Hello all,
As a follow up to the article which was posted with regards to the
computer club party chat on August 26, the following story may help to
explain the world of chat in a more down-to-earth manner.
This story may be accessed on the web at the following address:
http://www2.pbs.org/internet/stories/vn/index.html
Related lynx may be found at the following address:
http://www2.pbs.org/internet/relatedsites/vn/index.html
email:
[log in to unmask] or
[log in to unmask]
Jim Vaglia



   Virtual Neighbors

   Stu Harris and his partner Gayle Kidder are helping organize a dinner
   party, which will take place at 6 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, just when
   they'd normally be finishing their Sunday breakfast in San Diego,
   California. But no matter, time zones have to be ignored today, since
   this is an historic occasion -- the world's first Internet Relay Chat
   dinner party.

   harris picture The ingredients for this dinner include salmon, salad,
   and dessert. Participants will also need a power cord, a mouse pad,
   and a computer work station, all coming together so they can eat,
   chat, and get a taste of life, on the Internet.

   Internet Relay Chat (IRC), one of the most popular pastimes of the
   net, links people around the world who want to chat with one another
   by tuning into specially designated Internet channels. There are
   thousands of channels to choose from, including a channel that Stu
   Harris has created for his IRC dinner party.

   As his local guests start to arrive, Stu Harris is poised at an
   interesting intersection between the two neighborhoods he inhabits:
   the real and the virtual. Friends are gathering around the table in
   San Diego, and friends are gathering around the world in France,
   Canada, Austria, England, Holland -- all about to have the same dinner
   and all linked on the same IRC channel.

   The chat lines are largely populated by two distinct groups: people
   who share a particular interest and those transients who hop from
   conversation to conversation. But chat rooms and IRCs aren't the only
   places where people connect on the net. There are corners you can turn
   in cyberspace where you can find organized neighborhoods: places where
   people actually settle down, build virtual communities, and live at
   least part of their lives -- even if the life they choose to live is
   sometimes fictional, which brings us to the world of MUDs and MOOs.

   And just what is a MOO? To understand the background of MUDs and MOOs
   you have to go back to the game of Dungeons and Dragons. It's a story
   game in which you invent or take a character and, through an involved
   hierarchy and fictional role playing, live or die with the roll of the
   dice.

   Move that game to the Internet using Telnet technology, make it
   totally text driven, involve a lot of people, and you get a Multi User
   Dungeon -- a MUD. Some people refer to it as a Multi User Domain, but
   its roots are firmly in the game of Dungeons and Dragons. The MOOs
   take the whole process one step further. People actually inhabit the
   MOO, take part in it, and write their own code to build it. It is a
   place, an object, and the players deal with a database that is object
   oriented, "o o" for the MOO part.

   In the heart of Silicon Valley sits perhaps the most famous research
   center in the digital world, Xerox PARC. This is also the home of the
   LambdaMOO : part game, part new community, and for many the most
   important MOO in the world. And at Xerox PARC, in his day job as a
   researcher, you will find the man who created LambdaMOO, Pavel Curtis.
   For Pavel, like thousands of other people, MOOs comprise real
   communities and are a very real part of life. curtis picture

   turkle picture It's this whole new level of communication, of just how
   Internet friendships and relationships are developing, that has caught
   the attention of MIT clinical psychologist and author Sherry Turkle.
   Turkle has already been referred to as the Margaret Mead of the
   Internet, an anthropologist of sorts who for more than a decade has
   been studying what happens when people interact with computers. And
   she is finding that we may have to rethink our definitions of real and
   virtual as our relationships extend across networks.

   It seems that what originated with a game of Dungeons and Dragons has
   evolved into a whole new level of communications technology, one
   that'll even change the way friends get together for Sunday dinner. As
   people continue to gather in a cyberplace, we will have to change the
   metaphors of the Internet. It will continue to be the overused
   information highway, but it seems now it will also have to become a
   destination, a culture, a location. It will become a place made real
   because people have moved into it, people of similar interest who
   gather and interact with each other, thereby creating and defining a
   community, a neighborhood, a different way of life, on the Internet.