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Forward
by Marj Kibby 22 Jan '02

22 Jan '02

Ive had a request from a journalist from the times of india, bangalore who asks among other things " who devised the Forward option in email?" Anyone know the answer to this? Cheers, marj

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New Theoretical Approaches to the Self in Cyber-Culture
by Cristian Berrio 22 Jan '02

22 Jan '02

Are you thoeorizing that the behaviour of a person, reflected in the cyberspace, can configure a "self" with owned characteristics? Seems to be extremelly interesting that, a new environment like the cuyberspace might let a human being put his "self" into virtual space and express elements of his personality that are well hidden in the real world, up to the point to configure a new "self". If I am through the right track, pls let me know as I belong to a psychologists network and many would be very interested into the topic. Cristian Berrio _________________________________________________________________ Descargue GRATUITAMENTE MSN Explorer en http://explorer.yupimsn.com/intl.asp.

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Re: Air-l digest, Vol 1 #277 - 18 msgs
by Wei Zhang 22 Jan '02

22 Jan '02

> Has anyone come across research on *lurking*? I'm looking for any > pertinent articles. Any suggestions? There were a couple of papers talking about lurking in last Augest's AMCIS conference. You may find them from: http://aisel.isworld.org/article_all.asp?Publication_ID=14. For example: Why Lurkers Lurk Blair Nonnecke, Maptuit Corporation Jenny Preece, University of Maryland, Baltimore County We also had a paper in that conference, but it was not focused on lurking, but on peripheral members, i.e., members who seldom participate. Let me know if you are interested and I will send you an electronic copy. Wei ----------------------------------------------- Wei Zhang DBA Candidate in MIS program Boston University School of Management Tel: (617)323-9354(H) 595 Commwealth Ave. (617)353-4500(O) Boston, MA 02215 Fax: (617)353-5003 U.S.A. ------------ I Still Love MIS Game! -----------

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spam, if you can't lick 'em...
by Barry Wellman 22 Jan '02

22 Jan '02

When I was a kid, I had a stamp collection. I'll never forget the thrill of getting a Tanna Tuvu stamp. I am starting to notice that my spam is coming from similar exotic locales. For example, one today came from "chinahot" but by way of ".kr". I can't even begin to guess where .kr is. So I am thinking of starting a spam collection, of exotic .somethings. Who knows, perhaps it will be worth money someday to a future Brewster Kahle. Would someone please point me to a list of Internet suffixes? And friends, no "help" please, I get enough spam on my own Barry ___________________________________________________________________ Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman(a)chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 ___________________________________________________________________

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Exploiting a Beautiful Mind
by john.white＠wku.edu 22 Jan '02

