in the opposite direction and, having
reevaluated the merits of Japan's traditional institutions and culture,
make the best efforts to have non-Japanese understand these charac-
teristics and to try to persuade them to accept and coexist with diversity
or even actively propagating things Japanese abroad. However, here
too, there is no agreement among Japanese themselves on what is
typically Japanese or what is especially valuable about things Japanese
for Western countries to "Japanize."
These two courses do not necessarily stand in contradiction to one
another. To provide a socioeconomic model for the information age, we
believe it is very important that all of us make serious attempts to
emulate others and to help others to emulate us so that we can even-
326 Shumpei Kumon and Izumi Aizu

tually meld socioeconomic arrangements typified by the United States,

or the West in general, and those found in Japan, or the East in general.
The information age is inevitably leading to more and more networks
in the West. The West, then, can surely gain from studying the positive
and negative aspects of the network society in Japan. At the same time,
Japan must become aware of the impact that its socioeconomic struc-
ture and behaviors now have on the world as a whole. It must realize
that it can no longer confine the boundaries of its social networks to
its own national or cultural borders. Instead it must draw examples
from the more open societies of the West.
As we approach the end of the period of the prestige-wealth game,
and a decline in the nationalistic confrontations that arose from their
pursuit, the next danger comes from international rivalry and division.
For intelprises to function on the global stage members must under-
stand the culture and civilization of other peoples more fully than
before. It is desirable in this situation that the world system of the next
century be the era of co-emulation between the individualism-based
culture/civilization of the West and the contextualism-based cul-
ture/civilization of the East.
Sailing through Cyberspace: Counting
the Stars in Passing

Robert Jacobson

The global network that links the universe of computers is really many
networks, each evolved in its own idiosyncratic fashion, whipped to-
gether like the frayed strands of cotton ropes. Along this network—
which takes its name from the workings of a net, a tool devised to
capture and hold prey—millions of human beings struggle to make
themselves understood. It is not always easy to do, and the number of
those dismayed by trying to communicate via the "Net" is exceeded
only by those whose perseverance, taste for the novel, and need to be
in touch (a fascinating metaphor in this context) overpowers their
reticence to be trapped and held by the Net's allure.
The Net, like the human inventions before it, is not the product of
any one mind. In chapter 3, John Quarterman has well documented
the evolution of the Net as a collective, if not always collaborative,
effort. Strand by strand, trunk by trunk, the Net has been built out of
high technology and a dogged determination to let the email get
through. The result has been ruggedly beautiful in a monumental way,
and it works. But the average human being confronted with a commu-
nication task on the Net will recoil at the demands placed on her or
him, the new behaviors and operations we must learn. The Net itself is
forgiving, but this cannot always be said of the people who occupy the
cyberspace it creates. And this applies as much to the professionals who
design components of the Net as it does to the unabashedly nasty
characters who occupy the deeper dens of communicative iniquity.
The Net has many identities: it can be a hard-edged place, a TRON-
like evocation of electrons in eternal motion; a grey adjunct to the
library, a virtual file cabinet for those who need to know; or a techno-
Robert Jacobson

logical frontier town where entities shuffle their messages down an

electronic boardwalk from the barbershop to the saloon. How one sees
the Net is due largely to how one employs it: the Net appears differently
to the power user blasting megafiles from site to site, the modest resi-
dent of USENET newsgroups and mailing lists, and the pedestrian email
sender and reader who just wants to get her or his mail and then get
out. The computer bulletin board system (BBS) appended to the Net via
FidoNet or UUNET has a special relation to the sprawling web, a sort of
second-class but spritely executed citizenship in the Network Nation.
What is generally missing from the Net, however (with a few excep-
tions), is hospitality; or, in a more extreme expression, humaneness.
Individuals do what they can to humanize elements of the Net and
provide safe havens for those sailing through cyberspace. Some news-
groups on the USENET are comfortable electronic homes away from
home; I like to think that the newsgroup I moderate, scLvirtual-worlds,
has that welcoming quality. The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link),
a Net-accessible computer conferencing system where sage advice and
witty ripostes consume the memory core, is a unique example of a
purposefully undesigned sub-network whose ambiance turned out to
be surprisingly rich and warm. Around the world, individuals with a
playful side have crafted MUDs, or multiple-user dungeons and drag-
ons, where one can play at being a knight or a twenty-third century
galactic trader.
Nevertheless, we can do more to make the Net a place where people
want to visit, rather than where they are compelled to come. As an
urban designer by education, trained in the semi-intuitive art of shap-
ing physical space, I suspect that there is more art and craftsmanship
than science and engineering to the design of a good cyberspace. The
Net was created by scientists and engineers, with help from educators
and others whose manifest duty led them to this uncharted realm—but
the resulting melange of odd and uncomfortable places highlights the
need for a more conscious aesthetic to bear on this unique, intangible
environment.
Thus, in reconstructing the cyberspace in a humane form, I reject the
harsh language and austere methods of science. I suggest that softer
metaphors can better help us rebuild the Net brilliantly, to reflect the
subtle pleasure of shared human experience. Words like civility, convivi-
ality, reciprocity, harmony, edification, artfulness, and spirituality spring to
329 Sailing through Cyberspace

mind as ideal concepts to guide us to our goal. I would further suggest

that the resistance we sometimes encounter to using these meaning-
laden words as design tools—claims that they are "not scientific/' in-
sufficiently rigorous, or have nothing to do with computers—reflects a
parochialism and blindness to the fact that, after all, the Net is a social
construct, just a bunch of wires and radio transmitters and computers
if not for the human weaving of its elements into a rich tapestry of form
and significance. The Net is what we experience it to be, and the
language of common experience is ultimately more powerful as a de-
sign parameter than speculative cognitive science, tenuously stretched
sociology, and mechanical usability testing combined.

Civility

The first law of effective communication is civility. It is the respect we

manifest for another person's words, face-to-face or on the Net. Polite-
ness is sometimes used to mean civility, but politeness only stands for
the trimmings of the well turned-out courtier. Civility has a robustness
born of the respect one citizen shows another, the common recognition
that a community can exist only to the extent that it encourages many
voices to speak from many points of view. In this way something akin
to truth is deducible, and good decisions can be made.
Civility is a property of certain regions on the Net. In the better run
newsgroups, for example, civility is a quality that almost always pre-
vails. The minority and avant-garde viewpoint is not only tolerated but
sought out, to raise alternative perspectives. In situations where civility
is not present, conversation online degenerates into a keyboard fight as
combatants toss ill-considered, bilious verbiage at one another. Being
in the midst of one of these catfights is deeply embarrassing, perhaps
because one cannot even have the satisfaction of knowing with cer-
tainty the first causes from which the dispute has arisen. Worse yet are
those situations in which civility was once the house rule but now has
vanished. The story is by now apocryphal, but for those of us living
through it it was anything but pleasant, how a temperamental host of
a threaded computer conference, enraged at the online presence of his
lover's other champion, not only exited the system in a huff but also
removed every one of his own contributions from the conference,
leaving behind an empty shell of meaningless words. This sort of reck-
330 Robert Jacobson

less disregard for what has been built over time by many minds acting
together is the bane of community. A simple, civil rhetoric should
prevail online.
Some argue that direct talk is necessarily uncivil; that civility isn't
cool. The person who types invective, in their opinion, is honestly
expressing what he or she feels, thus making for a more genuine dia-
logue. There are newsgroups on the USENET and more than a few BBSs
where one can go and, as in the famous Monty Python skit, be abused.
Occasionally wandering into one of these electronic snakepits, I won-
der what attraction they hold. Maybe it is the easily felt testosterone-
high among the teenage boys or neo-Nazis or out-of-work Red squads
who inhabit these warrens that makes them so interesting. But undvil-
ity is still too prevalent even in more genteel quarters. For example,
women, many of whom are not disposed toward strong assertive rheto-
ric, often complain that on the Net, in newsgroups and other online
activities, their desire for collaborative, emotive expression is slighted.
They come looking for community, expect civility, and instead get
undvility flavored with masculine individualism.
One cannot design dvility into the electronic infrastructure of the
Net (except, perhaps, by disguising the participants so that everyone is
anonymous and thus equally to be feared). Civility is a sodal phenome-
non for which opinion leaders on the Net are ultimately responsible.
Civility on the Net is a tribute to those who make it a point to bring it
about.

ConvMallty

The marketplace of ideas is an old concept said to predate the industrial

age for which it became the perfect intellectual ornament. It conjures
images of stalls presided over by merchants hawking deep insights.
Watch out for the thumb on the Aristotelian scale! For me, a more
appealing metaphor is the groaning table, the medieval feast, where
one stuffs oneself with every morsel of information and swills a heady
brew of knowledge. Conviviality is the joy we share at being some-
where unique, online, to meet many minds at the groaning table of
shared understanding.
Can anyone forget the moment of discovery when, for the first time,
we hooked up modem to phone line and computer to modem—and
331 Sailing through Cyberspace

then discovered the incredibly wide world inside? The experience cer-
tainly shook me. Isolated in a relatively quiet town in California's
Central Valley, in 1984, from my computer I dialed a number in San
Francisco-^and suddenly became part of one of the most raucous,
convivial online communities I have ever known, the infant WELL. My
circle of friends expanded magnificently, with my emotions warping
through space to encompass personalities many tens and sometimes
hundreds of miles away. The feast had begun.
Over the next nearly ten years I explored other online communities
and, a few times, helped invent communities of interest where none
existed. Each time there was the rush of pleasure at bringing together
people of like mind or sentiment, who could find joy in each others'
online presence and support. Most of these communities organized
in-person activities to complement their Net dealings; those without
such meetings often did not fare well. For those online communities
for whom the act of coming together had been dramatic and relatively
sudden, one or a series of face-to-face gatherings (f-t-f, in the parlance
of the Net) proved crucial to stabilizing the relationships among the
inhabitants of the communities and the longevity of their respective
groups. More leisurely established online communities, like the various
LISTSERVs (or list services, automated emailing lists) and newsgroups,
may not feel the same need to assemble so that their members can
examine each other. But this may only be an illusion; their gatherings
may take place at larger, more formal conferences and events, in which
case the f-t-f factor may be as significant as ever.
Another memorable aspect of online conviviality was learning just
how wide is the spectrum of human experience. In our schools and
media we are led to believe that the range of human behavior is rela-
tively nanow; true deviance is the purview of criminals and crazy
people. No. Online, I discovered that the range is virtually a universe
wide. Even though there may be only five million of us on the Internet,
a mere tenth of a percent of the world population, still we are a very
large number of people with whom one may discourse. In the convivial
groups I have been invited to join, there are a seemingly infinite variety
of pairings, matings, and families (a tribute to the human Turing Ma-
chine, able to crank anything out of its binary genders) and a willing-
ness to speak frankly about them. At first, I was taken aback by this
honesty. After all, it is not the stuff of everyday conversation. But
332 Robert Jacobson

gradually I learned that there is no such thing as the "normal,* unless

by normal we mean the condition of suppressing the truly standard
deviation.
Conviviality online is the act of sharing the mindfood spread on the
table before us. It binds us. We become a community through the ritual
of acknowledging difference and the fact that we are, nevertheless,
together.

Reciprocity

It comes in the middle of my list, but reciprocity may be the single most
important quality that can be designed into both the infrastructure and
the operations of the Net. In short, reciprocity is the Golden Rule
embodied in information technology: that which you can know about
me, to influence or direct me, is also allowed to me about you, to
influence or direct you. Reciprocity is also one of the scarcest of the
properties of online experience, because the technologists who build
the infrastructure do not think of it as a valuable property of commu-
nication media. In a world where movies, CDs, and videos tend to
dominate colloquial thought about communication, one-way commu-
nication, from producer and director to audience, is thought natural
and right. For example, it is not unusual for individuals to accept
inequitable access to information technology even though it may be
the result of correctable design oversights. Many of us have come to
believe (perhaps rightly) that technology is inherently designed to
reflect class biases and, since most of us are not members of the elite,
we are lucky to have things work as well as they do. In a technological
system designed with reciprocity in mind, such denial would not be
tolerated. As a result of the participatory design movement in Scandi-
navia, workers (at least up until the last, most recent economic collapse)
have had the ability to literally redesign their factories and the infor-
mation technology that links the factories. There are no mysteries in
the reciprocal relationship.
A popular stand-in for reciprocity is interactivity. They are not the
same, however. Interactivity means simply the ability of two entities to
exchange tokens, according to the rules. X does A, and Y does B.
Reciprocity means to share in the making of the rules that govern our
exchanges. X does to Y, and Y does to X. Interactivity appears to be a
333 Sailing through Cyberspace

solution to the problem of equalizing relationships among humans and

machines, but it is more likely a trap. At the behavioral level, the phone
rings and it must be answered. At the systemic level, the ATM machine
takes your debit card and gives out money, but without disclosing how
it got the money or what will be done with the information about your
transaction. Of course, the conventions of politics take nonreciprocal
relations to the highest level of all, and if politics become embedded in
the construction of the Nef s infrastructure—as they show every sign of
doing, as revealed in the recent U.S. debate over the NREN, the Na-
tional Research and Education Network—then the chance of the Net
user being able to learn about the Net institution, let alone circumvent
or challenge its rules and operations, will become very slim.
Reciprocity is its own best argument. It is self-regulating and a neces-
sary foundation for all the other characteristics of online environments
that meet our test of humaneness. Without reciprocity, systems tend to
go into imbalance and have much less strength for riding out stressful
conditions. Online communities that succeed strive for reciprocity; in
its absence, the communities fail. Going online becomes a chore.

Harmony

How does one design for harmony? It seems more a function of other
factors, for which design may be a more appropriate endeavor, than a
factor itself susceptible to design interventions. We achieve harmony
through the successful advocacy of a particular behavior characterized,
for example, as civility, and by the building of online systems and
interfaces that make it possible for two or more people to collaborate
easily. Then harmony results.
Or does it?
The disharmonious system is inherently incapable of sustaining
healthy individuals and social relationships. One proprietary system,
not yet on the Net but soon to join, was wracked by first one wave of
turmoil and then many more as the story of an employee monitored
and ultimately fired by management spread throughout the firm. Civil-
ity was not at issue; conversations were open and candid. People were
convivial enough. There was some sense of epiphany in coming to grips
with censorship, which before had only been a looming grey possibil-
ity. But the swells of emotion that swept the internal network of the
Robert Jacobson

firm led to an eventual high level of mistrust and finally the imposition
by management of hard rules of use. One learns in political science that
the application of force is the last recourse of the imperiled regime, but
how can there be a revolution within a firm? In fact there cannot be a
revolution without seriously jeopardizing the firm, so that the com-
pany to this day is a smoldering hotbed of ill feeling and lowered
productivity. When it joins the Net, it may become a panspermatic
infuser of bad vibes throughout the regions it affects (and infects).
To return to the prior question, how might one design for harmony?
The easiest solution is to pursue stasis, which relates to harmony in the
same way that interactivity relates to reciprocity. It is a cheap substitute.
So we would design into the system various governors for keeping
things in check, including (as discussed above) monitors for the people
and software tools permitting surveillance of data. In a more liberal
regime, we might give individuals tools, like online polls, to create a
"public opinion" capable of running over any expressions of a highly
individual nature.
But suppose our goal is not stasis but rather a dynamic harmony, a
kind of movement in balance, like a dance company in a difficult but
evocative performance. Then we need stabilizers of various sorts to tip
the online interactions back onto a "carriage" capable of supporting the
online community as it readies itself for and ultimately pursues forward
progress. Usually these devices are human because of the finesse re-
quired to influence the course of a human activity. Censure, not cen-
sorship, becomes the means of disciplining the completely unruly who
might otherwise destroy the electronic commons. Harmony, while it
may be difficult to design for, is a parameter of online community that
cannot be dispensed with.

