The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace

                                      Michael Heim
 

This is a chapter from Michael Heim's book The Metaphysics of
Virtual Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993: 82-108.
It is used here with the permission of the author and Oxford
University Press.
 

Cyberspace is more than a breakthrough in electronic media or in
computer interface design. With its virtual environments and
simulated worlds, cyberspace is a metaphysical laboratory, a tool
for examining our very sense of reality.

When designing virtual worlds, we face a series of reality
questions. How, for instance, should users appear to themselves
in a virtual world? Should they appear to themselves in
cyberspace as one set of objects among others, as third-person
bodies that users can inspect with detachment? Or should users
feel themselves to be headless fields of awareness, similar to our
phenomenological experience? Should causality underpin the
cyberworld so that an injury inflicted on the user's cyberbody
likewise somehow damages the user's physical body? And who
should make the ongoing design decisions? If the people who
make simulations inevitably incorporate their own perceptions
and beliefs, loading cyberspace with their prejudices as well as
their insights, who should build the cyberworld? Should multiple
users at any point be free to shape the qualities and dimensions
of cyber entities? Should artistic users roam freely, programming
and directing their own unique cyber cinemas that provide
escape from the mundane world? Or does fantasy cease where
the economics of the virtual workplace begins? But why be
satisfied with a single virtual world? Why not several? Must we
pledge allegiance to a single reality? Perhaps worlds should be
layered like onion skins, realities within realities, or be loosely
linked like neighborhoods, permitting free aesthetic pleasure to
coexist with the task-oriented business world. Does the meaning
of "reality"--and the keen existential edge of experience--weaken as
it stretches over many virtual worlds?

Important as these questions are, they do not address the
ontology of cyberspace itself, the question of what it means to be
in a virtual world, whether one's own or another's world. They do
not probe the reality status of our metaphysical tools or tell us
why we invent virtual worlds. They are silent about the essence or
soul of cyberspace. How does the metaphysical laboratory fit into
human inquiry as a whole? What status do electronic worlds have
within the entire range of human experience? What perils haunt
the metaphysical origins of cyberspace?

In what follows, I explore the philosophical significance of
cyberspace. I want to show the ontological origin from which
cyber entities arise and then indicate the trajectory they seem to
be on. The ontological question, as I see it, requires a
two-pronged answer. We need to give an account of (1) the way
entities exist within cyberspace and (2) the ontological status of
cyberspace--the construct, the phenomenon--itself. The way in
which we understand the ontological structure of cyberspace will
determine how realities can exist within it. But the structure of
cyberspace becomes clear only once we appreciate the distinctive
way in which things appear within it. So we must begin with the
entities we experience within the computerized environment.

My approach to cyberspace passes first through the ancient
idealism of Plato and moves onward through the modern
metaphysics of Leibniz. By connecting with intellectual
precedents and prototypes, we can enrich our self-understanding
and make cyberspace function as a more useful metaphysical
laboratory.

Our Marriage to Technology

The phenomenal reality of cyber entities exists within a more
general fascination with technology, and the fascination with
technology is akin to aesthetic fascination. We love the simple,
clear-cut linear surfaces that computers generate. We love the
way that computers reduce complexity and ambiguity, capturing
things in a digital network, clothing them in beaming colors, and
girding them with precise geometrical structures. We are
enamored of the possibility of controlling all human knowledge.
The appeal of seeing society's data structures in cyberspace--if we
begin with William Gibson's vision--is like the appeal of seeing the
Los Angeles metropolis in the dark at five thousand feet: a great
warmth of powerful, incandescent blue and green embers with
red stripes that beckons the traveler to come down from the cool
darkness. We are the moths attracted to flames, and frightened
by them too, for there may be no home behind the lights, no
secure abode behind the vast glowing structures. There are only
the fiery objects of dream and longing.

Our love affair with computers, computer graphics, and computer
networks runs deeper than aesthetic fascination and deeper than
the play of the senses. We are searching for a home for the mind
and heart. Our fascination with computers is more erotic than
sensuous, more spiritual than utilitarian. Eros, as the ancient
Greeks understood, springs from a feeling of insufficiency or
inadequacy. Whereas the aesthete feels drawn to casual play and
dalliance, the erotic lover reaches out to a fulfillment far beyond
aesthetic detachment.

The computer's allure is more than utilitarian or aesthetic; it is
erotic. Instead of a refreshing play with surfaces, as with toys or
amusements, our affair with information machines announces a
symbiotic relationship and ultimately a mental marriage to
technology. Rightly perceived, the atmosphere of cyberspace
carries the scent that once surrounded Wisdom. The world
rendered as pure information not only fascinates our eyes and
minds, but also captures our hearts. We feel augmented and
empowered. Our hearts beat in the machines. This is Eros.

Cyberspace entities belong to a broad cultural phenomenon of
the last third of the twentieth century: the phenomenon of
computerization. Something becomes a phenomenon when it
arrests and holds the attention of a civilization. Only then does
our shared language articulate the presence of the thing so that
it can appear in its steady identity as the moving stream of
history.

Because we are immersed in everyday phenomena, however, we
usually miss their overall momentum and cannot see where they
are going or even what they truly are. A writer like William Gibson
helps us grasp what is phenomenal in current culture because he
captures the forward movement of our attention and shows us
the future as it projects its claim back into our present. Of all
writers, Gibson most clearly reveals the intrinsic allure of
computerized entities, and his books--Neuromancer, Count Zero,
and Mona Lisa Overdrive--point to the near-future, phenomenal
reality of cyberspace. Indeed, Gibson coined the word cyberspace.

The Romance of Neuromancer

For Gibson, cyber entities appear under the sign of Eros. The
fictional characters of Neuromancer experience the computer
matrix--cyberspace--as a place of rapture and erotic intensity, of
powerful desire and even self-submission. In the matrix, things
attain a supervivid hyper-reality. Ordinary experience seems dull
and unreal by comparison. Case, the data wizard of
Neuromancer, awakens to an obsessive Eros that drives him back
again and again to the information network:

     A year [in Japan] and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope
     fading nightly.... [S]till he'd see the matrix in his sleep,
     bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless
     void.... [H]e was no [longer] console man, no cyberspace
     cowboy.... But the dreams came on in the Japanese night
     like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep,
     and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some
     coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, . . . trying
     to reach the console that wasn't there.[1]

The sixteenth-century Spanish mystics John of the Cross and
Teresa of Avila used a similar point of reference. Seeking words
to connote the taste of spiritual divinity, they reached for the
language of sexual ecstasy. They wrote of the breathless union of
meditation in terms of the ecstatic blackout of consciousness, the
llama de amor viva piercing the interior center of the soul like a
white-hot arrow, the cauterio suave searing through the dreams of
the dark night of the soul. Similarly, the intensity of Gibson's
cyberspace inevitably conjures up the reference to orgasm, and
vice versa:

     Now she straddled him again, took his hand, and closed it
     over her, his thumb along the cleft of her buttocks, his
     fingers spread across the labia. As she began to lower
     herself, the images came pulsing back, the faces,
     fragments of neon arriving and receding. She slid down
     around him and his back arched convulsively. She rode
     him that way, impaling herself, slipping down on him again
     and again, until they both had come, his orgasm flaring
     blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix, where
     the faces were shredded and blown away down hurricane
     corridors, and her inner thighs were strong and wet
     against his hips.[2]

But the orgasmic connection does not mean that Eros's going
toward cyberspace entities terminates in a merely physiological
or psychological reflex. Eros goes beyond private, subjective
fantasies. Cyber Eros stems ultimately from the ontological drive
highlighted long ago by Plato. Platonic metaphysics helps clarify
the link between Eros and computerized entities.

In her speech in Plato's Symposium, Diotima, the priestess of love,
teaches a doctrine of the escalating spirituality of the erotic drive.
She tracks the intensity of Eros continuously from bodily
attraction all the way to the mental attention of mathematics and
beyond. The outer reaches of the biological sex drive, she
explains to Socrates, extend to the mental realm where we
continually seek to expand our knowledge.

On the primal level, Eros is a drive to extend our finite being, to
prolong something of our physical selves beyond our mortal
existence. But Eros does not stop with the drive for physical
extension. We seek to extend ourselves and to heighten the
intensity of our lives in general through Eros. The psyche longs to
perpetuate itself and to conceive offspring, and this it can do, in a
transposed sense, by conceiving ideas and nurturing awareness
in the minds of others as well as our own. The psyche develops
consciousness by formalizing perceptions and stabilizing
experiences through clearly defined entities. But Eros motivates
humans to see more and to know more deeply. So, according to
Plato, the fully explicit formalized identities of which we are
conscious help us maintain life in a "solid state," thereby keeping
perishability and impermanence at bay.

Only a short philosophical step separates this Platonic notion of
knowledge from the matrix of cyberspace entities. (The word
matrix, of course, stems from the Latin for "mother," the
generative-erotic origin). A short step in fundamental
assumptions, however, can take centuries, especially if the step
needs hardware support. The hardware for implementing
Platonically formalized knowledge took centuries. Underneath,
though, runs an ontological continuity, connecting the Platonic
knowledge of ideal forms to the information systems of the
matrix. Both approaches to cognition first extend and then
renounce the physical embodiment of knowledge. In both, Eros
inspires humans to outrun the drag of the "meat"--the flesh--by
attaching human attention to what formally attracts the mind. As
Platonists and Gnostics down through the ages have insisted,
Eros guides us to Logos.

The erotic drive, however, as Plato saw it, needs education to
attain its fulfillment. Left on its own, Eros naturally goes astray
on any number of tangents, most of which come from sensory
stimuli. In the Republic, Plato tells the well-known story of the
Cave in which people caught in the prison of everyday life learn to
love the fleeting, shadowy illusions projected on the walls of the
dungeon of the flesh. With their attention forcibly fixed on the
shadowy moving images cast by a flickering physical fire, the
prisoners passively take sensory objects to be the highest and
most interesting realities. Only later, when the prisoners manage
to get free of their corporeal shackles, do they ascend to the
realm of active thought, where they enjoy the shockingly clear
vision of real things, things present not to the physical eyes but to
the mind's eye. Only by actively processing things through mental
logic, according to Plato, do we move into the upper air of
reliable truth, which is also a lofty realm of intellectual beauty
stripped of the imprecise impressions of the senses. Thus the
liberation from the Cave requires a reeducation of human desires
and interests. It entails a realization that what attracts us in the
sensory world is no more than an outer projection of ideas we
can find within us. Education must redirect desire toward the
formally defined, logical aspects of things. Properly trained, love
guides the mind to the well-formed, mental aspects of things.

Cyberspace is Platonism as a working product. The cybernaut
seated before us, strapped into sensory-input devices, appears to
be, and is indeed, lost to this world. Suspended in computer
space, the cybernaut leaves the prison of the body and emerges
in a world of digital sensation.

This Platonism is thoroughly modern, however. Instead of
emerging in a sensationless world of pure concepts, the
cybernaut moves among entities that are well formed in a special
sense. The spatial objects of cyberspace proceed from the
constructs of Platonic imagination not in the same sense that
perfect solids or ideal numbers are Platonic constructs, but in the
sense that inFORMation in cyberspace inherits the beauty of
Platonic FORMS. The computer recycles ancient Platonism by
injecting the ideal content of cognition with empirical specifics.
Computerized representation of knowledge, then, is not the direct
mental insight fostered by Platonism. The computer clothes the
details of empirical experience so that they seem to share the
ideality of the stable knowledge of the Forms. The mathematical
machine uses a digital mold to reconstitute the mass of empirical
material so that human consciousness can enjoy an integrity in
the empirical data that would never have been possible before
computers. The notion of ideal Forms in early Platonism has the
allure of a perfect dream. But the ancient dream remained airy, a
landscape of genera and generalities, until the hardware of
information retrieval came to support the mind's quest for
knowledge. Now, with the support of the electronic matrix, the
dream can incorporate the smallest details of here-and-now
existence. With an electronic infrastructure, the dream of perfect
FORMS becomes the dream of inFORMation.

Filtered through the computer matrix, all reality becomes
patterns of information. When reality becomes indistinguishable
from information, then even Eros fits the schemes of binary
communication. Bodily sex appears to be no more than an
exchange of signal blips on the genetic corporeal network.
Further, the erotic-generative source of formal idealism becomes
subject to the laws of information management. Just as the later
Taoists of ancient China created a yin-yang cosmology that
encompassed sex, cooking, weather, painting, architecture,
martial arts, and the like, so too the computer culture interprets
all knowable reality as transmissible information. The conclusion
of Neuromancer shows us the transformation of sex and
personality into the language of information:

     There was a strength that ran in her, . . . [s]omething he'd
     found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew--he
     remembered--as she pulled him down, to the meat, the
     flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond
     knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and
     pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its
     strong blind way, could ever read.

     . . . [H]e broke [the zipper], some tiny metal part shooting
     off against the wall as salt-rotten cloth gave, and then he
     was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message.
     Here, even here, in a place he knew for what it was, a
     coded model of some stranger's memory, the drive held.

     She shuddered against him as the stick caught fire, a
     leaping flare that threw their locked shadows across the
     bunker wall.[3]

The dumb meat once kept sex private, an inner sanctum, an
opaque, silent, unknowable mystery. The sexual body held its
genetic information with the strength of a blind, unwavering
impulse. What is translucent you can manipulate, you can see.
What stays opaque you cannot scrutinize and manipulate. It is an
alien presence. The meat we either dismiss or come up against;
we cannot ignore it. It remains something to encounter. Yet here,
in Neuromancer, the protagonist, Case, makes love to a sexual
body named Linda. Who is this Linda?

Gibson raises the deepest ontological question of cyberspace by
suggesting that the Neuromancer master-computer simulates the
body and personality of Case's beloved. A simulated, embodied
personality provokes the sexual encounter. Why? Perhaps because
the cyberspace system, which depends on the physical space of
bodies for its initial impetus, now seeks to undermine the
separate existence of human bodies that make it dependent and
secondary. The ultimate revenge of the information system comes
when the system absorbs the very identity of the human
personality, absorbing the opacity of the body, grinding the meat
into information, and deriding erotic life by reducing it to a
transparent play of puppets. In an ontological turnabout, the
computer counterfeits the silent and private body from which
mental life originated. The machinate mind disdainfully mocks
the meat. Information digests even the secret recesses of the
caress. In its computerized version, Platonic Eros becomes a
master of artificial intelligence, CYBEROS, the controller, the
Neuromancer.