22 Jan '02

This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com) was forwarded to you from: john.white(a)wku.edu _________________________________________________________________ The following message was enclosed: For the technology and hollywood thread. We often think of it as gadgets, but technology should change the way we interact with our environment...not just the way we make coffee. :) --JW _________________________________________________________________ From the issue dated January 25, 2002 Exploiting a Beautiful Mind By DANIEL ROCKMORE As an undergraduate mathematics major at Princeton in the early 1980s, I have many memories of John Nash. A thin, raincoat-clad, umbrella-carrying specter in the bowels of Fine Hall, pacing the solemn and too quiet hallways outside the mathematics library, brushing along the badly lit walls, which were (and perhaps still are) decorated with eerie and garish paintings of imagined planetary landscapes. Or, instead, chain-smoking, lying flat on his back, on a bench outside the library doors, eyes fixed on the ceiling. I had heard the stories and wondered if they were true -- that he wrote the cryptic numerologico-political remarks left on blackboards, that he was a once-promising, even famous mathematician who, on the verge of publishing the solution of a long-outstanding problem, had been scooped by another mathematician and so had been driven to a nervous breakdown, convinced that he had been spied upon all these long years. "He sees little green men" is what I was told. When I saw him in the math department and in the library, I would nod, sometimes say hello, never sure if he recognized me from one day to the next. And I wondered -- I'm sure like many a budding mathematician -- just how close any one of us might be to his fate. It was, thus, with amazement that several years later I heard on the news that John Nash had received the Nobel prize in economics. Like many others, I raced through Sylvia Nasar's award-winning biography of Nash, gripped by the twists and turns of his improbable story, which Hollywood saw full of cinematic promise. The true story seemed ready-made for the big screen. A driven, arrogant, and socially awkward intellectual with eyes only for academic stardom, Nash was disdainful of pedagogical convention. His singular outlook led him to mathematical discoveries that reinvented the subject of game theory, which has become a mathematical pillar of economics and sociology, and later to breakthroughs that recast modern geometry, as well as the equations that describe the turbulent flow of fluids. In the 1950s, as a consultant on nuclear strategies at the top-secret Rand Institute and a regular visitor to Princeton and the Institute for Advanced Study, Nash hobnobbed with the great scientists of the day. But, while his scientific career rocketed upward, his personal life lurched along a chaotic path of confused and seemingly conflicted sexual identity (leading to the loss of his security clearance), the fathering of an illegitimate child, and finally a difficult but faithful marriage to Alicia Larde, a South American physicist who had been drawn to both Nash's handsome appearance and his seemingly assured intellectual status in the scientific firmament. All of this happened before Nash turned 31. Then, just as quickly, it became a career cut short by the sudden and completely debilitating onset of paranoid schizophrenia, leading to a 35-year wandering about in an emotional and psychological desert, in and out of institutions, subjected to shock treatments and mind-numbing drug therapies. Unable to work or to think, harassed by the demons of a cold war-tinged hallucinatory nightmare, he survived through the support of friends and, most important, his long-suffering wife, who, almost single-handedly, raised their child while working numerous jobs and managing Nash's illness. Then came Nash's slow but steady re-awakening, simultaneous with a growing recognition of the import of his work, which culminated in the Nobel. A hubris-laden hero; a life begun, lost, and regained; creativity entwined with madness; redemption by the love of a good woman. Oscar, here we come! So it was with a little shock, and much dismay, that I sat through the movie, A Beautiful Mind, squirming amid the conflation of fact, fiction, and fantasy, and the reappearance of all the old mathematician/scientist stereotypes. The robotic graduate student who speaks to women using language from a high-school sex-ed book; the suggestion that the paranoid delusions helped and even inspired Nash's work, roasting once again that favorite chestnut of madness equals genius (especially in mathematics); and the cliche of mathematician as code-cracker. And then a postscript that leads anyone not knowing the story to believe that all that preceded was true, from the weird pen-giving ceremony at Princeton (what was that?!) to the now avuncular John Nash happily teaching freshman calculus there. Perhaps the stage is better-suited than the screen to the telling of a mathematical story. The best plays create an entire world within the imagination from a sharp script and the necessarily few and relatively subtle hints that even the most well-appointed production might provide. The reliance on language rather than spectacle to builda self-consistent world mirrors a science whose chief tool is the finely chiseled argument for which technology can appear only as a servant in liege to logic. Be it mathematics or drama, even the most magical computer visualization will never replace a beautifully crafted, cogent argument. The simpler scale, the immediacy, even the smaller budgets hint that the play is to the movie as mathematics is to the big science of the laboratory or engineering center. David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning Proof gives a real sense of the process of mathematical discovery and argument, while still packing them in on Broadway. That play is the best of a collection that includes Michael Frayn's popular quantum-mechanical and uncertainty-driven drama Copenhagen and even a number-theoretic musical, Fermat's Last Tango, which brought to life the intellectual dance of problem solving. Somehow, when mathematics goes to Hollywood, all hell breaks loose. Hyperbole and exaggeration come with the change in scale and the attendant need, and desire, to appeal to the broadest possible audience. Facts morph subtly, and sometimes less so, into fiction and fantasy. Perhaps these are the wages of fame, the price paid for exposure on the big screen. The real story of Nash's life is rife with poetry, irony, and metaphor that could have, should have, fueled a masterpiece. A brilliant mathematical career suspended by a paranoid schizophrenia manifested in a tendency to see the hand of the government in everything. Messages encoded in newspapers and the stars and television. All phenomena devolving back to a world in which every single act and action must be part of some grand Nash-centric universe. All of the world part of a