The point of going online is to have experiences different from those

one can have offline, in the material world. In one sense, this is an
instrumental pursuit, the gathering of knowledge to do a thing. It is
always surprising, however, to discover how many people come online
simply for the point of doing so and the acquaintances and discoveries
they will make. They come to edify themselves and others, and if the
Net doesn't always deliver an ideal experience, at least they can come
Sailing through Cyberspace

back another time and try again. Eventually, so it seems, many people
do become broader, more tolerant, and more enlightened as a result of
spending time online. This qualitative change may be just a hopeful
figment of my imagination. As a designer, however, I am trained to
empathize with clients, and the need for personal growth and expan-
sion is strongly projected by the people with whom I have come into
contact online.
The Net as it is constituted seems superbly situated to fulfill its
inhabitants' need for edification. There are hundreds, even thousands,
of archives holding terabytes and more of data about every conceivable
subject; the willing explorer can spend a lifetime staying current on this
treasure trove of information. All that is required is to locate this data,
read or download it, and perhaps share it with others to test its validity.
But somehow, for many people, the first step—attempting to locate the
data—is also the last. There are several impediments to learning within
the environment of the Net, not the least of which is simply knowing
how to navigate around a space of complex dimensionality. When a
database gets too big, as Donald Norman (Jacobson, 1992) has pointed
out, the inclination is to want to "teleport" from place to place. Nor-
man would dispense with the endless search routines that are finally
too difficult for mere mortals to find their way and replace them with
a smart environment that customized itself to the inhabitant, rather
than the other way around.
Here we come very close to virtual worlds paradigms, of which I am
quite fond and which I speak about in closing. If we can mold the Net
to beneficially envelop the individual, so that in effect one "wears" the
Net rather than travels it, we may solve the problems that normally
defeat having an edifying experience online.

Things done well have an art about them. It is the visible invisible, a
quality that speaks of excellence in execution. Developers of informa-
tion technology seldom apologize for their more inartful creations;
users are encouraged to learn various tricks—for example, to use absurd
keyboards when better keyboards (and perhaps supplemental tools, like
joysticks and mice) are available. Styling is too often confused with
artfulness. Styling is the floss on the package or the line on the product
336 Robert Jacobson

that bespeaks of attention paid to the package and product after the
sales item had already been frozen in form.
Artfulness, on the other hand, is a commitment to realizing a state-
ment or a vision and manifesting it as a compelling experience. Regret-
tably, we can't say this very often regarding the Net. There are some
compelling innovations on the USENET, for instance, that deserve the
label of artful; in particular, one thinks of the WAIS, or Wide Area
Information Service, maintained by Thinking Machines Corp. on its
Cambridge-based hypercomputers. Today via WAIS one can access ma-
terial on all subjects from many databases, with the additional benefit
of the information being filtered by primitive agents (computer pro-
grams that act without explicit instruction to scout for or prioritize
specific information). This is an artful implementation.
Most of the NET, however, does not have dramatic or sufficiently
unique information to build around. At most sites there is the usual
USENET package of offerings, including programs, calendars, and in-
dexes to archived materials. Similarly, on most newsgroups there is a
familiar banter. However, the quality and personalities of the modera-
tors who manage the minority of moderated newsgroups tend to create
variance among the newsgroups; these moderated newsgroups are con-
sidered to be among the best.
An artfully conceived Net, in terms of its structure and appeal, would
probably generate an intense effort to find new applications for the Net,
and these might incorporate some artful ideas as well. USENET'S admin-
istrators might pay more attention to such small details as the way mail
is routed about the system and such portentous questions like how
email can be fused with fax, and so forth. We should also consider the
quality of our online conversations and see if the Net is capable of
supporting simultaneously data and voice, something that has been
predicted for some time. Finally, we might ask participants to join in
these design efforts, on the grounds that such participation makes for
contented citizens during the design process and, as we are all pioneers
in this process, provides many minds to double-check what it is we are
doing (see Harasim, chap. 2).

Spirituality

With the exception of a few Ray Bradbury stories that have dealt with
the concept of the soul of the machine (or perhaps, the ghost in the
337 Sailing through Cyberspace

machine!), it is generally unpopular to speak about the spiritual nature

of the online experience. However, like Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz,
the Portland couple who have been so influential in restoring ceremony
to the use of computers, many now understand that there may be
something profoundly moving about online communications and be-
ing on the Net.
What is this magic? Is it the spontaneity of rapid and consecutive
communication via email, or the more structured but equally quick
exchange of information within a structured group—so that one can
thoroughly appreciate and admire our deeply human capabilities for
communication, capabilities that lie fallow in other contexts? Or is it
simply that reconnecting with human beings en masse is somehow
akin to reintegrating with the whole of humanity, with an evolving,
dynamic collective memory, in a twist on Jung's frozen archetypes?
The spiritual dimension of online communication must be the one
for which it is consciously hardest to design. But because, if it exists at
all, it is so fundamentally a part of the online experience, then the
spiritual is necessarily expressed by the artful designer's system designs.
Staring at a Macintosh's blindly radiating, tiny screen in the early hours
of the morning, it is hard to recall the power that drove the Macintosh
development team to realize a truly novel departure in computing. I
suspect a Zen priest would be able to find great meaning in the scrawl-
ing of the cursor across the screen, leaving small characters in its wake;
he would be captured to a greater degree by the mystery of the Net
which, invisible yet prolific, is like a soundless ocean. Like the giant
goldfish in the still pond, the ebb and flow of personal energy across
the Net evokes a certain awe. The challenge is to design online systems
that recognize and respect these qualities. It is not trivial.

The Virtual World

The emergence of the virtual world releases us from the bondage of the
computer terminal and its tiny window on the world. The virtual
world, a general interface, embodies the paradigm of virtuality: that
what we perceive is all we can know. The person is at the center of the
information universe; it is according to her or his capabilities that our
interpretive information systems must be organized. The virtual world
grants easy access to chosen environments and selected data, in the
338 Robert Jacobson

form of natural objects or self-defined symbols. It promises to engender

a vastly enlarged Net population and wholly new ways of using net-
work technology.
Simply described, the virtual world is an information environment
created and sustained using fast rendering machines and distributed
data models of objects and relationships. Special I/O devices intimately
serve the human sensory array-primarily through simulated sights,
sounds, and tactile cues. Position sensors, voice input software, and
built-in tools and controls adjust the virtual world to comply with the
actions of the individual participant or multiple participants within.
Today, laboratories in Asia, North America, and Europe are working
hard to bring virtual world technology to market. We should see its
full-scale arrival within the decade, as televirtuality, the sharing of virtual
worlds transmitted over the wire, is made possible by the Net.
A person's ability in the virtual world to transcend space and time, to
be anywhere, anytime, as or with anyone, is the principal attraction of
the virtual world. It is very seductive. Paeans in the press and long lines
to play virtual-world arcade games and to see films purporting to treat
the subject attest to the attractive power of being able to slip one's
earthly bonds. But transcendence is a tricky business. It leads either to
greater awareness, insanity, or both. In medieval times, many saints
came back from their ordeals as sanctified babbling idiots. Their gibber-
ings were taken to be the inspired Word from on high. This does not
seem an appropriate goal for travellers on the Net, although some
would swear that the online population is already well inclined toward
Bedlam.
Should individuals be systematically trained or given an opportunity
to learn freely within the virtual world? This topic inspires heated
debate among those who insist that participants must be provided with
navigation tools and preconfigured experiences, as the first step toward
mastery of the virtual world, and those who would follow the Taoist
"uncut block" tradition of inviting participants into a void, where with
"virtual construction kits" they would build their own worlds to fit.
This ultimate design question remains unresolved and will probably
remain so despite what is learned from the first early experiments of
world inhabitation. Unfortunately, today's primitive technology can
only support simple worlds, whether designed by experts or by the
inhabitants themselves. Consequently we can only speculate on how
339 Sailing through Cyberspace

human beings will take to these information environments when they

become complex enough to pose perceptual problems.
Nevertheless, we can safely predict that when virtual world technol-
ogy finally unmoors individuals from their accustomed physical and
mental geographies, their desire to identify with online communities
residing in novel worlds will expand the significance of the Net. The
ability to mutate apparent reality may become a compelling educa-
tional experience and entertainment. What was once a technological
means to an intellectual or emotional end—sailing through cyber-
space—may become the end in itself. McLuhan's prescient axiom, that
"the medium is the message," is totally relevant.
We may long for instruction in how to evaluate these phenomena
that occur on many levels: psychophysical, social, intellectual, emo-
tional, and even spiritual. One solution is to observe superficially sim-
pler media, like novels and other literary forms, and how they abet
people's ability to voyage in new realms. But examined more closely,
literature is one of the most complex embodiments of human experi-
ence. In fact, literature's "subjectivity quotient" is so high that it is
extremely difficult to share the experience of a literary expression ex-
cept at a public reading, a storytelling, or as theatre. Another possibility
is to look at more contemporary media and make comparisons with
what we imagine the virtual world may become. However, the closer
one gets to the appearance of the virtual world—for example, televi-
sion, because it is video-based; or multimedia, because it relies on the
computer—the more extreme are the differences between the actual
experience of the media.
For now, we might as well think of cyberspace as the data-driven
pseudospace, the "consensual hallucination" so vividly described by
the writer William Gibson (1984). Our adventures may not be so ex-
treme as those encountered by Gibson's characters; but they will cer-
tainly be quite different from what we know today. Our descendants
will be surprised at our network naivete and the apparent sophistica-
tion with which we describe phenomena whose outlines are barely
evident over the horizon.
What tools do we have to assist in constructing virtual worlds that
comport with our rules for "good space"? What I have read of interface
design suggests to me that we are torn between philosophical homilies
340 Robert jacobson

and empirical anecdotes, neither an especially firm base on which to

build a virtual edifice.
We might begin by first specifying the qualities sought in the virtual
worlds we create. We might then move on to develop metrics by which
the presence of these qualities can be determined. Is something
sufficiently malleable or responsive? How shall we know until we have
an information environmental yardstick that is capable of putting
things in perspective. (Metaphors for experiential knowledge, like per-
spective, are readily available, but we have consigned them to the
slightly irrelevant world of art. We need to reintegrate art with our work
or at least reclaim the metaphors we have let slip through our figurative
fingers.)
Cognate to our concerns are design methodologies from the fields of
environmental design and information science. We expect sense-mak-
ing to provide us with useful tools for estimating knowledge needs, and
so to guide the crafting of virtual worlds. More surprising is the appli-
cability of design methods from the material world, like wayfinding,
that tell us how human beings locate and navigate themselves through
virtual space. If we wish to build virtual worlds that work, that are more
than the ad hoc product of technological accidents, then we are
definitely in the business of information environmental design, and we
should ply the tools of designers.
Finally, inherent to televirtuality—the experience of actually sharing
virtual worlds—are crucial social and philosophical questions. For ex-
ample, where are we when we transmit images of ourselves, but not our
bodies themselves, to a distant place? The ability to virtually transcend
limitations of time and space does not render these dimensions mean-
ingless, only ambiguous. The traveling of virtual beings to a "place"
that exists only in computers linked by a network—the classical defini-
tion of cyberspace—is an assembly of sorts, but is it endowed with the
same political and social meaning as a crowd gathered in a street or the
legal responsibilities of a group of business people who are making
a contract? Suddenly, the world, real and virtual, has become more
complex!
And these are just the simple questions, easy to pose because they are
so obvious. More profound are the consequences of televirtuality on
the individual as a member of a collective and as a self apart. The
transmission of one's being, or at least a part of one's persona, to realms
Sailing through Cyberspace

for which we still have few words, is certain to alter the perception of
personhood... not least for the individual involved. Who am I if I am
not only capable of being in multiple times and places, but also in
multiple identities: male, female, other; old, young, or unborn; human,
animal, plant, or inanimate object; or an atom, the universe, or a
simulacrum of the godhead itself? These are not just heady specula-
tions. Experiments with some of the less cosmic masques have already
taken place, with sometimes startling results.
We cannot easily extrapolate from current media, although the les-
sons of drama tell us a bit about the means, value, and wisdom of
assuming roles other than those we commonly play. The structured
forms of communication forced upon us by our physical, timebound
bodies (only rudely surmounted by video and other contemporary
forms of synthetic presence) are all that human beings have known for
thousands of years, with rare exceptions. That exception is the experi-
ence of altered states of consciousness found most fully in the trance
of the mystic or the heightened awareness available to more of us in a
transcendent moment.

There are ways of seeing the Net that are not common to the discourse
of the scientists, engineers, and educators who first came to the online
environment and whose professional predispositions and instrumental
needs biased the way they built the Net. Their design parameters are
stark and austere. There are guides more subtle, but perhaps more use-
ful, by which we can measure the quality and value of the online
experience. I have suggested a series of concepts—civility, conviviality,
reciprocity, harmony, edification, artfulness, and spirituality—as one
set of guides. Others may suggest different but equally valuable sets of
design parameters. In any case, we should begin discussing how we can
improve the quality of the online experience now, while the Net's
infrastructure is still malleable and our own behavior remains flexible
and capable of change.
The Global Authoring Network

Linda M. Harasim and Jan Walls

The very term global networks implies the existence or emergence of

global systems, describable as different elements in a common relation-
ship. Every system embodies expectations concerning the ways that its
elements should relate to each other—for what purpose or multiple
purposes, for how long, through what forms of mediation, using what
language or languages, over what channels, using what protocols, with
what levels of formality, to what degree of personalization, and so
forth. A globalizing network consists of emerging relationships among
elements whose expectations have been created by experience in differ-
ent systems—relationships for different purposes, through different
forms of mediation, over different channels, and using different proto-
cols. This new situation may be viewed as an unprecedented opportu-
nity to weave a greater diversity of elements into a richer texture of
relationships with an expanded definition of mutuality. It may also be
viewed as an unprecedented challenge to redefine our thinking about
the norms—the behavioral expectations—that lend stability to human
systems.