The Inner Structure of Cyberspace

Aware of the phenomenal reality of cyber entities, we can now
appreciate the backdrop that is cyberspace itself. We can sense a
distant source radiating an all-embracing power. For the creation
of computerized entities taps into the most powerful of our
psychobiological urges. Yet so far, this account of the distant
source as Eros tells only half the story. For although Platonism
provides the psychic makeup for cyberspace entities, only modern
philosophy shows us the structure of cyberspace itself.

In its early phases--from roughly 400 B.C. to A.D. 1600--
Platonism exclusively addressed the speculative intellect,
advancing a verbal-mental intellectuality over physical actuality.
Later, Renaissance and modern Platonists gradually injected new
features into the model of intelligence. The modern Platonists
opened up the gates of verbal-spiritual understanding to concrete
experiments set in empirical space and time. The new model of
intelligence included the evidence of repeatable experience and
the gritty details of experiment. For the first time, Platonism
would have to absorb real space and real time into the objects of
its contemplation.

The early Platonic model of intelligence considered space to be a
mere receptacle for the purely intelligible entities subsisting as
ideal forms. Time and space were refractive errors that rippled
and distorted the mental scene of perfect unchanging realities.
The bouncing rubber ball was in reality a round object, which
was in reality a sphere, which was in reality a set of concentric
circles, which could be analyzed with the precision of Euclidian
geometry. Such a view of intelligence passed to modern
Platonists, and they had to revise the classical assumptions.
Thinkers and mathematicians would no longer stare at the sky of
unchanging ideals. By applying mathematics to empirical
experiment, science would absorb physical movement in
space/time through the calculus. Mathematics transformed the
intelligent observer from a contemplator to a calculator. But as
long as the calculator depended on feeble human memory and
scattered printed materials, a gap would still stretch between the
longing and the satisfaction of knowledge. To close the gap, a
computational engine was needed.

Before engineering an appropriate machine, the cyberspace
project needed a new logic and a new metaphysics. The new
logic and metaphysics of modernity came largely from the work
of Gottfried Leibniz. In many ways, the later philosophies of Kant,
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger took their bearings
from Leibniz.

As Leibniz worked out the modern Idealist epistemology, he was
also experimenting with protocomputers. Pascal's calculator had
been no more than an adding machine; Leibniz went further and
produced a mechanical calculator that could also, by using
stepped wheels, multiply and divide. The basic Leibnizian design
became the blueprint for all commercial calculators until the
electronics revolution of the 1970s. Leibniz, therefore, is one of
the essential philosophical guides to the inner structure of
cyberspace. His logic, metaphysics, and notion of
representational symbols show us the hidden underpinnings of
cyberspace. At the same time, his monadological metaphysics
alerts us to the paradoxes that are likely to engulf cyberspace's
future inhabitants.

Leibniz's Electric Language

Leibniz was the first to conceive of an "electric language," a set of
symbols engineered for manipulation at the speed of thought. His
De arte combinatoria (1666) outlines a language that became the
historical foundation of contemporary symbolic logic. Leibniz's
general outlook on language also became the ideological basis
for computer-mediated telecommunications. A modern Platonist,
Leibniz dreamed of the matrix.

The language that Leibniz outlined is an ideographic system of
signs that can be manipulated to produce logical deductions
without recourse to natural language. The signs represent
primitive ideas gleaned from prior analysis. Once broken down
into primitives and represented by stipulated signs, the
component ideas can be paired and recombined to fashion novel
configurations. In this way, Leibniz sought to mechanize the
production of new ideas. As he described it, the encyclopedic
collection and definition of primitive ideas would require the
coordinated efforts of learned scholars from all parts of the
civilized world. The royal academies that Leibniz promoted were
the group nodes for an international republic of letters, a
universal network for problem solving.

Leibniz believed all problems to be, in principle, soluble. The first
step was to create a universal medium in which conflicting ideas
could coexist and interrelate. A universal language would make it
possible to translate all human notions and disagreements into
the same set of symbols. His universal character set,
characteristica universalis, rests on a binary logic, one quite unlike
natural discourse in that it is neither restricted by material
content nor embodied in vocalized sound. Contentless and silent,
the binary language can transform every significant statement
into the terms of a logical calculus, a system for proving
argumentative patterns valid or invalid, or at least for connecting
them in a homogeneous matrix. Through the common binary
language, discordant ways of thinking can exist under a single
roof. Disagreements in attitude or belief, once translated into
matching symbols, can later yield to operations for ensuring
logical consistency. To the partisans of dispute, Leibniz would
say, "Let us upload this into our common system, then let us sit
down and calculate." A single system would encompass all the
combinations and permutations of human thought. Leibniz longed
for his symbols to foster unified scientific research throughout the
civilized world. The universal calculus would compile all human
culture, bringing every natural language into a single shared
database.

Leibniz's binary logic, disembodied and devoid of material
content, depends on an artificial language remote from the
words, letters, and utterances of everyday discourse. This logic
treats reasoning as nothing more than a combining of signs, as a
calculus. Like mathematics, the Leibnizian symbols erase the
distance between the signifiers and the signified, between the
thought seeking to express and the expression. No gap remains
between symbol and meaning. Given the right motor, the
Leibnizian symbolic logic--as developed later by George Boole,
Bertrand Russell, and Alfred North Whitehead and then applied
to electronic switching circuitry by Shannon--can function at the
speed of thought. At such high speed, the felt semantic space
closes between thought, language, and the thing expressed.
Centuries later, John von Neumann applied a version of Leibniz's
binary logic when building the first computers at Princeton.

In his search for a universal language of the matrix, Leibniz to
some extent continued a premodern, medieval tradition. For
behind his ideal language stands a premodern model of human
intelligence. The medieval Scholastics held that human thinking,
in its pure or ideal form, is more or less identical with logical
reasoning. Reasoning functions along the lines of a superhuman
model who remains unaffected by the vagaries of feelings and
spatiotemporal experience. Human knowledge imitates a Being
who knows things perfectly and knows them in their deductive
connections. The omniscient Being transcends finite beings. Finite
beings go slowly, one step at a time, seeing only moment by
moment what is happening. On the path of life, a finite being
cannot see clearly the things that remain behind on the path or
the things that are going to happen after the next step. A divine
mind, on the contrary, oversees the whole path. God sees all the
trails below, inspecting at a single glance every step traveled,
what has happened, and even what will happen on all possible
paths below. God views things from the perspective of the
mountaintop of eternity.

Human knowledge, thought Leibniz, should emulate this visio dei,
this omniscient intuitive cognition of the deity. Human knowledge
strives to know the way that a divine or an infinite Being knows
things. No temporal unfolding, no linear steps, no delays limit
God's knowledge of things. The temporal simultaneity, the
all-at-once-ness of God's knowledge serves as a model for human
knowledge in the modern world as projected by the work of
Leibniz. What better way, then, to emulate God's knowledge than
to generate a virtual world constituted by bits of information? To
such a cyberworld human beings could enjoy a God-like instant
access. But if knowledge is power, who would handle the
controls that govern every single particle of existence?

The power of Leibniz's modern logic made traditional logic seem
puny and inefficient by comparison. For centuries, Aristotle's logic
had been taught in the schools. Logic traditionally evaluated the
steps of finite human thought, valid or invalid, as they occur in
arguments in natural language. Traditional logic stayed close to
spoken natural language. When modern logic absorbed the steps
of Aristotle's logic into its system of symbols, modern logic
became a network of symbols that could apply equally to
electronic switching circuits as to arguments in natural language.
Just as non-Euclidian geometry can set up axioms that defy the
domain of real circles (physical figures), so too modern logic
freed itself of any naturally given syntax. The universal logical
calculus could govern computer circuits.

Leibniz's "electric language" operates by emulating the divine
intelligence. God's knowledge has the simultaneity of
all-at-onceness, and so in order to achieve a divine access to
things, the global matrix functions like a net to trap all language
in an eternal present. Because access need not be linear,
cyberspace does not, in principle, require a jump from one
location to another. Science fiction writers have often imagined
what it would be like to experience traveling at the speed of light,
and one writer, Isaac Asimov, described such travel as a "jump
through hyperspace." When his fictional space ship hits the speed
of light, Asimov says that the ship makes a special kind of leap. At
that speed, it is impossible to trace the discrete points of the
distance traversed. In the novel The Naked Sun, Asimov depicts
movement in hyperspace:

     There was a queer momentary sensation of being turned
     inside out. It lasted an instant and Baley knew it was a
     Jump, that oddly incomprehensible, almost mystical,
     momentary transition through hyperspace that transferred
     a ship and all it contained from one point in space to
     another, light years away. Another lapse of time and
     another Jump, still another lapse, still another Jump.[4]

Like the fictional hyperspace, cyberspace unsettles the felt logical
tracking of the human mind. Cyberspace is the perfect computer
environment for accessing hypertext if we include all human
perceptions as the "letters" of the "text." In both hyperspace and
hypertext, linear perception loses track of the series of discernible
movements. With hypertext, we connect things at the speed of a
flash of intuition. The interaction with hypertext resembles
movement beyond the speed of light. Hypertext reading and
writing supports the intuitive leap over the traditional step-by-step
logical chain. The jump, not the step, is the characteristic
movement in hypertext. As the environment for sensory hypertext,
cyberspace feels like transportation through a frictionless,
timeless medium. There is no jump because everything exists,
implicitly if not actually, all at once. To understand this lightning
speed and its perils for finite beings, we must look again at the
metaphysics of Leibniz.

Monads Do Have Terminals

Leibniz called his metaphysics a monadology, a theory of reality
describing a system of "monads." From our perspective, the
monadology conceptually describes the nature of beings who are
capable of supporting a computer matrix. The monadology can
suggest how cyberspace fits into the larger world of networked,
computerized beings.

The term monadology comes from the Greek monas, as in
"monastic," "monk," and "monopoly." It refers to a certain kind of
aloneness, a solitude in which each being pursues its appetites in
isolation from all other beings, which also are solitary. The
monad exists as an independent point of vital willpower, a
surging drive to achieve its own goals according to its own
internal dictates. Because they are a sheer, vital thrust, the
monads do not have inert spatial dimensions but produce space
as a by-product of their activity. Monads are nonphysical,
psychical substances whose forceful life is an immanent activity.
For monads, there is no outer world to access, no larger,
broader vision. What the monads see are the projections of their
own appetites and their own ideas. In Leibniz's succinct phrase:
"Monads have no windows."

Monads may have no windows, but they do have terminals. The
mental life of the monad--and the monad has no other life--is a
procession of internal representations. Leibniz's German calls
these representations Vorstellungen, from vor (in front of) and
stellen (to place). Realities are representations continually placed
in front of the viewing apparatus of the monad, but placed in such
a way that the system interprets or represents what is being
pictured. The monad sees the pictures of things and knows only
what can be pictured. The monad knows through the interface.
The interface represents things, simulates them, and preserves
them in a format that the monad can manipulate in any number
of ways. The monad keeps the presence of things on tap, as it
were, making them instantly available and disposable, so that the
presence of things is represented or "canned." From the vantage
point of physical phenomenal beings, the monad undergoes a
surrogate experience. Yet the monad does more than think about
or imagine things at the interface. The monad senses things, sees
them and hears them as perceptions. But the perceptions of
phenomenal entities do not occur in real physical space because
no substances other than monads really exist. Whereas the
interface with things vastly expands the monad's perceptual and
cognitive powers, the things at the interface are simulations and
representations.

Yet Leibniz's monadology speaks of monads in the plural. For a
network to exist, more than one being must exist; otherwise,
nothing is there to be networked. But how can monads
coordinate or agree on anything at all, given their isolated
nature? Do they even care if other monads exist? Leibniz tells us
that each monad represents within itself the entire universe. Like
Indra's Net, each monad mirrors the whole world. Each monad
represents the universe in concentrated form, making within itself
a mundus concentratus. Each microcosm contains the
macrocosm. As such, the monad reflects the universe in a living
mirror, making it a miroir actif indivisible, whose appetites drive it
to represent everything to itself--everything, that is, mediated by
its mental activity. Since each unit represents everything, each
unit contains all the other units, containing them as represented.
No direct physical contact passes between the willful mental
units. Monads never meet face-to-face.

Although the monads represent the same universe, each one sees
it differently. The differences in perception come from differences
in perspective. These different perspectives arise not from
different physical positions in space--the monads are not physical,
and physical space is a by-product of mental perception--but from
the varying degrees of clarity and intensity in each monad's
mental landscape. The appetitive impulses in each monad
highlight different things in the sequence of representational
experience. Their different impulses constantly shift the scenes
they see. Monads run different software.

Still, there exists, according to the monadology, one actual
universe. Despite their ultimately solitary character, the monads
belong to a single world. The harmony of all the entities in the
world comes from the one underlying operating system. Although
no unit directly contacts other units, each unit exists in
synchronous time in the same reality. All their representations are
coordinated through the supervisory role of the Central Infinite
Monad, traditionally known as God. The Central Infinite Monad,
we could say, is the Central System Operator (sysop), who
harmonizes all the finite monadic units. The Central System
Monad is the only being that exists with absolute necessity.
Without a sysop, no one could get on line to reality. Thanks to the
Central System Monad, each individual monad lives out its
separate life according to the dictates of its own willful nature
while still harmonizing with all the other monads on line.

Paradoxes in the Cultural Terrain of Cyberspace

Leibniz's monadological metaphysics brings out certain aspects
of the erotic ontology of cyberspace. Although the monadology
does not actually describe computerized space, of course, it does
suggest some of the inner tendencies of computerized space.
These tendencies are inherent in the structure of cyberspace and
therefore affect the broader realities in which the matrix exists.
Some paradoxes crop up. The monadological metaphysics shows
us a cultural topography riddled with deep inconsistencies.

