The Virtual STS Centre on MediaMOO: Issues and Challenges as Non-Technical Users Enter Social Virtual Spaces by Wade Roush Program in Science, Technology, and Society Massachusetts Institute of Technology Copyright 1993 by Wade Roush. Permission is granted to reproduce this essay for academic purposes provided that this notice is retained. Author's address: Room E51-017, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139. E-mail: weroush@athena.mit.edu 0. The Metaversity, (1) April 21, 1998: A Cautionary Demo In 1988, Apple Computer, Inc., released a concept video entitled "Knowledge Navigator" which has since been viewed widely among professionals in the electronic media and computer fields. The video combined convincing mock-up equipment and high production quality to demonstrate ideas about "agents," customizable personal automata which would, like perfectly servile butlers or executive secretaries, smooth the computer user's way through the information nexus. The particular near-future scenario chosen by the video's producers involves a middle-aged, probably Northern Californian academic of indeterminate discipline, who relies on his Apple agent to organize his daily schedule, manage the process of scholarly research, establish video and data connections with fellow academics, and screen out annoying phone calls from his mother. Because this video is so widely known, it serves as a useful substrate for describing a somewhat different concept of the computerization of scholarly communication. Latent in the Knowledge Navigator presentation are possibilities for the organization of real-time cooperative work in what can best be described as "virtual spaces," electronic environments where users at two or more distant locations can gather, communicate, and manipulate information. What follows -- part sincere imitation, part parody -- is a recasting of the Knowledge Navigator tale that, in place of ideas about "agents," emphasizes the prospective uses of geographically-patterned virtual spaces for work-related interaction in a field of the humanities. * * * Amalya Pradhek-Wilson, anthropologist, arrives at her office on the Edmonton campus of the University of Alberta promptly at 10:00 Monday morning. She sits down at her desk. While listening to her voice mail, she downloads the papers she graded at home over the weekend. Her computer will sort the papers, record the grades, and mail her comments back to the eighteen students in her class. She's met only six of these students face-to-face; the others live in far-flung parts of Alberta and the Northwest Territories and telecommute to her class each Tuesday and Thursday via the Net. At least one of the students, she knows, is going to be unhappy with her grade. She makes a mental note to expect a visit from her. There's nothing in Amalya's voice mail that requires an immediate response. She turns back to her computer and, with several swift movements of her hand across the touch-sensitive active-matrix-display deskpad, calls up the article she's writing about upheavals in Ninavut tribal culture with the proliferation of inexpensive satellite-dish communications. The submission deadline for OLENA, On-Line Ethnographies of North America, is approaching fast. Amalya needs to supplement her extensive field work (both real and virtual) with historical material on relations between the Ninavuts and the Canadian government, especially the secession movement of the early 1990s. Another touch of her keypad connects Amalya's computer to the central catalog of the Library of Congress, which recently merged its vast electronic holdings with those of the British Library, the Bibliotheque Nationale, and the libraries of Harvard and the University of California. A voice-agent prompts her for search mode and keywords. Amalya speaks into the computer, "Subject mode. Search one: Ninavut tribes, Canada, government, secession movement, 1985 to present. Search two: Ninavut tribes, history, treaties." "Your search has entered the queue," the agent responds. "Stand by." "Standing by," Amalya sighs, although her quip goes unnoticed. "I guess it's time to open up shop." While the computer monitors the library-agent's progress in one corner of her screen, she brings up a large window connecting her with the Metaversity and divides it into two halves. The bottom half represents her virtual office in the Anthropology Wing of the Metaversity's Human Sciences Building. It's a map, a top-down view of a roughly rectangular space more or less identical to thousands of other virtual offices around the Metaversity. A small icon indicates Amalya's virtual presence in the office, right behind her virtual desk. On the desk, as she can see from an icon resembling a stack of papers, several e-mail messages are waiting for her. She'll leave those until later. By touching a section of the office wall on her screen, Amalya unlocks her door, making the fact of her presence available to others around the Metaversity who might wish to find her. In the top half of her window, Amalya goes on a walk across the campus. Not a literal walk, of course; the Metaversity is a graphic representation of a huge collection of customized virtual spaces -- all organized according to the geographical metaphor of a real university campus -- and for Amalya the novelty of getting from one side of the virtual campus to the other in a linear fashion, by strolling from space to space, wore off about a day after she first arrived. Thousands of people spend hours every day wandering around the Metaversity's vast campus, where meeting up with interesting people and information sources is practically inevitable, but today Amalya needs to see one person in particular. She calls up a map of the Metaversity. Now the icon that represents Amalya is inside a tiny box representing the Human Sciences Building. Sprawling across the cluttered campus (after extensive study and debate, the Metaversity Architectural Committee decided that clutter lent both charm and navigability to the virtual campus) are other buildings housing libraries, conference facilities, computing resources, and the virtual offices of at least half of the academic professionals on Earth (with the notable absence of administrators, who have become part of the programming). Amalya picks out the History Building, which, oddly enough, is on the opposite side of campus from the Human Sciences Building. She touches the screen just above the lobby of the History Building and a new picture fills the top half of her window. Amalya is now sending a projection of herself across the Metaversity, although she is also still "present" in her virtual office, should anyone happen to stop by. (2) An icon representing the History Building's directory sits on the lobby's reception desk, and Amalya touches it. The directory immediately fills her screen. She types in the name "Anderson, Kenwood." The directory responds: "Professor Kenwood Anderson is in his office, and is accepting visitors." Amalya met Anderson at an on-line