As observed in the Preface, this book is the product of a global network

process that we named the GAN: the Global Authoring Network. The
GAN was an effort to define, practice, and refine a new mode of rela-
tionship between editor and authors of an edited volume on the very
subject of global networks. It was a global network focusing on global-
izing networks and structured to encourage a sense of editorial unity
344 Linda M. Harasim and Jan Walls

while preserving a wide diversity of authorial perspectives. It required

the addressing of such fundamental and broad topics as networlds,
global matrices and virtual communities (chaps. 2-4). It also addressed
such issues as the international legal implications of globalizing infor-
mation exchange, applications and implications for the workplace in
light of international, intercultural, and interlingual co-operation
(chaps. 5-10). Naturally, the addressing of all these issues must be
grounded in experience and articulated in such a way as to suggest a
vision of where globalized networks are leading us, could be leading us,
and should be leading us (chaps. 11-20).
The goal of the GAN was to use global networking of authors in the
following ways:

• To arrive at a cohesive and interdependent whole

• To inform one another of the contents of the other chapters, and to
refine our own thinking and cross-referencing
• To facilitate a process of interactive feedback, to enhance the crea-
tive/analytical process, and build a unity of vision in the book

Chapter authors were not obliged to incorporate all suggestions but

were encouraged to use peer feedback to help edit and refine their own
chapter and to link it to a vision of the book as a whole. Final editing
decisions would be made by the chapter author(s) and volume editor.
What were the outcomes of the GAN? Given that (1) a traditional
problem with producing a cohesive volume out of edited chapters
written by diverse authors is the development of a shared perspective
on the topic and subtopics, and that (2) electronic networking allows
for cost-effective exchange of information and sharing of views in
collaborative endeavors, we proposed the following hypothesis: Com-
puter-mediated networking of authors in a time-constrained collaborative
discussion of each others' draft chapters will encourage a unified vision of the
topic to a degree that would be very difficult and far more time consuming by
nonelectronic mediation.

The CAN Process

A total of nineteen contributors from three continents and four coun-

tries (England, Japan, Canada, and the United States) were linked by
electronic mail to send and receive messages related to book chapters.
345 The Global Authoring Network

Nine others participated as readers, offering occasional comments. Five

authors and coauthors were not able to participate on the GAN, and
the process of integrating their chapters into the book was substantially
different, as discussed in the Applications section.
The GAN began in January 1992, and discussion of the chapters
continued regularly over a four-month period. Comserve, an email
distribution list for communication professionals, was employed. Par-
ticipants sent their message to one project address, at Comserve, which
automatically distributed the message to the GAN participants on BIT-
NET and Internet.
The nature of the networking technology, in this case email, was a
critical factor in designing the GAN collaboration. The advantages were
that the networks were global and hence familiar and accessible to most
of the book contributors. The attributes of time and place inde-
pendence augmented the opportunities for participation; the text-
based archives facilitated review and consideration of comments
received and sent.
Nonetheless, email services are recognized as limited, awkward, and
"not really tuned or tunable" for collaborative work (Greif, 1988, 6).
Unlike groupware such as computer conferencing or more powerful
systems such as the TeamWorkStation being developed by Ishii (see
chap. 8), email has few tools to organize a shared object for a group
discussion. Only such cues as the address and the subject header pro-
vided clues as to the content of the message and distinguished that
message as part of the GAN rather than any other source.
To organize the exchange around each chapter, and to coordi-
nate/synchronize the discussion flows, a design based on sequential
presentation of chapters was employed. Each week an author would
present her or his chapter electronically, prefaced by comments about
the objectives of the chapter and questions or requests for feedback that
would be especially appreciated. The "host author" would then moder-
ate the discussion for one week; fifteen chapters were discussed in this
way on the network.
This model of group discussion is quite distinct from what would
have been possible if the GAN had been linked by computer conferenc-
ing, which enables multiple topics to be discussed simultaneously. In
the conferencing model, the system organizes the discussion around
the various topics. In the "group email" model, the coordination or
346 Linda M. Harasim and Jan Walls

synchronization of group interaction was provided by the weekly

schedule and a set of conventions for key words in the subject headers
designed to organize the messages along a topical format.

Outcomes

Outcomes of the GAN are discussed in terms of the volume and quality
of exchange, impacts on the authors and the book process, and issues
in the design and implementation of a global network for group work.
The volume of communication exchanged on the GAN over the
four-month period was high: over five hundred pages of text (125,000
words) were generated containing comments, questions, and critiques
related to the chapters. This figure excludes the chapter contents,
which constituted another two hundred and fifty pages of text. The
volume of the exchange was double that of the book manuscript.
The high level of input throughout the sixteen-week period was
somewhat unexpected given the voluntary nature of the task and the
demanding professional and travel schedules that characterize the lives
of contributors to the book. Participants communicated even while
traveling, logging on from a hotel room using a laptop computer.
Most authors participated (i.e., both reading their group mail and
contributing messages). The flows of discussion are presented in figure
21.1. The bar chart in figure 21.1 shows the weekly volume of commu-
nication on the GAN. The chapters were not presented in the book
order, but primarily according to completion schedules. Week 1 was a
general introduction, not chapter discussion.
There were ebbs and flows to the volume of discussion over the
sixteen-week period of the principal GAN exchange. The total number
of words indicates the combination of general interest in the chapter
contents, participant availability (work and travel schedules) and, as
discussed in the next section, host-author (moderator) proactive inspi-
ration. A relationship between the level of input by the author/mod-
erator and that of the discussants was suggested by the usage data.

Moderating

The author(s) of each chapter were asked to moderate the discussion of

their draft manuscript over the period of one week. Moderating in-
347 The Gtobal Authoring Network

29721
JUUUU -

25000 .

20000 -
18027

15000 -
«S

10000 -
85501

5000 -

0 -

Figure 21.1
Communication volume on the GAN

volved launching the discussion with a brief statement of the goals of

their chapter, followed by questions or issues that would help them in
revising their chapter.
All authors complied and, despite their demanding work schedules,
launched and concluded their discussion week in a timely fashion.
Moderators responded to each message and in some cases stimulated
a discussion around common issues raised by discussants. The majority
of the messages were focused on the issues in the chapter, but a few
tangential discussions did emerge: a discussion on the definition of
human community, on ''flaming/' and on the role of email in the
Rodney King trial in Los Angeles that was then taking place.
Most of the weekly discussions suggest a relationship between the
level of the author-moderator input and the level of GAN input into
the discussion (see figure 21.2). Whether a causal relationship exists was
not determined.
348 Linda M. Harasim and Ian Walls

30000

25000

20000

| 15000

| 10000
2

5000

0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
GAN week
Figure 21.2
Relationship of author/moderator to total GAN output

Croup Review

Feedback generated through the process of the GAN can be categorized

as follows:

• Praise, interest, appreciation for the analysis

• Identification of common themes, different perspectives
• "I see links between my chapter and this one . . . "
• "I treat this same issue in my chapter, from a somewhat different
perspective that examines ..."
• Elaborations on themes in the chapter
• "My own experience . . . "
34 9 The Cbbal Authoring Network

• Substantive critiques
• Disagreements
• Suggestions for new perspectives
• Identification of weaknesses in the argument
• Suggestions for new or additional content
• Suggested references
• Suggestions for corrections/stylistic improvements
• Vetting: seeking feedback on potential content or analysis
• Questions and requests for clarification
• Related tangents
• Informal social exchange
As would be expected, most commentators offered remarks from
their own disciplinary or professional perspective. This produced the
anticipated diversity of perspectives on each topic and also provided
fuel for lively discussion, which the authors would consider in sub-
sequent drafts and final revision of their chapters.
Most of the substantive discussion and nitpicking was offered and
received in good humor, as illustrated in the following exchange:

>Well, you are sooooooo picky, indeed.

>I am wondering what's behind it. <grin>.
Well, as Eve said to Adam in the garden, The snake made me do it!" But,
speaking of the devil, you know how I do love to click into the old diablo
advocati <smile>, I have also done my time as proofreader and editor, so that
has had an effect.

Some comments, such as the following, were extremely helpful in

providing a rallying point for a common definition of terms, such as
^community/' that tend otherwise to be used too loosely by committed
telecommunicators:
Before we move on I'd like to suggest a brief definition of community. I think
of community as essentially more than a utilitarian gathering to accomplish a
task. Thus many groups are not communities in my sense. To qualify as a
community a group must have solidarity plus history plus culture. By solidarity
I mean sentimental bonds or identifications distinct from functional roles. By
history I mean a shared past that plays a role in the group members' identity,
not just in the time line of a task. By culture I mean shared codes that enable
350 Linda M. Harasim and Jan Walls

the members of the group to understand each other. Each of these elements,
solidarity, history and culture may exist without the others, but only where
all three come together do we find something we would want to call real
community.

This motivated at least one author to devote more time and space
than originally planned to matters of community, society, groups, me-
diated relationships, and goal achievement.

Impacts

The goals of the GAN were achieved: all the authors reported benefit
from the network. The GAN helped to develop the book from chapters
written by diverse authors into a more cohesive and interdependent
whole, with a shared perspective on the topic and subtopics. The
authors used the GAN to become familiar with the other chapters and
contributors and to refine analysis and cross-referencing within the
chapters. Participants reported that the GAN was valuable "in terms of
understanding the work of fellow contributors and in structuring our
own chapter." The GAN also was found to facilitate a process of inter-
active feedback, which enhanced the creative/analytical process and
built a unity of vision in the book. The authors felt that the group
review process "help[ed] us have a better sense of the topics and issues
that others are addressing and encourage[d] the writers to think more
globally about issues that are contained in other chapters." Since "a
conference of people of diverse personal, professional, and network
backgrounds can be a source of new ideas, styles, and professional and
personal connections" authors found that they benefited from the ex-
change of perspectives and information gained on the network.
Electronic networking allowed for cost-effective exchange of infor-
mation and sharing of views in collaborative endeavors. Participants
noted that the GAN discussions had a valuable educational outcome:
the exchange of perspectives introduced new ideas and viewpoints on
the issues presented in the chapters.

I found the comments extremely helpful. My own strategy for revision was to
copy the comments of the readers into the text of the paper at the appropriate
place and then as I worked on the revision I had the comments in a written
format. Once I dealt with them, I just deleted them. So personally I have [found]
that my chapter is much improved as a result of the exchange.
351 The Cfobal Authoring Network

Participation on the GAN contributed to building a unified vision of

the book: "the discussion helped clarify several issues which were
adapted into the final copy . . . and led to a shift in focus . . . to more
of our global concerns and work."
The GAN exchange shaped not only the individual chapters but
"served an extremely important role in helping us define the book as
group."
Networking of authors in a time-constrained collaborative discussion
of each others' draft chapters promoted a unified vision of the topic to
a degree that would be very difficult if not impossible by nonelectronic
mediation. No other medium could support the ongoing interaction
and enable each participant to view comments from all others. The
opportunity for reflection and thoughtful input that the asynchronidty
provided was vital for such collaborative peer review.
Those authors unable to participate in the GAN could not reflect the
unity of perspective evident in chapters of participating authors; the
editor provided guidance on the themes and perspectives of the book
and incorporated references to other chapters in the text. Moreover, the
relationship of these authors to the book was subjectively different,
since they did not have the extensive interaction with the authors of
the other chapters nor the vision of the book as a whole.

Networking Technology

The choice of network technology for the GAN was viewed as sig-
nificant and received comment. Many participants found the email
mode awkward for the collaborative nature of the task.
I believe the use of mail permitted only some of the group to interact on a
regular basis but for others it deterred participation . . . I receive some 100 plus
mail messages per day because I regularly use CMC for teaching and research,
and so [I] had to postpone large parts of GAN discussion due to immediacy of
the other work.

Organizing the GAN messages was difficult. The lack of tools to

organize messages available on systems such as computer conferencing
systems or USENET newsgroups had a negative effect on participation
for some authors.

I found that because of the mail use that many comments I ported to a file and
did not give [them] as much attention to them as I would had they been in a
conference for better access and response . . .
352 Linda M. Harasim and Jan Walls

Yet for others, the use of email was facilitative.

I had no trouble with the e-mail arrangement and fear that if it were a confer-
ence, I would have been less likely to have read it as it would have been easier
for me to have been too busy to turn to it. With it appearing with the rest of
my work, I tried my best to make time.

The network format encouraged the participant to give some thought

to each of the other chapters, even to those only remotely connected
with her/his own area of special interest. Regular, unavoidable confron-
tation with coauthor perspectives contributes to what has been called
convergence in a field of study known as convergence theory, which states
that "if two or more individuals share information with one another,
then over time they will tend to converge toward one another, leading
to a state of greater uniformity" (Kincaid, 1988, 282). The implications
for unifying perspectives between multiple authors are obvious.
On the other hand, by limiting focused discussion to one week for
each draft chapter, the email format discouraged the kind of in-depth
discussion that might emerge through multiple topic computer confer-
encing, wherein authors might naturally gravitate toward subtopics
that were of special interest for in-depth discussion. The optimal solu-
tion likely lies not in "either/or", but in "both/and" strategies: it would
not be implausible to have an email focus on one chapter each week,
alongside multiple conference sections that would cater to the interests
of subgroups among the authoring group. Or, as another participant
suggested: "set up a reasonable network of connections of a mailing list
into at least a USENET newsgroup, and probably into the conferencing
systems of those who have favorite conferencing systems."