Cyberspace supplants physical space. We see this happening
already in the familiar cyberspace of on-line communication--
telephone, e-mail, newsgroups, and so forth. When on line, we
break free, like the monads, from bodily existence.
Telecommunication offers an unrestricted freedom of expression
and personal contact, with far less hierarchy and formality than
are found in the primary social world. Isolation persists as a
major problem of contemporary urban society, and I mean
spiritual isolation, the kind that plagues individuals even on
crowded city streets. With the telephone and television, the
computer network can function as a countermeasure. The
computer network appears as a godsend in providing forums for
people to gather in surprisingly personal proximity--especially
considering today's limited band widths--without the physical
limitations of geography, time zones, or conspicuous social
status. For many, networks and bulletin boards act as computer
antidotes to the atomism of society. They assemble the monads.
They function as social nodes for fostering those fluid and
multiple elective affinities that everyday urban life seldom, in fact,
supports.

Unfortunately, what technology gives with one hand, it often
takes away with the other. Technology increasingly eliminates
direct human interdependence. While our devices give us greater
personal autonomy, at the same time they disrupt the familiar
networks of direct association. Because our machines automate
much of our labor, we have less to do with one another.
Association becomes a conscious act of will. Voluntary
associations operate with less spontaneity than do those having
sprouted serendipitously. Because machines provide us with the
power to flit about the universe, our communities grow more
fragile, airy, and ephemeral even as our connections multiply.

Being a body constitutes the principle behind our separateness
from one another and behind our personal presence. Our bodily
existence stands at the forefront of our personal identity and
individuality. Both law and morality recognize the physical body
as something of a fence, an absolute boundary, establishing and
protecting our privacy. Now the computer network simply
brackets the physical presence of the participants, by either
omitting or simulating corporeal immediacy. In one sense, this
frees us from the restrictions imposed by our physical identity. We
are more equal on the net because we can either ignore or create
the body that appears in cyberspace. But in another sense, the
quality of the human encounter narrows. The secondary or
stand-in body reveals only as much of ourselves as we mentally
wish to reveal. Bodily contact becomes optional; you need never
stand face-to-face with other members of the virtual community.
You can live your own separate existence without ever physically
meeting another person. Computers may at first liberate societies
through increased communication and may even foment
revolutions (I am thinking of the computer printouts in Tiananmen
Square during the 1989 prodemocracy uprisings in China). They
have, however, another side, a dark side.

The darker side hides a sinister melding of human and machine.
The cyborg, or cybernetic organism, implies that the conscious
mind steers--the meaning of the Greek kybernetes--our organic life.
Organic life energy ceases to initiate our mental gestures. Can we
ever be fully present when we live through a surrogate body
standing in for us? The stand-in self lacks the vulnerability and
fragility of our primary identity. The stand-in self can never fully
represent us. The more we mistake the cyberbodies for ourselves,
the more the machine twists ourselves into the prostheses we are
wearing.

Gibson's fiction inspired the creation of role-playing games for
young people. One of these games in the cybertech genre, The
View from the Edge: The Cyberpunk Handbook, portrays the visage
of humanity twisted to fit the shapes of the computer prosthesis.
The body becomes literally "meat" for the implantation of
information devices. The computer plugs directly into the bones
of the wrist or skull and taps into major nerve trunks so that the
chips can send and receive neural signals. As the game book
wryly states:

     Some will put an interface plug at the temples (a "plug
     head"), just behind the ears (called a Frankenstein") or in
     the back of the head (a "puppethead"). Some cover them
     with inlaid silver or gold caps, others with wristwarmers.
     Once again, a matter of style. Each time you add a
     cybernetic enhancement, there's a corresponding loss of
     humanity. But it s not nice, simple and linear. Different
     people react differently to the cyborging process.
     Therefore, your humanity loss is based on the throw of
     random dice value for each enhancement. This is
     important, because it means that sheer luck could put you
     over the line before you know it. Walk carefully. Guard your
     mind.[5]

At the computer interface, the spirit migrates from the body to a
world of total representation. Information and images float
through the Platonic mind without a grounding in bodily
experience. You can lose your humanity at the throw of the dice.

Gibson highlights this essentially Gnostic aspect of cybertech
culture when he describes the computer addict who despairs at
no longer being able to enter the computer matrix: "For Case,
who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the
Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite
stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The
body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh."[6] The
surrogate life in cyberspace makes flesh feel like a prison, a fall
from grace, a descent into a dark confusing reality. From the pit
of life in the body, the virtual life looks like the virtuous life.
Gibson evokes the Gnostic-Platonic-Manichean contempt for
earthy, earthly existence.

Today's computer communication cuts the physical face out of
the communication process. Computers stick the windows of the
soul behind monitors, headsets, and datasuits. Even video
conferencing adds only a simulation of face-to-face meeting, only
a representation or an appearance of real meeting. The living,
nonrepresentable face is the primal source of responsibility, the
direct, warm link between private bodies. Without directly
meeting others physically, our ethics languishes. Face-to-face
communication, the fleshly bond between people, supports a
longterm warmth and loyalty, a sense of obligation for which the
computer-mediated communities have not yet been tested.
Computer networks offer a certain sense of belonging, to be sure,
but the sense of belonging circulates primarily among a special
group of pioneers. How long and how deep are the personal
relationships that develop outside embodied presence? The face
is the primal interface, more basic than any machine mediation.
The physical eyes are the windows that establish the
neighborhood of trust. Without the direct experience of the human
face, ethical awareness shrinks and rudeness enters. Examples
abound. John Coates, spokesperson for the WELL in northern
California says: "Some people just lose good manners on line. You
can really feel insulated and protected from people if you're not
looking at them-- nobody can take a swing at you. On occasion,
we've stepped in to request more diplomacy. One time we had to
ask someone to go away."[7]

At the far end of distrust lies computer crime. The machine
interface may amplify an amoral indifference to human
relationships. Computers often eliminate the need to respond
directly to what takes place between humans. People do not just
observe one another, but become "lurkers." Without direct human
presence, participation becomes optional. Electronic life converts
primary bodily presence into telepresence, introducing a remove
between represented presences. True, in bodily life we often play
at altering our identity with different clothing, masks, and
nicknames, but electronics installs the illusion that we are "having
it both ways," keeping our distance while "putting ourselves on the
line." On-line existence is intrinsically ambiguous, like the
purchased passion of the customers in the House of Blue Lights
in Gibson's Burning Chrome: "The customers are torn between
needing someone and wanting to be alone at the same time,
which has probably always been the name of that particular
game, even before we had the neuroelectronics to enable them to
have it both ways."[8] As the expanding global network permits
the passage of bodily representations, "having it both ways" may
reduce trust and spread cynical anomie.

A loss of innocence therefore accompanies an expanding network.
As the on-line culture grows geographically, the sense of
community diminishes. Shareware worked well in the early days
of computers, and so did open bulletin boards. When the size of
the user base increased, however, the spirit of community
diminished, and the villains began appearing, some introducing
viruses. Hackers invisibly reformatted hard disks, and shareware
software writers moved to the commercial world. When we speak
of a global village, we should keep in mind that every village
makes villains, and when civilization reaches a certain degree of
density, the barbaric tribes return, from within. Tribes shun their
independent thinkers and punish individuality. A global
international village, fed by accelerated competition and driven
by information, may be host to an unprecedented barbarism.
Gibson's vision of cyberspace works like a mental aphrodisiac, but
it turns the living environment--electronic and real--into a harsh,
nightmarish jungle. This jungle is more than a mere cyberpunk
affectation, a matter of aestheticizing grit or conflict or rejection.
It may also be an accurate vision of the intrinsic energies
released in a cyberized society.

An artificial information jungle already spreads out over the
world, duplicating with its virtual vastness the scattered
geography of the actual world. The matrix already multiplies
confusion, and future cyberspace may not simply reproduce a
more efficient version of traditional information. The new
information networks resemble the modern megalopolis, often
described as a concrete jungle (New York) or a sprawl (Los
Angeles). A maze of activities and hidden byways snakes around
with no apparent center. Architecturally, the network sprawl
suggests the absence of a philosophical or religious absolute.
Traditional publishing resembles a medieval European city, with
the center of all activity, the cathedral or church spire, guiding
and gathering all the communal directions and pathways. The
steeple visibly radiates like a hub, drawing the inhabitants into a
unity and measuring the other buildings on a central model.
Traditionally, the long-involved process of choosing which texts to
print or which movies or television shows to produce serves a
similar function. The book industry, for instance, provides readers
with various cues for evaluating information. The publishers
legitimize printed information by giving clues that affect the
reader's willingness to engage in reading the book. Editorial
attention, packaging endorsements by professionals or
colleagues, book design, and materials all add to the value of the
publisher's imprint. Communication in contemporary cyberspace
lacks the formal clues. In their place are private
recommendations or just blind luck. The electronic world, unlike
the traditional book industry, does not protect its readers or
travelers by following rules that set up certain expectations.
Already, in the electric element, the need for stable channels of
content and reliable processes of choice grows urgent.

If cyberspace unfolds like existing large-scale media, we might
expect a debasement of discriminating attention. If the economics
of marketing forces the matrix to hold the attention of a critical
mass of the population, we might expect a flashy liveliness and a
flimsy currency to replace depth of content. Sustained attention
will give way to fast-paced cuts. One British humanist spoke of
the HISTORY forum on Bitnet in the following terms: "The
HISTORY network has no view of what it exists for, and of late
has become a sort of bar-room courthouse for pseudo-historical
discussion on a range of currently topical events. It really is, as
Glasgow soccer players are often called, a waste of space."
Cyberspace without carefully laid channels of choice may become
a waste of space.

The Underlying Fault

Finally, on-line freedom seems paradoxical. If the drive to
construct cyber entities comes from Eros in the Platonic sense,
and if the structure of cyberspace follows the model of Leibniz's
computer God, then cyberspace rests dangerously on an
underlying fault of paradox. Remove the hidden recesses, the lure
of the unknown, and you also destroy the erotic urge to uncover
and reach further; you destroy the source of yearning. Set up a
synthetic reality, place yourself in a computer-simulated
environment, and you undermine the human craving to penetrate
what radically eludes you, what is novel and unpredictable. The
computer God's-eye view robs you of your freedom to be fully
human. Knowing that the computer God already knows every
nook and cranny deprives you of your freedom to search and
discover.

Even though the computer God's eye view remains closed to the
human agents in cyberspace, they will know that such a view
exists. Computerized reality synthesizes everything through
calculation, and nothing exists in the synthetic world that is not
literally numbered and counted. Here Gibson's protagonist gets a
brief glimpse of this superhuman, or inhuman, omniscience:

     Case's consciousness divided like beads of mercury, arcing
     above an endless beach the color of the dark silver clouds.
     His vision was spherical, as though a single retina lined
     the inner surface of a globe that contained all things, if all
     things could be counted.

     And here things could be counted, each one. He knew the
     number of grains of sand in the construct of the beach (a
     number coded in a mathematical system that existed
     nowhere outside the mind that was Neuromancer). He
     knew the number of yellow food packets in the canisters in
     the bunker (four hundred and seven). He knew the number
     of brass teeth in the left half of the open zipper of the
     saltcrusted leather jacket that Linda Lee wore as she
     trudged along the sunset beach, swinging a stick of
     driftwood in her hand (two hundred and two).[9]

The erotic lover reels under the burden of omniscience: "If all
things could be counted . . ." Can the beloved remain the beloved
when she is fully known, when she is fully exposed to the analysis
and synthesis of binary construction? Can we be touched or
surprised--deeply astonished--by a synthetic reality, or will it
always remain a magic trick, an illusory prestidigitation?

With the thrill of free access to unlimited corridors of information
comes the complementary threat of total organization. Beneath
the artificial harmony lies the possibility of surveillance by the
all-knowing Central System Monad. The absolute sysop wields
invisible power over all members of the network. The infinite CSM
holds the key for monitoring, censoring, or rerouting any piece of
information or any phenomenal presence on the network. The
integrative nature of the computer shows up today in the ability of
the CSM to read, delete, or alter private e-mail on any
computer-mediated system. Those who hold the keys to the
system, technically and economically, have access to anything on
the system. The CSM will most likely place a top priority on
maintaining and securing its power. While matrix users feel
geographical and intellectual distances melt away, the price they
pay is their ability to initiate uncontrolled and unsupervised
activity.

According to Leibniz's monadology, the physical space perceived
by the monads comes as an inessential by-product of experience.
Spatiotemporal experience goes back to the limitations of the
fuzzy finite monad minds, their inability to grasp the true roots of
their existence. From the perspective of eternity, the monads exist
by rational law and make no unprescribed movements. Whatever
movement or change they make disappears in the lightning speed
of God's absolute cognition. The flesh, Leibniz maintained,
introduces a cognitive fuzziness. For the Platonic imagination,
this fuzzy incarnate world dims the light of intelligence.

Yet the erotic ontology of cyberspace contradicts this preference
for disembodied intelligibility. If I am right about the erotic basis
of cyberspace, then the surrogate body undoes its genesis,
contradicts its nature. The ideal of the simultaneous
all-at-once-ness of computerized information access undermines
any world that is worth knowing. The fleshly world is worth
knowing for its distances and its hidden horizons. Thankfully, the
Central System Monad never gets beyond the terminals into the
physical richness of this world. Fortunately, here in the broader
world, we still need eyes, fingers, mice, modems, and phone
lines.

Gibson leaves us the image of a human group that instinctively
keeps its distance from the computer matrix. These are the
Zionites, the religiously tribal folk who prefer music to computers
and intuitive loyalties to calculation. The Zionites constitute a
human remnant in the environmental desolation of Neuromancer:

     Case didn't understand the Zionites.

     . . . The Zionites always touched you when they were
     talking, hands on your shoulder. He [Case] didn't like
     that....

     "Try it, " Case said [holding out the electrodes of the
     cyberspace deck].

     [The Zionite Aerol] took the band, put it on, and Case
     adjusted the trodes. He closed his eyes. Case hit the
     power stud. Aerol shuddered. Case jacked him back out.
     "What did you see, man?"

     "Babylon," Aerol said, sadly, handing him the trodes and
     kicking off down the corridors.[10]

As we suit up for the exciting future in cyberspace, we must not
lose touch with the Zionites, the body people who remain rooted
in the energies of the earth. They will nudge us out of our heady
reverie in this new layer of reality. They will remind us of the
living genesis of cyberspace, of the heartbeat behind the
laboratory, of the love that still sprouts amid the broken slag and
the rusty shells of oil refineries "under the poisoned silver sky."
 