conference last year. He's a cultural historian at the University of Melbourne, specializing in the experience of indigenous cultures during the era of European colonialism. She calls up the building map, and teleports to the hallway just outside Anderson's door. She knocks. Instantly, a Net audio channel opens between Amalya's office in Edmonton and Anderson's den in his Melbourne apartment, where it is late in the evening. "Come in!" booms Anderson's hearty voice. Amalya moves her projection into the office, isolating the channel for privacy. "Hi, Ken -- it's Amalya." "Amalya, dear! Good to see you." (Anderson, of course, sees only an icon his screen representing Amalya's virtual presence in his virtual office, but it's tedious to maintain all these distinctions in casual talk. If Anderson wished, he could click on Amalya's icon to see her photograph, a statement of her research interests, c.v., and various other descriptors.) "I got your message last week. How's the article coming?" "Just fine. In fact, that's why I stopped by. I'm going to be submitting it to OLENA later this week, and I'm looking for an expert opinion on my latest draft from somebody off-continent. You're the only person I trust who isn't likely to be called on to referee the piece." "I'm flattered! But I'm not much of an expert on native tribes of northern Canada, you know..." "I'm sure the dynamics of this situation will be familiar to you," Amalya replies. "I was hoping you might help me to put the story in a larger context. You know, the hegemony of the Western media marginalizing local culture, that sort of thing." "Oh! In that case..." Amalya's computer emits a sudden door-bell sound. "Sounds like you've got company," Anderson says. Amalya glances at the bottom window. The student she was expecting is standing outside her office door. "I'm sorry, Ken. This should only take a minute." She touches a button on her screen, switching audio channels. "Come in!" An icon moves from the hallway into Amalya's office. "Hello, professor. It's June Aomori." June lives with her father in a uranium-mining compound at Port Radium, just below the Arctic Circle. "I got my paper back. I was just wondering if we could...you know...talk about my grade?" "Absolutely, June. There are some things we need to discuss, in particular your footnoting and bibliographic style. But right now I'm in a conference with a colleague in Australia. Can you stop by again in about half an hour?" "Okay," June answers. "I've got some friends in Finland to hang out with until then. Thanks." "Allright, I'll see you." Amalya switches back to her Australian connection. "I'm back, Ken. Sorry for the interruption. Can I send my draft to you?" "Right. I think I'll be able to get to it sometime tomorrow or Wednesday." "That's wonderful. Here it comes." Amalya touches the corner of the text-window displaying her article and drags it across the screen to the map of Anderson's office. Within microseconds, the file is transferred to Anderson's account in Melbourne. "Maybe we can do some editing together? Say, on Thursday?" she asks. "That might work. I'll get back to you soon, okay?" "Okay. Bye, Ken. Thanks!" "G'night." The connection closes and Amalya leaps back to her own office. She brings up June's paper in a new window. She spends a few minutes looking over her comments, then locates June. The map shows her in the Student Union, at the geographic center of the Metaversity. Amalya decides against interrupting June's conversation with her Finnish friends. Instead, she pulls up the Metaversity calendar and scans it for today's virtual lectures and conferences, looking for anything she might want to attend. Of course, the computer is showing her only a small fraction of the public listings for today, primarily those that relate in some way to her research interests. As at most real universities, there are far too many activities scheduled each day for any single person to keep track of. She finds two promising events, one lecture on archaeology in the Aleutian Islands and a discussion on the delivery of medical services in the Appalachians. The lecture conflicts with another apppointment; she'll have to get a transcript later from the computer. She glances at the library agent, which is taking an unusually long time with her request. There must be heavy demand on the Library of Congress computers this morning. "Got time for coffee?" Amalya looks up to see a real person standing in her office door. It's Sally Randolph, a friend from the neighboring Math Department. "Sure, Sally! Just let me leave a note for someone." She pages June with a message delaying their appointment by another half-hour, puts her computer into power-saving mode, and grabs her purse. Amalya never turns down an invitation to coffee. With so much of her work taking place on the Net, it's one of the few things that gets her out of her office. 1. The Virtues of Failure Though the appropriation of futurism by commercial interests has greatly diminished its cultural value -- Disney World's EPCOT Center, for example, is one part social forecasting to ninety-nine parts advertising -- there may still be some benefit in making the imaginative leap from today's technological realities to future possibilities, if only in order to think about what kind of future we don't want. In the case of the Metaversity scenario outlined in the preceding demo -- and in contrast to the "agents" idea proposed in the original Apple Knowledge Navigator video -- the gap between present and future is particularly narrow. The conceptual barriers to the implementation of a global virtual university which would electronically combine research, teaching, collaboration, publishing, and long-distance communication are insignificant. The tools for these kinds of computer-supported work already exist in rudimentary form; the remaining hurdles involve problems of content, scale, access, ease of use, and disciplinary and cultural biases. These hurdles are not insignificant, and they are perhaps not worth overcoming, but nonetheless many in the corporate world and elsewhere are hard at work trying to overcome them. The Metaversity may be the least imaginative outcome of current trends in the architecture of virtual communities, but it also seems among the most likely. The current moment -- when thinkers from outside the computer sciences are beginning to inhabit the growing universe of virtual spaces but before the new technologies have gained irreversible momentum in any particular direction -- seems a good time to examine some of these possibilities with a skeptical, sociological eye. Experiments that fail often teach more than those that succeed. What follows is an account of my own attempt to create something primitively resembling the Metaversity using what seemed a promising tool at the time, the object-oriented multi- user dungeon (MOO). (3) That this experiment "failed" according to the terms I originally set out for it is still a happy result, because it teaches -- at least, it has taught