Book review: Making connections in cyberspace. Culture of the Internet. Sara Kiesler (ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Mahwah, NJ, 1997. No. of pages 463. ISBN 0-8058-1635-6. Price $99.95 (cloth) $39.95 (paper).
✍ Scribed by Holly Arrow
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1999
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 54 KB
- Volume
- 13
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0888-4080
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
This volume is a smorgasbord of theoretical and empirical chapters looking at interactions on the Internet from a range of social science perspectives. The criterion for selecting the nineteen chapters (seven are reprints, some of them abridged) was a common focus on the social aspects of human±computer interaction and computer±mediated communication. Sproull and Faraj propose in their chapter that the Internet should be viewed not just as a repository of information resources accessed by coacting but unconnected individuals, but as a social technology. The Internet provides a virtual space in which people connect to people via computers ± and in some cases, connect and interact with simulated people via computers. The possibilities posed by the latter appear in the chapter by Binik, Cantor, Ochs, and Meana on psychotherapy, which discusses therapeutic relationships with programs such as Sexpert', a virtual sex therapist; in Turkle's chapter on MUDs (multi-user dungeons, a virtual space designed for recreational purposes), in which players interact both with other players and with bots' (software robots), often mistaking them for other human players; and in Carnevale and Probst's chapter on con¯ict and negotiation, which discusses programs such as MEDIATOR that assist people in resolving con¯icts.
Of the six sections ± supplemented by three sidebars on erotica, intranets, and attentional economics ± the most coherent is the one on electronic groups. A theme that recurs across sections is that one of the main things that people do on the Internet is form, join, and interact in groups. As Wellman clari®es in an excellent theoretical chapter on computer networks as social networks, these range from dense, bounded, pre-existing groups such as the research teams discussed by Walsh and Bayma in their chapter on how scientists use e-mail, to sparse unbounded networks whose membership is unde®ned, such as the USENET groups discussed by Baym.
Scholars of distributed cognition may be particulary interested in Baym's discussion of how posters on rec.arts.tv.soaps (which has over 100,000 readers) collaborate on interpretations of popular soap operas and in King, Grinter, and Pickering's historical account of the Internet as both a space for and a creation of collaborative intellectual work. At the level of individual cognition, Whittaker and Sidner document how people use e-mail as an aid to working and prospective memory.
A current weakness of scholarship on the Internet, re¯ected in several of the chapters, is the extent to which researchers ignore broader theories about technology and communication that can help us link interesting phenomena to theoretically important features of the technology. For some welcome exceptions, see Kedzie's chapter on political implications of the Internet, in which he reviews the key features distinguishing successive waves of new technology, from the printing press to the telephone to e-mail; Connolly's chapter on electronic brainstorming (EBS), which identi®es anonymity as crucial to the unexpected success of EBS; and Kraut and Attewell's investigation of how people in a large organization choose among communication media.
Sproull and Faraj's theory of the Internet as a social technology views the Net as a social space in which people make and sustain connections. The issue of what sort of place' this is, and how basic social processes such as identity, gender, intimacy, and con¯ict are transformed by the transposition from real life' to cyberspace, is one of the most interesting intellectual