grand design and pattern whose revelation became a turbulent-minded obsession. But this is, in essence, a mathematician's worst nightmare: pattern seeking taken to its infinite limit; mathematical skill and talent run amok. Surely, if we were forced to sum up in a single word the guiding principle of mathematics and mathematical research, it would be the principle of pattern. Numbers as the distillation of the pattern common among equinumerous collections of objects; geometry as the spatial patterns of the Platonic proxies of the real objects around us; logic as the pattern of argument and reason. And the patterns don't stop there. We then connect those first-order patterns with further patterns: Any number ending in 0 is divisible by 10; any number whose digits add to a multiple of nine is divisible by nine; the sum of the squares of the lengths of the legs of a right triangle is equal to the square of the hypotenuse. Patterns upon patterns upon patterns, without end. Nash's Nobel-winning work was the distillation and axiomatization of human commerce. It began with a brief, jewel-like work: a multifaceted, sparkling seven-page paper titled "The Bargaining Problem." This was a fitting title for a man whose life seems itself a real Faustian bargain, in which flashes of brilliance and clarity were traded for long periods of depression and confusion, creativity lying fallow, waiting for a day in which the ravages of disease might be plowed under so that productivity might spring anew. "The Bargaining Problem" marked Nash's foray into the subject of game theory, but his lasting achievement followed soon with the publication of "Equilibrium Points in n-Person Games." Here Nash achieved a startlingly broad extension of the utility and applicability of game theory for economics, moving it out of the impossibly idealized and simple model of two-person zero-sum games, in which one actor's loss is the other's gain, to the highly nuanced and real-life scenarios of equilibrium through compromise, a result of many players sharing and hiding information, forming coalitions and cartels -- in short, acting as people do. Nash laid waste to Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, that unseen force guiding any competitive market to natural equilibriums of price and value. He instead made possible an analytic theory of a world of economics in which personal interest and gain were fundamental forces, a world in which any individual's actions were of worth and mattered, a world without a divine cosmic scheme. Nash's work made irrelevant an omniscient and omnipotent tyrant that, later, while in the thrall of his illness, he found impossible to deny. Nash's game-theoretic work places the real world of human interaction in the confines of the ideal and Platonic, and his achievements in geometry were of the same flavor. The physical world is a world modeled not by the perfect lines, angles, and circles of Euclidean geometry, but one in which Riemannian geometry holds sway, a description of shape and distance, of spatial (rather than emotional) relationships, that seems to lie beyond the possibilities of rigid Euclidean description. Riemannian geometry is the mathematics of Einstein's and Hawking's space-time, a geometry capable of describing a curved universe, black holes, and knots of stringlike tendrils of energy. On the surface, Euclid's and Riemann's worlds would appear to be completely different. The classic example of a Riemannian geometry is the surface of a sphere. In this setting, even our familiar triangles acquire puzzling possibilities. Its gentle, constant curvature entails a land where a triangle's angles add up to an amount greater than the Euclidean, or "flat," 180-degree paradigm. Nevertheless, the sphere can be seen in the mind's eye and even modeled by hand, providing a realization of this exotic two-dimensional world (on the surface of a sphere, two numbers -- latitude and longitude -- suffice to give a precise location) within a Euclidean three-dimensional world. But what of Riemannian spaces of higher dimensions and of more elaborate and complicated curvatures, whose twists and turns would seem to defy any such mundane coordination? These spaces are beyond imagination, defined only as solutions to families of polynomial equations, just as a sphere can be defined as the locus of points at a unit distance from some ideal center. It was with a shock to many mathematicians and scientists that in the early 1950s, in his paper "The Imbedding Problem for Riemannian Manifolds," Nash showed that, in fact, many of these Riemannian worlds (more precisely, Riemannian "manifolds" of sufficient smoothness) could actually be described in a Euclidean setting, provided that enough dimensions are used, showing that under certain conditions, the real and Platonic worlds can coexist. These major intellectual achievements stand like a synecdoche for a mind bent on integrating real and imagined worlds, or a life bent on finding order in the messiness of real relationships, and even, identity. Walking the tightrope between the Platonic and the worldly is the hallmark of great applied mathematics. Great ideas can be like thunderbolts, brilliant flashes of illumination that explode from a tumultuous and sometimes dark cloud of thoughts born of a serendipitous collision of nature and nurture. Revealing by a powerful light that facet of the real world deserving of the distillation into theorem and proof and, in so doing, unearthingthe essence of a phenomenon. Nash's model of human behavior in his theory of noncooperative games, his breakthrough achievement in geometry, his work on equations that describe turbulent fluid flow -- each of these was such a thunderbolt. Ultimately, the creation of a beautiful mathematical model is about making choices -- what to omit and what to include, what to ignore and what to magnify -- and in this way, it is like any work of art. It was Edna St. Vincent Millay who said that "Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare." Perhaps it would take someone who was a little bit of a mathematician to turn the embarrassment of riches that is the truth of John Nash's remarkable life into a beautiful movie. Daniel Rockmore is a professor of mathematics and computer science at Dartmouth College. _________________________________________________________________ This article from The Chronicle is available online at this address: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i20/20b01801.htm If you would like to have complete access to The Chronicle's Web site, a special subscription offer can be found at: http://chronicle.com/4free _________________________________________________________________ You may visit The Chronicle as follows: * via the World-Wide Web, at http://chronicle.com * via telnet at chronicle.com _________________________________________________________________ Copyright 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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RE: [Air-l] Lurking
by Bunz, Ulla K 22 Jan '02

