Well, Amanda - Are you looking at the hacker context - if so, Eric Raymond explains the history of some hacker words. But the USENET community, as far as I know, is where the all caps as YELLING comes from. Here's some core (old) documents on the formation of hacker communities. Hafner is good on the community aspects of the WELL, not sure about the rules of interaction - such as you could yell at people in person but not broadcast it to the whole community. Raymond, E. (1998). The new hacker's dictionary. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Levy, S. (1984). Hackers: Heros of the computer revolution. New York, Dell. Hafner, K. (1997). "The world's most influential online community (and it's not AOL), the epic saga of the Well." WIRED May(5.05): 98-142. She wrote this up later in a book. Diana Hacker (yes that's her name) had a pocket manual on Email style - I own the book, couldn't find it on amazon. One of her books is called _Research and Documentation in the Electronic Age_ It's about proper email citation but informal rules about using email have been published in these style guides. The 'Netiquette' websites abound. As I understand it, Brandon Kehoe was the first to put some of the informal rules into style guides. Finally his style guide for USENET made it into print after making the rounds electronically for many years. I think I first saw it in 1986. Kehoe, B. T. (1994). Zen and the art of the Internet: A Beginner's guide to the Internet, 2nd edition, Prentice Hall. Of course, FAQs were initially designed to help newbies not mess things up, again from USENET. Here's another ref on USENET: Lueg, C. and D. Fisher, Eds. (2003). From Usenet to CoWebs: Interacting with Social Information Spaces. London, Springer-Verlag. Cheers, Denise ===== Denise N. Rall, PhD candidate, School of Environ. Science, Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 Sustainable Forestry Mentoring Coordinator & Internet Researcher Room T2.12, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 Tuesdays or Mobile 0438 233 344 http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/rsm/staff/pages/drall/index.html