Virtual Orality:

Transcending the Boundaries of Speech through Text

Lauren Wells Hasten

Department of Anthropology

Columbia University in the City of New York

Spring 1998

Contents

Introduction

I. Communiqués

E-mail

Bulletin Board Systems and E-lists

Private Rooms and Messages

Public Rooms and Multi-User Domains

II. Context Compensation

III. Text as Emotion

Emoticons

<xyz> Expressions

Emphasis

Acronyms

"Emoting," In the MUD and Out of It

IV. Text as Identity: Authorship of the Self

Virtual Anonymity

Cross-Gender Surfing

Multiplicity and Fragmentation

The "Author," part one

The Proper Name

V. Text as Simulacrum

VI. Simultaneous and Multidimensional Text

Chat

Hypertext and Polylogue

Polychronic Time

VII. Text as Property

The "Author," part two: Birth

The "Author," part three: Death? or Transcendence?

Conclusions

References

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Plato’s Phaedrus draws a theoretical distinction between oral and written communication which grants orality pre-eminence over literacy. Writing is understood to be a limb on the torso of a human language which is oral at its origins, an extension of orality, and an inferior substitute for it. Writing and speech are self-contained and distinct; they face each other across a carnival mirror where one is simply the distorted reflection of the other, a degraded "kind of image," the "original of which" is "no dead discourse, but the living speech."^** The written word is only an understudy for the spoken word, capable of rendering a performance only as good as an imitation can be, always one step short of the actuality of originary orality. Written words are merely witnesses of that which has been previously articulated, and they stand in the stead of that which would be spoken, were it possible to speak. While they have found legitimacy, as works that have been "authored" or "documents" that have been validated as "evidence," their real power lies in the insurance they provide against the day those who would articulate them die. The writer writes what she might say, were she to speak, so that it may be spoken in her silence; the speaker’s words are written, captured as text, so that they may be spoken again. Orality is consistently inferred as the preferred mode of communication.

The notion that it is possible even to draw such distinctions as these, to presume that speech and writing are so separable as to be placed heirarchically in opposition to one another, is problematic in itself, as is the assumption that one necessarily predates or takes precedence over the other. Indeed, to separate writing from speech at all is to invoke an almost automatic kind of dualism which serves to pit the two of them one against the other while diverting us away from any new and truly creative inquiry. Critics who have managed to resist the pull of this binary oppositionism have come forward to question the so-called primacy of speech; to do so requires an expanded definition of writing as text, and a willingness to see text and textuality as exceeding the boundaries of alpha-numeric script, incorporated, indeed, within all human interactions. We may even assert, perhaps, that human beings did not necessarily speak their thoughts before indicating them as text.

Current computer technology provides the critic with powerful model environments where textuality, in fact, asserts primacy over speech. In a milieu virtually devoid of orality, writing, the "dumb" cousin of speech, has had to replace it almost entirely. Computer-users rely upon the written word to the near-exclusion of the spoken; in some cases, the written word is actually perceived as spoken, and the distinction becomes irrelevant. The medium demands critical attention all the more because computer- mediated communication (CMC) has fast become a fundamental means of exchanging information in the industrialized world. Millions of people around the globe now spend significant amounts of time traversing the vast terrain of "cyberspace," immersed in what Ronald Deibert, following Jean Baudrillard, refers to as a hypermedia environment. There, through a hypermediated, hyperreal simulation of the kind of interpersonal communications that might ordinarily take place during face-to-face (FtF) or telephone encounters, people purchase products, obtain and disseminate information, have sex, fall in love and generally live lives-via-machines, a perfectly Baudrillardian simulacrum so real as to have become, for all intents and purposes, virtual reality.

What began as a United States Department of Defense project aimed at safeguarding national security has, ironically, become the Internet, available for use by anyone with access to a computer and a modem -- literally hundreds of millions of people around the world. Mark Geise explains:

A metaphorical web was to be cast across the globe, linked point to point through individual nodes; in the event of an attack on one or more points, all of the surviving nodes would be able to re-establish contact. Like Christmas tree lights wired in parallel fashion, broken bulbs will not render the entire strand useless.

Once released to the public for commercial use, the Internet grew exponentially. In 1983, there were less than 1000 network nodes, or host computers, facilitating Internet communication (Deibert⁺); by July of 1998 there were over 36,000,000^† (see Table 1). Ronald J. Deibert refers to this massive proliferation of technology and its formidable penetration into the consumer marketplace as "ubiquitous computing, or an infusion of communication technologies so deeply into everyday life that they become virtually invisible." This can largely be credited to the industry’s success at data compaction:

Computer technology is now available cheaply to millions of people, from doctors to schoolchildren, who have gained access to a global information network the scope of which was scarcely imaginable even ten years ago. More importantly, the technology has been made "user-friendly" enough for virtually anyone to learn.