me -- valuable lessons about what MOOs are good for, and what they are not good for; about the nature of social interaction in virtual spaces; and about how the preconceptions we bring to a new medium structure our experience in that medium. What I take to be one of the most important lessons of this experiment is the fundamental emptiness of the attempt to transplant real social and institutional structures into virtual spaces. (The rather mundane boss/secretary relationship enacted in the Knowledge Navigator video suffers from exactly this flaw.) This is a cautionary tale, then, intended partly to discourage others from making the same mistake. Yet I fear that the growing interest in virtual realities, as exemplified by the popular fictions of William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Vernor Vinge, and by corporate and military research going on in many locales, may already be tending toward the construction of virtual spaces as more-or-less literal recreations of the real world. Consider: Full-up, graphical virtual realities are judged in both the popular and professional realms according to the realism of their representations of three-dimensional spaces; the most admired virtual bodies or "avatars" in Stephenson's cyberspace fiction are those whose owners can most realistically simulate their own actual appearance; and in a recent episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Enterprise crew realized only too late that they were trapped inside a "holodeck" simulation of their own ship. What is superficially titillating in each of these examples is the breakdown of the distinction between the real and the virtual. But it takes little imagination to transpose familiar aspects of reality into virtual worlds, and the seemingly instinctive attempt to do so may not be among the most enriching uses of the new media of virtual reality. In the words of MIT Media Lab researcher Amy Bruckman, "Embodied experience has features the virtual can not and should not try to replace. It's not a substitute -- it's something different." (4) My claim to being an unbiased observer in these matters evaporated several months ago, when I decided to build the Virtual Science and Technology Studies Centre. Although I had some prior familiarity with multi-user dungeons (5), I was mainly inspired (as many others have been) by Bruckman's MediaMOO project at the Media Lab. The strength of MediaMOO, a MUD primarily dedicated to enhancing professional community among researchers in media technologies, is its unapologetic self-reflexivity. Where better to test the proposition that social virtual spaces can have professional utility than in a virtual space inhabited by the very people most intrigued by this proposition? Committed to the hands-on educational principles of Constructionism, Bruckman has allowed MediaMOO to grow freely according to the interests and enthusiasms of its users, and the Virtual STS Centre was one of the early fruits of this policy. Although it was explicitly dedicated to the "exploration of cyberspace and its role in enhancing community among researchers in the history and social study of science and technology and related fields," (6) the STS Centre would, I hoped, become something more: a point-of- entry for humanities scholars wishing to probe this new medium and a demonstration that many of the activities humanist scholars pursue in daily life could also be enacted in virtual space. The Virtual STS Centre continues to exist and grow. And although this is not occurring in the way I had originally intended, I remain excited about the Centre's future and convinced that interesting and unpredictable developments will flow from it. These pages represent my attempt to put in writing the story of my gradual discovery of the true potential of social virtual spaces. Briefly, I will recount the short history of the Virtual STS Centre to date, assess its potential as an environment for professional activities, list some of the technical and social factors that will be key to its future evolution, and offer an argument for the application of Constructionist principles on the boundaries between computer science, new electronic media, and the humanities. 2. The Virtual STS Centre: A Brief History First, a tour of the facility itself. (I assume for the purposes of this essay that the reader is already familiar with the basics of MUDs and the conventions governing them.) In contrast to the core geography of MediaMOO, which is patterned after the real MIT Media Lab, the STS Centre is a wholly imaginary structure, designed to function as something between a clubhouse and a conference center. At its heart is a comfortable lounge outfitted with couches, picture windows that overlook the Charles River (over which the building is cantilevered), and a variety of pre- programmed objects, contributory and otherwise. There is, for example, a "buzzword generator" which, when cranked, disgorges phrases like "Foucauldian socially constructed false consciousness" and to which visitors can add their own new buzzwords. Ringing the lounge is a balcony graced by a series of life-size statues of well-known personalities in science and technology studies; visitors are invited to add both snide and serious comments to the statues' pedestals. Conference rooms, a library, a game room, and offices are located on the second and third floors. Visitors to the Rooftop Cafe can order drinks or use the diving board to take a quick dip in the river. Many users have built their own customized rooms, attaching them to a corridor below the building. The basic intent guiding the design of the STS Centre was to provide the intended audience -- users whose interests include social and historical aspects of science and technology -- with a thought-provoking environment in which to gather, converse, and explore the MOO medium. My original hope was that the STS Centre would become known among scholars in science and technology studies (including the history and social study of science and technology and related fields) as a virtual crossroads for the profession: a perpetual academic fair, a place where all kinds of interactions -- planned and unplanned, independent and collaborative -- would take place. The existence of several electronic bulletin board systems (BBS) used by STS scholars seemed to bode well for such a venture. (7) I assumed that subscribers to BBS, newsgroups, or other asynchronous electronic forums, because they were already computer-literate, would form a natural constituency for the STS Centre. In an announcement about the opening of the STS Centre circulated on these bulletin boards, I stressed the advantages of text-based virtual reality systems like MUDs over e-mail and BBS, pointing out that MOO interactions occur both in real time and within a rich context of user- customizable virtual spaces and objects. I hoped that a sufficient number of BBS subscribers would see the value of the new medium that a population of MediaMOO users with interests in