Design

We asked participants how they might reconstruct the GAN. Several

suggestions were offered:
1. If financially feasible, a preliminary face-to-face meeting would be
valuable—especially if participants did not know one another or hadn't
worked together previously, and if the process was time-constrained.
Such a meeting would help provide "the big picture" and enable people
to connect with one another and with the spectrum of themes and
perspectives—to help mentally organize the themes that emerged on
the GAN.
353 The Gbbal Authoring Network

2. Advance planning is essential. Implementing an online collabora-

tive project requires extensive organizing of the networks, the agenda,
and the anticipated workload on the individual participants. Estimat-
ing the workload is critical to participants with busy lives. Materials
related to the technical and process activities need to be developed and
distributed among participants. Substantive material, such as the book
chapters, should be sent as far in advance as possible.
3. Select the networking technology that best fits the task and the
user group. This can be a difficult decision, given such factors as acces-
sibility, cost, and user preferences. Even while many authors in the
GAN acknowledged that a conferencing system might be best suited to
the task, selecting one specific system can be contentious. Users may
not have the time nor the interest to learn a new system for a limited
period. On the other hand, the potential benefits or specific demands
of the task may warrant the effort of introducing a specific groupware
tool for that period.
4. Design the group interaction: identify tasks, sequence, roles, and
timelines. As one author observed: "the acts of authoring and of par-
ticipating in an email exchange are quite different activities with their
own peculiar behavioral requirements."
Various models are available: the sequential group review format used
in the GAN; an online workshop (Harasim and Winkelman, 1990); a
collaborative editing process in which authors have more editorial
control over each other's chapter. A format based on the learning circle
model was also proposed:

In the learning circle model, each of the writers would have sent their summa-
ries at the beginning of the session and we would have posed a set of questions
for each of the others to respond to. Each writer would have been responsible
for sending at least one message for each of the authors reacting to their
questions or chapter. The organizers (you guys) as circle coordinator would have
created a matrix which would have included the chapters down one side and
the authors initials across the top and x's to indicate that we have commented
on someone's work. This would have been posted each week. In this way, you
would see what you had accomplished and what you still needed to do. I would
have [been] more inclined to return the favor of reading the chapter of someone
who gave me comments as well as try to respond to everyone. This way all of
the discussion would have run parallel with subject headers indicating the
author and topic.
5. Provide moderating, whether by a specially designated facilitator
or in a turn-taking model.
354 Linda M. Harasim and fan Walls

Prologue: Looking Ahead

The GAN experience offers a number of insights regarding how global

networks of authors and educators might be used and developed most
advantageously.
Selecting the network technology that best supports the required
activity and group is key. Given the task, online exchange of manu-
scripts and mediating of group review, an asynchronous text-based
medium is very appropriate. Asynchronidty enables the participation
of people with different time schedules and in different time zones.
Text-based communication supports considered response and can be
archived for future reference.
Design of the interaction is equally key to effective collaboration.
Specifically how can we structure the benefits of holistic involvement
offered to all coauthors by group email, while enjoying the equally
important benefits of longer-term and more in-depth analysis and dis-
cussion of each separate chapter offered by the conferencing approach?
The challenge may be seen as one of integrating the benefits of syn-
chronic (dividing attention among several manuscripts at the same
time) and diachronic (focusing attention on single manuscripts in a
linear sequence over a period of time) approaches.
Group email offers the advantage of requiring all chapter authors to
be involved in discussion of each other's manuscript, encouraging
greater breadth of discussion than would likely occur if a smaller num-
ber of chapter authors participated in discussing only those topics that
interested them most. Greater depth of discussion, however, is limited
by the fact that each chapter is up for discussion only once and only
for one week.
Diversity of perspectives is virtually required in group email discus-
sion, thus encouraging each author to consider multidisciplinary an-
gles on topics that might otherwise be seen only through the author's
conventional discipline. Unity of vision is encouraged by the group
email's requirement that all participants contribute and respond to the
multidisciplinary discussions of issues raised in the book. These
strengths and weaknesses may be visualized more graphically through
a matrix (fig. 21.3).
The ideal global authoring network, as well as other forms of com-
puter-mediated network collaboration of the future, will find ways to
incorporate the advantages of both of the above modes. This may be
355 The Global Authoring Network

Breadth of Depth of Diversity of Unity of

discussion discussion perspectives vision

Group Weekly Some depth All interests Group

email chapter sacrificed bring diversity involvement in
mode rotation in interest of focus to each chapter
encourages of holistic each week's encourages
breadth vision chapter unified vision

Conference Umited Continual Interests tend Limited

mode in interest discussions to focus on in interest
of in-depth develop different of in-depth
discussions depth chapters discussions

Figure 21.3

done through using group email for discussing certain broader aspects
of the collaborative project, while also maintaining separate confer-
ences for each chapter or sub-heading of the collaborative project. Each
chapter author would be encouraged to read and offer comments on
each other's chapter-conference, with the understanding that each
author will probably be more attracted to some chapter conferences
than to others.
The unity of vision could be maintained by the editor, or an editorial
group, reviewing and summarizing the salient points of each chapter
conference and offering summary comments via the project group
email each week. This would capture much of the benefit of everyone's
involvement in every aspect of the discussion of everyone else's chapter
without forcing information overload on colleagues who would rather
keep control over the scheduling of their GAN work.
The GAN model and experience, or more likely a modified and im-
proved version of it, can serve as a template for productive interna-
tional, even intercultural, collaboration for mutual benefit, integrating
a diversity of backgrounds, interests, and expertise into a synergistic
whole, wherein the whole is truly greater than the mere sum of its parts.
We leave the last word to Shakespeare whose observation in The
Tempest could well be heeded by global networkers of the late twentieth
century.

what's past is prologue, what to come

In yours and my discharge.
—(Act II, Scene 1)
 Contributors

Linda M. Haraslm

is associate professor, Department of Communication, Simon Fraser

University in British Columbia, Canada. She holds a Ph.D. in educa-
tional theory from the University of Toronto and has been active for
the past decade researching educational and organizational applica-
tions of computer networking. She has designed, implemented, and
evaluated networking applications in Canada, the United States, and
Latin America and was the organizer of the Global Authoring Network,
which linked contributors for this book. She edited Online Education:
Perspectives on a New Environment (Praeger, 1990) and, together with
coauthors Starr Roxanne Hiltz, Ludo Teles, and Murray TUroff, is about
to publish Learning Networks: A Field Guide (MIT Press, 1994). She has
published many articles on computer communications and has pre-
sented her research at numerous international meetings. She conducts
most of her teaching and her project work online, on various global
networks.

IzumiAizu

has a long experience in people-to-people communications and inter-

national marketing. As secretary general of the Networking Forum, he
has promoted PC networking in Japan from its early stages. He is now
committed to the establishment of a new research institute, the Insti-
tute for Hypernetwork Society, with Shumpei Kumon. He is a member
of study groups on computer networks for a number of government
362 Contributors

ministries including MTTI (Ministry of International Ttade and Indus-

try) and MPT (Ministry of Post and Telecommunication).

Armando Arias, Jr.

is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Texas A&M University-

Kingsville and cofounder of BESTNET. BESTNET conducts an ongoing
research program concerning the higher education application of com-
puter con- ferencing and related technologies in the areas of instruc-
tion, interinstitutional cooperation, research, institutional service, and
administration.

Beryl Bellman

received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in anthropology from the University
of California at Los Angeles and his Ph.D. in social sciences from the
University of California at Irvine. He is a professor of communication
studies at the California State University at Los Angeles. He has con-
ducted extensive cross-cultural and intercultural communications re-
search in Africa and Latin America, which has resulted in the
publication of three books and over two dozen essays. Dr. Bellman is a
cofounder of BESTNET and has published extensively and presented
numerous scholarly papers on computer communications and related
technologies. He also frequently consults for various international and
governmental agencies on communications, education, and intercultu-
ral issues.

Anne Wells Branscomb

is a legal scholar specializing in communications, computer, and intel-

lectual property law. She is president of the Raven Group, a consulting
firm specializing in strategic planning and policy analysis for high-tech-
nology firms. She is also a research affiliate of the Harvard University
Law School and Program on Information Resource Policies. Her aca-
demic achievements have included appointments as adjunct professor
of international law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of
Tufts University and adjunct professor of international telecommunica-
tions law at the Polytechnic Institute of New York.
363 Contributors

Andrew Feenberg

is professor of philosophy at San Diego State University. He is the

author of Critical Theory of Technology, and Lukacs, Marx and the Sources
of Critical Theory (both with Oxford University Press), as well as numer-
ous articles on philosophy of technology and social thought.

Howard Frederick

is author of Global Communication and International Relations

(Wadsworth, 1993) and Cuban-American Radio Wars (Ablex, 1986). He
is president of the international communication section of the Interna-
tional Association for Mass Communication Research (IAMCR) and the
former director of PeaceNet, the world's largest computer network dedi-
cated solely to human rights and peace. He currently teaches in the
Department of Politics and Society, University of California, Irvine.

Hiroshilshii

joined NTT Yokosuka Electrical Communications Laboratories in 1980.

He is currently a senior research engineer of NTT Human Interface
Laboratories. He teaches human-computer interaction (HCI) at Chiba
University. Since 1985 he has conducted research on computer-sup-
ported cooperative work (CSCW) and groupware design. His research
interests focus on human-computer interaction, multimedia shared
workspace design for realtime and asynchronous collaboration, struc-
tured groupware design based on human communication models, and
the role of CSCW technologies in aoss-cultural communication. He
has a number of publications in the Communications of the ACM
(CACM).

Robert Jacobson

is president and chief executive officer of WORLDESIGN, Inc., an infor-

mation design firm specializing in the design and construction of vir-
tual environments in industrial settings. Formerly associate director of
the Human Interface Technology Laboratory at the University of Wash-
364 Contributors

ington, Dr. Jacobson has maintained a long scholarly interest in the

design of humane information environments.

Mitchell Kapor

received his B.A. from Yale College in 1971, holds a master's degree in
psychology, and has studied management at MIT's Sloan School. He is
the cofounder and chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Previously, he founded Lotus Development Corporation and served as
its chief executive officer, president, and chairman. He is the designer
of Lotus 1-2-3, Agenda, and many other software applications. Cur-
rently, he serves as chairman of ON Technology, Inc. of Cambridge,
Massachusetts. He is the chairman of Commercial Internet Exchange
(CIX) and serves on the Computer Science and Telecommunications
Board of the National Research Council. He is an adjunct research
fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in the area of in-
formation technology policy.

Sara Kiesler

completed a Ph.D. in social psychology at Ohio State University in

1965. In 1979 she joined the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University,
where she is a professor of social and decision sciences and social psy-
chology, as well as a member of the university's robotics institute. She
has participated in national policy committees on the social implica-
tions of technology and written extensively on this topic.

Michael Kirby

is president of the New South Wales Court of Appeal. Between 1975 and
1984, the Honorable Justice Kirby was the first chairman of the Austra-
lian Law Reform Commission. From 1978 to 1980 he chaired an OECD
Expert Group on Transborder Data Barriers and the Protection of Pri-
vacy. This produced the OECD Guidelines on Privacy, which were
adopted by the Council of the OECD. The guidelines have been widely
influential, including in the Australian Federal Privacy Act. Since 1991
he has been chairing the OECD Expert Group on Security of Informa-
tion Systems. He holds many other international posts including chair-
365 Contributors

man of the Executive Committee of the International Commission of

Jurists, Geneva.

Shumpei Kumon

completed his B.A. and M.A. degrees in economics at Tokyo University.

He attained a Ph.D. degree in economics at the Russian and East-Euro-
pean Institute, Indiana University. He translated a couple of Kenneth
Boulding's books into Japanese and published books on social systems
theory, international systems, and the network society. He coedited,
with Henry Rosovsky, The Political Economy of Japan, Vol. 3, Cultural and
Social Dynamics (Stanford University Press, 1992). Currently he is a
professor and researcher in the Center for Global Communications
(GLOCOM) at International University of Japan.

Marvin Manheim

is the William A. Patterson Distinguished Professor of Transportation at

the J. L Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern Uni-
versity. Previously, he founded and headed the transportation systems
program at MIT, where he taught for nineteen years. His B.S. and Ph.D.
degrees are from MIT. He teaches, does research, and consults on com-
petitive strategy and the strategic uses of information technology, on
globalization and strategic change in organizations, and on new forms
of information systems such as team support and intelligent agents.
Professor Manheim has lectured and consulted in more than fifteen
countries, published over 130 papers and reports, lead the development
of two major federal government regulations, and written or edited four
books, including a well-known transportation textbook.

Robin Mason

is a lecturer in computer-supported cooperative learning at the Open

University, U.K., supporting and evaluating the university's use of com-
puter conferencing in mass distance education. Her research involves
the integration of computer conferencing with other teaching media
such as audio, audiographics, and video.
366 Contributors

Catherine Murray

is associate professor in the Department of Communication at Simon

Fraser University, teaching telecommunications policy and regulation.
She is a frequent expert witness in the area of public demand for and
valuation of new information services in the Canadian regulatory
arena. Prior to joining Simon Fraser, she was vice-president of telecom-
munications for Dedma Research, a consulting company in the field of
public opinion and market research.

John Quarterman

is editor of Matrix News, a monthly newsletter about contextual issues

crossing network, geographic, and political boundaries, and is secretary
of Matrix Information and Directory Services, Inc., of Austin. He is the
author of "Notable Computer Networks," (G4CM, October 1986) and
The Matrix (Digital Press, 1990). He is also a partner in Texas Internet
Consulting, which consults in networks and open systems, with par-
ticular emphasis on TCP/IP networks, UNIX systems, and standards.

Howard Rheingold

is the author of Virtual Reality (Summit, 1992), Tools For Thought (Simon
& Schuster, 1985), and several other books about technology, culture,
and the human mind. He is the editor of Whole Earth Review. He is
working on a book for Addison-Wesley about "virtual communities,"
for late 1993 publication.

Margaret Mel

is an educational researcher who has developed and assessed educa-

tional programs through tdecommunications. She works with AT&T to
design the educational structure and write the curriculum guides for
electronic "learning drcles" on the AT&T Learning Network. She also
provides online training and direction to the drcle and mentor coordi-
nators on the AT&T Learning Network.
367 Contributors

Jeffrey Shapard

is from Montana via Tokyo, where he lived and worked for over a
decade. He trained in language and linguistics, with a B.A. in English
from the University of Montana and an M.A. in linguistics from the
University of Oregon. He became involved in electronic networking in
1984 in Japan and then developed and operated the TWICS system and
service until 1992 when he returned to the United States for graduate
studies in business at the University of California in Berkeley. He is a
longtime ''connect-activist'' and global networker.

Lee Sproull

has spent more than a decade studying established electronic mail

communities to learn about how they change patterns of communica-
tion within organizations. She received a Ph.D. in social science from
Stanford University in 1977. Until 1992 she was a professor of social
sciences and sociology at Carnegie Mellon University. She is now a
professor of management at Boston University. She has written exten-
sively about information behavior in organizations and social analyses
of computing.

Luck) Teles

has his B.A. in sociology from the Johan Wolfgang Goethe University,
Frankfurt, Germany, an M.A. in international development from the
University of Geneva, and a Ph.D. in computer applications in educa-
tion from the University of Toronto. He has conducted research on the
use of computer networking to enhance classroom learning and pro-
fessional development. Currently he works on the design and imple-
mentation of multimedia environments as manager, instructional
computing, at the Open Learning Agency in British Columbia, Canada.

Alex Tlndlmubona

is program officer for the African Academy of Sciences in Nairobi,

Kenya, and is editor of their scientific journal. He received his doctorate
in chemistry from the University of British Columbia; prior to his
368 Contributors

current position he was a member of the chemistry faculty at the Uni-

versity of Nairobi. He is also involved in the development of AFRINET.

fan Walls

completed his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in Chinese and Japanese
languages and literatures at Indiana University. He has published trans-
lations and studies of poetry and poets, presented papers and public
lectures on cross-cultural communication, and continues to pursue on-
going research into the ways that differences in life experience, lan-
guage structure, and cultural values impede interpersonal and
intercultural communication. Currently he is a professor in the Depart-
ment of Communication and director of the David Lam Centre for
International Communication at Simon Fraser University.