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Table 1

(reprinted from Internet Software Consortium at http://www.isc.org/ds/)

I. Communiqués

•E-mail

Computer technology has launched human beings into an era of communication free, for the most part, from the vocal apparatus. In this respect, computer-mediated- communication (CMC) lies somewhat closer to the practice of letter-writing than it does to the face-to-face verbal exchange (FtF); electronic mail (E-mail) simulates this type of interaction most closely. E-mail, like conventional mail, is an asynchronous form of communication wherein completed texts are exchanged in a manner which disallows synchronic human interaction. Rather than with other people, one actually interacts with texts -- "traces", as Derrida might say, of the prior presence of other people, in locations other than those of the "trace." Derrida’s "trace," as "the mark of the absence of a presence, an always already absent present" (Spivak, xvii), conveys absence so obviously with E-mail because the text is completely separated from its author in time and space. In this respect it resembles closely the practice of posting mail. It differs significantly, however, in at least one respect.

An E-mail message transmitted via the Internet arrives in the mailbox of its recipient within minutes, if not seconds, and unless it has remained within a private network, it generally cannot be unsent. By contrast, one writes a letter and places it in an envelope, where it may sit for days before one gets around to putting a stamp on it and dropping it into a mailbox. During the time that elapses, one has the opportunity to rethink and perhaps recompose the text, or to opt not to send it at all. E-mail, however, is largely composed while one is on-line where, once one hits the "send" button, there is often no turning back. All the while, one’s phone line is tied up and charges are being billed. It is surprisingly simple to compose a letter hurriedly and send it off within moments, even before one has given oneself the chance to really think matters through.

Once E-mail arrives in the mailbox of its recipient, there is some degree of social pressure to respond to it in a timely fashion; business matters may require an immediate response, while friends may begin to feel ignored after a day or two. The fact that it takes only moments to check one’s E-mail -- assuming that one is not subscribed to a number of talkative E-lists -- and respond to it helps to create the expectation that the recipient will expeditiously do so. E-mail demands immediate attention, simply because it is there immediately. A posted letter, once mailed, falls out of the hands of its composer. While electronic mail separates sender from recipient only by phone lines and computers, posted mail is conveyed by an entire network of human beings, which takes considerably longer. When one imagines oneself to have received a posted letter a little later than one actually has, or allows for an imagined "time lag" in the process of return post, a posted letter appears to come with a far greater time allowance than instantaneous E-mail does; it simply comes off as less demanding.

Posted mail, however, has a kind of permanence, or semi-permanence, that E-mail typically lacks; Michael Benedikt, in fact, calls cyberspace the realm of the "permanently ephemeral" (Strate 1996b:366). It is notoriously easy to accidentally delete unread or important-to-save E-mail -- just hit one button, once. Rarely does one accidentally destroy or discard a written letter; to do so requires conscious physical activity. E-mail, by contrast, can be very fleeting. But beyond a physical sense of permanence, posted mail has demonstrable legal permanence as a kind of "evidence": Posted mail is postmarked, validated by the United States Postal Service (or any other) as having been sent from a particular place on a particular day; this provides a kind of impartial "evidence" that the material within existed by the time the date was stamped on the outside. E-mail, too, may be time-stamped, but if one desires, the process can be defeated. Posted mail generally cannot be unrecognizably altered by anyone other than the sender, and once it is posted, only the recipient may read it. E-mail, once uploaded to the Internet, becomes available to anyone with the skill to access it, and may be edited or plagiarized with stunning ease. Posted mail arrives, often enough, with a handwritten signature, the surest legal "evidence" that someone attests to something; an E-mail correspondence may have a personalized "sig" file at its close, but there is no genuine personal signature. One may consider going to the trouble of creating a picture file of one’s signature, but once it is digitized it is no longer genuine.

• Bulletin Board Systems and E-lists

Bulletin Board Systems (BBS’s) are public forums for textualized topical discussion. Letters are posted to a central "bulletin board" which can generally be accessed only by members who subscribe to the service; unlike private E-mail, one’s text is posted for all members to read and respond to. In this respect, posting to a bulletin board resembles the actual practice for which it is named. It is an asynchronous form of communication which requires that a completed text be transmitted in its entirety before it can be addressed by others. The text is the "trace" its composer has left behind, to be answered by further "traces" left behind by others. None of the interaction occurs in "real time," and none of it occurs between actual human beings.