STS issues would form quickly. From the beginning, however, it was unclear to me whether the audience I had in mind for the STS Centre would be eager to move in. A warm-up project preceding the opening of the STS Centre had yielded unpromising results. With encouragement from Bruckman, I had, as my first construction project on MediaMOO, built a virtual version of MIT's Building E51, which in real life is home to the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. As part of a series of afternoon gatherings customarily held weekly among graduate students in the STS Program, I organized a "Virtual Tea Talk" to take place in the virtual Building E51 on February 18. I invited all my fellow doctoral students to the event and prepared step-by-step instructions for those without MUD experience (everyone, as it turned out) on how to connect to MediaMOO, how to reach the seminar room, and how to communicate from within the MOO. About fifteen people attended, approximately six of whom were STS graduate students (the real proportion is hard to determine, since all were using guest characters and were under no obligation to reveal their true identities). Bruckman, the featured speaker, made a few remarks about the ideas behind MediaMOO, which were well-received and which sparked an interesting if incoherent discussion. The graduate student's inexperience -- this was, after all, the first time any of them had visited a MUD -- contributed to a raucous atmosphere that seemed manifestly to contradict the premise of the tea talk, i.e., that a useful academic discussion could take place in virtual space. Worse, whether on the basis of their single experience or because of the conflicting demands of graduate student life, none of the students who attended the tea talk decided to explore the medium further. Although I was later to recognize that there were a number of confounding factors (especially the students' ignorance of MUD social conventions, the awkwardness of the MOO interface for those who are unaccustomed to it, and the fact that the medium may be fundamentally ill-suited for lecture-type events), it seemed from the Virtual Tea Talk that, at least among one small group of humanities scholars, virtual conferencing was an idea whose time had not yet come. Fine, I said to myself; if my colleagues in the STS Program did not appreciate the opportunity to meet or wander in a virtual copy of the real building in which they toiled, then it was time to go on to bigger and better things. With Bruckman's indulgence and new "janitorial" powers on MediaMOO (most importantly, the ability to register new users), I proceeded to build and equip the STS Centre. The Centre was ready for occupancy by mid-March, and a grand opening celebration was scheduled for early April. Announcements went out via BBS and word-of-mouth at the end of March. Happily, requests for information and registration began pouring in immediately. (After returning from an ill-timed mid-week trip to New York City, I found 246 unanswered e-mail messages awaiting me.) Measuring from attendance and the comments of those present, the grand opening on April 9 was a moderate success. Between 40 and 50 people visited the STS Centre during the three-hour event, which featured abundant cocktail-party conversation and the unveiling of a plaque specially "engraved" for the occasion. Visitors connected to MediaMOO from as far away as the Netherlands and Austria. (Fewer than half of the guests, however, were new users who had been attracted by the public announcements; the rest were established MediaMOO users whose primary interests lay in media research.) As could be expected from the purpose of the opening -- namely, to celebrate -- the discussion was, like many MOO conversations, meandering and unfocused. But the generally high level of enthusiasm seemed to mark an auspicious beginning for the STS Centre. Among the sometimes-whimsical reactions emoted by various guests were "feels privileged to be here," "is overwhelmed," "claps loudly and whistles," "always gets misty- eyed at these sorts of things," and, ominously, "wonders if the faculty will actually venture here." With the grand opening past, the operative question became: What now? New users continued to register at an encouraging rate (peaking at five to 10 per day) but there was, as yet, little in the way of organized activities to occupy them. In order to maintain the sense of momentum created by the opening (and partly, I admit, in order to gather data for this paper) I scheduled a forum at the STS Centre on "The Use of Virtual Spaces for Work-Related Interaction in the Humanities." The insightfulness of many participants' remarks at this event, held April 23, went significantly beyond what I had come to expect from previous MUD encounters. Despite the limitations of the MOO medium, which dispose it poorly to any kind of organized discussion involving large numbers of people, it became clear from the participants' comments (quoted extensively below) that many computer-literate humanists are excited by the potential of MUDs as environments for creative work and are searching for the forms and techniques that will push the medium to a new level of usefulness. This enthusiasm is held in check, however, by an awareness of the difficult cultural barriers standing between today's realities and users' visions of how the medium should best be used and whom it must reach. Having attracted a small, path-breaking group of users -- perhaps between 50 and 100 -- the Virtual STS Centre now stands poised for an uncertain future. For reasons which will be discussed below, it appears that my original plans for the Centre were both unrealistic and misguided. But given the level of enthusiasm among the Centre's initial users, the actual outcome is likely to be more interesting. 3. The Underpopulation Problem The critical factor leaving the Virtual STS Centre's viability in doubt, at least for the moment, is a shortage of users. (This is also true, to a lesser extent, for MediaMOO as a whole.) Unlike the Earth, for which sustainability probably necessitates much lower rates of population growth than the human race is currently experiencing, the new social virtual spaces depend for their success on a geometrical increase in population. Once this population growth is underway, it becomes self-sustaining, especially as word of the advantages of joining the community spreads from users to non-users. In the meantime, without a large group of users, virtual spaces remains unrewarding places to spend time; and as long as they remain unrewarding, they are unlikely to attract new users. As of this writing, the number of registered MediaMOO users is almost 400. The number of people active on MediaMOO on the average weekday afternoon varies between 10 and 20 -- a significant increase over past months, but still insufficient to create the critical mass of users necessary for fruitful interactions. (8) Of those, only two or three at any given time are likely to be STS users. Alex