 

*****************
 

Identity and the virtual community

    Identity plays a key role in virtual communities. In communication, which is the
    primary activity, knowing the identity of those with whom you communicate is
    essential for understanding and evaluating an interaction. Yet in the disembodied
    world of the virtual community, identity is also ambiguous. Many of the basic cues
    about personality and social role we are accustomed to in the physical world are
    absent. The goal of this paper is to understand how identity is established in an online
    community and to examine the effects of identity deception and the conditions that give
    rise to it.

    In the physical world there is an inherent unity to the self, for the body provides a
    compelling and convenient definition of identity. The norm is: one body, one identity.
    Though the self may be complex and mutable over time and circumstance, the body
    provides a stabilizing anchor. Said Sartre in Being and Nothingness, ``I am my body
    to the extent that I am,'' The virtual world is different. It is composed of information
    rather than matter. Information spreads and diffuses; there is no law of the
    conservation of information. The inhabitants of this impalpable space are also diffuse,
    free from the body's unifying anchor. One can have, some claim, as many electronic
    personas as one has time and energy to create.

    ``One can have...?'' Who is this ``one''? It is, of course, the embodied self, the body
    that is synonymous with identity, the body at the keyboard. The two worlds are not
    really disjoint. While it is true that a single person can create multiple electronic
    identities that are linked only by their common progenitor, that link, though invisible
    in the virtual world, is of great significance. What is the relationship among multiple
    personas sharing a single progenitor? Do virtual personas inherit the qualities - and
    responsibilities - of their creators? Such questions bring a fresh approach to ancient
    inquiries into the relationship between the self and the body - and a fresh urgency.
    Online communities are growing rapidly and their participants face these questions,
    not as hypothetical thought experiments, but as basic issues in their daily existence. A
    man creates a female identity; a high school student claims to be an expert on viruses.
    Other explorers in virtual space develop relationships with the ostensible female,
    relationships based on deep-seated assumptions about gender and their own sexuality;
    patients desperate for a cure read the virtual virologist's pronouncements on new
    AIDS treatments, believing them to be backed by real-world knowledge. For
    assessing the reliability of information and the trustworthiness of a confidant, identity
    is essential. And care of one's own identity, one's reputation, is fundamental to the
    formation of community.

    Identity cues are sparse in the virtual world, but not non-existent. People become
    attuned to the nuances of email addresses and signature styles. New phrases evolve
    that mark their users as members of a chosen subculture. Virtual reputations are
    established and impugned. By looking closely at these cues, at how they work and
    when they fail, we can learn a great deal about how to build vibrant on-line
    environments.

    The Usenet environment

    This paper examines identity and deception in the context of the Usenet newsgroups.
    Although technically simple - they are essentially structured bulletin boards - a
    complex social structure has evolved within them. Unlike many MUDs, which are
    intended as fantasy worlds, most of Usenet is meant to be non-fiction; the basic
    premise is that the users are who they claim to be. There is, however, a significant
    variance between newsgroups as to what constitutes a real or legitimate identity. And
    there are numerous cases of identity deception, from the pseudo-naive trolls to the
    name-switching spammers.

    People participate in Usenet newsgroups for a variety of reasons. They may be
    seeking information or companionship, advocating an operating system or a religion.
    As in the real world, their motivations may be complex: both the desire to be helpful
    and the desire to be noticed may prompt the writing of a lengthy exposition. For most
    participants, identity - both the establishment of their own reputation and the
    recognition of others - plays a vital role.

    Information exchange is a basic function of Usenet. Requests for information are very
    common and answers, both right and wrong, are usually forthcoming. In the real world
    we may believe a story if it was published in The Wall Street Journal and dismiss it if
    it appeared in The National Enquirer. With Usenet, there is no editorial board
    ensuring standards of reliability; each posting comes direct from the writer. Thus, the
    writer's identity - in particular, claims of real-world expertise or history of accurate
    online contributions - plays an important role in judging the veracity of an article.
    Similarly, knowing the writer's motivation - e.g. political beliefs, professional
    affiliations, personal relationships - can greatly affect how we interpret his or her
    statements. Is the persuasive posting about the virtues of a new compiler coming from
    a programmer who has evaluated its code output or from a marketer of the product?
    The reader who knows that the author stands to gain from promoting a product or an
    idea is likely to doubt the veracity of the claims [Aronson 95].

    The cost of identity deception to the information-seeking reader is potentially high.
    Misinformation, from poor nutritional advice to erroneous interpretations of
    drug-smuggling law, is easy to find on the net - and it is more likely to be believed
    when offered by one who is perceived to be an expert [Aronson 95]. The limited
    identity cues may make people accept at face value a writer's claims of credibility: it
    may take a long time - and a history of dubious postings - until people start to wonder
    about the actual knowledge on a self-proclaimed expert.

    Providing affiliation and support is another important function of Usenet [Sproull &
    Kiesler 91, Wellman 97]. Here, too, identity is central. The sense of shared
    community requires that the participants be sympathetic to the ideas around which the
    group is based; even if they disagree, there needs to be some fundamental common
    ground. Trust in the shared motivations and beliefs of the other participants - in other
    words, their social identity - is essential to the sense of community [Beniger 87].

    Identity also plays a key role in motivating people to actively participate in
    newsgroup discussions. It is easy to imagine why people may seek information on the
    net: they have a problem and would like a solution. What prompts someone to
    answer? Why take the effort to help an unknown and distant person? Altruism is often
    cited: people feel a desire or obligation to help individuals and to contribute to the
    group [Constant et al. 95]. Yet selfless goodwill alone does not sustain the thousands
    of discussions: building reputation and establishing one's online identity provides a
    great deal of motivation. There are people who expend enormous amounts of energy
    on a newsgroup: answering questions, quelling arguments, maintaining FAQs[1].
    Their names - and reputations - are well-known to the readers of the group: other
    writers may defer to their judgement, or recommend that their ideas be sought in an
    argument. In most newsgroups, reputation is enhanced by posting intelligent and
    interesting comments, while in some others it is enhanced by posting rude flames or
    snide and cutting observations. Though the rules of conduct are different, the ultimate
    effect is the same: reputation is enhanced by contributing remarks of the type admired
    by the group. To the writer seeking to be better known, a clearly recognizable display
    of identity is especially important. No matter how brilliant the posting, there is no
    gain in reputation if the readers are oblivious to whom the author is.
 
 

Models of honesty and deception

    The approach of this paper is ethnographic - an interpretation of closely examined
    social discourse [Geertz 73]. As a framework for the examination I will look at the
    virtual community as a communication system, its inhabitants as signallers and
    receivers.

    Examples of identity deception abound in the animal world[2]. The deception is quite
    harmful to those deceived, whose costs range from a lost meal to loss of life.
    However, it is beneficial to the deceivers, who gain food, free child care, or their
    own safety. What maintains the balance between honest and deceptive signalling and
    why, since it can be so beneficial to the deceiver, isn't deception more common? Why
    don't more harmless butterflies mimic the bad-tasting monarch? And why don't weak,
    undesirable mates just pretend to be strong, desirable ones?

    There is not a simple answer to this question; there is not even agreement among
    biologists as to how common, or effective, is deception. If a signal becomes very
    unreliable due to excessive cheating it ceases to convey information - it stops being a
    signal. Yet there are stable systems of deception, where the percentage of deceivers
    does not overwhelm the population, and the signal remains information-bearing,
    however imperfectly. And there are signals that are inherently reliable: signals that
    are difficult, or impossible, to cheat.

    Biologists and game theorists have developed an analytical framework for modeling
    the interplay between honesty and deception in a communication system. Of especial
    interest to us is the work done by Amotz Zahavi and others in examining what makes a
    signal reliable. Zahavi proposed the ``Handicap Principle'', which states that

        ...[F]or every message there is an optimal signal, which best amplifies the asymmetry between an
        honest signaller and a cheater. For example, wasting money is a reliable signal for wealth because a
        cheater, a poor individual claiming to be rich, does not have money to throw away; the message of
        strength may be displayed reliable by bearing heavy loads; and confidence may be displayed by
        providing an advantage to a rival. [Zahavi 93b]

    Signals that follow the handicap principle are called assessment signals. They are
    costly and the cost is directly related to the trait being advertised. Big horns on a stag
    are an assessment signal for strength, for the animal must be quite strong and healthy
    to support these massive growths. The horns are a signal: potential rivals or mates
    need not directly test the stag's strength; they can simply look at the size of the horns.
    The thick neck of a brawny bouncer in a bar sends a similar signal in the human world
    and few patrons demand a personal exhibition of strength. Assessment signals are
    reliable, since sending an assessment signal requires that the sender possess the
    relevant trait.

    Signals that do not follow the handicap principle are called conventional signals.
    Here, the signal is correlated with a trait is by custom or convention: the sender need
    not possess the trait in order to make the signal. Wearing a T-shirt that says ``Gold's
    Gym Powerlifter'' or signing ``Mr. Deadlift'' in your letters to a weight-lifting
    newsgroup is a signal of strength, but not a reliable one. Anyone can wear the shirt or
    type the signature: no feats of strength are involved in the signal's production.
    Conventional signals are open to deception. If being thought of as strong is highly
    desirable, it seems reasonable that many people, weak or strong, would choose to
    wear ``Powerlifter'' T-shirts. Yet, if T-shirt wearing by the weak becomes prevalent,
    the signal loses its meaning as an indicator of strength. Conventional signals can thus
    be unstable: due to excessive deception, a once meaningful signal can become noise.

    Since assessment signals are so reliable, and conventional ones not, why use the latter
    at all? One reason is that conventional signals are often less costly, for both the
    signaller and the receiver [Dawkins & Guilford 91]. If the costs associated with
    deception are relatively low, then a conventional signal may be more suitable than a
    more reliable, but costly, assessment signal. Think of a job applicant. The text in a
    resume is a conventional signal, for one can write down an impressive job history
    without having actually experienced it. Statements made during an extensive interview
    are more like assessment signals, for one must have actually acquired the knowledge
    in order to display it. It is much quicker and easier (that is, less costly) for the
    employer to just look at the resume, but the chances of being deceived are much
    higher. If the costs of deception are high - say, the job is a responsible one and an
    inexperienced employee may cause a great deal of harm - then it will be worth making
    the effort to make the costlier evaluation.

    The spread of deception can be limited. In particular, imposing a cost to being caught
    deceiving - that is, punishing deception - is a deterrent [Hauser 92]. Going back to our
    resume example, there is usually little penalty for being caught padding one's
    employment history when seeking, say, a waitressing job, whereas the punishment for
    being caught amplifying one's medical qualifications may be quite severe. By
    imposing high costs on deception a social system can make conventional signals more
    reliable.

    There are costs to imposing the punishment. For a deceptive signaller to be caught,
    someone must make the effort to assess the honesty of the signal (termed the cost of
    probing among biologists). In addition to the time and energy thus expended, probing
    may itself have high costs if the probee turns out to be honest [Dawkins & Guilford
    91]. For instance, imagine probing the strength of our ``Powerlifter'' T-shirt wearers
    by challenging them to a fight. If the wearer is ``deceptive'', he or she will lose the
    challenge - and quite likely be dissuaded from misleading T-shirt practices. If,
    however, the wearer is ``honest'', it is the prober who loses.

    Applying the model is an interpretive process. Even in the relatively simple world of
    biological signalling, there is often disagreement about whether a particular signal is
    inherently or conventionally tied to a trait (see Dawkins & Guilford 91 and Zahavi
    93b for opposing views). Interpreting the social world of cyberspace is far a more
    subjective process. The purpose of the model is to help articulate the arguments: it is
    a framework on which to begin sorting out the intricate and often murky discussion
    about identity in cyberspace.
 
 

The anatomy of a Usenet letter

    Usenet news is accessible by millions of people all over the world [3]. Subscribers
    range from the highly technical to the computer illiterate, from young children playing
    with their parents' account to homebound elderly people using the Net for social
    contact, from young American urban professionals to radical Afghani Muslims. Some
    are posting from work accounts, knowing their boss monitors on-line exchanges;
    others are posting from a recreational service, entertaining themselves by playing an
    imaginary character.

    There are several hundred discussion groups, covering topics ranging from computer
    networking protocols to gun-control and vegetarian cooking. Some newsgroups
    encourage anonymous postings; in others such postings are coldly ignored. Some
    newsgroups are close-knit communities, in which people refer to each other by name
    and ask after each other's friends and family members. Others are primarily places to
    exchange information, repositories of knowledge where one can submit a question and
    receive a (possibly correct) answer. Some groups provide a warm, trusting and
    supportive atmosphere, while others promote a raw and angry free-for-all.

    This range of styles, topics, and participants makes Usenet an especially interesting
    focus for this study. Although the groups share the a common technology and interface,
    the social mores - writing style, personal interactions, and clues about identity - vary
    greatly from forum to forum.

    In the mediated world of the Usenet newsgroups, the letter is not only the basic form
    of communication, but one's primary means for self-presentation. In the following
    section, we will take a close look at the anatomy of a Usenet letter and at how identity
    is established or concealed within it.

                               Example 1: A Usenet Letter
                      header
                            Owen@netcom.com (Owen Koslov)
                            Re: Brine Shrimp
                            Mon, 24 Jan 1994 09:38:23 GMT
                            Newsgroups: sci.aquaria,rec.aquaria
                            In article fdorrance@aol.com (F. Dorrance) writes:
        Message body (extract from
               original question)
                            >> I tried to hatch some brine shrimp for my fish. I could
                            >> only get the shrimp to live for 2 days. Could someone
                            >> tell me what to feed them and give me details on
                            >> hatching them.
          Message body (response)
                            You are not supposed to keep them alive for longer than a day or so. They
                            should be fed to the fish as soon as they hatch. Otherwise, you need the type of
                            set up you'd expect in a regular saltwater tank: low bio-load, plenty of water
                            circulation, and adequate filtration. You can feed the shrimp OSI's APR or
                            other commercial invert foods, or use green water. In all cases, unless you are
                            doing it on a large scale, buying live brine shrimp at a shop is simpler, faster and
                            easier.
                    Signature
                            -- Owen Koslov at home (owen@netcom.com) or work
                            (okoslov@veritas.com)
 

    Example 1 is a typical Usenet letter. In this example, the writer is offering advice in
    response to a request for information. What does the reader of this posting know about
    Mr. Koslov [4]? Clues can be found in each part of the letter: the header provides the
    writer's name and email address, the body of the letter reveals voice and something of
    the history of the exchange, the signature shows the writer as he or she chooses to be
    identified.