While bulletin board systems lack the privacy afforded by private E-mail, they provide one with an opportunity to reach out to an almost infinite audience of complete strangers. Private E-mail, unless one is a bulk advertiser, is usually sent only to one’s friends and acquaintances; bulletin boards invite the replies of multitudinous others, both known and unknown. Perfect for finding a great chocolate-chip cookie recipe or the most highly recommended brand of steel-belted radials, the BBS has many practical applications for which both posted and electronic mail are inadequate. A BBS offers its users the opportunity for near-immediate feedback; at the same time, its posts lack the urgency of private E-mail. One does not feel compelled to respond as quickly as possible -- after all, there are hundreds of others around to do it.

Electronic mailing lists, or "E-lists," work just the same as bulletin boards with the exception that posts are sent directly to one’s E-mail box once one subscribes to the list. While the BBS requires users to go directly to the bulletin board to read and post messages, the E-list user finds mail from the list waiting for her in her E-mail box, and may respond directly to it from her E-mail program. Mail posted to the list but directed toward a particular individual demands a timely response in the same way that private E-mail does, but comes complete with a host of witnesses to the interaction. Fights can brew on-list between individuals which are witnessed and commented upon by the entire list community, providing this medium in particular with a certain kind of communal drama. E-mail list content may be moderated by selected individuals, and membership may be subject to their approval. One may subscribe to virtually any list so long as one is willing to follow its rules of conduct; academic lists tend to require students to research questions well before Professors will address them; European lists expect Americans to know a bit about American foreign policy.

Posting a letter to a BBS is rather like publishing it; one’s writing becomes open to misinterpretation and criticism by absolutely anyone. It can be very disheartening to watch a group of respondents fixate upon what seemed to you to be an inconsequential point and misread it entirely, and time consuming to try to respond to any and all comers. One loses patience quickly with under- or mis-informed individuals who insist on instigating confrontations, and academic boards in particular tend to ignore or insult those they deem to be the less-educated among them. It takes a certain amount of courage to post a letter to a bulletin board, especially if one is new to the board and uncertain of its established "netiquette."

• Private Rooms and Messages

Private rooms and messages invite two or more computer users to exchange short bits of text with each other in real time when both are on-line at the same time; unlike the other forms of CMC previously discussed, the private message allows for synchronous communication. While the user is still interacting, essentially, with a "trace," the temporal proximity of the "trace" to its origin is far closer than with any of the other methods. Lacking the familiar temporal delays of ordinary written communication, the immediacy of the private message lends it a closer resemblance to the oral telephone conversation after which, as "chat," it is named. The traces, like speech, are "transient and, unless recorded, do not endure beyond the moment in which they are created, sent and received" (Jacobson 1996:463-464). Most chat programs do not allow users to easily save texts, and once the message window is closed they are gone forever unless one has managed to copy or capture them somehow.

If an E-mail letter sits in one’s E-mail box "demanding" to be read, then chat text insists upon immediate engagement. The difference is that with E-mail, one responds to a complete text, while with chat, statements are conventionally brief, and each anticipates a response. Sometimes individuals can chat for several minutes before enough context has been provided for mutual understanding. In busy rooms, text flies by at a phenomenal rate which can be rather difficult to keep up with. One may be present in a private room where there are several conversations going on at once, and at the same time, be engaged in several private one-on-one chats outside of that particular room. This kind of simultaneous multiple chatting can be very demanding, especially if one is not a particularly fast typist. Responding to someone in a private chat may divert one’s attention away from the group room, where statements that have been addressed to oneself go unnoticed and chatters may feel ignored. Coming back to the group requires private chats be "put on hold," and conversants to exercise patience. Under these circumstances, it is not unusual for individuals to be "stuck" online for hours, engaged in multiple conversations which likely would have taken far less time had they occurred over the phone. Of course, in a chat room, one speaks to people from all over the world for the cost of a local phone call.

•Public Rooms and Multi-User Domains

Public Rooms and Multi-User Domains (MUDs or MOOs -- Multi-User Domains that are Object-Oriented) are additional forms of synchronous computer-mediated communication, similar to private chat but usually held in larger, open-invitation groups. The Multi-User Domain differs from ordinary chat in that it is set up specifically for the creation of an imagined environment in which users interact as fictionalized characters. Based on role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons, MUDs and MOOs allow individuals to use their imaginations to determine everything from their physical surroundings to their physical attributes. They provide the kind of "make believe" playtime for adults that is generally only granted to children; in this respect, they can be very enlightening. Hence, they enjoy a certain degree of popularity in psychological journals. Of greater concern here is the fact that MUDs and MOOs allow participants greater opportunities for creating context than most of the other formats do; most of the players are regulars in the room who have created a history for their characters simply by maintaining a regular presence. One might say that the entire game, in fact, is about creating context.