Daniel Weltzner

is an attorney in the Washington office of the Electronic Frontier Foun-

dation, where he is involved in a range of communications and infor-
mation policy issues including infrastructure policy as well as free
speech and privacy problems raised by new communications technolo-
gies. Previously he was a policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties
Union Information Technology Project. ML Weitzner has a J.D. from
Buffalo Law School and a B.A. in philosophy from Swarthmore College.
Index

AAS (African Academy of Sciences), AFS (Andrew File System), 41

248-249 Air transportation industry, 136-137
Acceptable use policies (AUP), 308 Aldus company, 94-95
Access AlterNet, 41
anyplace communication and, 22- AlterNex, 293, 358
23 American Standard Code for Informa-
anytime communication and, 23-24 tion Interchange (ASCII), 257, 268-
expansion, commercial network serv- 270
ice providers and, 304-306 America Online, 18, 20
group roles and, 30-31 ANDEAN, 102
to information, 32-33 Anonymity, in computer networlds, 27-
information and resource, Internet, 28, 58, 66-67, 71, 74, 240-241
44-45 Anonymous FTP, 44
jurisdictional barriers, 89-91 AFC. See Association for Progressive
networlds, 15 Communications (APC)
to people, 32-33 Apprenticeship, cognitive. See Cogni-
to services, 32-33 tive apprenticeship
ACM (Association for Computing Ma- Archie, 44, 45, 56
chinery), 144 ARPA, 36, 40, 48, 301. See also AR-
Advanced Research Projects Agency PANET; Internet
(ARPA).&*ARPA ARPANET
Africa, 12, 237 communication, 46-49
AAS, 248-249 creation, 5, 64
AFRINET project, 247-249 educational resources and, 304
BESTNET, 242-243 electronic mail, 37-38, 106-107
Internet nodes, 252 flaming, 110
networking need in, 243-245 history, 35, 36-39, 305
problems in computer networking, information access, 45
245-247 Internet and, 40-41
X.25 DPN usage, 250 local area networks and, 39-40
X.25 networks in, 244 people, 45-46
African Academy of Sciences (AAS), population, 42-43
248-249 resource access, 44-45
Index

ARPANET (cont.) Bikson, Tora K., 114

resource naming, 43-44 Binational English and Spanish Tele-
resource sharing, 46 communications Network. See BEST-
speeds, 36 NET
Art, computer-mediated conferencing BITNET, 6, 35, 46, 47, 291, 357, 360
and, 54 Boundaries
ASCII character codes, 257, 268, 269- language, 52-53
270 network, 49-56
ASCIInet, 261 organizational, 53-55
Ask-An-Expert conference, 280 political, 50
Association for Computing Machinery time, 50-51
(ACM), 144 Brand, Stewart, 72
Association for Progressive Communi- Broadcast media, noninteractivity of, 25
cations (APC) Bulletin board services (BBSs), 17, 35,
conferences, 292 107
electronic mail, 291-292 extraterritoriality and, 85
environmental information, 293-294 governance, 100
history, 288-291 in Japan, 261. See also TWICS
networks, 293-294, 358-360 usage, 19
world public opinion and, 294-295 Business
Asynchronous communication, 23-24 communication, 208-210
AT&T Learning Network, 12, 223, 226, firms, types of, 155
357-358 networld usage, 19-21
AT&T Mail, 6, 7 partnerships, facilitation of, 208-210
AUP (acceptable use policies), 308
Australia California State University systemwide
IP backbone networks, 42 computer communications network
OECD guidelines and, 170-171 (CSU-NET), 243, 249, 250
Australian Privacy Act, 171 Campus 2000, 202-203, 205
Canada
Barlow, John Perry, 50 BESTNET, 242-243
BBOARD, 45, 47 Internet and, 41-42
BBSs. See Bulletin board services Caucus, 202-203, 214
BC-Net, 209 CDP (Community Data Processing),
Bell, Alexander Graham, 5 288,291
BESTNET Censorship, 86, 318
access to, 358 Centre for Electronic Communications
addressing information needs in devel- and Open Support Systems in Edu-
opment, 251-253 cation, 212
establishment, 238-242 CERFnet, 357
extension into Africa, 247-248 Character codes
internationalization, 242-243 ASCII, 257, 268-270
Internet and, 251-252 French, 214
networking with AAS in AFRINET, German, 214
248-249 Japanese, 255-256
nodes, 250 JIS, 257-258
project findings, 241-242 one-byte, 268
Index

TWICS and, 264-265 cultural nature, 11

two-byte, 269 decentralized, 288
Charging, networks and, 56 human, computer networking and, 16
Charter of Communication Inde- intercultural, 160
pendence, 283 intracultural, 159-160
Chinese character codes, 267-268 networked, workplace structure and,
Chinese government, and Tiananmen 106-108, 112-114
Square uprising, 163, 292 place-independent, 22-23
CIS. See CompuServe Information Serv- places and, 46
ice politics and, 48-49
Cities, networked, 208-209 real-time vs. anytime, 23-24
Civility, online, 71, 329-330 social, 18-19, 263
Civil society concept, 285 text-based, 25-27
CMC. See Computer-mediated commu- travel, 47
nication (CMC) Communication anxiety, in computer
COARA (Communication of Oita Ama- conferencing, 191-192
teur Research Association), 261, 312 Communication of Oita Amateur Re-
Code characters, 214 search Association (COARA), 261,
Co-emulation, 13-14, 32, 311, 323-326 312
Cognitive apprenticeship Community. See also Telecommunity
exploration and, 277 building, 188-190
in global network environments, 271- and communication, 47-48
272, 281 definition, 155-156
learning environments and, 272-273 as geographical place, 284
mentorship and, 271, 276 network as, 10. See also Virtual com-
by peer collaboration. See Peer collabo- munities
ration as nonplace, 284
reflection and, 276-277 pseudo-community, 60-61
scaffolding and, 276 Community Data Processing (CDP),
sequencing instruction and, 278 288,291
Collective decision making, 148-149 Community group (COM group), 190
COMETT, 201, 211 Community model, 155
ComLink, 359 Community project facilitation, elec-
Commercial Internet Exchange, 305 tronic networking and, 208-210
Commercial network service providers, Competitive advantage, 121
access expansion, 304-306 vs. competitive necessity, 125-126
Commission of the European Commu- in hetarchical organization, task/team
nities, 201-202 support systems and, 136-137
Common carriers, 302-303 strategy elements, 125
Communication teams and, 133
anyplace, 22-23 T/TSS and, 139-140
asynchronous, 23-24 CompuServe Information Service (CIS),
business, 208-210 97
civility and, 329-330 history, 18, 97-98
communities and, 47-48 users, 33, 303-304
conviviality and, 330-332 Computer-based communication, in
cross-cultural, 160-161 workplace, 105-106
Index

Computer conferencing, 7, 17. See also research and development and, 211-
Computer-mediated communica- 212
tion (CMC); Networking Computer networks
BESTNET project, 240-242 benefits, 202-212
Commission of the European Commu- cultural awareness and, 202-204
nities and, 201-202 Computer-supported cooperative work
communication anxiety and, 191-192 (CSCW), 11
contextual deprivation and, 194 cultural tools, 144
decision-making and, 108-110 groupmedia and, 321
democracy and, 110 groupware and, 137-138, 143-144
educational applications, 237-242, Computer terrorism, 93
271-274. See also ELNET project Computer tools, introduction of, 3
electronic mail and, 193-194 Comserve, 345, 360
for language learning, 217-218 Confidentiality, information security
openness, 110 and, 177
for student discussion, 238-239 ConflictNet, 289, 358
user resistance and, 194-195 Convergence theory, 163-164, 352
Computer-derived reports, 111 Copyright law, 99-100, 101
Computer environment, 146 Corporate sovereignty, information
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of control, 84
1986, 371 Corporation for the National Research
Computer-mediated communication Initiative (CNRI), 44
(CMC), 46. See also Computer con- COSYS, 207
ferencing Counseling, computer applications,
advantages, 54-55 111-112
electronic mail. See Electronic mail Crackers, 93, 318, 371
in groupmedia, 321 Credit card information, 87
infrastructure, 57 CRIES, 359
networks. See Networks Crime, computer-related, 174
networlds. See Networlds Criminal behavior, 92-95
political dimensions, 78 Cross-cultural awareness, 202-204,
potential, 60 225, 226, 279-280
Computer mediation, 25-28, 28 global education and, 230-231
Computer networking. See also Com- peer collaboration and, 279-280
puter conferencing; Computer-medi- Cross-cultural communication, 151,
ated communication (CMC); Global 160-161
networks; Networks groupware and, 148-150
business partnership facilitation, 208- human issues, 145
210 for intercultural networks, 161-165
community project facilitation, 208- CSCW. See Computer-supported coop-
210 erative work (CSCW)
cost-effectiveness, 350 CSU-NET (California State University
efficient and flexible education and systemwide computer communica-
training, 205-208 tions network), 243, 248, 250
in Europe, 219-220 Cues, communication, 26, 27
language learning and, 204-205
Index

Culture Democratizing, of networld, 31-34

awareness, electronic networks and, Developing world, networking need in,
202-204 243-245
in computer-supported communica- Dialcom, 291
tion media design, 144 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC),
in global network society, 323-324 195-197, 208
Curriculum integration, 216-217, 224, Discretionary information sharing, 116
279 Distance collaborative work, 247
Cybernets, definition, 84 Distance education, 239, 247. See also
Cyberocracy, 84 Education
Cyberology, 84 Distributed global nets, 249
Cyberpunks, 371 Distributed services, 45. See also specific
Cyberspace, 5, 9, 33, 369 distributed services
artfulness and, 335-336 DNS (Domain Name Service), 43-45
civility and, 329-330 Domain knowledge, 274-276
conviviality and, 330-332 Domain Name Service (DNS), 43-45
definition, 57-58, 84, 340 Dubrovsky, Vitaly, 110
edification and, 334-335 Duffy, John C, 111
emergence of virtual world and, 337-
341 EADTU (European Association of Dis-
harmony and, 333-334 tance Teaching Universities), 206
reciprocity and, 332-333 EARN, 253-254, 291
spirituality and, 336-337 EASANET, 246
Cyberstrata, definition, 84 East Asia
multibyte character codes, 267-270
DARPA (Defense Research Projects as network society, 312-313
Agency), 36, 48 EC. See European Community (EC)
DASnet, 357 EC 92, 127-132
Data authenticity, information security EcoNet, 289, 294, 303, 358
and, 177 Economics, of networks, 49
Data availability, information security Economic systems, informatization
and, 177 and, 313-315
Databases, relationship marketers and, ECSCW (European CSCW), 144
87-88 EcuaNex Intercom, 359
DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), EDI (electronic data interchange), 126
195-197, 208 Education. See also Learning
Decentralized communication computer conferencing and, 237-238.
globalization and, 32 See also Western Behavioral Sciences
large-scale impact, 292 Institute (WBSI)
technologies, 288 efficiency and flexibility, electronic
Decision making networking and, 205-208
anytime communication and, 24 electronic mail and, 237
collective, 148-149 global. See Global education
cultural differences, 148-150 international. See International net-
in Japan vs. U.S., 148-149 working, educational experiments
process, 148-149 networks and, 54
DELTA, 201, 206-207, 211, 212 networlds, 21-22
Index

Edutel, 203 Email. See Electronic mail

EEC (European Economic Commu- Encryption, 102-103
nity), 101 English language, 52-53
EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), Ethernet speed, 36, 39-40
50, 78, 299 EuroKom, 208
EIES (Electronic Information Exchange EuroPACE, 211
System), 85, 186, 195 Europe
Electronic Communications Privacy Eastern, networks in, 203-204, 237,
Act of 1986, 89 253-254
Electronic cottage, 19, 20, 209 electronic networking, 219-220
Electronic data interchange (EDI), 126 Internet growth, 43
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), IP backbone networks, 41-42
50, 78, 299 telecommunications network develop-
Electronic funds transfers, 88 ment, 199-201
Electronic groups, 112-115, 119 unification resistance, 199
Electronic Information Exchange Sys- European Association of Distance
tem (EIES), 85, 186, 195 Teaching Universities (EADTU), 206
Electronic mail, 5, 6-7 European Business and Languages
access, 107 Learning Network. See ELNET proj-
APC network, 291-292 ect
ARPANET and, 106-107 European Community (EC)
for collaborative work, 345-346 Commission of, 12, 201-202
collective decision making, 149 harmonization of international law
cost, 107 and, 102, 169
cultural awareness and, 202 initiatives, 179-180
democracy and, 110 single market creation, 122, 123-124
distribution lists, 38 European Convention on Human
educational applications, 237-239 Rights, 169
vs. face-to-face meetings, 150 European Economic Community
in File Transfer Protocol, 37-38 (EEC), 101
Global Authoring Network and, 345- Eveland, John D., 114
346, 354-355 Expert Group on Security of Informa-
informality of, 25-26 tion Systems, 179
internet and, 35 Expert practice, for peer collaboration,
openness, 110 278-280
providers as distributors, 98 Extraterritoriality, 85-86
social networlds on, 17
time zones and, 50-51 Face-to-face (f2f or f-t-f), 5, 114, 149-
types, 118 150, 154, 162, 331
Electronic markets or hierarchies, 315 Farallones Institute, 289
Electronic message cues, 108, 110-111 Farson, Richard, 186
Electronic networking. See Computer Federal Communications Commission
networking (FCC), 95
Electronic networks. See Computer net- Female learners, computer conferenc-
works ing and, 240
Electronic Village Halls, 209 FidoNet, 6-7, 42
ELNET project, 212-219 access to, 357
Index

in Africa, 250 group email mode, 354-355

APC and, 291 group review, 349-350
description, 244-245 impacts, 350-351
electronic mail, 35 moderating, 347-349
popularity, 304 networking technology, 351-352
File transfer protocol (FTP), 36-38, 42 outcomes, 346
Financial data process, 344-346
transnational access, 90-91 volume of communication, 347
vulnerability to fraud, 175 Global civil society, 13
Financial settlement practices, for inter- common good and, 286
connecting networks, 306-307 communication transaction clusters
Finholt, Thomas, 116 and, 285-286
Flaming, 110 government and, 286
Foundation for the Arts of Peace, 288 info-rich/info-poor population gap
Fraud, computer-related, 174 and, 287-288
French Minitel network, 18, 33, 185 markets and, 286
FTP (file transfer protocol), 36-38, 42 nongovernmental movement and,
283-284, 285
GAIT (General Agreement on Informa- problems facing, 286
tion Trade), 101 Global collaborative systems, 32
GAN. See Global Authoring Network Global education
(GAN) cross-cultural awareness and, 230-231
GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs global networking and, 236
and Trade), 101 goals, 221
GCOs (globally competing organiza- learning circles and, 223-224
tions), 121, 126-127, 132-139 learning network and professional de-
GDSS (group decision support sys- velopment of teachers, 235-236
tems), 149 learning role, 221-222
General Agreement on Information in local context, 225-226
Trade (GATT), 101 options for participation, 233-235
General Agreement on Tariffs and teaching role, 221-222
Trade (GATT), 101 use of communication technology in
GEnie, 18 classroom, 222-223
Geographical jurisdictions, data trans- Global hypemetwork society, co-emula-
mission and, 83 tion, 13-14, 32, 311, 323-326
GeoNet, 209, 291 Global intelprise, 320
German language, 52 Globalization
Germany, 232 communication advances and, 199
Gibson, William, 9, 339 of computer networking, 32
GlasNet, 359 without homogenization, 11, 163-165
Global Authoring Network (GAN), xi- implications, 122-123
xii, 343 international legal implications, 344
conference mode, 354 strategic issues, 123
design, 352-354 Globally competing organizations
electronic mail and, 345-346, 354-355 (GCOs), 121, 126
future, 354-356 major forms, 127
goals, 344, 350 teams, 132-139
402 Index

