SOBER/drunk, happy/sad, young/old, man/woman: it鈥檚 impossible to tell who you are talking to on the Internet. Does this mean that electronic communication is equalitarian? Has the anonymity of the Internet succeeded where countless communes and democratic systems failed, by shattering the social barriers of gender, class and race? Or has the Net merely reinforced the modern, hierarchical systems that are so well established in the US and Europe, complete with their ghettos and pecking orders?
The world is full of glib generalisations and facile theories, but distressingly short of hard data to support any of the claims. All that is changing fast. For more than a decade, researchers have been studying the effects of electronic communication on societies. And recently, more and more of them have started to map those findings onto that latest, most global addition to the digital repertoire 鈥� the Internet. After all, with millions logging on daily, it offers unlimited opportunities for the people-watchers.
Some of the sociologists and anthropologists have given up the dream of studying tribes in rainforests or gang warfare in LA for a night on the Net. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a new thing to study and it鈥檚 happening right under our noses 鈥� just look at your computer,鈥� says Andrew Petto, a bioanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin. Petto has just spent four years monitoring the interactions of three large discussion groups on the Internet. These electronic connections are worth studying partly because, as Petto wrote in a recent paper, some have predicted they will lead either to 鈥榞reater democracy and participation in intellectual discussions鈥� or to 鈥榞reater fragmentation of society鈥�. The former possibility explains why high-profile politicians have shown so much interest in the potential of the Internet.鈥�
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Newt Gingrich, the controversial speaker of the US House of Representatives, and Vice-President Al Gore have both described the linking-up of millions of computers as a way to democratically redistribute power and to overthrow unjust authority. In a recent article in Time magazine, Gingrich was quoted as saying: 鈥淐yberspace is the land of knowledge. And the exploration of that land can be a civilisation鈥檚 truest, highest calling.鈥� One can question whether what he really meant was information rather than knowledge, but all the same the picture he paints is pretty clear. Gore, who positions himself rather left of Gingrich鈥檚 New Right, is also enthusiastic. He says the part played by the printed word in supporting democracy pales into insignificance compared with what can be achieved through electronic communication.
So is there any evidence to back these Utopian visions? Much of the chatter about democracy is based on the fact that electronic communication is largely text-based today. It can be argued that this makes people concentrate on the content of a message, instead of being influenced by static or dynamic social cues, such as how close together someone鈥檚 eyes are or whether they have a firm handshake. As Rob Kling, who specialises in the social science of computing at the University of California at Irvine points out: 鈥淚f I start to make a joke and someone laughs, I may continue telling it. But if they don鈥檛 like the way my joke is going and stare at me with a stony face, I may stop. E-mail filters all that out.鈥�
Hidden meanings
Compared with a handwritten letter, electronic communication says very little about the correspondent. ASCII characters don鈥檛 have a style, and there are few choices for changing the layout of the message or the electronic page on which the characters will be displayed. To those who support the idea that electronic communication can be democratising, the blandness of text should cut through the sexism, racism and obsession with class or status that is so prevalent in more traditional forms of interactive communication.
Lee Sproull, a professor of management at Boston University in Massachusetts, and Sara Kiesler, a professor in the department of human computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, feel their findings support this view. For more than a decade they had been experimenting to see if using e-mail can break down traditional hierarchies.
E-mail users tend to 鈥渢alk more frankly and more equally鈥� than they do face-to-face, according to Sproull and Kiesler. 鈥淚nstead of one or two people doing most of the talking, as happens in many face-to-face groups, everyone had a more equal say.鈥� This 鈥渆qualises鈥� human relationships and allows people to speak on more even levels than would be possible in face-to-face communication where their sex, race, dress, shyness, body language or other factors might influence how others evaluate their comments.
To test their theories, Lee and Sproull enlisted a group of student volunteers which included both undergraduates and graduate students. The group was then asked to discuss ideas for written research projects 鈥� a fairly typical request. But instead of meeting in a room to discuss the ideas, the students were asked to communicate by sending messages over the college鈥檚 internal e-mail.
Previous research showed that in face-to-face encounters, the group was most likely to choose a project advocated by graduate students, presumably because of their higher academic rank. But when they used e-mail, 鈥渋t was a toss-up 鈥� half the time they wrote what the undergraduate wanted to write and half the time what the graduate student wanted,鈥� says one of Sproull鈥檚 and Kiesler鈥檚 co-researchers, Charles Huff. This was particularly interesting, says Sproull, because all the students knew each other. The study implies that computer networks can 鈥渄emocratise鈥� decision making.