    The account name - basic ID

    The most straightforward form of identification is the writer's account name (i.e.
    email address). This information is automatically included in the header by the
    posting software. It appears in the article lists Usenet readers skim to find postings of
    interest and it is the data used in killfiles to identify writers one finds onerous [5]. The
    automatically inserted account name may be the only overt identifier in the posting;
    while people do not always sign their letters, all postings must have the senders
    account name in the header.

    A close look at the account name, a seemingly simple identification signal, proves to
    be quite interesting for it touches on issues ranging from the reputations of various
    virtual neighborhoods to techniques for detecting identity deception. There may be a
    clear and straightforward mapping from an account name to a real-world individual -
    or it may be deliberately opaque. The domain (account names are in the form
    name@domain, where domain is the organization that provides the account) yields
    contextual clues about the writer - and about the reliability of the header information.

    While the name of the individual writer may be unfamiliar, often the name of the
    domain is not. Like notes written on letterhead, a posting submitted from a
    well-known site shares in its reputation: a posting about oceanography has added
    authority if it came from whoi.edu (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute) and a
    question about security breaches may seem more intriguing if it came from .mil (the
    U.S. military).

    The domain is a virtual neighborhood and, as with real world neighborhoods, some
    names bring to mind a wealth of demographic data. The domain may correspond to a
    real world place, indicating that the writer is in, say, Thailand or Israel or working at
    Raytheon or Greenpeace. Even some of the commercial services have distinctive
    reputations: San Francisco's The Well is tie-dyed and politically active while New
    York City's Echo is black-clad and arts-oriented. There are ``poor'' neighborhoods,
    addresses that reveal a limited budget:

        >> jake@cleveland.freenet.edu
        >> Hacker wanted to disassemble commercial program and rewrite to our specs.
        >> This is not a B.S. post, we willpay BIG $$$ to have this service performed.
        >> Email for details.

        Nobody with ``BIG $$$'' to spend is going to be writing that message from Cleveland Freenet. :-)

    And, while there are not yet any recognized ``wealthy'' virtual neighborhoods, it is
    probably only a matter of time until exclusive on-line addresses become symbols of
    status.

    To understand the significance of the domain it is useful to distinguish between
    institutional and commercial accounts. Institutional accounts are online addresses
    from universities, research labs and corporations; they are given to people because of
    an association with the institute. Commercial accounts are available for a fee from
    various service providers. Unlike the institutional accounts, these commercial
    accounts do not imply any affiliation; they simply mean that the user has signed up for
    the service.

    In the early days of the net, all accounts were institutional. Most sites were big
    universities and laboratories and the users were academics and researchers at these
    institutes. Today, the situation is more complex and not all postings are from
    recognizable institutes. Some are from small businesses unknown to the reader; others
    are accounts from commercial service providers -somewhat like electronic post
    office boxes. Furthermore, as net access becomes widespread, a posting from a
    research lab domain no longer necessarily means a researcher sent it. Support staff as
    well as scientists have computers: the posting from Woods Hole may be from a
    prominent oceanographer - or a temporary receptionist. There is a great deal of
    contextual and other information to be found in the domain name, but it needs to be
    evaluated within the culture of the net and of the organizations that provide access.

    The opening up of the online world to anyone with a computer and modem has met
    with quite a bit of resistance from the original residents. Most maligned are
    newcomers who have accounts with the consumer-oriented commercial services such
    as Prodigy and America Online (AOL). Postings with aol.com addresses are
    sometimes greeted with derision; newsgroups such as alt.aol-sucks exist solely to
    spurn America Online subscribers. This resistance is partly a reaction to the loss of
    exclusivity - access to online communication no longer means one is at the forefront of
    technology - but there are also substantive differences between the postings of the old
    guard and the newcomers.

        I have to admit, i do have an account on prodigy, becasue my mom has had it for a few years, and it
        was free for me, i never use it though, it's embarassing.. I think i'd be the same way if i had AOL, i
        would be embarassed to post or reply or just be seen anywhere with a loser@aol.com address. I
        guess it just seems that they are so stupid..

                                                              - alt.2600

    Some of the differences are stylistic. The consumer-oriented services offer their own
    communication forums in which the conversational conventions are quite different
    than within Usenet. For instance, in an AOL chat room, it is fine to simply respond
    ``yes'' to a statement. On Usenet, where each statement is a stand-alone posting, it is
    considered poor manners to post a response with no added content and with no
    indication of the original statement. Newcomers to Usenet from AOL, accustomed to
    chat room style interactions, frequently post one word rejoinders, infuriating other
    Usenet users and adding to the image of AOL-based participants as thoughtless and
    ignorant of local customs.

    There are also differences in accountability. The holder of an institutional account - a
    student or employee - has reasons, such as a job or degree, for remaining in good
    standing with the account provider. A user who engages in malicious or illegal
    activity online stands to lose more than just the account: a number of students have
    been disciplined - and some expelled - for violations of institutional policy. The
    relationship of a subscriber to a commercial service is much less consequential.
    While most services have policies about what constitutes acceptable behavior, the
    repercussions for infractions are limited to termination of service - an inconvenience,
    certainly, but not the equivalent of demotion or firing. In other words, higher
    punishment costs can be imposed on the institutional account.

    Institutional accounts are also less private than commercial accounts. A work- or
    school-based account name is known within the organization and there are many
    people who can make a direct connection between the name on a posting and the real
    world person. For the writer using an institutional account, the online world is a
    public forum in which he or she can be seen by numerous colleagues and
    acquaintances. With a commercial account, it is up to the user to decide who should
    know the link between physical self and virtual appellation. Some services allow
    subscribers only a single account name and the user thus has some concern about the
    reputation that attaches to that name. Some consumer-oriented commercial services
    make it easy for subscribers to create multiple, fictitious names and to keep their real
    names from appearing on their postings. The anonymity of these accounts makes them
    popular for disruptive and harassing posting.

    Truly anonymous postings can be sent using anonymous remailers. These are
    forwarding services which will strip all identifying information from a letter and then
    forward it, anonymously or under a pseudonym, to the intended recipient or
    newsgroup. The pseudonymous address added by many, though not all, remailers
    clearly indicates that the posting is anonymous: an12321@anon.penet.fi and
    anon-remailer@utopia.hacktic.nl are typical. While remailers can be used
    maliciously, their primary use is to provide privacy. Anonymous posts are common in
    groups where the participants reveal highly personal information and many of the
    support groups (e.g. alt.support.depression) periodically provide instructions on how
    to use an anonymous remailer. Use of a remailer can also be a political statement, an
    affirmation that one supports citizen's right to privacy (which includes anonymity,
    access to strong encryption tools, etc.) and opposes government and corporate
    surveillance.

    Many Usenet participants frown upon anonymous postings:

        I don't like dealing with anyone that uses an anonymous remailer! I will, however, assume you are
        doing this for 'legitimate' reasons and try to render assistance.

                                                       - comp.unix.security

        The anonymous address and excessive crossposting were a bit much don't you think? I'll humour
        you this time...

                                                              - alt.2600

    These writers felt compelled to point out their disapproval of anonymous posting
    before answering the question. And the stigma of writing anonymously was clearly
    felt by an451494@anon.penet.fi, the writer of an innocuous request for reviews of a
    human interface, who signed his posting with his real name and the note ``sorry; my
    employer doesn't like seeing me posting to news-groups''.

    The account name is thus an important, but limited, form of online identification. It is
    important because it is ubiquitous: all postings must have the account name in the
    header. It is a key marker of individual identity: although there is not always a
    one-to-one mapping between an account name and a real world person (accounts may
    be shared, some people have several accounts), the account name is generally
    perceived to refer to a single person (or persona). And it may provide some
    contextual information about the writer, information that, while quite sketchy, may be
    the only such cues in the posting.

    Identity in voice and language

    The contents of the posting can reveal a great deal more about the writer. It may
    include overtly identity-related data: name, age, etc. More importantly, it provides a
    chance to get a sense of the writer's ``voice'' and to see how he or she interacts with
    others in the on-line social environment.

    Erving Goffman, in his classic work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
    distinguished between the ``expressions given'' and the ``expressions given off''. The
    former are the deliberately stated messages indicating how the one wishes to be
    perceived; the latter are the much more subtle - and sometimes unintentional -
    messages communicated via action and nuance [Goffman 59]. Both forms of
    expression are subject to deliberate manipulation, but the ``expression given off'' may
    be much harder to control. One can write ``I am female'', but sustaining a voice and
    reactions that are convincingly a woman's may prove to be quite difficult for a man.

    Is the ``expression given off'' an assessment or conventional signal? Even in the real
    world, with its far richer array of social nuance, imposters exist. Drag queens,
    confidence men, undercover spies - all are adept at mimicking subtle social codes.
    Yet, although nuance is not an infallible indication of a social role, the experience of
    living the part greatly influences one's ability to play it: years of socialization make
    most women adept at playing the role of woman in their culture and one can argue that
    the cost in time that it takes to fully attain the role makes it an assessment signal [6]. Is
    the same true in the virtual world - is there sufficient complexity to the nuances in a
    Usenet exchange for one's experience in living a role to be revealed in the
    ``expression given off''?

    Looking again at Example 1, from the header and signature we know the writer's name
    (Owen Koslov), we know that he writes both from home (as owen@netcom.com) and
    from work (okoslov@veritas.com). Neither location tells us a great deal about the
    author - netcom is a commercial service provider and veritas.com is not a
    well-known company. The writer's history on the net reveals much more. A look at
    recent articles shows that he is a fairly frequent writer, not only on sci.aquaria, but
    also on the closely related groups rec.aquaria and alt.aquaria. Indoor aquaria seem to
    be his passion. He provides a fellow killifish fancier with the address of a
    mailing-list devoted solely to killifish. He writes several letters a day on aquaria
    related topics. We learn that he has perhaps too many fish: ``I wish I had your
    discipline in keeping the number of species down. I have 9 species of lampeyes
    alone...'' His letters are usually answers to questions posed by others, his voice is
    usually authoritative, pedantic, occasionally dryly humorous. Here are selections
    (ellipses mine) from his response to someone who said to avoid charcoal in tanks
    with plants.

        While activated carbon does adsorb more than just organic carbons, a categorical statement like
        that is inaccurate. Carbon may remove some trace minerals, but I challenge you to substantiate the
        statement that it is a ``bad thing'' for live plants. ... Further more, Dick Boyd's Chemi-Pure uses
        activated carbon as one of its ingredients and I am yet to hear one credible report of it negatively
        affecting live plants. The late Dr. Bridge had used a mix of activated carbon and peatmoss as a
        filtration medium for his planted show tank and reported excellent results.

    Over time, the frequent contributors to a newsgroup creates a strong impression. The
    reader of rec.aquaria is likely to be familiar with these postings and has come to
    some conclusion about both Mr. Koslov's reliability and his personality. Although this
    writer says little about himself, there is a great deal of expression given off.

    Writing style can identify the author of an posting. A known and notorious net
    personality hoping to appear online under a fresh name may have an easier time
    disguising his or her header ID than the identity revealed in the text. The introduction
    to the cypherpunks newsgroup includes this warning:

        The cypherpunks list has its very own net.loon, a fellow named L. Detweiler. The history is too long
        for here, but he thinks that cypherpunks are evil incarnate. If you see a densely worded rant
        featuring characteristic words such as ``medusa'', ``pseudospoofing'', ``treachery'', ``poison'', or
        ``black lies'', it's probably him, no matter what the From: line says.

                                                    - Cypherpunks mailing list

    In this case, where the usual assessment signal - the name in the header - is believed
    to be false, language is used as a more reliable signal of individual identity.

    Language is also an important indication of group identity. ``[R]egarding group
    membership, language is a key factor - an identification badge - for both self and
    outside perception.'' [Saville-Troike 82] Language patterns evolve within the
    newsgroups as the participants develop idiosyncratic styles of interaction - especially
    phrases and abbreviations. Some are common to all groups: BTW, IMHO, YMMV
    (By The Way, In My Humble Opinion, Your Mileage May Vary). Others are of
    limited extent: MOB, ONNA (Mother Of the Bride, Oh No Not Again - used in
    misc.kids.pregnancy by women who were trying to get pregnant to report the monthly
    disappointment). New words are coined and ordinary words gain new meaning:
    flame, spam, troll, newbie. Using these phrases expresses ones identification with the
    online community - it is akin to moving to a new region and picking up the local
    accent.

    Participants interpret these language cues according to their own position within the
    social group. A newsgroup can be home to two or more factional groups, each of
    which tries to establish its style and views as the rightful culture of the group.
    Alt.2600 is a newsgroup devoted to computer hacking and related topics. Being a
    hacker - or appearing to be one - has recently gained mass popularity, and would-be
    hackers and trend-conscious teens have adopted a style of writing that features
    alternative spellings (such as ``kewl'' for ``cool'') and random capitalization. Older or
    more experienced hackers felt compelled to separate themselves from the crowd. In a
    thread called ``Attn LaMerZ and Wana-B's'', one wrote:

        ATTENTION you are not a hacker if you have seen the movie HACKERS. ATTENTION you are
        not a hacker if you post here looking for AOLHELL, free AOL, Unix passwords, crackerjack, or
        virus creation lab. ATTENTION you are not a hacker if you HaVE A PrOOBLEM WiTh YOuR
        CaPS LOckS KeY.

                                                               -alt.2600

    Here, the language markers one group developed to distinguish themselves are a sign
    of scorn for the other.

    The signature

    Language markers such as the above are an important element in signatures, which are
    the on-line world's most deliberate identity signals. The signature is added at the
    discretion of the user, though once designed, it is usually appended automatically to
    postings. It may be an electronic business card, an elaborate work of self-expression,
    a cryptic remark, or simply a name. Not everyone uses one, and they are far more
    prevalent in certain forums than others. Although the signature itself is an easy to copy
    conventional signal, it is often used as a means to link to more robust and reliable
    indicators of identity and to show writer's the affiliation with a subgroup.