Global networks HCI (human-computer interaction),

applications, 11-13 145-148
definition of, 3 Hetarchical organization
expectations, 343 characteristics, 129-130
future, 253-254 competititive advantage, task/team
global education and, 236 support systems and, 136-137
historical context, 4-6 EC 92 and, 130-132
proprietary boundaries, 83 HHI (human-human interaction), 145-
technologies in, 5-6. See also Com- 148
puter conferencing; Electronic mail; Huff, Charles, 117
Televirtuality Human communication
Global network society, guiding princi- model, 144-145
ples, 323-324 in networld, 22-28
Global organizations, 127,128 Human-computer interaction (HCI),
Global sales, task/team support sys- 145-148
tems, 135-136 Human-human interaction (HHI), 145-
Global villaglzation, 8-9 148
Government Human rights for information process-
global civil society and, 286 ing and transmission. See Informa-
network funding and, 306 tion rights
Government policy, networks and, 309- Human social activity, aspects, 153-154
310 Hypernetworks, 311
GreenNet, 289, 291, 360 evolution, 312-313
Group decision support systems intelprise and, 319-320
(GDSS), 137, 149 Hypernetwork society
Groupmedia, 320, 321-323 global, co-emulation in, 323-326
Groups groupmedia and, 321-323
interactivity, 24-25 information rights and, 318-319
newsgroups, 6-7 intelprises in, 320-321
as systems, 154-155
task-focused, 156-158 IBASE, 358
tasks and relationships, 153-156 ICCP (Information, Computer and
Group structure, of networlds, 30-31 Communications Policy), 176
Groupware IDRC (International Development Re-
computer-supported cooperative work search Council), 251
and, 143-144 IGC (Institute for Global Communica-
cross-cultural communication and, tions), 289
148-150 Information
products, 137 Computer and Communications Pol-
Gulf War, 293 icy (ICCP), 176
from credit cards, 87
Hackers, 92-95 from telephone, 86-87
vs. crackers, 93, 371 Information autonomy/security right,
Hamelink,CeesJ.,285 318
Handicapped student education, com- Information control
puter conferencing and, 240 corporate sovereignty, 84
geopolitical sovereignty, 102-103
Index

legal rights, 99-100 ELNET case study, 212-219

nation-state sovereignty, 84 in Europe, 200
transnational, 286-287 in knowledge-building strategies, 274-
Information control/privacy right, 319 276
Information dissemination, 199-200 in language learning, 204-205
Information overload, 67 in state-of-the-planet awareness, 229-
Information processing, in near future, 230
322 in systemic awareness, 231-233
Information products, 99 WSBI experience. See Western Behav-
Information property, description, 86- ioral Sciences Institute (WBSI)
89 International Public Network (IPN), 13,
Information requests, 115-116 323
Information rights description, 299
in hypernetwork society, 318-319 in Japan, 261
intelprise and, 320 local policies and, 309
Information security, 11, 177-178 policy approach, 300-302
international regime, 167-168 International Telecommunications
new OECD initiatives, 174-176 Union (ITU), 101
OECD Guidelines on Privacy, 168-174 International Users Group (INTUG),
Information service providers, 85, 98 102
Information technology, as competi- Internet, 6, 17, 60, 83, 107,112, 117
tive weapon, 124-126 APC systems and, 291
Information title/priority right, 318- applications, 301
319 BESTNET and, 251-252
Information utility, 98 commercial providers, 304-306
Informatization, 313-318 commercial usage, 307
Institute for Global Communications description, 40-41
(IGC), 289 electronic mail and, 35
Integrity, information security and, 177 file transfer, 36
Intellectual property rights, 319 growth, 40
Intelprises, 311, 317, 320-322 information access, 45
Interactivity, reciprocity and, 332-333. mail message format, 38
See also Groups people, 45-46
Interconnecting networks, standard resource access, 44-45
financial settlement practices, 306- resource naming, 43-44
307 service classification schemes, 309
Intercultural communication, 160, 161- speeds, 36
162 thick connectivity, 301
International Covenant on Civil and users, 303-304
Political Rights, 169 Internet Protocol (IP), 40, 259, 261
International Development Research Internet worm, 83, 86, 93, 175
Council (IDRC), 251 Interpersonal computer environment,
International networking, educational 146
experiments, 185-186 Intracultural communication, 159-160
in cultural awareness, 202-204, 279- IP (Internet Protocol), 40, 259, 261
280 IPN (International Public Network), 13,
in efficiency and flexibility, 205-208 299
 Index

Iran, 91 KEMFIR (Kenya Marine and Fisheries

ISO-OSI, 40, 44 Institute), 251
1ST (Information systems and telecom- KENPAC, 245
munications), 121, 133 Kenya, 245-246
ITU (International Telecommunica- Kenya Marine and Fisheries Institute
tions Union), 101 (KEMFIR), 251
Knowbot Information Service (KIS), 44,
Janet, 291 45
JANUS, 206 Knowledge-building strategies, 274-276
Japan, 12-13 Knowledge Navigator, 322
character codes, 255-256, 268 Korea, character codes, 267-268
co-emulation and, 311 Korean Hanja and hangul, 269
community model, 156
decision making in, 148-149 LaborNet, 358
Dejima and, 255 Language, 52-53
face-to-face meetings and, 149-150 interfaces, for conferencing systems,
global co-emulation and, 325-326 214-215
industrial organizations, 315 learning, 204-205, 217-218
IP backbone networks, 42 segmentation, 264
isolation and parallel realms, 259-262 LAN Oocal area network), 6, 36, 39-40,
isolation in Tokyo Bay, 262-267 138
language in electronic networking, Latin America, 12, 237, 250
255-256 BESTNET and, 242-243, 248-249
MITI, 180-181 developing south-south communica-
as network society, 312-313 tions with, 249-251
Personal Data Protection Act, 171-172 Internet nodes, 252
product groups, 128 Law. See Legal systems
social legitimacy, 324-325 Learning, 13. See also Education
systemic awareness, 232-233 in global education, 221-222
Japanese Industrial Standards Bureau language, electronic networking and,
(JIS), 257-259 204-205
Japanese writing system, computer net- nontraditional learners, equity for, 238
working and, 256-259, 269 organizational, 124
Japan Unix Network (JUNET), 259-264 Learning circles, 12
JIS (Japanese Industrial Standards Bu- access to, 357-358
reau), 257-259 for Global Authoring Network, 353-
JUNET Oapan Unix Network), 259-264 354
Jurisdictional barriers, access, 89-91 global education and, 223-224
Jurisdictional control, 84 participation options and, 233-235
perspective consciousness, 226-228
Kanji, 256 phases, 224-225
character codes, 261 Learning environments, cognitive ap-
filter solutions for TWICS, 265-267 prenticeships and, 272-273
JUNET and, 264-265 Learning networks, 21-22, 23, 235-236
Katakana, 257 Legal systems, 89-90
KCI-NET (Kenya Computer Institute financial data access and, 90-91
Network), 246 harmonization, 100-102
Index

international harmony of laws and, Morris, Robert T. Jr., 83, 86, 93

93-94 MTA (mail transfer agent), 38
jurisdictions of, 10 MUDs (multiple-user dungeons and
networks and, 49 dragons), 328
new communication forms and, 95-99 Multibyte character codes
racially offensive literature and, 90 East Asia and, 267-270
Licklider, JCR, 64-65 opposition to, 269-270
LISTSERV, 47, 331 Multinational organizations, 127
Local area network (LAN), 6, 36, 39-40, Multiple-user dungeons and dragons
138 (MUDs), 328
Locke, John, 285 Multiuser interface, 146
Lutherlink, 100
National assets, 91
MacBride Report, 294-295 National Council for Educational Tech-
McClure, Matthew, 72 nology (NCET), 202
McLuhan, Marshall, 3, 8 National Research and Education Net-
Mailing lists, 38-39 work (NREN), 46, 307, 333
language, 52-53 National Science Foundation (NSF), 41
worldwide, 51 National Science Foundation Network.
Major organizational forms, 127 See NSFNET
Manager-employee relations, 106,117- National Security Agency, 180
118 NCET (National Council for Educa-
Markets, global civil society and, 286 tional Technology), 202
Matrix, 3, 10, 35-36 Nemawashi, 148-149, 157
ARPANET and, 36-41 Net, 327. See Networks
boundaries of, 49-56 Netiquette, 31
NSFNET and, 41-42 NET TCP/IP Internet-based network,
population and, 42-49 250
Mentorship, 271, 276 Network File System (NFS), 40
Message Handling System (MHS), 46 Network industrial organizations, 315
Metaphors, in networlds, 29-30 Network Information Service (NIS), 41
MetaWELL, 777 Networking, cross-cultural, 161-165
MILNET, 40 Network News Transfer Protocol
MIME, 53 (NNTP), 45
Ministry for International Trade and In- Networkplaces, 19-21
dustry (MITi), 172 Networks. See also Computer-mediated
Minitel (Teletel), 18, 33, 185 communication (CMC); Electronic
Minority student education, computer mail; Networlds
conferencing and, 240 access, 32-33
Miscreant behavior, definitions, 92-95 artfulness and, 335-336
MIST, 195 boundaries, 49-56
MITI (Ministry for International Trade civility and, 329-330
and Industry), 172 constituents, naming of, 37
MIT Project Athena, 41 conviviality and, 330-332
MNS Online BBS, 357 economics of, 49
Moderators, 30-31, 193, 272 edification and, 334-335
Modern civilization, phases, 315-317 evolution, 327
Index

Networks (cont.) NIS (Network Information Service), 41

extraterritoriality, 85-86 NNTP (Network News Transfer Proto-
freedom vs. control, 31-32 col), 45
funding, government and, 306 Nongovernmental movement. See
globalization, 32 NGO movement
governance, 99-100 NordNet, 291, 359
harmony and, 333-334 Norman, Donald, 335
humanization, 328 Nova Scotia, bank of, 90
identities, 327-328 NREN (National Research and Educa-
Japanese writing system and, 257-259 tion Network), 46, 307, 333
open-access, 116 NSF (National Science Foundation), 41,
as places, 15,16-22, 46 48
protocols, 49-50 NSFNET
range and speed of, 15-16 backbone, 308
reciprocity and, 332-333 communities, 48
security, 86 description, 41-42
shaping into networlds, 28-31 economics, 49
size, 56 resource sharing, 46
social policy and, 34 Tl backbone, 45
social relationships and, 9-10 upgraded, 305-306
speeds and services, 36, 37
spirituality and, 336-337 OECD, 126, 170
transition to hypernetworks, 312-313 Guidelines on Information Security,
as travel, 47 181-182
user role, 33-34 Guidelines on Privacy, 168-174
Network society, 312-313 initiatives, 179-181
Networlds, 15-16, 34, 315. See also spe- mission, 178-179
cific aspects of networlds new information security initiatives,
authenticity, establishing, 27-28 174-176
democratizing, 31-34 privacy guidelines, 173
devoted to work-related communica- project on information security, status
tion, 19-21 of, 176-178
educational, 21-22 transnational data transfer, 88-89,
group roles, 30-31 101-102
human communication in, 22-28 OLE (Organizational Learning in Enter-
social, 17-19, 28-31 prises), 211-212
spatial structures in, 29-30 OLEW (Open Learning Experimental
task structures in, 29 Workshop), 212
vertical hierarchy in social relation- Online, 5
ships and, 26 apprenticeship, 271
Newman, Brian, 99 classroom, 191, 238-240
New Zealand, 42 group, 155
NGO movement, 13 mentorship, for creative writing, 274-
beginning of, 285 276
global civil society and, 283-284 services, 18-19
info-rich/info-poor population gap Ono, Torn, 312
and, 287-288
Index

Open Learning Experimental Work- People's network. See FidoNet

shop (OLEW), 212 r-. Personal computing environment, tra-
Open Systems Interconnect model (OSI ditional view, 146
model), 147 Personal data, treatment, 88
Optimal networking, 163-165 Personal information, from computer-
Organizational Learning in Enterprises derived reports, 111
(OLE), 211-212 Personal sovereignty, information con-
Organization for Economic Coopera- trol, 84
tion and Development. See OECD Physical handicaps, 54
Organizations Picospan, 72, 74
boundaries, 53-55 Pipeline management systems (PLMS),
collectivist, 324 126,133-134
global, 127 Place-independent communication, 22-
groupware and, 322 23
international, 127 Planet awareness, 225, 229-230
learning, 124 PLMS (pipeline management systems),
major forms, 127 126, 133-134
multinational, 127 PLUTO, 203
networked, 117-118 Politics
communication with shift workers, boundaries and, 50
117 communication and, 48-49
electronic mail in, 105,107-108 Poptel, 210
hierarchy, 117 PortaCom, 208
industrial, 315 Post-modern civilization
information requests, 115-116 informatization and, 317-318
information sharing patterns, 114- transition to, 311
117 Post Telegraph and Telephone (PTTs),
limited-access, 108 50, 303
open-access, 108 Power centers, organizational, 128-130
people and, 123 Privacy principle, 169
structure and coordination, 123-124, Privacy protection, in computer age,
127-132 169-170
structures, 128-130 Prodigy, 18
OSI model (Open Systems Interconnect charges, controversy over, 96
model), 147 prescreening of messages, 96-97
users, 303-304
Packet data networks (PDN), 51, 245 Product design process, 123
PADIS (Pan African Documentation Product groups, geographical vs.
and Information System), 246-247 global, 127-130
PDN (packet data networks), 51, 245 Property rights, 319
PeaceNet, 288-289, 293, 303, 358 Pseudo-community, 60-61
Peer collaboration PSINet, 41
cross-cultural awareness and, 279-280 PTTs (Post Telegraph and Telephone),
for expert practice, 278-280 50, 303
formats, 274 Public data networking, 301-302
in online apprenticeship, 271 common carriers, free expression and,
Pegasus Networks, 359 302-303
Penzias, Arno, 153-154
Index

