I was confused too, as I had assumed that online communities using videoconferencing to enhance communication would have been of interest. I guess it's easy to assume others have the same focus as you. I'd be interested to get more of an idea what you're looking into, Yvonne. Ben ----- Original Message ----- From: Brenda Danet To: air-l@aoir.org Sent: Sunday, April 28, 2002 6:50 PM Subject: [Air-l] Re: Yvonne Waern's query about visual aspects of WWW/chat Yvonne (and others): It's not clear from your posting whether you really mean only the Web itself, or chat that is directly accessed from the Web, or chat most generally. Maybe my work on visual communication on IRC is relevant; in my book _Cyberpl@y: Communicating Online_ (Berg, Oxford, 2001) I devoted a chapter to 2 channels that communicate on IRC mainly via the display of images that are an elaboration of ASCII art. Players add the nick of a recipient to be greeted before displaying a file. One of the channels, "colors", has meanwhile closed down, but the other, called "rainbow," continues to flourish, and I am writing a whole new book about them now. There are other IRC channels devoted to this phenomenon too. The entire chapter about this form of art as communication, including all color and black and white illustrations, is the sample chapter on the book's Website, and can be accessed at http://atar.mscc.huji.ac.il/~msdanet/cyberpl@y/ (best viewed in Internet Explorer). There is also a text-only pdf version of the chapter available for downloading. This phenomenon is very different from visual enhancement of what is basically typed textual chat, as in comics-like environments, The Palace, or 3D graphical interfaces for typed chat. Regards, Brenda