    Signatures can be used to anchor the virtual persona to the real world person. The net
    is a great leveler: no one knows if you are male or female, boss or underling,
    gray-haired or adolescent; ``on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog''. This is not
    to your advantage if in the real world you hold some authority: no one can see that you
    are a respected professional at work in your office, not a teenager logging in from a
    bedroom. One use of the signature is to present real world credentials: your full name,
    title, department, office phone number; enough information so that someone could, if
    they were curious, check to see that you were really who you claimed to be. Such
    business-card signatures are common in the technical newsgroups. Advice from
    someone who's job title is ``Unix System Specialist'' or ``Director, Software
    Development'' has added weight, particularly if it is in a known and respected
    company (for the important sounding ``Director of Software Development'' at
    unknown ``ABC Software Co.'' may be also be the founder and sole employee). These
    signatures imply that the writer is posting in his or her official, employed capacity -
    willing to publicly stand behind the statements.

    One newsgroup that contains many business-card signatures is comp.security.unix.
    The discussion here is about how to make unix systems secure - and about known
    system flaws. While many of the participants are system administrators of major
    institutions, others are just learning how to set up a system in a fledgling company and
    some, of course, are hoping to learn how to break into systems. Someone posting a
    question may wish to include credentials to assure potential responders that the
    question is legitimate, not a disguised dig for information from a would-be hacker. A
    posting suggesting that administrators improve their sites by changing this or that line
    of code in the system software could be a furtive attempt get novice administrators to
    introduce security holes; a signature verifying the legitimacy of the writer alleviates
    this suspicion. Identity deception is a big concern of the participants in this group, and
    they are very aware of signatures and their implications.

    An important new use of the signature is to refer to the writer's home page on the
    World Wide Web. Like the business card signature, the Web address may contain
    credentials - and much more. A home page may provide a detailed portrayal of its
    subject: people include everything from resumes and papers to photographs and lists
    of favorite foods. A person's presence on the Web has depth and nuance not found in
    the ephemeral Usenet environment and a writer's self-presentation on the Web can
    provide a very enlightening context for understanding his or her postings.

    Signatures often include a disclaimer, saying something to the effect that ``These are
    my opinions and not those of my employers''. For many people, participating in Usenet
    newsgroups occupies a sometimes awkward position between work and private life.
    The newsgroups may be an important resource for one's work; they may also be a
    purely recreational past-time. Whether a posting is about signal processing or
    Argentinian culture, if sent from one's work account it will show up under the
    company's electronic letter-head. The disclaimer proclaims that the writer is
    appearing as himself, not as an official company spokesman.

    Signatures are also used to establish one's ties to online groups. Many signatures
    contain computer jokes and phrases, showing that the writer is a programmer - a
    member of the old guard of the net.

                           Example 2: Programmer signatures

      a.#include <stddisclmer.h>

      b.Write failed on /dev/brain: file system full

      c.Doom: 5% Health, 0% Armor, 59 cent Tacos, Lets Go!

      d.Dave Mescher dmescher@csugrad.cs.vt.edu
        GCS d H>+ s+:- g+ p3 au a-- w+ v,--->! C++++,++ UU++++,
        A$ P-- L-3- E--- N++ K- W--- M V-- po Y+ t--- 5 jx R G+
        !tv b++ D- B--- e+,* u+ h- f+ r(+,++)@ !n,--- y?

    In a), the phrase #include <stddisclmer.h> uses a C language construct to make a
    reference to the disclaimer signature. It has both the effect of being a disclaimer (the
    writer is not speaking officially) and of proclaiming the writer's affinity to the C
    programming world. b) uses the format of a common Unix error message. For the
    Unix-literate reader, the phrase is familiar and the joke obvious; for others it is simply
    obscure. Similarly, c) plays off the scoring style of the popular computer game Doom.
    Signatures such as these are often individual creations, meant to be used only by their
    author. Since one needs to be familiar with a subculture in order to make a joke in its
    vocabulary, these signatures, when original, show their author's familiarity with the
    programming world. Furthermore, the world in which they are used is small. A writer
    who simply copies the clever phrase of another is likely to quickly come to the
    attention of the potentially irate creator. The possible cost of copying - public
    humiliation through accusations of plagiarism - is quite high. (Smitten by a phrase too
    witty not to use, some writers have taken to using other's signatures - with
    attribution.).

    These signatures are what Fiske calls ``producerly'' writings, easily accessible yet
    playing with complex mixes of vocabularies and codes [Fiske 89]. Such puns, he
    says, entertain both through the process of discovering the layers of meaning and in
    their juxtaposition of social contexts. ``Write failed on /dev/brain: file system full'' is
    not only a play on Unix error messages, but can also be read as a comment on
    information overload - or as a subtle jab at those who post, but seem not to absorb
    anyone else's comments. ``#include <stddisclmr.h>'' in addition to mixing the culture
    of Usenet with the code of C programmers, also refers to the numbing ubiquity of
    disclaimers.

    The signature in d), which includes the writer's ``Geek Code'' is a bit different.
    Proclaiming one' s ``geek identity'' - both one's identification with geeks as a group
    and one's particular and individual type of geekiness - is the purpose of this code:

        How to tell the world you are a geek, you ask? Use the universal Geek code. By joining the geek
        organization, you have license to use this special code that will allow you to let other un-closeted
        geeks know who you are in a simple, codified statement.

                                      -Robert Hayden, The Code of the Geeks, 1995.

    The Code consists of a series of descriptive categories and modifiers. The first
    category is G, Geek type. GCS stands for Computer Science Geek (GSS would be
    Social Science Geek). The second category, d, is for dress style. In the example
    above d is without modifiers, meaning: ``I dress a lot like those found in catalog ads.
    Bland, boring, without life or meaning''. There are many possibilities, ranging from
    ``d++: I tend to wear conservative dress such as a business suit'' to ``!d: No clothing.
    Quite a fashion statement, don't you think?''. The Geek Code can become quite
    complex. For instance, the modifier ``>'' means moving towards. Thus, the symbol
    H>+ above is interpreted as someone whose hair (H) is striving to achieve (>)
    shoulder length (+). The Code is full of inside jokes, e.g. !H, the code for baldness,
    refers to the computer language convention of ! meaning negation. It is also full of
    cultural references: to operating systems, to Internet personalities, to TV shows and to
    various games. One has to be quite dedicated to decipher a Geek Code, but its
    primary message - identification with the online ``geek'' world - is easily perceived
    by anyone who knows what a geek code looks like.

    The Geek Code has inspired a number of other identity codes. The Goth Code has
    categories for dress style, body piercings, musical taste; the Magic Code provides the
    means to express one's opinions of the Kabbala, Aleister Crowley, and one's own
    supernatural powers; the Cat Code has categories ranging from breed to purr volume.
    The Codes seem to have originated in the gay and lesbian on-line community, inspired
    both by the handkerchief codes of the gay bar scene and (according to the introduction
    to the progenitor of all the codes, the Bear Code) by the astronomical classification
    schemes for stars and galaxies. Until recently, seeing these codes in a signature would
    be a puzzle to all but the initiated. Today, the Web has made finding esoteric
    information - such as the decoding scheme for the Muffdiva Code - simply a matter of
    a quick net search. The codes still function as subcultural membership markers, though
    their meaning is now open. They can now function as a tourist's introduction to the
    subculture, enumerating the features of greatest interest to the group.

    Some signature styles are unique to particular newsgroups. Often they refer to the
    writer's role within that group. For example, soc.couples.wedding is a newsgroup
    devoted to planning weddings from the fine points of invitation writing protocols to
    advice about how to deal with hostile in-laws. The participants include people who
    are engaged to be married, people who would like to be engaged to married, and
    people who like giving advice. The brides-to-be are the central group: they ask
    questions, they share their experiences, they write to complain about their caterers,
    bridesmaids and future mother-in-laws. And they have developed their own signature
    pattern:

        Joan (and Mike, May 27, 1995)
        Amy (& Chris Sept. 7, 1996)

    A similar signature pattern is found on misc.kids.pregnancy, where the expectant
    mothers sign with the baby's due date. These signatures show the special status of the
    writer: as bride- or mother-to-be, her real world situation is the focus of the group's
    interest. The signatures also highlight the temporal nature of this identity. The readers
    know the stages of wedding preparation and pregnancy. Responses to letters often
    include references to the signature (``June 10th - I'm getting married the next day! Are
    you nervous yet?'') even if the body of the letter was unrelated to the writer's wedding.

    An especially well-defined community has emerged in the group rec.motorcycles,
    where an online club, called the Denizens of Doom (DoD), has formed. The DoD
    began as a satire of the newsgroup and of real motorcycle clubs, but is now a real
    club, with memberships lists and real-world badges. Members get DoD numbers,
    which they use in their signatures. One must apply for membership, and, while the
    procedure is not terribly secret, it does take a bit of knowing who's who in the group
    to apply: a DoD number in a signature means that the writer is not a newcomer to the
    group. Here is a signature from rec.motorcycles:

        whiteb1@aol.com (Ben White)
        AMA # 580866 COG # 1844
        DoD # 1747 Better watch out, He turned me loose!
        '95 VFR 750 5 bucks more, I coulda got a red one
        '85 Shadow
        No more Connie

    In addition to the DoD number, it features the writer's membership in the American
    Motorcycle Association plus the motorcycles he owns (or used to own); this signature
    is a virtual world substitute for the colors and badges of real-world biking.

    Finally, signatures make it easier to quickly identify the writer. In the uniform
    environment of ASCII text, there is little to visually distinguish one letter from another
    and it is easy confuse two writers with similar names, or to simply not notice the
    attribution at all. Signatures are easily recognized, identifying the writer at a glance.

    Individual recognition is important in many newsgroups. Participants in arguments
    often call each other by name - both heated flames and supportive letters are often
    written as person-to-person missives. On-line status is recognized and there is
    deferral to respected members. This writer, himself an aerobics instructor, described
    a modification he had made to a move, and then asked:

        Bill Whedon and Larry DeLuca, Are you There? You guys have seemed to be the most vocal AND
        concientious... By turning lunges into squats, have Lori and I traded one problem for another?

                                                      - misc.fitness.aerobics

    High status participants get special treatment. A bridal consultant who contributes
    frequently to soc.couples.wedding asked the newsgroup to help her plan a vacation.
    Such a request is quite outside the group's domain, and would normally result in a
    sharp requests to keep the postings on topic; instead, several people enthusiastically
    wrote in with advice and suggestions. The signature is an important technique for
    insuring that one's postings are accredited to one's name.

    From the header to the signature, identity cues are scattered throughout the Usenet
    letter, from declarations of one's name, age, sexual orientation, to the subtler
    ``expressions given off'' through voice and vocabulary. The virtual world's
    subcultures have developed their own patois, with codes and linguistic patterns that
    identify affiliated participants. And people have found ways to control the degree of
    personal identity they wish to expose online, from authentication through business
    card signatures to the private cloak of anonymous remailers.
 
 

Deceptions and manipulations

    Yet these identity cues are not always reliable. The account name in the header can be
    faked, identity claims can be false, social cues can be deliberately misleading.

    Many varieties of identity deception can be found within the Usenet newsgroup. Some
    are quite harmful to individuals or to the community; others are innocuous, benefitting
    the performer without injuring the group. Some are clearly deceptions, meant to
    provide a false impression; others are more subtle identity manipulations, similar to
    the adjustments in self-presentation we make in many real world situations.

    Trolls

    In the spring of 1995 a new user appeared in the wedding newsgroups. She signed her
    letters Cheryl, the name on her account was ultimatego@aol.com and her letters
    espoused a rigid interpretation of formal etiquette. The discussion in these groups is
    often about how to have a wedding on a limited budget. When the women would talk
    about using balloons for decorations, Ultimatego would post that balloons were
    vulgar; when the discussion turned to do-it-yourself laser-printing she would interject
    that only engraving is acceptable to people with taste. Some readers were intimidated
    by her intimations of upper-crust social knowledge; others were infuriated by her
    condescending remarks. When she wrote that people who could not get married in full
    formal splendor should not have a wedding at all but should simply go to city hall, an
    intense and angry exchange ensued. At this point, someone said that Ultimatego was
    probably a troll.

        Are you familiar with fishing? Trolling is where you set your fishing lines in the water and then slowly
        go back and forth dragging the bait and hoping for a bite. Trolling on the Net is the same concept -
        someone baits a post and then waits for the bite on the line and then enjoys the ensuing fight.

    Trolling is a game about identity deception, albeit one that is played without the
    consent of most of the players. The troll attempts to pass as a legitimate participant,
    sharing the group's common interests and concerns; the newsgroup members, if they
    are cognizant of trolls and other identity deceptions, attempt to both distinguish real
    from trolling postings and, upon judging a poster to be a troll, make the offending
    poster leave the group. Their success at the former depends on how well they - and
    the troll - understand identity cues; their success at the latter depends on whether the
    troll's enjoyment is sufficiently diminished or outweighed by the costs imposed by the
    group.

    Trolls can be costly in several ways. A troll can disrupt the discussion on a
    newsgroup, disseminate bad advice, and damage the feeling of trust in the newsgroup
    community. Furthermore, in a group that has become sensitized to trolling - where the
    rate of deception is high - many honestly naive questions may be quickly rejected as
    trollings. This can be quite off-putting to the new user who upon venturing a first
    posting is immediately bombarded with angry accusations. Even if the accusation is
    unfounded, being branded a troll is quite damaging to one's online reputation.

    Rec.motorcycles is a free-wheeling group where tough-guy banter mixes with advice
    about riding techniques and equipment. Being able to ride on a challenging bike in
    difficult conditions is respected - but attempting feats beyond one's capabilities is
    greatly disapproved of. Beginners who want to start out on a powerful bike are likely
    to be severely lectured. Provoking this response is the goal of flame-seeking trolls.

        Subject: New Rider; what bike? Is ZX11 good to start with?
        From: crystllthr@aol.com (CrystlLthr)
        Organization: America Online, Inc. (1-800-827-6364)

        Hi. I am a college junior and am interested in buying my first motorcycle. I've seen the Kawasaki
        ZX11 and think it looks pretty hot. Would this be a good bike to buy. Money is no problem. My
        dad will buy me anything I want. Also, I've heard that you should get a turbo kit from Mr. Turbo in
        Houston, because the bike needs more power. Any other modifications suggested? Also, where
        should I go to learn to ride?