22 Jan '02

Gerhard Lukawetz from Black Box FreeNet and Online-community gave a great presentation at Aoir, essentially about lurkers. The presentation title was "Quantifying and Correcting Unit Nonresponse-Errors in Online-Surveys." Maybe the paper is online in the archive. According to my list (of November), Gerhard is not a member, but maybe someone else on the air-l can get you in touch with him. Ulla Bunz ************************* Ulla K. Bunz University of Kansas 102 Bailey Lawrence, KS 66045 785-864-1160 ulla(a)ukans.edu ************************* -----Original Message----- From: robert m. tynes [mailto:rtynes@u.washington.edu] Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2002 10:24 AM To: air-l(a)aoir.org Subject: [Air-l] Lurking Has anyone come across research on *lurking*? I'm looking for any pertinent articles. Any suggestions? Thank you. -Robert Tynes _______________________________________________ Air-l mailing list Air-l(a)aoir.org http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l

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summary of responses about community-networks
by Mete Yildiz 22 Jan '02

22 Jan '02

Hi, I would like to thank everyone who responded to my inquiry about community networks. I would like to share the summary of the responses with the group so that future inquirers about the subject might use the archive as AIR-L's collective memory. Some of these e-mails were personal correspondance. I hope it is Ok to share the information portion with the group. I edited the e-mails slightly. I hope others will benefit from them as I did. Cheers, Mete --------------------------------------------- Mete Yildiz Ph.D. Student, Public Affairs School of Public and Environmental Affairs Indiana University Bloomington --------------------------------------------- Original Question: All kinds of resources about (online) community networks. Responses: 1. from Sergey Veselovsky You may want to look at some surveys like the following and search "online communities" at amazon.com. Probably it's worth to subscribe for a discussion group of online community professionals at http://www.e-mint.org.uk - Barry Wellman et al,"Does the Internet Increase, Decrease or Supplement Social Capital? Social Networks, Participation and Community Commitment" Revised Version American Behavioral Scientist, 45, 3 (November 2001), pp. 437-56. available via http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/index.html - Pew Internet & American Life Project, "Online Communities: Networks that nurture long-distance relationships and local ties", http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=47 - UCLA, "Surveying the Digital Future", http://www.ccp.ucla.edu/pages/internet-report.asp 2. From Christina Courtright There's Michael Gurstein's mailing list on community informatics: write to Majordomo(a)vcn.bc.ca and in the body write subscribe communityinformatics Or you can visit the Web site that hosts the list http://www.vcn.bc.ca/groups/ 3. From Valdis Krebs IMHO, the most advanced thinking in community networking is done by June Holley and her organization: Appalachian Center for Economic Networks in Athens, OH -- http://www.acenetworks.org They have even mapped out the small business/resource networks in the SE Ohio area [> 200 organizations and individuals] and are keeping network metrics as the networks evolve and change. They are concentrating on three specific relationships/networks: 1) Collaboration -- who works with whom 2) Expertise -- who seeks out whom for expert advice and mentoring 3) Innovation -- who gets ideas from whom, and who do they, in turn, share them with 4. From Kim Gregson virtual communities annotated bibliography: http://php.indiana.edu/~kgregson/virtual_communities.html community networking annotated bib: http://php.indiana.edu/~kgregson/main_menu.html bibliography and online links for a papr i did with another SLIS grad student (Charlotte Ford) on evaluating community nets http://php.indiana.edu/~kgregson/eval_bib.html I think there's a new book or a new version of his classic, by Howard Rheingold on community networks 5. From Nick Jankowski See the following URL for information on a upcoming conference concerning, in part, community networks: http://baserv.uci.kun.nl/~jankow/Euricom 6. From David Silver Thorsten Lohbeck compiled a massive bibliography focusing on community networks. It can be found here: http://orgwis.gmd.de/%7emambrey/cn_bibliogr.html 7. From Tomoaki Watanabe The definite book on the subject is (still) Doug Schler's "New Community Networks: Wired for change" ACM Press, 1996. "Cyberdemocracy: Technology, cities, and civic networks" Eds. by Rosa Tsagarousianou, Damian Tambini and Cathy Bryan. Routledge, 1998. This book includes interesting chapters on e-government, participatory democracy side of comnets. Journal articles: check php.indiana.edu/~twatanab/citations.rtf Some good conferences: I would recommend to check out TPRC's archive section, too. www.tprc.org -> archive in 2001 and 2000, at least, they had some papers on community networks. Maybe other years as well. INET in the last year had a session on community networks, too. The papers were interesting. http://www.isoc.org/isoc/conferences/inet/01/ Other famous conferences include DIAC (organized by Doug Shuler, the authoer of the definite book I mentioned first), and Global Community Networking (GCN). Web sites: Blacksburg Electronic Village's web site has some usage analysis and other reports. This and Canada's National Capital Net, Amsterdam's Digital City are the most well-documented case studies. These are published both online and on paper - some are only on paper. U Michigan's school of information has a good project called Community Connector. Benton Foundation, a non-profit telecom-policy watchdog, has a page on community networking, as well. Their home page is www.benton.org. They are more interested in digital divide issue.