Pang, a historian who connects to MediaMOO from the University of California at Berkeley under the name Wintermute, comments: "This is a promising medium that could become truly useful if we USE IT. I think that the technical problems are more irritations than anything else right now; the REAL problem with the technology is that not enough people have reason to use it. It's time to start creating reasons." (9) It may not be necessary to guarantee a high minimum threshold of connected users in order to vindicate the STS Centre. Instead, it might be sufficient to create regular occasions for users to gather at the STS Centre, along the lines of the "Happy Hour" that takes place in MediaMOO's Root Lounge every Friday at 4:00 p.m. Pang/Wintermute writes: "This is a social problem that can be solved through the creation of social institutions (or rituals, or what have you). What would be GREAT would be to use the space to hold journal club meetings, small conferences, even perhaps classes." The challenge is to discover what kind of format, structure, location, subject matter, and background would best facilitate these "rituals," so that, eventually, they would become worthwhile in and of themselves. 4. "Only connect": Positive Lessons For many early users of the Virtual STS Centre the why of the new medium, if not the who, is clear and convincing. As perceived by these enthusiasts, the unique advantages of MUD technology for professional work fall into four broad and alliterative categories: connection, collaboration, context, and creativity. Pang/Wintermute says of his MediaMOO experience, "For me, it's the contact with people from all over the world that's great; everything else is either fun, diverting, or not yet very useful. (10) Especially for scholars at far-flung institutions, MUDs offer an escape from professional isolation. "A MUD is a hell of a useful [thing] in terms of connection," says Peter, a researcher interested in the political and social implications of computer networking who logs into MediaMOO from a particularly distant location. "In South Africa I am very much isolated from my community of peers. Our department is small. Networking, and particularly MUDding allows me to connect with my peers. Now, of course, you can use the standard e-mail for that. But an interactive environment gives you a much better forum to meet people." Nicholas Whyte, a historian of science in Belfast, Ireland, agrees: "The great strength [of visiting the Virtual STS Centre] is that I'm no longer stuck in Belfast on the periphery of affairs." MUDs can also offer an economical way to confer for those who can't afford the expense of physical travel or telephone communication. Tona Henderson/Tonami, a librarian, says "I'm sure in these times of budget cuts that the MOO and its conferencing abilities will be of great use for librarians and their national committee work." But the ease and convenience of virtual interactions also bring together people who work in close proximity. Paul Bowers/PaulB is a researcher on public policy and new technologies who is collaborating with colleague Ken Schweller/cdr on the creation of MediaMOO's TV network, complete with broadcast studio and news helicopter. Bowers/PaulB reports: "Here's an interesting irony. cdr and I are colleagues on the same campus. But this MOO has provided us with a means for interaction that we never had before. We've interacted [on MediaMOO] as much or more than in real life." Rick Duffy/Rik explains the appeal of the medium this way: "A MUD seems to change the emphasis of a computer environment from that of the data to that of the people. Now that we are connected to other work environments, it is no longer just me and my data." Friendly, informal conversation -- enlivened by events in the surrounding virtual space -- is perhaps the form of interaction that MUDs support best. Users can build on this strength to make MUDs a useful medium for professional collaboration, according to several who have been involved in early developments on MediaMOO. Eric Crump/Eric, a researcher with interests in on-line writing environments, is the most optimistic, saying MUDs have the potential to become "the places where social and professional work typically is done -- not places where we retreat to do work that we'll then bring out into the light for display, but the place where our work resides, at least for those of us whose work primarily involves words. This is home!" Crump/Eric, along with three colleagues from other institutions, used MediaMOO as the location for a series of planning meetings in preparation for a professional workshop. "I think the four of us agree that the quality of our collaboration on the workshop proposal was better because of the conversations we had on MediaMOO," he says. "We could have had four separate related topics, spliced them together, and called it done. E-mail would have sufficed. But by talking in real time, we were able to more thoroughly negotiate everything. Everyone had a say in the rhetorical strategies we employed. At points of contention, new ideas sprang forth, born of the heat generated by the clash of wills (well, clash may be a bit hyperbolic -- our disagreements were settled without much verbal bloodshed). This is important: the MOO sessions gave everyone in the group a better chance to have an impact on the product, to feel a part of it." Other real-time media, including Internet Relay Chat (IRC), can support similar purposive conversations. But MediaMOO users say that the MOO environment, in which they may construct virtual spaces and objects to fit their own purposes, brings an important context to collaboration. Daniel Rose/Daniel, a programmer at Apple Computer, says "MUDs give a sense of place missing from other online forums. There's something really vivid about text in the same way that novels are often better than their movies." Other users liken the virtual environment to neutral territory, where everyone is equally a guest and outward indications of status or position are blissfully lacking: "I believe the virtual sense of place helps transcend many barriers in international/inter- gender/interdisciplinary interactions," says Molly, an anonymous MediaMOO user. Eric Crump/Eric relates one way in which context enhanced his writer's group's collaboration: "When somebody mentioned something about boats (that we were sinking? I can't remember exactly) I created a boat we could stand on and we even tossed discarded ideas over the side. But far from impeding our work, this play was energizing. It opened up the kinds of things we allowed ourselves to say, which let us splurt out all sorts of interesting and stupid things, some of which actually turned out to be (we thought) smart enough to inform the project we were working on." Henderson/Tonami complains that other technologies like IRC have "absolutely no context," saying "It's the context that creates the virtual reality," but he also acknowledges that context "can be seen as getting in the way or setting