        Derick Nichols
        Tulane University

    A few took this posting seriously. Some responded angrily:

        Cool Derick. Great bike! The turbo kit will make it awesome. Don't worry about learning to ride,
        just go pick it up and ride it home. Good idea though to have your dad buy a coffin and funeral plot
        at the same time. I think they offer a deal on those when you get a zx-11 as your first bike. Oh yeah.
        Don't worry about hitting any manhole covers on your way home - if you warp the wheel you can
        always sue the city.

    Others tried to be helpful:

        Well, I agree with Sherry [quoted above].though i problby wouldnt have put in quite like that.
        Derick, if you have never ridden before maybe you can start with something a bit smaller. You dont
        hae to buy your first bike nwe.,that way, when you otgrow it, you wont have put a lot of money into
        it (if you bought it cash), or if you financed, you can get out ot it easier.

    Most readers, however, decided it was a troll:

        This has got to be bait, right?????

        Sounds like extreme flamebait to me..
        Yes, get the ZX, (a used '91.) I'll buy the resulting wreck for parts for $100.00 :-)

    Several pointed out the discrepancy between the signature and the domain:

        >> This has got to be bait, right?????
        Since the "college junior" is not coming from an .edu address, then I would guess yes it does. :-)

        College junior @ aol.com? Bad bait, too obvious.

    Still, as with many issues of online identity, the question of Derick's intentions
    remained unresolved:

        >> >>I worry about people like this on motorcycles.
        >>I worry about people like this behind on computers. No matter how lame the bait someone will
        bite.
        What scares me even more is teh possibility that it isn't bait....

    In a group such as rec.motorcycles an occasional troll is not too harmful. The troll's
    game of testing the participants' astuteness is not too far in spirit from the newsgroup's
    normal banter and remarks such as ``Bad bait, too obvious'' imply the testing goes
    both way. A better troll would be admired for cleverness; the offense here was not
    trolling per se, but doing it so poorly.

    In other groups the presence of a troll can inflict quite a bit of harm by undermining
    the trust of the community. The wedding newsgroups that Ultimatego frequented
    consist of women (and a few men) from very disparate backgrounds discussing the
    planning of a highly emotional event fraught with concerns about family, tradition,
    money, and status. The culture that has evolved frowns upon any authoritative
    statement of the ``right'' way to do things and writers frame their advice with phrases
    such as ``in my opinion'' or ``it is often done this way''. Ultimatego's early posts were
    not overtly offensive, but their formal and imperative voice was at odds with the
    conversational tone of the other participants.

    One woman wrote:

        Hi Everyone, Some of my coworkers and I were wondering if it is still considered a faux pas to
        wear white to someone else's wedding. One of the girls just got married and said she noticed that
        about 20 women (400 guests) wore white outfits. It didn't bug her, but another guest commented
        about it later. thanks, Jaime (and Jet) 03-09-96

    Ultimatego responded:

        Dear Jaime,

        It is consider improper to wear white at a whedding, since it appears to compete with the bride. The
        guests were improperly dressed. It is taboo to wear black...even as a fashion statement since it is
        associated traditionally with mourning.

        Kindly,
        Cheryl.

    Had Ultimatego maintained this persona, it is quite possible that she would have been
    accepted as the wedding groups' duenna, uninvited but not entirely unwelcome.
    However, Ultimatego's facade kept slipping. She went from chilly to rude, her proper
    grammar sliding into vicious name calling. Participants who could otherwise count on
    a generally supportive reaction from the group found themselves subject to
    Ultimatego's attacks. To someone seeking advice about a painful issue, such as a
    parent who is refusing to come to the wedding, the feeling that part of the audience
    was motivated by hostility or perverse humor was inhibiting.

    Some trolls post deliberately misleading information. In rec.pets.cats a writer named
    keffo suggested deterring cats from clawing furniture and chewing on wires by
    spraying hydrogen peroxide at them. Again, the readers' reactions were mixed.
    Rec.pets.cats has had a great deal of experience with Usenet pranks and many readers
    immediately cried ``troll!''. Others believed that she was well-meaning and simply did
    not know that such a technique would be extremely painful to the cat; the fact that she
    claimed to be a girl in 8th grade helped to explain her naivete. And some readers
    thought it was a reasonable suggestion, at least until a number of more knowledgeable
    ones explained the danger to the cat's eyes. Although past experience had taught the
    readers of rec.pets.cats that ignoring hostile posts was the best approach, this case
    was a bit different:

        Personally I find her type of marginal sadism towards cats as disturbing as the more overt
        alt.t*steless stuff, in that she could actually convince people that her suggestions are harmless. Do
        people who don't wear contacts know how painful it is to get the wrong solution in their eyes? I
        think this type of insidious troll needs stamping on as much as any other, with the proviso that in this
        case it is important that other people quickly point out the cruelty of her suggestions; other trolls, I
        think, should be ignored completely.

    Responding to a troll is very tempting, especially since these posts are designed to
    incite. Yet this is where the troll can cause the most harm, by diverting the discussion
    off the newsgroup topic and into a heated argument. Instead, most groups advise
    ignoring such posts, both to keep the discussion topical and in the hope that, if
    ignored, the troll will go away. Several point newcomers to FAQs that explain how to
    use a killfile, which is a filter that allows one to avoid seeing any postings by a
    particular person or on a given topic. (Indeed, an extensive description of killfile
    techniques in a group's FAQ is a kind of virtual scar-tissue, an indication that they
    have had previous trouble with trolls or flame-wars.)

    Rebuking the offending writer privately through email is also often recommended, for
    it does not derail the group's discussion. Such a response can be quite effective in
    stopping someone whose goal was not primarily to annoy others:

        I would like to apologize, to any and all of you who downloaded the junk I posted... Again I am
        sorry and will be more carefull in the future. Oh and I would like to thank the hundreds of you sent
        me E-Mail bringing it to my attention.

                                                        - comp.cad.autocad

    though it may encourage the troll whose intent was to inflame. If, however, the writer
    uses a false name and address, such contact is not be possible.

    Responding to a troll can be costly. One may be unpleasantly insulted, as happened to
    this person who tried to explain to keffo (who, it later transpired, was actually a male
    university student) the error of her ways:

        I have tried twice to communicate with Kristen (Keffo) (by e-mail). I have found that she is nothing
        but a foul mouthed, uneducated, little girl who lacks respect for anything Adults;Education; Culture;
        Life; etc. I have received nothing but insulting profanity from this child. I explained that IF she
        wanted to be accepted by this group that she should issue a **Blanket Apology** to the group -- I
        was told what to do with my ``Blanket Apology''.''

    Others who have responded in person to newsgroup harassers have been
    mail-bombed or have had their own system administrator - or boss - contacted and
    told that they were making trouble on-line.

    Contacting the offender's system administrator is usually done as a last resort, when it
    is clear that the rules of Usenet etiquette have been transgressed. Mail to keffo's
    postmaster complaining about the increasingly hostile postings resulted in the account
    being closed:

        Actually, keffo is a male university student. I've had enough of these complaints though, so don't
        expect to hear from him again. This is the last straw.

    How seriously the system administrators or other authorities take such complaints
    varies greatly from provider to provider. Some may do nothing; others may be very
    quick to expel a user based on even a spurious complaint.

    Category deception

    Our perception of others is not one of wholly unique individuals, but of patterns of
    social categories. Our first impressions, based on brief observation, determine the
    basic social categories in which we place the new acquaintance, and which shape our
    subsequent and more detailed interpretations of their motives and behaviors [Simmel
    71]. It can take significant evidence to change this initial categorization - we are more
    likely to reinterpret the events than to re-evaluate the basic classification [Aronson
    95].

    The troll is engaging in category deception. By giving the impression of being a
    particular type - a conservative etiquette zealot helping brides avoid errors in taste, a
    young girl sharing her discoveries about cat care, an earnest college junior shopping
    for his first motorcycle - the troll manipulates the readers' initial interpretations of his
    or her postings. Only when the contradictions between the troll's actions and the
    expectations raised by the category assessment strongly conflict does the deception
    begin to unravel; when, in Goffman's performance metaphor, the troll speaks out of
    character. Still, many readers attempt to reinterpret the actions rather than disbelieve
    the identification. The decisive moment in the group's realization that the postings are
    coming from a troll is when someone offers evidence that the real person behind the
    virtual identity is at odds with the one presented.

    There are many other varieties of on-line category deception. Gender deception
    [O'Brien 97, Turkle 95] is the classic one, especially in the MUDs and in chatrooms
    where sex is a predominate topic of conversation (or at least, a very significant
    subtext to the discussion). In the Usenet newsgroups, gender deception appears to be
    much less common, except in forums where sex and gender are the main
    conversational topics. Similar category deceptions, e.g. age deception, do occur in
    Usenet; however, since many cases are not obvious, it is impossible to know how
    often or to what degree this occurs.

    What does seem to be quite common here is status enhancement. Many newsgroups
    have some exemplary model: the consummate hacker in alt.2600, the cool biker in
    rec.motorcycles, the well-built body in misc.fitness.weights. The participant who
    tries to pass as an incarnation of the ideal is closely examined by the others in the
    group. Status in these groups is prized and, for those who claim on it is legitimate (or
    who have quite thoroughly deceived the others), accepting claims of dubious
    provenance would lessen the value and exclusiveness of their own position.

        WE all know Barry is a pathetic puppy, but his recent freaking out about my posting a picture of me
        has really set him off. I have many times told him to post a picture of himself so he can put up or
        shut up about ``how ripped an huge'' he claims to be.

                                                       - misc.fitness.weights

    The verbal claim of being muscular is a conventional signal. A change in the
    environment (the advent of the Web) has made it possible to send a more reliable
    signal of muscularity - a photograph. A prominent member of the group (the author of
    the above quote) put his photograph online, thus strengthening his claim to status (the
    photo is very impressive). Most participants applauded this effort, saying that they
    found it helpful to see what another participant looked like and reassuring to know
    that this writer's claims of expertise were indeed backed by his appearance. ``Barry'',
    however, greeted it with a great deal of hostility and renewed claims of his own
    strength; he was then challenged by many others to prove his words - to back up the
    conventional verbal signal with the assessment signal of a photograph.

    In some groups the postings themselves are assessment signals for a salient trait. In
    rec.arts.poetry, aspiring poets submit their verses for critique by their peers; in
    comp.lang.perl programmers provide elegantly coded solutions in response to
    requests for help. An interesting example is alt.hackers. This is a moderated group,
    meaning that postings cannot be submitted directly to the newsgroup, but must be sent
    to the moderator, who (in ordinary moderated groups) filters out irrelevant or
    otherwise unacceptable material and posts the rest. Alt.hackers uses this mechanism,
    but without any actual moderator: to post to the group one must be able to figure out
    how to hack the news system. In such groups status claims and posturing are far less
    pervasive. This is especially noticeable in the contrast between alt.hackers and it's
    non-assessment analogue alt.2600. Posts to the former tend to be on topic and
    informative; those to the latter are often (when they are not completely off-topic)
    escalating boasts about petty criminal prowess.

        Why is it that everyone keeps posting that they can do amazing things,yet no proof has surfaced?
        Making up all this is easy because no one can rebute it, yet no one has confirmed these either. Don't
        post this crap unless you have some way of confirming it.

                                                              - alt.2600

    Impersonation

    Not all on-line deception is involves categories. Individual identity - one's claim to
    be a particular individual, either in the physical or the real world - can also be
    challenged. A particularly costly form of identity deception is impersonation. If I can
    pass as you, I can wreck havoc on your reputation, either on-line or off.

    Compared to the physical world, it is relatively easy to pass as someone else online
    since there are relatively few identity cues [7]. A surprising number of impersonated
    postings are made simply by signing the target's name, without copying the writing
    style or forging the header information. Even more surprising is how successful such
    crude imitations can be. Readers may pay little attention to the header information - or
    they may encounter the forgery in a subsequent posting, quoted without the header.

    How harmful are such impersonations depends upon how defamatory the faked
    postings are and whether readers believe the false attribution. When impersonations
    are made in a newsgroup in order to discredit one of the group's participants, the
    target is likely to notice and post a denial:

        I am very disturbed to find that after only two weeks of Internet use, I am already being
        'impersonated' by another user... Is this really so easy to do? Or did this person have to work at it?
        I discovered postings to a Newsgroup that appeared to come from me...but which in fact did not

                                                         - alt.alien.visitors

    Since Usenet postings are not necessarily read in sequence some readers may read the
    forgery and miss the one that reveals the deception. This is especially likely if the
    faked posting set off an acrimonious flame-war: many readers will simply skip the
    rest of the thread and any subsequent postings made by the apparent participants.

    Some of the most harmful impersonations are done without deliberate malice towards
    the victim, who may simply have inadvertently provided a useful identity for the
    impersonator to hide behind. New computer user are warned to guard their passwords
    carefully and to be sure to log off of public terminals. It can be very difficult to prove
    that one did not actually write the words that are clearly traceable to one's account.

        I would like to think everyone for bringing to our attention the outrageous message that was posted
        to this group several days ago... After talking with the owner of the account that generated this post.
        It has become clear that this is a case of a new user leaving the terminal before logging off. I ask that
        you please refrain from sending mail to this user (ST40L) regarding the post. He is shaken from the
        incident and has learned a valuable lesson the hard way.

                                                        - soc.culture.jewish

    In this case, the user convinced the administrators that the posting (an anti-Semitic
    letter) was forged. Still, he must deal with the fact that a message that he finds
    abhorrent went out under his name. (This is particularly unfortunate since the debut of
    searchable Usenet archives. A search for letters written by this user will turn up the
    forgery, but not clarifications written by others, such as the one above.)

    Identity concealment

    Many individual identity deceptions are acts of omission, rather than commission;
    they involve hiding one's identity.

    Sometimes identity is hidden to circumvent killfiles. Killfiles are filters that allow
    you to skip unwanted postings: if you put someone in your killfile, you will see no
    more of their postings. While killfiles may sound like the electronic version of the
    ostrich putting its head in the sand, they are said to be very effective in keeping a
    newsgroup readable. Those using a killfile no longer see the offending posts and are
    not tempted to respond, thus lowering the number of angry, off-topic postings. To the
    person who has been killfiled, Usenet becomes a corridor of frustratingly shut doors:
    one can shout, but cannot be heard. Some writers, determined to have their say,
    continuously switch the name under which their postings appear.

        I gave up trying to killfile Grubor and his myriad aliases when my filter file exceeded 10k. I am not
        joking about this. Admittedly only half was Johnny-boy; the other half was phone-sex spams. Still,
        4-5k just on one person is a little ridiculous.