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Fake University Degree Programs
by Ken Friedman 22 Jan '02

22 Jan '02

Christian Berrio asks whether the degrees touted in current spam ads are forgeries --snip-- Diplomas from prestigious non-accredited universities based on your present knowledge and life experience. No required tests, classes, books, or interviews. Bachelors, masters, MBA, and doctorate (PhD) diplomas available in the field of your choice. --snip-- These university offers are not offers for forged university diplomas. They are solicitations for the sale of "genuine" and _worthless_ diplomas from a fake university. All serious university degrees are offered by accredited universities. Universities are accredited by the government in most nations, usually through the ministry of education. In the United States, this takes place at a second remove through the regional accrediting agencies authorized by the department of education. This level of accreditation is necessary for tax status, for proper status in relation to student loans, for many kinds of financing and support, and for other purposes. In addition the specific professional schools or programs of many universities are ALSO accredited under the special accreditation programs of various associations. In business, for example, this would include accreditation by the AACSB in the US and by EQUIS in Europe. Some international schools seek these specialized accreditations from other nations specifically to establish value, and ranking, and to make the school attractive to outstanding foreign students, especially in the competition for talented research students at master's and especially at the doctoral level. The tip-off on the solicitation you received was the line "prestigious non-accredited universities." Since no one recognizes a degree from a "non-accredited university," and since a "non-accredited university" seeks none of the kinds of status or funding for which accreditation is required, anyone may establish one. In effect, anyone who receives this ad could just as easily establish his own non-accredited university, and give himself his own PhD. Those who want several degrees from different universities can establish one for each degree. The tricky aspect of this is that some fake universities emulate the names of real universities with sound-alike or resemblance names. This was once a common practice, but aggressive trademark action by legitimate universities to protect their names is curtailing this. What can't be stopped is the use of totally fake names or the use of names that are not protected in a remote jurisdiction. For example, it might be difficult for the administration of the real Patrice Lumumba University of Moscow in Russia to locate and take legal action in the United States against someone from Moscow, Idaho, who sets up his own Patrice Lumumba University. The ancient University of Montpelier would probably never learn about a fake university of the same name operating in Texas. For the most part, though, these places chose fancy, pan-Galactic names such as The University of Higher Studies or Oceanic University. The tendency of some universities to change names to slightly wild new versions doesn't help keep things sorted. In some cases, these degrees are also awarded for subjects that simply don't exist in real universities, such as theosophy, astrology, or phrenology. The term "prestigious" is as meaningful or meaningless as anyone wishes to make it. For some people in certain places, it is far more prestigious to own a relatively complete set of Pokemon cards than to own a complete set of college degrees. Prestige is a factor of social circumstance. These non-accredited universities are primarily what used to be called diploma mills, and their main purpose is earning money for the people who own them. Anyone likely to require a degree these days tends to check not only on the degree, but on the university. To many people, it doesn't matter, though. They simply want a degree to feel better about themselves or to sound better to friends and neighbors. For those purposes, a "non-accredited university" may be as good as any. These aren't forged diplomas, though. For a small fee, I'll be happy to send you an absolutely authentic doctorate in phrongistics from Laurel and Hardy University. If phrongistics isn't your thing, I'll invite the subscribers of AIR-L to join me in establishing the Pan-Galactic University of Higher Studies Department of Cyberspace Programs. We'll offer an MBA in dot.commerce and a Ph.D. in anything you care to name. With so many unaccredited mouths to feed, of course, this will cost a bit more than a doctorate from L&HU. Nevertheless, at L&HU, "no one is turned down" and we can guarantee "confidentiality assured." In contrast, who knows what those cyberspace people at PGUHS will be doing with your prestigious, non-accredited degree? On the whole, I'd say the Laurel and Hardy doctoral program in phrongistics is the far wiser choice. Of course, to keep the record absolutely straight, most of us who earned accredited degrees are aware of two things. First, it is the degree that counts, not the diploma. The diploma is merely a piece of paper that signifies the award of a degree. The necessary legal document is the transcript kept in the files of each university's registrar. Second, the prestige conferred by these degrees is not always as great as many would wish. One always hopes on graduation that this degree or that will help one to get a good job, meet the right member of the opposite or the same sex, finally get one's family to recognize that one is an adult, etc. What you learn is that: 1) Jobs are scarce for everyone. 2) Grandma always loves you, you'll always be a child to your Mom, and your Dad still kisses you no matter how long you have had your Ph.D. 3) The degree generally doesn't matter much to the girls, boys, women or men whom you want to attract. On the other hand, a good Pokemon collection may do the trick. -- Ken Friedman, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design Department of Technology and Knowledge Management Norwegian School of Management Visiting Professor Advanced Research Institute School of Art and Design Staffordshire University