the stage, depending on the perspective." Indeed, at least one MediaMOO guest has pointed out that Internet itself is already a kind of distributed, amorphous virtual reality. "I believe cyberspace in itself does not need these preconstructed realities [like MUDs]. It just ends up becoming the same hegemonic-type world that is created. I believe the less context we put in the way, the easier communication will be." Finally, users see MUDs as exciting new media for creative expression, both collaborative and individual, whether work- related or not. Alex Pang/Wintermute: "For those of us who have grown up with computers and video games, the experience of programming spaces and creating objects will be fascinating -- it's part computer science, part architecture, part mystery writing. That's a big plus." Bowers/PaulB compares today's embryonic virtual communities to the group of amateurs and hobbyists who pioneered the use of radio waves for communication early in the century . "Radio broadcasting was quite literally invented by the audience," he says. "The technology preceded it, and the paradigm was invented by people playing around just like here [on MediaMOO]. A ferment of uses will naturally and intuitively spring out of the interaction." 4. Virtual Spaces and the Humanities A new technology does not spread autonomously. Either it must win acceptance by offering potential users some clear and compelling advantage over older ways, or it must be forced into use through the persistent and aggressive efforts of its advocates. In both cases there is resistance, and it is often useful to look to the areas where the resistance is strongest for lessons about the nature of the technology in question and the social structures it tends to modify. One might reasonably guess that scholars in the humanities would be among the most resistant to the spreading use of virtual spaces in academia. Preliminary observations would seem to confirm this guess, and as I've learned in the brief time since the opening of the Virtual STS Centre, the reasons for this resistance are complex and go beyond mere technophobia. Making an inventory of these factors helps build a case against ve attempts, like my own, to stencil real-world institutions onto virtual spaces. We must take seriously all the various structural limitations to the participation of non-technically- oriented users in virtual communities. In searching for ways to make these communities to grow and flourish, we should concentrate on ways to counterbalance the limitations, instead of negating or denying them. The most commonly mentioned but perhaps most trivial stumbling block to the use of social virtual spaces by professional humanities scholars is the technology itself. The computer- mediated exchange of information between MUD users -- what media researchers call the "interface" -- remains awkward and off-putting for newcomers. Steve Lelchuk/Sheperd Moon, a researcher at the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science, offers the following summary after his first few MUD experiences: "One does get a sense of 'being someplace' and can certainly interact in real time with other persons, whether it be scholarly discussion or playful chit-chat. But the user interface is presently very rough and distracting, and it will take a lot of work to make it a really useful new resource for scholarship." Experienced users insist that the MUD interface becomes less distracting with time, but the unfamiliar format and pacing of these entirely text-based interactions can quickly drive first-time users away. Pang/Wintermute explains, "For some, 'being in' a virtual space is quite an interesting experience, but others find it dull at best or frustrating at worst. There is a rhythm that conversations have there, thanks to the delay time involved in typing and sending/receiving responses, that takes some getting used to." One guest at the recent STS Centre forum put it succinctly: "MUD interactions are like dancing with a partner who is hearing a different beat." Difficult as it can be at times, direct communication is only part of the point of the MOO environment. Another part -- the ability to enhance communication through the programming of customized spaces and objects -- presents non-technical users with even bigger challenges. Although the MOO programming language is straightforward in comparison to many other computer languages, mastering it requires a significant amount of study and experimentation. Without programming skills, MOO users remain mere visitors, unable to contribute to the growth of the virtual community in the terms which it most values. "The problem is this," says Peter. "The goals of the MOO are defined by its construction, and the other way around. However, to construct you need to program. Thus we need a better way to construct for non-computer scientists. I think that everyone realizes the generalized benefits of the Net; the benefits of MOO are a bit more difficult to explain. And they will remain inacessible to non-programmers till we have a more accessible interface." Paola Petta/Der_Wanderer, a researcher on network information services, adds: "The important thing is to interview the non-computer scientists and try to implement what they see as fundamental needs. It is vital to get them to use the MOOs as soon as possible." But Petta/Der_Wanderer sees the possibility of an escape from the problem of inaccessibility in the very subtlety of MOO language. "Non-computer scientists are scared by the very short persistence of items in the computer science field. You have to learn how to do the most basic things over and over again! The MOO perhaps finally is abstracted far enough from the underlying tools to hide the changing technicalities from the non-computer science users." Difficulties with interfaces and accessibility will likely yield sooner or later to the ingenuity of MOO designers and programmers. But there are no technical solutions to many of the deeper social and cultural factors limiting the use of social virtual spaces by humanities scholars. As Pang/Wintermute puts it, "I think that the critical variables that will shape how this technology is used, and how it affects our work, will be social ones -- how many of us use the system, what place we make for it in our professional lives -- rather than technological ones." One of the social variables at work here may be a general preference among humanists for older, established forms of communication, especially as against new electronic media. Crump/Eric, who is active in computers-and-writing community, has given considerable thought to these matters. Fun as it can be, he says, MUD-based work "will distract the hell out of people who were raised to believe that writing and professional interaction are solemn, solitary activities. People believe in myths about writing and writers, that writers are tortured souls seeking communion with mystical muses, or that professional writing is just plain hard work, each word a sledge crashing