Public data networking (cont.) Sequencing instruction, cognitive ap-

interconnected, market-based network prenticeship and, 278
communications services and, 303- Servers, 37
307 Service classifications, for public net-
mixed commercial and noncommer- works, 308-309
cial use, 307-309 SF-LOVERS (Science Fiction Lovers), 47
Public domain, 99 Shift-JIS, 264-265, 269
Public networking, service classifica- SIGCHI (Special Interest Group on
tions, 308-309 Computer and Human Interaction),
144
R&D (research and development), 123, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP),
211-212 38
Real-time communication, vs. anytime SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol),
communication, 23-24 38
Reciprocity Snail mail, 5
cyberspace and, 332-333 Social communication, on networks,
virtual communities and, 69-70 18-19, 263
RECOSCIX (Regional Committee on Social policy, networks and, 34
Scientific Information Exchange), Social processes design, 138
250 Society, networks and, 49
Reflection, cognitive apprenticeship Society for Worldwide Interbank Finan-
and, 276-277 cial Transfers (SWIFT), 85-86
Regional Committee on Scientific Infor- Sociological transition, informatization
mation Exchange (RECOSCIX), 250 and, 315-317
Reid, Brian K., 112 Sodotechnical system, 155
Relationships Software, bug-free, 94
in human social activity, 154 Source, 33, 260
in task groups and communities, 157 South Africa, IP links, 42
Research agenda, 306-307 Soviet Union, attempted coup of 1990,
for interconnected commercial net- 293
works, 304-307 Spatial structures, in networlds, 29-30
for public policy, 300-301 Special Interest Group on Computer
Research and development (R&D), 123, and Human Interaction (SIGCHI),
211-212 144
Resource sharing, ARPANET and, 46 Spirituality, cyberspace and, 336-337
RFC-822, 38, 53 State-of-the-planet awareness, global
Romaji, 257, 264 education and, 225, 229-230
Ronstadt, Donald, 84-85 Strong-tie groups, 156, 157
Rumorville USA, 97-98 Sun Microsystems, 40-41, 54
Russian Research Networks Organizing SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Inter-
Team, 254 bank Financial Transfers), 85-86
Systems
Satellite technology, 83 awareness, global education and, 231-
Scaffolding, 276 233
Science Fiction Lovers (SF-LOVERS), 47 "crackers," 93, 318, 371
Security, 102-103 definition, 154-155
design, 137-138
Index

Taiwan, character codes, 267-268 Telework, 19. See also Work

Task-focused groups, 156-158 electronic mail and, 106-108
goal-oriented function, 30-31, 158 future of, 118-119
with relationship-focused groups, 158- group decision making and, 108-110
159 information sharing and, 114-116
subcultures, 160 job status and, 110
Task-focused networks, 162-165 networked communications, work-
Task structures, in networld, 29 place structure and, 110-114, 116-
Task/team support system (T/TSS), 121, 117
134-135 resource allocation and, 117-118
competitive advantage and, 139-140 social status and, 110-111
competitive advantage in hetarchical TELNET, 42
organization, 136-137 Terrorism, 93, 318, 371
designing for specific application, 137 Text-based communication
development and implementation, anonymity, 26
138-139 benefits, 25-26
for global sales, 135-136 conflict resolution and, 27
management strategy and, 138 intellectual benefits, 26
Taylor, Robert, 64-65 social benefits, 26
TCP/IP, 40 thoughtful consideration in, 26
Teachers vertical hierarchy in social relation-
preparation for virtual classrooms, 191 ships and, 26
professional development, 235-236 TGI (transaction-generated informa-
revitalization of, networlds and, 21 tion), 87
Teaching, in global education, 221-222 Tiananmen Square uprising, 163, 292
Teams, 132-139 Top-down organization, 31, 153-154
TeamWorkStation, 144, 147-148, 345 Tort, 371
Teleapprenticeship, 271 Tortfeasor, 95, 371
Telecommunications Training, 205-208
as daily reality, 4 Transmission Control Protocol (TCP),
networks and, 19-20 40
revolution, 5 Transnational disputes, resolution, 100-
satellites, 5 102
services, 287 Transnational organization, 129
Telecommunity Transnational transgressions, 92
extraterritoriality and, 85-86 TRANSPAC packet switching system,
governance of, 99-100 201
Telecottages, 20, 209 Travel, networks as, 47
Telecourses, 238 Trilateral Commission, 102
Telegraph, introduction of, 5 Trubow, George, 88
TELENET, 37 T/TSS. See Task/team support system
Telephone (T/TSS)
information, 86-87 TWICS, 17-18, 262-267, 358
invention, 5 character codes, 264-265
Teletel (Minitel), 18, 33, 185 environmental influences, 264-265
Televirtuality, 7-8, 338-341. See also Cy- kanji filter solutions, 265-267
berspace language influences, 264-265
nature of, 262-264
Index

UDP (User Datagram Protocol), 40 communication style, 151

UNESCO, 169-170, 287 cybernaut's eye view of, 59-64
International Oceanographic Council, definition, 58
250 disadvantages, 71
UNINET, 246, 247 friendships and, 65-67
United Kingdom, computer-related future, 78-80
fraud, 174-175 geographic local focus, 64
United Nations, 169-170 geopolitical boundaries, 84-85
Conference on Environment and De- governance, 99-100
velopment (UNCED), 293 growth, 63
Conference on Trade and Develop- vs. human communities, 64
ment (UNCTAD), 101 information overload and, 67
United States IRL or offline, 61
decision making in, 148-149 nature, 60-61
Department of Defense, 301 politics and, 48-49, 78-79
National Academy, 102 real vs. pseudocommunities, 62
National Research Council, 167 reciprocity and, 69-70
Universal Declaration of Human relationship-focused, 156-158
Rights, 169 resource sharing, 47-48
UNIX, 40, 45 social change potential, 58-59
USENET, 6, 36, 328 social contracts, 64-68
artfulness, 336 and virtual networks, 164-165
computer conferences, 292 Virtual laboratories, 237, 253
news, 45 Virtual reality, 7-8, 337-341
organizational users, 112 Viruses, 92, 175, 318
politics and, 48 Aldus, 94
resource sharing, 46 Christmas, 83
travel and, 47 VR (virtual reality), 7-8
USENET/UUCP, 291
User Datagram Protocol (UDP), 40 WAIS (Wide Area Information Service),
User interface, 146 45, 46, 322
Utility of data, information security WAN (wide area network), 6,138
and, 177 Waterton, Jennifer J., I l l
UUCP, 35, 42, 45, 46, 47, 291 Weak-tie groups, 156, 157
UUNET, 357 Weaving comments, 193
Web, 291
VAX Notes, 196-197 Weizman Institute, 102
Vernaculars, 52 WELL, 10, 17, 28, 60, 68
Video conferencing, 28 access to, 357
Video lectures, 238 ambiance, 328
Videotex geographic local focus, 64
commercial systems, 18 Grateful Dead Conference, 73
information markets, 287 Hosts conference, 76-77
Virtual classroom, 191, 238-240 Mind conference, 75
Virtual college design, 213-214 neighborhood, 74-78
Virtual communities, 35, 56, 57 News conference, 75-76
benefits, 63 Policy conference, 77
Index

social contracts, 65-66

success and growth, 303
users, 72-74, 99
Western Behavioral Sciences Institute
(WBSI), 12
community building, 188-190
educational interface designing, 193-
197
international networking experience,
185-188
pedagogy invention, 190-193
WHOB, 39, 44
Whole Earth Catalog, 72
Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link. See WELL
Wide Area Information Service (WAIS),
45, 322
Wide area network (WAN), 6, 138
WIDE (Widely Integrated Distributed
Network), 259-262
WIPO (World Intellectual Property Or-
ganization), 101
Work. See also Telework
computer networks and, 105-106
interactions, computer networking
and, 108-110
networkplaces and, 19-21
Workflow management systems, 137
Workstation-based desktop video con-
ference systems, 143-144
World Intellectual Property Organiza-
tion (WIPO), 101
Worms, 92, 93
"Writer's Link" program, 277

X.400, 46
X.500, 44, 45
X.25 DPN, 250
Xerox
Ethernet. See Ethernet
Intel. See Intel
X.25 networks, 244, 245, 248

YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary), 62

Zuboff, Shoshana, 110

 Notes

Chapter 2 Networlds: Networks as Social Space

Linda M. Harasim

1. A student describes her experience in an educational computer conference.

2. Akira Shinjo, cited in B. Schepp and D. Schepp, The complete guide to CompuServe,
New York: Osborne McGraw-Hill, (1990) 12.

Chapter 3 The Global Matrix of Minds

John S. Quarterman

This book chapter is adapted and expanded from two articles in the newsletter Matrix
News (Quarterman, 1991a; 1991b). For more information, send mail to
[email protected].

Chapter 5 Jurisdictional Quandaries for Global Networks

Anne Wells Branscomb

1. The word "cyberspace" originates from science fiction for the virtual world in
which some "cyberpunks," or people addicted to computers, operated. The term has
been more recently adopted by John Barlow to mean the electronic frontiers of
computer networks.

2. Donald Ronstadt, "Cyberocracy, Cyberspace, and Cyberology: Political Effects of

the Information Revolution," Rand, P-7745, (1991):77.

3. Statement in the first Ithiel de Sola Pool commemorative lecture at the Massachu-
setts Institute of Technology, October 1990.

4. Citation from Harper's magazine, April 1990.

5. From Robert S. Boyd, "Computers chip away at privacy," The Chicago Tribune, July
4, 1990, 1.
 Notes

6. For an excellent analysis of these variances with respect to Financial Services, see
Joel R. Reidenberg, "The Privacy Obstacle Course: Hurdling Barriers to Transnational
Financial Barriers," Fordham Law Review, 56(6) May 1992.

7. See Fair Credit Billing Act, 15 U.S.C. Sec. 1666 (1988); Fair Credit Reporting Act,
15 U.S.C. Sec. 1681(1988); Fair Debt Collections Practices Act, 15 U.S.C. Sec. 1692
(1988) and Electronic Funds Transfer Act Sec. 1693 (1988).

8. OECD, "Recommendation of the Council Concerning Guidelines Governing the

Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data, OECD Document (C
58 Final) October 1, 1980.

9. Council of Europe, "Convention for the Protection of Individuals with Regard to

Automatic Processing of Personal Data," January 18,1981, European Treaty Series no.
108.

10. "First UK Ban on Data Exports is to Named Companies in the USA," Privacy Law
and Business, Winter 1990/91, 5.

11. Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, April 18, 1961, Arts. XXVII, XXIX
23 U.S.T. 3227, 3239, 3240, 500 U.N.T.S. 95, 108, 110.

12. 18 U.S. C.A. Sec. 2511 (3) repealed by Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of
1978, Pub. L. 95-511, 92 Stat. 1797 (1978), replaced by Exec. Order No. 12,333, 46
Fed. Reg. 59,941, (Sec. 2.5) December 8, 1981.

13. The International Telegraph Convention of Paris, May 17, 1965, 9 Recueil des
Traites de la France 254.

14. Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (PL 99-508).

15. R. T. Piemchiak, "White Supremacists See Computers as Revolutionary Key," AP

March 3, 1985, via NEXIS; S. Green, "Neo Nazis go High-Tech," UPI, March 9, 1985,
via NEXIS.

16. United States v. Bank of Nova Scotia, 69 F. 2d 1184 (11th Cir. 1982); 740 F.2d 817
(11th Qr. 1984), 84-2 U.S. Tax Cas. (CCH) P9802; The logic of the court was that
"the confidentiality laws of the Cayman Islands should not be used as a blanket to
encourage or foster criminal activities . . . and even if the Cayman Islands had an
absolute right to privacy" which it could bestow upon its own citizens "this right
could not fully apply to American citizens," who could not be insulated against a
criminal investigation since they are required to report such financial transactions as
were in question pursuant to 31 U.S.C. Sec. 11221 and 31 C.F.R. Sec. 103.24 (1979).
The court also relied upon the fact that the disclosure was to a grand jury investiga-
tion in itself a privileged and confidential proceeding. See also J. T. Burnett, "Infor-
mation, Banking Law and Extraterritoriality," Transnational Data and Communications
Report, January 1986, 17-18.

17. Dow Jones News Document, 860404-400, Wall Street Journal, April 4, 1986, 10.

18. On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants occupied the U.S. embassy in Tehran
and took hostages. As one response to this indignity, President Carter declared a
national emergency and froze all Iranian assets subject to the jurisdiction of the
Notes

United States. Pursuant to this authority, the Secretary of the Treasury promulgated
Iranian Assets Control Regulations, 31 C.F.R. Sec. 535.101-904 (1979). Numerous
cases were filed by claimants to these assets—see, for example, Malek-Marzban v.
U.S., 653 F. 2d 1213 (4th Cir. 1981); Itel Corp. v. M/S Victoria U (Ex Pishtaz Iran) 710
F.2d 199 (5th Cir. 1983); Behring International Inc. v. Imperial Iranian Airforce et al.,
712 F.2d 45 (3d Cir. 1983), 36 Fed. R. Serv. 2d (Callaghan) 391.

19. D. Tweedale, "U.S. Businessmen Complain about Sanctions against Panama,"

UPI, April 15, 1988, BC Cycle via NEXIS.

20. After the Soviet Union placed Poland under martial law, the U.S. government
attempted to disrupt the construction of the Soviet gas pipeline from Siberia to
Western Europe by placing an embargo on U.S. originated products and technology.
This affected Dresser Industries, which relied upon data in the United States.

21. Transnational Data Report, February 1987, 7.

22. "Hacking" is a word originally intended as a compliment meaning a highly

skilled and ingenious computer scientist. More recently it has been popularized by
journalists to mean unscrupulous individuals who use their skills with computers to
wreak havoc upon networks and databases. "Cyberpunks" or "crackers" are more
acceptable words to describe transgressors who roam the electronic corners of cyber-
space, exploring its frontiers and disregarding no trespassing signs.

23. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (PL 99-474) covers only federal and
interstate computer crimes, making it a federal misdemeanor to trespass intention-
ally to read or obtain data and a felony to access computers to destroy or alter
computer data.

24. A tortfeasor is one who commits an actionable offense or civil wrongdoing for
which compensation for damages incurred may be achieved through the courts.
According to Black's law dictionary, a tort is "a legal wrong committed upon the
person or property independent of contract."

25. Simon L. Garfinkel, "Computer Network Users Attempt a Mutiny," The Christian
Science Monitor," December 5, 1990, S&T Section, 12.

26. Cubby, Inc. v. CompuServe, Inc, 776 F. Supp. 135, 1991 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 15545;
19 Media L. Rep. 1525 (1991).

27. This amendment was first proposed by Professor Lawrence Tribe of the Harvard
University Law School at a conference held in California, March 1991, organized by
the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.

28. NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U.S. 449 (1958); Thomburgh v. American CoUege of
Obstetricians, 106 Sup. Ct. 2169 (1986); but see Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 at 71-72
(1976) requiring disclosure of the names of contributors to campaign committees.

29. "Computer as a Forum of Hate Poses Problem," Los Angeles Times, November 16,
1991, F13.

30. "UNCTAD Meeting on Technology Transfer Fails to Reach Agreement on Code of

Conduct," BNA, Inc. Daily Report for Executives, June 7, 1985, DER no. 10, L-8.
372 Notes

Chapter 6 Computers, Networks, and Work

Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler

This chapter appeared in Scientific American, vol. 265, September 1991. The chapter
is published with the permission of Scientific American, Inc.

Chapter 7 Integrating Global Organizations through Task/Team Support Systems

Marvin Manheim

This chapter is an adaptation and extension of Manheim, 1992.

Chapter 8 Cross-Cultural Communication and CSCW

Hiroshi Ishii

A previous version of this manuscript appeared in Whole Earth Review (no. 69, Winter
1990) edited by Howard Rheingold (Ishii, 1990b). This chapter is published with the
permission of Whole Earth Review.