New status
Likewise, traditional social barriers such as sex and race appear to lose their force over e-mail communication. In a similar experiment, Kiesler and her colleagues ranked a group of volunteers from the college by 鈥渟tatus鈥� using traditional social cues 鈥� for example, white males held higher status than black females. The volunteers were then asked to propose ideas to each other, by sending each other e-mail. Kiesler found that in face-to-face communication, higher-status people are more likely to speak first. But over a computer network, communication is 鈥渁synchronous鈥�: people can propose ideas simultaneously without having to wait politely until the other person is finished. The result was that high and low-status members were equally likely to come forward with an idea. Once again, e-mail appeared to erode the influence of authority.
Further support for the democratising effect of electronic interaction comes from Tora Bikson of Rand, the government-backed research organisation based in Santa Monica, California. Bikson and her colleagues investigated the impact of e-mail by comparing the performance of two task forces 鈥� one which used e-mail, the other which relied on handwritten memos and telephone calls.
The two groups were given a year to prepare a report on how ageing employees can prepare themselves financially and emotionally for retirement. Both groups comprised people who had retired from Rand, and employees who were approaching retirement. Bikson found that retired people made a greater contribution to the debate, developing and criticising ideas, when they were given access to e-mail than when they were left with phone and letter.
Also, she observed, 鈥渋n the electronic group, participation was more evenly distributed among members, and at varied times during the work year, different individuals assumed more responsibility when task force needs meshed with their skills and schedules. Not only did the electronic task force engender more de facto leaders, it also exhibited greater social cohesion. Further, its retired members were able to play strong central roles; in the standard task force, in contrast, retired members had peripheral status.鈥�
So e-mail really does seem to have succeeded where the social architects of the Sixties and Seventies failed, in giving a voice to all people of all ages in the community. There is even some evidence that electronic communication improves people鈥檚 efficiency. Bikson found, for example, that in her organisation people respond very quickly to e-mail messages. She analysed records of e-mail at Rand and discovered that more than 10 per cent of all e-mail replies arrived within 15 minutes, and 鈥渢he average time to reply is just an hour and a half, and over half of all replies are received within four hours鈥�.
Bikson is also optimistic about the ability of electronic communication to give a voice to those who are on the periphery of a community. In an office, for example, making a simple decision, such as where to place the new fax machine, can become annoyingly complex if it is an office without e-mail. Everyone must get together for a face-to-face discussion or communicate via memos. The first can be difficult to arrange in a busy office and may omit employees who don鈥檛 work regular hours, while memos must be distributed manually and tend to slow down communication.
With e-mail, communication is both instantaneous and 鈥渁synchronous鈥�: a message arrives in a recipient鈥檚 computer usually moments after it is sent, while people who work odd hours or were away, can add their comments for all to read on the computer-screen during the daytime. That way, for example, salespeople can have their say in decisions as well as the office night owls and early birds, and keep in touch with developments they might otherwise have little hope of influencing 鈥� or even hearing about.
Together, the findings of Bikson and Kiesler do appear to give some credence to the Utopian view of computer networks. So has the time come to don sandals, jump into our painted buses complete with computer, e-mail connection and satellite link, and drive to some Himalayan outpost? Can we can tend our water buffalo and study silk making, happy in the knowledge that we still influence important business decisions and communicate on an equal footing with our office-bound peers?
Not quite, comes the reply from other researchers looking at the Internet. Although Steve Mizrach, an anthropologist at the University of Florida at Gainesville, argues that those people who use e-mail, bulletin boards and the Internet to keep in contact on subjects of mutual interest constitute a true counterculture, of the sort that flourished in London鈥檚 Soho or Greenwich Village in New York in the 1960s. Other researchers have found emerging signs of hierarchies, egos and morals 鈥� the very same evils that compromised the Utopian visions of the past. Some discussion groups, for example, have closed their doors to those outside a small peer group. This is prevalent among groups ranging from those dedicated to scientific research, groups set up for women who may feel uncomfortable discussing intimate issues or 鈥渟exual politics鈥� on a public forum, and even a private animal welfare discussion group.