down into the rock pile. Folks with those sensibilities will find MOOspace to be filled with annoying and unproductive places. I expect some will eventually adapt to the new environment (and will, in the process, change the shape of the environment, perhaps bringing with them a slight civilizing influence). Some will shun the experience and will cling hard to the technoculture they trust (print). It's difficult to predict who will react which way, though. Age can be a predictor, but there are plenty of senior professors out in Netland, and there are 19- year-olds who quake at the sight of a computer." He continues, "Part of it is tradition, social conditioning if you will. Many humanists were raised to distrust machines. They grasp nostalgically at aging reading/writing technology (print) and feel culturally assaulted when some of us suggest that exploring new territory is not necessarily a rejection of humanist heritage." Bowers/PaulB guesses that this attitude toward electronic communications resources in the humanities will shift with the generations. "It's an age distinction," he says. "Future humanities people will use computing more than their current counterparts. I think if English scholars and historians perceive this as useful, then it will become useful." But for now, even the hardy few in the humanities who decide to explore the new technologies often run into institutional brick walls. Petta/Der_Wanderer relates, "In Europe it is still very common that when someone from the humanities applies for computer equipment at the computing center they are put off with the statement 'What for?' " Even basic Internet resources such as electronic mail have been slow to find their way into the humanities. There are few professional incentives or rewards as yet for humanities scholars who wish to make virtual spaces a part of their work -- in fact, there may be active disincentives. Says Crump/Eric, "MOO usually results in very clever bovine jokes when I bring it up among my peers. And vacant looks. And some suspicion. One problem I've encountered as a humanist-type: people sometimes think I'm not doing any work when I'm on the Net. They have no framework in which to value work in this environment." What many MUD users consider one of the medium's great strengths -- its inherent playfulness -- may run directly counter to the staid traditionalism of the humanities. As one MediaMOO guest asked plaintively, "How can one collect serious thoughts in this way?" Says Jeffrey Galin/Calypso, one of Crump/Eric's colleagues in the writing workshop project, "This is a bit messy. It's funny how a lot of humanities types don't like messy." Becky Rickly/Beckster, another researcher with interests in computers and writing, agrees. "This reeks of gaming, something 'scholars' don't usually think highly of," she says. "We don't trust anything we can't hold in our hands, smell the musty pages, etc. You know, initially I was scared spitless, and I did not want to be bothered by all this construction. I just wanted to talk, like on IRC. But now, I really like all the playfulness inherent on the MOO." Bowers/PaulB points out, "I think for the humanities people and non-computer scientists, we ought to not overlook the fun aspects of the MOO. You don't know how many people have gone joy-riding in the copter since cdr built it. It is the goofing which serves an important socializing purpose. Only later do most users begin to be aware of the serious purposes that can derive from this environment." The ideal of the lone humanities scholar poring quietly through ancient volumes, seeking pearls of wisdom -- like Crump/Eric's notion of writers as tortured souls -- may also militate against the use by humanists of what are, after all, social virtual spaces. Pang/Wintermute: "I think [MOOs] could become useful to historians in a couple obvious ways: holding meetings, conferences, that kind of thing. But so much of humanities research is a solitary kind of thing, I'm skeptical that different kinds of communication will emerge and crystallize around MOOs for us." Others disagree, saying that cooperation of all kinds is becoming more common in the humanities. "I think that 'loner' bit is waning," says Crump/Eric. "Collaboration, at least in composition/rhetoric studies, is booming." A final social barrier to the entry of large numbers of humanists into virtual communities might best be described as the "two cultures" problem. British writer C.P. Snow, in his famous 1959 Rede Lecture, first used the term "two cultures" to denote the supposed absence of a common intellectual ground between humanists and scientists. (11) Whether accurate or not, Snow's diagnosis did proceed from a realistic assessment of the mutual prejudices dividing the two groups, and these prejudices spill over into the contemporary relationship between technically-oriented researchers who were the original constituency for social virtual spaces and their less computer- literate counterparts in the humanities. As one MediaMOO guest put it, "I wonder about the academic benefits of joining. I have the feeling that this kind of thing makes a real computer weirdo of you/me." That telling phrase -- computer weirdo -- captures all too well the mixture of contempt, suspicion, and fear with which many humanistic scholars regard anyone who seems knowledgeable about, or comfortable around, computers. As a result, the only non-technical scholars likely to venture into virtual spaces, at least for the time being, are those who are sufficiently blas about the social and professional stigma they may incur in doing so. 5. Ruminations The previous two sections may be seen as a search for the characteristics of MOOs -- and of the Virtual STS Centre in particular -- which make them "appropriable" in the eyes of some humanities scholars and "inappropriable" in the eyes of others. Appropriability, in the sense used by Sherry Turkle, denotes the capacity of scientific and technological ideas to "move out" from the environments in which they were born to the larger culture. "Appropriable theories," Turkle writes, "tend to be those in which we can become 'actively' involved. They tend to be theories that we can 'play with.'" (12) As we have seen, the ideas behind social virtual spaces are not yet as appropriable as their creators would like them to be. To the extent that humanists are even aware of these virtual spaces, many remain reluctant to "play with" them. The largest barrier to the appropriability of the medium among humanists may be the one voiced by Alex Pang/Wintermute when he said, "The REAL problem with the technology is that not enough people have reason to use it." There is little humanists can do in social virtual spaces that they cannot already do in real life; the improvements offered over existing methods of communication, research, collaboration, and professional community-building are not yet convincing. Moreover, no matter how much the interface is "improved," virtual spaces patterned straightforwardly after