Page 28 RAIN November/December 1985 A New Medium in the Making: How People Are Shaping (and Being Shaped by) On-Line Communications by Alfred Glossbrenner In future decades, when the pundits cast a pontificating eye backward on the Personal Computer Revolution, weighty tomes are sure to be written on the sociological effect of micro-based telecommunications. As a person with some experience in the field, I have long been convinced that it is here that the impact of the affordable microcomupter will be most profoundly felt by John and Mary Everyman. And nothing has swayed my belief that for tens of millions of people, communications is positively the best reason to buy a personal or home computer. Nor do I have any doubt that computer communications is the New Medium. There is simply no other application that can so dramatically change the quality of a person's life. At the same time, no other application is so malleable and so receptive to the human imprint. We are a race of toolmakers, and we will shape our tools to our needs and our designs, or we will not use them at all. You can already see it happening. People are learning to express themselves on-line and are developing imaginative techniques for circumventing the limitations of the medium. But at the same time, an unanticipated phenomenon is taking place. There are indications that the tool is shaping the toolmaker, affecting not only online electronic communication but face-to-face human communication as well. Though it is still quite early, it is clear that the influences of on-line communications flow in both directions. Meeting Places of the Electronic Universe Many components of the New Medium have been . well covered in this and other magazines, so I won't recap them here. If you are a new computer owner, you need only know that your machine can be equipped to "talk" to other computers over the telephone. For our purposes, the available communications ophons can be divided into two broad categories: "printlike" and "interactive." The print-like category includes electronic mail and messages posted on free "bulletin board systems" (BBSs) and on the bulletin boards operated by the more than 60 CompuServe Special Interest Groups (SIGs), as well as those found on the main system boards (POST on The Source; BULLET on CompuServe). It also includes the poetry, essays, short stories, and other works that would-be writers "publish" via ACCESS on CompuServe and PUBLIC on The Source. The interactive category can also be subdivided. There are computerized conferencing facilities such as those offered by PARTICIPATE on The Source and by some BBS software. (These allow any number of people to discuss a topic over time by keying in responses and responses-to-responses whenever they sign on.) And there are the real-time options like CHAT on The Source (strictly one-to-one) and CompuServe's CB simulator (any number can play). The print-like components have clearly been influenced by the medium. For one thing, they tend to be much more conversational than their paper-based counterparts. Writers tend to speak as though they were addressing a national club meeting where many of the attendees may be complete strangers, but it is assumed that all share certain interests, experiences, and ideals. By and large, though, things tend to develop more slowly here than elsewhere. If you're interested in exploring how man meets the New Medium (and vice versa), nothing can match the fast moving free-for-all that takes place each evening on 80 channels of CompuServe's CB simulator. This is the primary on-line communications development site.
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