Meanwhile, specialists who still want to contribute to open forums, in particular those dedicated to serious science or technology, sometimes try to distinguish their messages from the rabble by automatically appending a list of their academic credentials to their messages. 鈥淧eople are working out ways to slip status back in,鈥� says Huff. 鈥淚f you have an 鈥榓ol.com鈥� [America Online 鈥� one of the popular bulletin board systems in the US] address, it may be a sign of no status.鈥�
In the longer term, many researchers see traditional social cues re-emerging in electronic communication, especially once people begin to use video conferencing. At present, unless you work for a large corporation with a dedicated network, video communication over the Internet is usually limited to a system called CuSeeMe.
This enables you to plug a cheap video camera into your computer and send black and white video images to other people who have logged onto the CuSeeMe group. The frame rate is slow, the pictures shaky and communication is still mainly textual. But even with this level of visual communication, the age and appearance of the people you are communicating with is fairly obvious. When digitised colour video images with a 鈥渞efresh鈥� rate of 15 or so frames per second [British TV uses 25 frames per second] becomes routine, even more of the traditional social cues will be available.
One of the more immediate and obvious effects this will have is to expose the gender of all participants. One of the key arguments of those who support the idea that communication over the Internet is democratic is that women can contribute to debates without male contributors making obvious assumptions.
What sex please?
But is text-based electronic communication truly gender-neutral? Howard Shaffer, an associate director of the addictions division at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachussetts, has spent some time monitoring Internet 鈥渃hat rooms鈥�. And from his experience, one of the most frequently asked questions of a new person entering the discussion is whether they are male or female.
And according to Lucy Suchman, an anthropologist working at Xerox Parc in Palo Alto, telling the truth does not always help. 鈥淎 lot of women have found that if they entered a discussion group, the fact that they were women aroused so much curiosity it overwhelmed the discussion.鈥�
Current estimates suggest that over 90 per cent of the people who use the Internet are men. A fact supported by a recent study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which found that the number of men outnumbered women on the Internet by more than six to one.
Even if women get a say in this male-dominated world, Susan Herring, a professor of linguistics who studies gender issues in computing at the University of Texas at Arlington, is reluctant to describe it as being on an equal footing with male counterparts.
When she first joined a special interest group in her area of research, the majority of the other participants were male. To find out why, she began collecting the messages and analysing their verbal content, to see if there were gender differences in the texts. (She culled her data by selecting users with sexually unambiguous names.) There were, and they resemble the gender differences that other linguists have identified in male and female speech: for example, women are more likely to state a fact in the form of a question and to 鈥渉edge鈥� an assertion with a qualifier such as 鈥渕aybe鈥� or 鈥渟ort of鈥�. By contrast, male communication tends to last twice as long as the women鈥檚 on average and to be more aggressive, and occasionally involve the fierce form of verbal assault known as 鈥渇laming鈥�. Altogether the male approach to communication 鈥渉as the effect of turning women off and making many of them not communicate or turn to an all-female group鈥�, Herring concludes.
From these and other findings, Herring supports the view that the Internet is not Utopia 鈥� for women at least. 鈥淎s much as people have wanted to go on [talking] about how democratising it is, the Internet is still the domain of middle-class, highly educated, white males of a certain age, perhaps the highest concentration of men being from ages 18 to 30.鈥�
Why this should be the case is still under debate. One possibility is that many women still feel uneasy with technology. Perhaps as a result of parents or teachers giving brothers or male friends priority when it comes to using a computer. Also, TV and cinema films still tend to portray computing as a male pursuit (but to its credit, a leading US sudio is now making a film in which the popular star Sandra Bullock portrays a female hacker.) Another view is that women want more from communication than a line of ASCII characters, they want social cues such as a supportive smile, or a gentle touch on the hand. A view apparently corroborated by Cafe Cyberia, the London-based Internet cafe that provides access to the network in a social environment, and has attracted a large female clientele.
Still, so far 鈥渢here has been very little research on how women fare in their use of [electronic communication] and, in particular, how they can be encouraged to develop skills in this area鈥�, as Nina Wakeford, formerly a researcher at Sheffield University writes in a recent paper.
Indeed, there is almost a New World pioneering spirit among the researchers who have chosen to study the effects of linking millions of people using computers and telephone lines. But even in these early days opinions are forming.
鈥淭he Net is a potentially democratising force, but a great deal more must be done to realise this potential,鈥� says Lee Felsenslein, who helped start a famous computer network in Berkeley, California, in the 1970s. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 think that the Net, as it is trending today, will do more than optimise opportunities for a rather narrow stratum of 鈥榯he right people鈥� 鈥� to paraphrase Lincoln Steffens [an American journalist and a campaigner for human rights at the turn of the century], I have seen the future, and it needs work.鈥