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Re: [Air-l] Technology in Hollywood
by noci 22 Jan '02

22 Jan '02

RE: [Air-l] Technology in Hollywoodand don't forget "operation swordfish" with John Travolta.. in that movie, he messes around with a "virus", in order to crack a database or something-- anyways, my point is: the "virus" was designed on AutoCAD- as pointed out by wired.com when the movie hit the theatres. that's so typical of hollywood movies- the lack of realistic computer technology (kind of similar to what Frank Schaap said earlier) there is a german movie- "23" - which is far more realistic, mainly featuring minimalistic command line action and distorted modem sounds. and still, there's a lot of suspense, proving that no visualization overkill is needed in order to create a good movie. regards, max doelling

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Re: [Air-l] New Theoretical Approaches to the Self in Cyber-Culture
by noci 21 Jan '02

21 Jan '02

cristian- at first i'd like to note that i am not a researcher, but i have a lot of experience with "online people" and their behaviour- so here's my quick opinion: > Are you thoeorizing that the behaviour of a person, reflected in the > cyberspace, can configure a "self" with owned characteristics? i think your assumption is right. from my experience, most people who devote a lot of their time to online chats develop a defined self. i.e, in the IRC, the channels are the social space, in which people interact. in a specific channel, especially the regular users create a picture of themselves that is then projected to the others. they become edgy, defined characters, just like in real life, because the need to be an individual also exists online. the interesting questions there: is the "online self" different from the "real" self? > Seems to be extremelly interesting that, a new environment like the > cuyberspace might let a human being put his "self" into virtual space and > express elements of his personality that are well hidden in the real world, > up to the point to configure a new "self". i've witnessed many different approaches- what you say is perfectly underlined by one prominent example: online sex, be it ASCII or via videoconferencing systems. the new "self" of an online sex consumer (and i mean voyeurism/exhibitionism, NOT the relatively passive consumption of online porn) is defined by the person's sexual needs/drive. in real life, the sexual preferences might be well hidden under layers of "decency"- but online, the social restraints don't apply. therefore, you might want to consider the resulting characters as being a single, deformed facet of the actual character. that's only one side of online communication, though. still, I daresay that in most cases, the online character is a more or less modified replica of the offline self. the grade of modification makes the difference. regards, max doelling

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