1. The term "Computer-Supported Cooperative Work" (CSCW) was coined by Paul

Cashman and Irene Greif in 1984 when they decided to use the term for a workshop
they were running. CSCW is rooted in the pioneering work of Doug Engelbart of
"augmenting human intellect," the explorations in the use of computer conferenc-
ing and computer networks (Engelbart, 1963).

Chapter 10 Information Security: At Risk?

Michael Kirby and Catherine Murray

1. United States, National Research Council, Computers at Risk: Safe Computing in the
Information Age, National Academy Press, 1991, 7.

2. Japan Information Processing Development Center, Final Announcement of Sym-

posium, Tokyo, October 1991, 3.

3. See, for example, the special issue of "Communications, Computers and Net-
works," Scientific American (September 1991), especially, V. G. Cerf, "Networks," 72.

4. See M. D. Kirby, "Information Security—OECD Initiatives," a paper delivered to

the International Symposium on Information Security, Tokyo, October 1991. Re-
printed in The Computer Law and Security Report, 8 Qune 1992): 102-110.

5. Liability of air carriers for losses to passengers and cargo as set out in the Warsaw
Convention has totally failed to keep pace with inflation and the exponential expan-
sion of international air travel. Despite attempts by various countries to ratify
amending protocols to the Warsaw convention, no consensus in international re-
form has emerged. People who suffer loss to passengers and cargo are virtually forced
to sue in the courts, seeking to circumvent the convention's arbitrary cap on recovery
by proving willful recklessness. Families of victims of the Pan Am accident in Bali in
1974, and of the Korean Airlines or Lockerbie disasters are still waiting for settlement.

6. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, art. 12.

373 Notes

7. See Articles 8 and 17 respectively.

8. For a fuller discussion, see M. D. Kirby, "Legal Aspects of Informatics and Transbor-
der Data Flows" in G. L. Hughes (1990) Essays on Computer Law (Melbourne, Austra-
lia: Longman Professional).

9. OECD Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data,
Paris, 1981.
10. A double dissolution is the means provided by the Australian constitution, s 57,
for resolving differences between the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Where the Senate rejects or fails to pass a measure, the Governor-General may
dissolve both houses simultaneously. Upon resumption, if necessary, there may be a
Joint Sitting which, if it carries the disputed measure, will give it authority of law.
The procedure has only been used once (1974).

11. Masao Horibe, "Access to Information Held by the State and Privacy in Japan,"
(paper for the XIII International Congress of Comparative Law, Montreal, August
1990, mimeo).

12. Ibid., IS.

13. The plaintiff recovered most of the requested damages of Y800,000 in the Tokyo
District Court. See Horibe, ibid., IS.

14. Ibid., 17.

15. Ibid., 19.

16. Ibid., 22.

17. Ibid., 22.

18. M. D. Kirby, "Legal Aspects of Informatics and Transborder Data Flows" in G. L.

Hughes (1990) Essays on Computer Law (Melbourne, Australia: Longman Profes-
sional).

19. Council of Europe, European Committee on Crime Problems, Computer-Related

Crime (Strasbourg: 1990) 14.

20. Ibid., 15.

21. Ibid., 16.
22. Ibid., 17.
23. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, ICCP Report No. 10,
Computer-related Crime: Analysis of Legal Policy (Paris: 1986).
24. See Council decision, 26 July 1988; O J No. C 288, 21 October 1988.

25. Ibid., 60.

26. Ibid., 83.

27. See M. D. Kirby, "Toronto Statement on the International Legal Vulnerability of

Financial Information," (1990-91) 3 Computer Law and Security Report, 2.
374 Notes

28. Ibid. See also L. J. Hoffman, ed. Rogue Programs: Viruses, Worms and Trojan Horses,
(New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990) 61.

29. See M. D. Kirby, "Toronto Statement on the International Legal Vulnerability of

Financial Information,'' (1990-91) 3 Computer Law and Security Report, 2.

30. See International Standards Organization (BO), "Security Architecture," Part n in

Information Processing Systems: Open System Interconnection: Basic Reference Model ISO-
7498-2 (New York: American National Standards Institute, 1989).

31. Compare D. B. Parker, "Restating the Foundation of Information Security,''

confidential note (Applied Research Note 11—Revised).

32. OECD, Press Release (CSG/Press 91, 31, Paris, 5 June 1991) 1, 2, 4, 7, 20.

33. European Communities Council, Working Party on Economic Questions (Data

Protection), "Outcome of Proceedings,'' (Brussels, 29 July 1991, mimeo).
34. Ibid., 2.

35. Ibid., 3.

36. National Council Report (n 1, above).

37. Ibid., 3.

38. "Current State of Computer Security-Related Policies and Measures," a document

provided by the delegation of Japan to the OECD Expert Group (1991) 7.

Chapter 11 Building a Global Network: The WBSI Experience

Andrew Feenberg

1. For an analysis of that instance, see Feenberg (1992).

2. The Western Behavioral Sciences Institute was founded in 1958 as a nonprofit

educational and research foundation in La Jolla, California. In the 1960s, while Carl
Rogers was there, the institute became well known for its work on encounter groups,
but when I joined the staff in 1981, not much remained to remind one of this early
history; WBSI was seeking a completely new direction. For more on WBSI, see Farson
(1989/90) and Rowan (1983) and (1986).

3. The predominance of English has something to do with the fact that WBSI was an
American institution, but still more to do with the American dominance of interna-
tional communications and business. After all, English serves as a universal medium
because it is so widely spoken. However, under special circumstances, it is possible
to arrange things more equitably. For example, in 19871 taught an online course for
the CELSA at the University of Paris that enrolled students from France, French-
Canadians, and English-speaking Canadians. Each contributed in his or her own
language; we were treated to a remarkable mixing of styles of writing and thinking.

4. This wider social significance of this clash of cultures is discussed in Feenberg

(1991, chap. 5).
375 Notes

Chapter 14 Technology Transfer in Global Networking

Beryl Bellman, Alex Tmdimubona, and Armando Arias, Jr.

1. This project stems from a series of meetings sponsored by Digital Equipment

Corporation for the global extension of BESTNET into Africa. These meetings in-
volved representatives from the National Science Foundation (NSFNET division),
National Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Sci-
ence, the World Bank, Agricultural Cooperatives Development International, USAID,
the African Development Foundation, and the California State University system.
These representatives met with representatives from several organizations internal to
Digital who support this effort. As a result of those meetings, it was decided that the
African Academy of Sciences was the appropriate African organization with which to
work and that the California State University and BESTNET should codevelop pro-
posals with them to establish an African computer communications network and
integrate it with the already functioning BESTNET project.
The African Academy of Sciences is a continentwide, nongovernmental, nonpoli-
tical, and nonprofit organization of senior scientists, science policy experts, and
science managers with its secretariat in Nairobi, Kenya. Started in 1985, it is dedi-
cated to the promotion of science and technology for development. It does this
through a vigorous program of activities spanning mobilization and strengthening
of the African scientific community; networking; publication and dissemination of
scientific materials; policy research; and capacity building in science and technology.

Chapter 17 Networks and Emergence of Global CM! Society

Howard Frederick

1. There are more than one hundred news agencies around the world, yet five
transnational news agencies controlled about 96 percent of the world's news flows.

Words per Day of Major News Agencies, 1986-87 (Millions)

17,000 Associated Press (AP)
14,000 United Press International (UPI)
4,000 TASS
1,500 Reuters
1,000 Agence France Presse (AFP)
.500 EFE (Spain)
.300 Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata (Italy)
.115 Deutsche Presse Agentur (Germany)
.150 Inter Press Service (Rome, New York)
.100 Non-Aligned News Pool
.075 Telegrafska Agenda Nova Jugoslavya (Tanjug)
.025 Caribbean News Agency
.020 Pan-African News Agency
.018 Gulf News Agency
See Mowlana (1986: 28); International Journalism Institute (1987: 40); UNESCO
(1989: 136-141).
376 Notes

Chapter 18 Social and Industrial Policy for Public Networks

Mitchell Kapor and Daniel Weitzner

1. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a nonprofit advocacy and educational

organization established by Mitchell Kapor and John Perry Barlow. Mitchell Kapor is
the chairman of EFF and Jerry Berman, an attorney and former head of the ACLU
Information Technology Project, is the executive director of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation's Washington Office. The EFF board includes John Perry Barlow, John
Gilmore, Stewart Brand, Esther Dyson, and David Farber.

2. Professor Eli Noam has said: "Common carriage is the practical analog to [the] First
Amendment for electronic speech over privately-owned networks, where the First
Amendment does not necessarily govern directly." E. Noam, "The FCC as the Na-
tional Systems-Integrator: The New Paradigm for the 90s," statement before the FCC
Hearing: "Networks of the Future: Policy Implications—Challenges and Risks," May
1, 1991.

3. In 1991, the U.S. Congress passed a law creating the National Research and
Education Network (NREN). See the High-Performance Computing Act (HPCA), Pub.
L. No. 102-194, 105 Stat. 1594 (1991).

4. HPCA, Sec. 102(c)(4).

Chapter 19 Co-Emulation: A Global Hypernetwork Society

Shumpei Kumon and Izumi Aizu

1. The social game is a competitive game in which participants (social actors) com-
pete for conventional prizes (say, prestige or wealth) by conventional means (say,
following rules of international law, or civil/commercial codes).

2. Keiretsu-type organizations are business (economic, financial, or industrial) groups

in postwar Japan (Abegglen and Stalk, 1985, 162). Keiretsu are networks of compa-
nies usually allied around major banks or trading companies. These alliances are
linked by cross-shareholdings, common banking affiliations, and the use of the same
trading company to procure raw materials and to distribute products (Prestowitz,
1988,157). Imai (1992) argues that, as informatization of industry proceeds, Keiretsu
will further evolve into a looser group called industrial networks.

3. A video of Apple's vision of computer networks in the year 2015.

4. "Ie" is a Japanese word usually meaning house and/or family, but it also means
highly integrated and cohesive social groups with a high degree of self-sufficiency.
Members of an Ie, particularly a large Ie, although they do not have any direct blood
relation, usually describe their status and roles in the organization in terms of blood
relations such as "parent" and "children." Concrete examples of Ie are Daimyo
(feudal lords and warriors) and today's large Japanese firms.
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Chapter 13 Global Education through Learning Circles

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 Appendix
A Sampler of Global Network Addresses

Chapter 1

To participate on the Internet, you must establish an account with a

research or educational institution that connects to the Internet or
subscribe to a network gateway such as UUNET (call (703) 204-8000),
or CERFnet (call (619) 534-5087, (800) 876-2373, or send email to
[email protected]). The WELL (see below) also provides Internet access.
To access BITNET, you must set up an account at a facility that is a
member of BITNET. For further information, call the BITNET Network
Information Center at (202) 872-4200.
To participate in FidoNet you must dial into a BBS that is part of the
FidoNet. For the number of the host nearest you, call the Basic'ly
Computers BBS at (604) 584-9811 and contact Bob Satti, the Zone 1
coordinator.

Chapter 4

To join the WELL, TELNET well.sf.ca.us or dialup (415) 332-6106 and

follow the signup procedures, or call (415) 332-4335 and talk to a
human. Rates are $15/mo plus $2/hr.

Chapter 13

For more information on the AT&T Learning Network, write P.O. Box
6391, Parsippany, New Jersey 07054-7391, or call, USA: 1-800-367-7225
ext. 4158; Canada: 1-800-567-4671; United Kingdom: 44 071-
358 Appendix

537-4115; Europe/Middle East: 322 676-3576; Hong Kong: 852 846-

2800; Japan: 03-5561-3411; Australia: 02 256-6000.

Chapter 14

To join BESTNEX send a message to [email protected]. For an

institution to be affiliated, the cost of membership is based on what
value-added services they can provide to others on the network. To be
an institutional member, one needs to run VMS on a VAX to be a
distributed node, but affiliation is also possible by telneting into BEST-
NET.

Chapter 15

TWICS
International Education Center
1-21 Yotsuya, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 160 JAPAN
tel: +81.3.3351.5997
fax: +81.3.3353.6096
Internet: [email protected]

Chapter 17

Member networks of the Association for Progressive Communications:

AlterNex, IBASE BRASIL

Rua Vicente de Souza 29 Tel: +55-21-286-4467
22251-070 Rio de Janeiro Fax: +55-21-286-0541
BRAZIL email: [email protected]
Tel: +55-21-286-0348
Fax: +55-21-286-0541 Chasque, Institute* del Tercer
email: [email protected] Mundo
(serves Brazil, South America) Casilla Correo 1539
Montevideo 11000
APC International Secretariat, URUGUAY
c/o IBASE Tel: +598-2-496192
Rua Vicente de Souza 29 Fax: +598-2-419222
22251-070 Rio de Janeiro email: [email protected]
(serves Uruguay)
Appendix

ComLink Institute for Global Communica-

Moorkamp 46 tions
D(w)-3000 Hannover 1 (PeaceNet, EcoNet, ConflictNet,
GERMANY LaborNet)
Tel: +49-511-350-3081 18 de Boom Street
email: [email protected] San Francisco, CA 94107
link.apc.org USA
(serves Germany, Austria, Switzer- Tel: +1-415-442-0220
land, North Italy, Ex-Yugoslavia) Fax: +1-415-546-1794
email: [email protected]
EcuaNex Intercom (serves United States, Mexico)
Casilla 17-03-596
Quito Nicarao, CRIES
ECUADOR Apartado 3516, Iglesia Carmen
Tel: +593-2-505-074 1 cuadra al lago, Managua
Fax: +593-2-580-835 NICARAGUA
email: [email protected] Tel: +505-2-26228
(serves Ecuador) Fax: +505-2-26180
email: [email protected]
GlasNet (serves Nicaragua, Central America)
Ulitsa Yaroslavaskaya 8
Korpus 3, Komnata 111 NordNet
129164 Moscow Huvudskaersvaegen 13, nb
RUSSIA S-121 54 Johanneshov
Tel: +7-095-217-6182 SWEDEN
+7-095-262-7079 Tel: +46-8-600-0331
email: [email protected] Fax: +46-8-600-0443
(serves Russia, Commonwealth email: [email protected]
of Independent States countries) (serves Scandinavia, Baltic States)

GreenNet Pegasus Networks

23 Bevenden Street PO Box 284, Broadway
London Nl 6BH Brisbane, Queensland 4006
ENGLAND AUSTRALIA
Tel: +44-71-608-3040 Tel:+61 7 257 1111
Fax: +44-71-253-0801 Fax: +61 7 257 1087
email: [email protected] email: [email protected]
(serves Great Britain, Western (serves Australia, South Pacific,
Europe, Africa, Asia Southeast Asia)
360 Appendix

Web, Nirv Centre

401 Richmond St., Suite 104
Toronto, Ontario, M5V 3A8
CANADA
Tel: +1-416-596-0212
Fax: +1-416-596-1374
email: [email protected]
(serves Canada)

Chapter 21

Comserve can be accessed from any computer that can send and receive
email over BITNET and Internet. Comserve can be contacted at either
of the following addresses: Comserve@Rpitsvm (BITNET) and Com-
[email protected] (Internet). To get started with Comserve, send a
message with only the word HELP in the body.