******************************************************** * The Virtual Science and Technology Studies Centre on * * MediaMOO: Frequently Asked Questions * ******************************************************** CONTENTS: 1. What is the Virtual STS Centre? 2. How do I get to the Virtual STS Centre? 3. What does the Virtual STS Centre "look" like? 4. What goes on at the Virtual STS Centre? 5. What is the philosophy behind the Virtual STS Centre? 6. What is MediaMOO? 7. Who designed the Virtual STS Centre? 8. Where can I get more information? 1. What is the Virtual STS Centre? It's an interactive, text-based virtual environment designed to foster real-time interaction among scholars investigating science and technology as social and historical phenomena. Open to all with research interests in these fields, the STS Centre is accessible 24 hours a day over Internet. IT is NOT an electronic bulletin board system. The STS Centre is part of a "multi-user dimension," or MUD: a program that allows you to chat with colleagues, manipulate virtual objects, and build new objects and places. MUDs are similar to the on-line conferencing or "talk" features available on Compuserve and other networks, but with the addition of a user-programmable setting providing an imaginative background for communication. And best of all, there's no fee! 2. How do I get to the Virtual STS Centre? The STS Centre is part of a larger MUD called MediaMOO, located at the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. To reach MediaMOO, you must have telnet access to Internet. On UNIX machines, the command is typed as follows: "telnet purple-crayon.media.mit.edu 8888". Or, from a system running VMS, type: "telnet purple- crayon.media.mit.edu /port=8888". If you have properly connected, you will see a message reading "Welcome to MediaMOO!" Now type: "connect guest". The online help system will help you get started. Try typing "help" and "help introduction". Typing "help create" will give you information on how to register as a permanent user. Another useful command is: "say Hi! I'm new here. Can you help me?". You can type "look at " and "examine ". Examining something will give you a list of the things you can do with it. When you first connect to MediaMOO, you will be in a virtual room called the "Lego Closet." You can step out of the closet by typing: "out". Now you will be a room called the "E&L Garden." From there, you can get to the Virtual STS Centre by typing: "STS". 3. What does the Virtual STS Centre "look" like? The best way to find out is to go there yourself, but here's a brief description anyway. The STS Centre is an imaginary building adjacent to the virtual campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (just across the street from MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society). The building contains a comfortable lounge, conference rooms, a library, a game room, a rooftop cafe, and offices owned by individual users. It is also contains interactive objects like the Quotation Machine and the Hall of Statues. Users are encouraged to contribute their own virtual objects and to build their own virtual additions to the STS Centre. 4. What Goes On at the Virtual STS Centre? The STS Centre officially opened on April 9, 1993. Dozens of people from Internet nodes around the world attended the grand opening celebration. The Centre recently hosted a special "Forum on the Use of Virtual Spaces for Work-Related Interaction in the Humanities," and it also is the home of a monthly journal club for historians, sociologists, and others studying science and technology. The Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science and UCLA's Virtual Center for the Study of Virtual Spaces have offices located at the STS Centre. University students and faculty have held virtual course meetings at the Centre. Just as important as these organized events, however, are the spontaneous encounters and gatherings which occur among users connecting to MediaMOO at random times throughout the day. It may be through these kinds of unplanned interactions -- analogous to bumping into colleagues in the hallway during a conference -- that the most useful professional exchanges will take place in virtual space. 5. What's the Philosophy Behind the Virtual STS Centre? The reader is probably already familiar with the use of electronic mailing lists, bulletin boards, or newsgroups for the exchange of opinions, queries, conference announcements, job offerings, and disciplinary chit-chat within the humanities. One can think of an electronic mailing list as a professional journal, published many times daily and consisting entirely of letters to the editor. As the technology improves and as access to national and international computer networks spreads, this kind of electronic interaction is likely to become more convenient, more widespread, and ultimately indispensable. But electronic mailing lists, like e-mail itself, have the defect of being asynchronous and hence a bit stiff and formal. It's as if we're signaling to each other from distant islands: Since we've decided to rearrange the stones on the beach to spell something new, we might as well dot all the i's and cross all the t's. But by the time we've got our stones in place, the subject has probably changed. If an electronic mailing list is like a journal, then a MUD (for multi-user dungeon, or multi-user dimension) is like a cross between an academic conference and a perpetual cocktail party. At any given time of day, many different users are likely to be logged on to the system, creating the possibility for spontaneous and enlightening encounters. Scheduled events bring together many people for discussions on topics of professional interest. Two or more users from far-flung institutions can meet by appointment to chat or collaborate. And as the substrate for all these activities, there is a world of virtual "rooms," programmed with settings ranging from the ordinary to the exotic and furnished with interesting objects to use and modify. Programming itself is straightforward and open to all, so that the virtual world grows and changes along with its community of users. The Virtual STS Centre is, in essence, an ongoing social experiment designed to test whether the MUD environment can enable new kinds of meaningful professional interactions between scholars in humanistic fields, especially the social and historical study of science and technology. 