                                                            - news.groups

    The killfile program looks for the account name in the header, which is usually
    inserted automatically by the posting software. The reason someone can create
    ``myriad aliases'' has to do with the transformation of the header from an assessment
    to a conventional signal.

    Until recently, header information was quite reliable. Most people accessed Usenet
    with software that inserted the account name automatically - one had to be quite
    knowledgeable to change the default data. Today, many programs simply let the writer
    fill in the name and address to be used, making posting with a false name and site is
    much easier. The astute observer may detect suspicious anomalies in the routing data
    (the record of how the letter passed through the net) that can expose a posting from a
    falsified location[8]. Yet few people are likely to look that closely at a posting unless
    they have reason to be suspicious about its provenance.

    With the header data becoming a conventional signal, such deception may be quite
    wide-spread. There are many benefits to using a pseudonym on-line and, unless the
    writer is imposing a cost on the group (i.e. being a nuisance or impersonating another
    participant) there is little reason to pay the costs of verifying each posting.

    People have many reasons for not wanting their real names to be revealed online:

        As far as letting you know my name or giving you my fingerprints or whatever else you demand, no
        I don't think so. There is more going on in this net than just misc.fitness.weights. I'm involved in the
        net war in alt.religion.scientology. Those cultists have so far raided 4 of their net critics on bogus
        copyright violation charges, and in one case they placed a large amount of LSD on the toothbrush of
        a person who was raided, a couple of days before he was to undergo a video deposition. In my city
        they have been convicted of several crimes, including infiltrating the municipal, provincial, and
        federal police forces. No, I will not give out my name just to satify your curiousity. Deal with it.

                                                       - misc.fitness.weights

    There can be real harm in being ``seen'' online. One Usenet troublemaker forwards
    postings to their authors' supervisors, claiming that they were inappropriate uses of
    the net and that the author is a troll, etc. Although the original posts are completely
    legitimate (questions about integer precision in database packages and the like) many
    managers know little about Usenet culture and will assume that the employee must
    have been doing something wrong - and doing it on company time and under the
    company name. In an online discussion about this case, several people mentioned that,
    although they had free Internet access through work, they subscribed to a commercial
    service for their personal use, particularly for Usenet discussion: ``I'd rather pay an
    ISP to maintain a home account than risk getting some nut-case harassing my
    employers''.

    Privacy is a common reason for using a pseudonym, for Usenet is an exposed public
    forum in which the writers have no control over who reads their posts. People who
    are embarrassed use pseudonyms, such as system administrators who are asking how
    to fix something with which they ought to be familiar. People who are revealing
    extremely personal data (as in alt.support.depression) or who are discussing matters
    of dubious legality (as in rec.drugs.psychedelic) often use anonymous remailers.
    Finally, some people may simply not want their participation in Usenet, no matter how
    innocuous, to be public knowledge.

    It is useful to distinguish between pseudonymity and pure anonymity. In the virtual
    world, many degrees of identification are possible. Full anonymity is one extreme of a
    continuum that runs from the totally anonymous to the thoroughly named. A
    pseudonym, though it may be untraceable to a real-world person, may have a
    well-established reputation in the virtual domain; a pseudonymous message may thus
    come with a wealth of contextual information about the sender. A purely anonymous
    message, on the other hand, stands alone.

    Anonymity (including pseudonymity) is very controversial in the on-line world. On
    one side, anonymity is touted as the savior of personal freedom, necessary to ensure
    liberty in an era of increasingly sophisticated surveillance. It ``allows people to
    develop reputations based on the quality of their ideas, rather than their job, wealth,
    age, or status.'' [May 94]. On the other side, it is condemned it as an invitation to
    anarchy, providing cover for criminals from tax-evaders to terrorists. The ``very
    purpose of anonymity'', said Supreme Court Justice Scalia, is to ``facilitate wrong by
    eliminating accountability.'' [quoted in Froomkin 95].

    There merit to both sides of the argument, much of it contingent on the distinction
    between anonymity and pseudonymity. Many of the strongest proponents of
    cryptographic privacy would agree that ``anonymous community'' is an oxymoron;
    their ideal is a pseudonymous world with merit-based reputations [May 94]. Purely
    anonymous individuals are capable of communicating with each other, but there is no
    accretion of personal histories in their interactions: reputation of any kind is
    impossible in a purely anonymous environment. The motivation for many of the
    qualities we associate with community, from cooperative behavior to creative
    endeavor, depends on the existence of distinct and persistent personas.

    An interesting question is the accountability of a pseudonymous persona. The
    sanctions to offensive on-line behavior can be roughly divided into two main
    categories: those that involve making a connection to a real world person and those
    that do not. Complaints to a system administrator or other real-world authority are in
    the former category; killfiles and public castigation are in the latter. E-mail flames are
    somewhere in-between - one must know an electronic address that the offender
    accesses in order for them to be seen at all, but that address may be quite securely
    pseudonymous in relation to the real-world identity. In an electronic environment in
    which pseudonyms are prevalent, only the sanctions that do not require a connection
    to the real world are practical. While these mechanisms can only discourage, and not
    eliminate, outlawed behavior, they can have a significant effect [Kollock & Smith 95].
 
 

The evolving virtual world

    In the world of biology, changes in signalling behavior may occur quite slowly, over
    evolutionary time. In the world of human interaction, changes can occur quite quickly.
    If excessive deception makes a signal lose its meaning, it can be replaced by a more
    reliable assessment signal or the community may begin to punish deception. In the
    virtual world, both the participants and the environment itself change: the participants
    establish new styles of interaction and the environment evolves as it is further
    designed and developed.

    Killfiles are a good example of a social action that is poorly supported by the existing
    technology. One of the basic features (or drawbacks) of Usenet is that the readers are
    invisible. On the positive side, this lends it an aura of intimacy that would quite
    possibly be lacking if each writer were viscerally aware of the enormous number of
    people who follow the newsgroup. On the negative side, it makes the fact that one is
    ignoring someone very hard to indicate. The need to publicly turn away from someone
    can be seen in the custom of sending a posting that says ``Plonk!'', in response to that
    last-straw posting that caused one to killfile someone - ``plonk'' is the sound of
    dropping the offender into the killfile.

        > Why do people feel the need to announce to the whole world that they have
        > justplonked someone? Big deal. It happens all the time. Plonk 'em and get
        > on with your life.

        ``On the Internet, no one can hear your killfile.'' Sometimes it is not only neccisary to regard
        someone as an idoit, you have to make them aware of it as well. I just wonder where they got the
        idea that killfiles have sound effects...

                                                         - alt.cypherpunks

    The counterpart of ``plonk'' is the posting that simply says ``yes, I agree!''. These
    affirmations show that a particular opinion has enthusiastic backers and they provide
    a way to indicate an affiliation to an idea or person. These are frowned upon in
    Usenet etiquette because as a full-scale posting, they require too much time and effort
    to download, given the minimal information they include.

    The online world is a wholly built environment. The architects of a virtual space -
    from the software designers to the site administrators -shape the community in a more
    profound way than do their real-world counterpart. People eat, sleep, and work in
    buildings; the buildings affect how happily they do these things. But the buildings do
    not completely control their perception of the world. In the electronic domain, the
    design of the environment is everything. Whether or not you know that other people
    are present or privy to a conversation, whether you can connect an on-line identity to
    a real-world person, whether you have only a faint notion of the personalities of those
    around you or a vibrant and detailed impression - this is all determined by the design
    of the environment.

    How can Usenet - or other discussion-based systems - be redesigned to allow for
    better communication of social cues? Systems that are able to show participants or
    participant behavior - how other readers have navigated a newsgroup or how close or
    far other readers place themselves from an idea or person - are technically feasible.
    The real question is how they would effect the Usenet community. My prediction is
    that making the social patterns more visible would increase the strength of social
    pressures, making the community both more orderly and less spontaneous. But
    predicting the social ramifications of technology is difficult, especially when the
    whole environment is in constant flux.

    For example, Usenet postings used to be ephemera, remaining available for only days
    or weeks before they disappeared from the net. Starting in 1995, several news
    archives have become available. These archives extend the lifetime of a posting
    indefinitely and, more significantly, they are searchable. One can request a listing of
    someone's entire Usenet oeuvre. Without such a search mechanism, finding all of
    someone's postings was nearly impossible: you might know that they were a frequent
    contributor to, say, the nutrition and medical groups, but have no idea that they spent
    their evenings as a verbal warrior in the ethnic disputes on soc.culture.turkey or
    writing baby-talk ``meow-chat'' postings to rec.pets.cats. The archives bring forth all
    of one's contributions for public examination, removed from the social context for
    which they were written. It involves a paradigm shift, from perceiving Usenet as a
    series of effectively private areas, bounded not by technical means but by their sheer
    numbers and parochial focus, to seeing it as a public repository of neatly
    cross-referenced postings.

    This is not necessarily a harmful development for the Usenet community. One of the
    drawbacks of the virtual world has been that one's view of others is sketchy and
    one-sided. Being able to gather a more complex image of one's fellow participants
    can deepen the social ties as the users see each other as more fully-rounded
    individuals [Sproull & Kiesler 91]. Again, prediction is tricky. As awareness of the
    new paradigm increases, people may become far more concerned with managing their
    on-line reputation, resulting in widespread use of multiple pseudonyms - and an even
    murkier view of who's who on-line.

    The Usenet reader's picture of the other participants is also being filled in by the Web.
    Whereas the archives present a documentary recording, the Web-based home page
    presents a crafted self-presentation [Donath & Robertson 94], showing how one
    wishes to appear - which can, of course, be quite inadvertently revealing [Goffman
    59]. As home pages grow increasingly elaborate, their value to their creator grows.
    While it may not be terribly costly to discard, say, a name on AOL in order to escape
    from the consequences of actions done under it, one is far less inclined to abandon an
    online presence that has taken great effort to create. With an increasing number of
    articles signed with the writer's Web page, the Usenet readers gain both a deeper
    context for understanding an author's view, and a greater commitment by participants
    in the virtual environment.

    Here again, the social ramifications may be unexpected. In a forum where a link to
    one's Web page is the norm, the opportunity to explore multiple persona's may be
    greatly curtailed (though perhaps given greater depth, if one was then motivated to
    create a elaborate series of pseudonymous portraits). For most people, one Web
    presence suffices - and it is often an official one, created for one's employer, one with
    a picture revealing age, race, gender, etc. The cost of deception would certainly be
    higher - the question remains whether that is necessarily a good thing.

    New ways of establishing and of hiding identity are evolving in the virtual world.
    There is no formula that works best in all forums: balancing privacy and
    accountability, reliability and self-expression, security and accessibility requires a
    series of compromises and trade-offs whose value is very dependent on the goals of
    the group and of the individuals that comprise it. The role of this paper has been to
    examine closely the approaches - the signals - that have developed in a very diverse
    yet technically simple environment. What we have seen is a world of complex
    interactions, one that intermingles people from disparate real-world cultures and
    disparate virtual-world cultures; a world in which the boundaries exist only as social
    mechanisms and are both fluid and surprisingly durable. It is a world in which a
    technology built for the exchange of scientific data among a small class of academics
    and professionals has evolved into a communications forum in which information is
    still exchanged, but so is support and affiliation and adolescent bonding and outbursts
    of anger. It is a world that has evolved an intricate system of signals and behaviors
    that aid in establishing identity and in controlling identity deception.

    (Draft 3.0)
 
 

Footnotes

    [1] A FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) is a document that contains many of the
    facts and anecdotes relevant to a group; their purpose is to answer these questions
    before they are asked - yet again - in the newsgroup. A FAQ may be quite long and
    require much an effort to create and keep up to date. [Return]

    [2] Examples include "femme fatale" fireflies, brood parasites such as the cuckoo and
    the cowbird, and Batesian mimics such as the burrowing owl and the viceroy
    butterfly. "Femme fatale" fireflies are predatory females of the species Photuris who
    are able to mimic the flash pattern of females of the species Photinus. The deceptive
    Photuris female signals, the unsuspecting Photinus male approaches, and the predatory
    female attacks and eats him. Brood parasites lay their eggs in the nest of another bird.
    The unwitting adop tive parent hatches the egg and raises the parasite, often at the
    expense of its own offspring. Batesian mim ics are harmless species that imitate
    species that are repellent to predators or competitors: the Viceroy butterfly resembles
    the bad-tasting Monarch; the hissing call of the burrowing owl sounds like a rattle
    snake's rattle. [Return]

    [3] News is accessible by anyone with Internet access. How many people that is at a
    given moment is debate able, but it is agreed that the number is growing exponentially.
    (Oct 1994 estimate 13.5 million: should update this number as close to publication as
    possible - could be 10x or more this number by 1997). [Return]

    [4] Names and other identifying features have been changed. [Return]

    [5] Killfiles are used to filter out postings by people or about topics one does not
    wish to read. For more about killfiles see Identity concealment. [Return]

    [6] This is not to say that these "parts" are necessarily straightforward. See O'Brien
    97 for a discussion of the complexity of gender roles - and the added intricacy of their
    virtual manifestation. [Return]

    [7] There exists a technological solution to this problem. A digital signature can
    ensure that a message has not been altered since it was signed and, given various
    levels of certification, it can guarantee that a particular person was the signer.
    Interestingly, the certification of identity is personal trust. Individuals vouch for indi
    viduals and their personal guarantees become a part of one's digital signature. If I
    know nothing about the people who vouched for you, the guarantee is meaningless.).
    They are currently rather difficult to use, though this is a problem more of interface
    than underlying technology. As encryption and decryption become an integrated part
    of the virtual environment, the appearance of a real, vouched-for persona may begin to
    differ markedly from other, more ephemeral beings. (See [Garfinkel 95] for a full
    technical exposition). [Return]

    [8] A letter posted to Usenet is distributed through the net by being passed from the
    sender's machine through a series of Usenet sites, each of which distributes it to a
    number of other sites. When it finally reaches a particular reader's machine, it may
    have passed through 20 or more sites or "hops", each of which records its name on the
    header of the posting. While the exact route a posting from A-B will take is not
    predictable (one of the distinctive technological features of the Internet is its ability to
    re-route itself around down machine and clogged regions), obvious peculiarities in
    the route are signs of a forged message.

****