real-world institutions and structures -- as the Virtual STS Centre was -- will continue to offer little for humanists to play with. They recapitulate the mundane. They fail to take advantage of the medium's potential to help people think about new forms of interaction. This is where we return to my original theme: that the too-literal re-creation of aspects of the real world in virtual space is a wasted endeavour. Even in suburbanized, late- capitalist, consumerist society, real life is not so soulless and stultifying that we must turn to simulations for refuge. The most enriching, appropriable uses of social virtual spaces may instead be those which least resemble existing social arrangements. Let me offer a brief example of the way my own thinking on this subject has changed. Until very recently I found it disappointing and somewhat annoying that most MediaMOO users adopted whimsical or fantastical names for their characters, like Wintermute, Shepherd Moon, or Calypso. This trend seemed counter to my interpretation of the spirit of MediaMOO: that it should be a place where people's virtual presences would merge as far as possible with their professional lives. It made little sense to me that people working together to explore the professional applications of cyberspace should want to do so under bizarre pseudonyms like those used on other MUDs; it seemed tantamount to attending an academic conference in a Halloween mask (albeit one that could easily be pulled off using the "@whois" command). Lately, though, I've come to see this practice in a more tolerant, even appreciative light. The ability to represent oneself in ways that may vary from the reality is, as Amy Bruckman has shown, a powerful and appealing aspect of MUDs. (13) One's personality in social virtual spaces need not correspond to one's "real" identity, and in fact a multiplicity of identities may enable one to perform activities, including varieties of productive work, which would otherwise be difficult or impossible given the real-world social constraints on our roles and behaviors. In real life, for example, Ken Schweller/cdr teaches computer programming and artificial intelligence at a small Midwestern college. On MediaMOO, he is a crack news reporter for "MMTV" with a tendency to arrive on the scene via his gadget-laden helicopter or TV van. "To me MediaMOO is a wonderful test-bed where my interests, predilections, and abilities somehow coalesce," Schweller/cdr says. "I love to do creative work. My selection of the 'reporter' persona was just so I could tackle something reasonably complex." (14) It is as a medium for this kind of unfettered creativity that MOOs function best. My own mistake in creating the Virtual STS Centre was to believe the voice that said, "If you build it, people will come" -- to believe, in other words, that if I created a pre-fabricated environment in which historians, sociologists, and anthropologists could gather to interact and collaborate, they would naturally do so. In fact, even given better advertising among my intended audience and the hypothetical elimination of all the social and cultural barriers mentioned above, this is not what would or should have happened. To *create an environment for the users* goes against the fundamental Constructionist nature of the MOO, which dictates that *the users be allowed to create the environment.* Alex Pang/Wintermute wisely suggested that "It's time to start creating reasons" for people to inhabit social virtual spaces. It's my hope that the Virtual STS Centre will become one of the places where those reasons are being manufactured. I can't predict which direction events at the Centre will take, and I refuse henceforth to intervene heavy-handedly in its evolution. My primary tasks now are to find ways to conquer to underpopulation problem and to encourage others to use the STS Centre as they see fit. The Metaversity, while it may still be present on the horizon, seems among the most paltry and lifeless goals possible for this enterprise. If it ever comes to pass, it will be in spite of the work of those like Eric, cdr, PaulB, Peter, Der_Wanderer, Tonami, Calypso, and the others -- not because of it. Acknowledgement I thank Amy Bruckman for her generosity, openness, and willingness to tolerate my endless questions. In a significant sense, she is the co-author of this paper -- although, of course, all errors of fact and conception remain my own. Notes 1. I make no claim to have coined this term myself, although I have not yet encountered it elsewhere. It seems a natural elision of "metaverse" (science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson's term for public virtual spaces) and "university"; also, cf. "megaversity," a term usually applied to over-large public universities. 2. Neal Stephenson uses the word "avatar" for the concept of a person's active audio-visual virtual presence; the corresponding term in MOO programming is "player." Xerox's Pavel Curtis has used the term "doppelganger" to connote a passive virtual presence. 3. The MOO programming environment was created by Xerox researcher Pavel Curtis. 4. Personal communication, May 3, 1993. 5. MUDs. Some substitute "dimension" or "domain" for "dungeon," although this less refined term remains the most accurate historically, acknowledging the technology's roots in computerized role-playing fantasy games. 6. From the Dedication Plaque in the STS Centre Lounge. 7. Including HOPOS-L@ukcc.uky.edu for the history and philosophy of science, HTECH-L%SIVM.BITNET for the history of technology, and SCI-TECH-STUDIES@ucsd.edu for science and technology studies in general. 8. Bruckman has estimated this critical mass to be about 1,000 registered users. LambdaMOO, by contrast, is home to approximately 2,500 users, between 10 and 45 of whom are likely to be connected at any given time. Pavel Curtis, "Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities," available via anonymous ftp from parcftp.xerox.com. 9. Posted to the mailing list SCI-TECH-STUDIES@ucsd.edu, April 28, 1993. In cases where the informant's real name is available to other MediaMOO users, I use both his or her real name and his or her MediaMOO character name. If the informant's MediaMOO character is "anonymous," I use only the character name. 10. This and all subsequent quotations are from the Forum on the Use of Virtual Spaces for Work-Related Interaction in the Humanities at the MediaMOO Virtual STS Centre, April 23, 1993, unless otherwise noted; a transcript of the forum is available in MediaMOO's ftp directory. 11. Snow wrote in his 1959 lecture: "A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold; it was also negative." Ch. 1. 12. Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1984) 298, 300. 13. Amy Bruckman, "Identity Workshop: Emergent Social and Psychological Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Reality," unpublished manuscript, 1992. Available via anonymous ftp from parcftp.xerox.com, directory: pub/MOOs/papers. 14. Personal communication, April 4, 1993.