6. What is MediaMOO? The use of MUDs for professional communication is very new. The Virtual STS Centre is part of MediaMOO, a MUD which primarily serves researchers in the areas of interactive media, computer science, artificial intelligence, and computers and learning, and which opened in January, 1993. Scholars who visit the Virtual STS Centre, therefore, will be helping to explore the frontiers of this new medium. MUDs have been around for about ten years, and have been used primarily by computer programmers for socializing or role- playing adventure games. David Steffen, a cell biologist at Baylor College of Medicine who is helping to develop a virtual conference facility for the use of biologists, has written to his colleagues: "First, a confession. A MUD is a game, descendant of a long line of games. Our current interest in the MUD is as a tool for scientific communication, but if this bastard lineage is too distressing to your puritanical soul, read no further." There are now some 250 publicly announced MUDs around the world. The MOO programming language, which emphasizes easy customizability, was developed by Xerox researcher Pavel Curtis in the late 1980s. (MOO stands for MUD, Object-Oriented). Lately it's become clear that the kinds of human interactions that have been occurring on MUDs for years could also be useful in professional work. For this reason the core of MediaMOO's geography is a virtual representation of many of the rooms in the real MIT Media Lab. The STS Centre is a separate installation, although users can easily "travel" between the two locations. The researchers who created and administer MediaMOO (the "janitors") invite STS users to inhabit this area of their virtual world in the hope that mutually beneficial and productive interactions will occur between the two populations of users. 7. Who Designed the Virtual STS Centre? Wade Roush ("Wade" on MediaMOO) is a science journalist and a doctoral candidate in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, researching the social and political meaning of technological disasters. The Virtual STS Centre emerged from conversation and collaboration with MediaMOO's creator and arch-janitor, Media Lab researcher Amy Bruckman. Roush "built" the STS Centre to provide scholars in his field of study with a thought-provoking environment in which to gather, converse, and explore the MOO medium. His original hope was that the STS Centre would become known as a virtual crossroads for the profession: a perpetual academic fair, a place where all kinds of interactions - - planned and unplanned, individual and collaborative -- would take place. Initially, he envisioned that these interactions would take the form of real-life academic institutions such as colloquia, seminars, and conferences. With the benefit of a little experience, however, he has come to see his original plans as somewhat misguided. He had fallen into the "If you build it, people will come" syndrome. He believed that the kinds of interactions familiar in real academic life would naturally begin to take place in virtual space if he merely provided an interesting stage. Things didn't quite happen that way. Roush came to see that interesting, imaginative, and useful developments would not occur at the STS Centre as a product of his own heavy-handed intervention. All he could do, he realized, was to encourage others to take advantage of the medium in any way they see fit. The medium *does* have immense potential, thanks to its essential Constructionist nature. But to *create an environment for the users*, as he first tried to do, goes against this nature, which dictates that the *users be allowed to create the environment.* (You can be certain that this is an accurate account of Roush's thoughts on the matter, since he wrote it himself.) 8. Where Can I Get More Information? MediaMOO's on-line help system is quite thorough, and can answer many questions about navigating your way through the MOO environment. You can find out how to register as a permanent user by connecting as a guest and then typing: "help create". Registration requests and requests for other kinds of help -- for example, if you have trouble connecting to MediaMOO -- should be e-mailed to "MediaMOO- Registration@media.mit.edu". Information is also available via anonymous ftp (file-transfer-protocol) from the MIT Media Lab and Xerox PARC. Files available for ftp from the Media Lab at the address "media.mit.edu" in the directories /pub/MediaMOO/Papers and /pub/MediaMOO/Transcripts include: a paper by Amy Bruckman entitled "Identity Workshop: Emergent Social and Psychological Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Reality"; another paper by Amy Bruckman under the filename "MediaMOO-3Cyberconf.{ps,rtf,txt}" entitled "Virtual Professional Community: Results from the MediaMOO Project"; a paper by Wade Roush under the filename "STS-Centre" entitled "The Virtual STS Centre on MediaMOO: Issues and Challenges as Non- Technical Users Enter Social Virtual Spaces"; an article on MediaMOO by Wade Roush entitled "Have Computer, Won't Travel"; and transcripts of various events and forums which have taken place at the Virtual STS Centre. Documents available from Xerox PARC at parcftp.xerox.com in the directory /pub/MOO include a MOO programmer's manual and tutorial, as well as client programs to improve your MOO interface and a number of interesting papers. See you online!