It is the stuff of final two categories, namely, private and public rooms and messages, with which this paper will primarily be concerned. These forms of computer-mediated synchronous communication have become significant locales for human interaction in the absence of orality. While one can argue that computer chats strive to simulate a model of orality, it is also true that they lack the necessary counterparts of aurality and/or visuality that would normally be present in a face-to-face or telephone encounter. Instead, they set up environments in which people use only alphanumeric keyboards to communicate with one another, yet where the written word carries the same force as the spoken word and is generally taken as such. Modern technology here provides compelling counter-examples to the Platonic argument for oral pre-eminence, and may yet yield insight into a question which had seemed already decided.

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II. Context Compensation

What is the "context" for a singular synchronous computer-mediated communiqué, applying David Jacobson’s first sense of context as the "setting of an event or an encounter"? Truly and originarily, the context for any computer-mediated encounter is created by the environment surrounding the individuals involved; alone at their computers, at home, in cafes and offices all over the world, millions of individuals sit quietly, eyes upon the screen. When two or more individuals interact via their computers, the context differs for each of them. A 9:00 a.m. conference in New York may be a 12:00 lunch meeting for the San Franciscans attending via the Internet; telecommuters from home may even attend their meetings via laptop computer from the comfort of their beds. The only shared aspect of context, in this sense, is the link via computer.

But time and place, while fixed in reality, are flexible and fluid in cyberspace, and chat participants can agree to imagine any context they choose. In a multi-user domain (MUD), especially in one that is object-oriented (MOO), the creation of context is part of the game, and users construct worlds as wild as their imaginations will allow. Even in private chats, users are free to imagine themselves physically together at a particular place and time, which they may describe to one another and attempt to interact within. Kate Bornstein and Caitlin Sullivan provide excellent textual examples of such adult play in their novel Nearly Roadkill: an Infobahn Erotic Adventure. In a private chat room with a James Bond theme, two users interact under appropriate aliases in a manner influenced by the context of such a setting:

But what is one to make of Jacobson’s second sense of context, of the "cognitive dimension" which refers to the "concepts, beliefs, and values in terms of which people behave, as well as interpret, their actions and those of others"? To anthropological ears, it sounds suspiciously like a definition for "culture". But the two are not the same, for contexts shift situationally while cultures shift only over time. Jacobson’s definition merely points out the fact that it is culture which determines situationally correct behavior within any particular context; since the Internet is used by people around globe, it is, in this sense, unavoidably multi-contextual. It is important to point out, however, that while the Internet may be used by people from a variety of cultures all over the world, it has been accused of becoming a kind of "monoculture" with a distinctly Euro-American, capitalist/industrialist bias. And while Internet technology has penetrated virtually every corner of the globe, the people that have access to it have generally been those with access to money.

"Contexts," Jacobson continues, "are differentiated by cues. Cues signal the nature of the context and include where and when the action is taking place; the characteristics, roles, and relationships of those who are participating in it; and the manner of their behavior" (1996:463). Cues provided during a face-to-face interaction include everything from tone of voice, body language and facial expression to weather conditions and time of day; all of these are "filtered" out by simple text CMC. Early theorists, using the language of radio and television, concluded that FtF communication has the widest possible "bandwidth," providing human beings with the most "channels" of information, the clearest context, and the most cues. CMC, by contrast, was "judged to have a narrower bandwidth and less information richness than FtF communication" because relational cues such as vocal quality and facial expression which would generally emanate from physical context in an FtF encounter are missing (Parks and Floyd, 1996:81).

In the James Bond example cited above, contextual cues are provided by the conscious choice of setting and the adoption, by both parties, of gender and role-specific nicknames. Individual attitudes are conveyed by descriptive statements which manage to inflect a "tone of voice," and by the use of recognizable, or "stock," lines and phrases. In fact, many such devices have evolved among computer-users to compensate for the "narrowness of bandwidth," or lack of context which might lead to misinterpretation. In their article, "Making Friends in Cyberspace," Malcolm R. Parks and Kory Floyd explain that "because people need to manage uncertainty and develop rapport, they will adapt the textual cues to meet their needs when faced with a channel that does not carry visual and aural cues. . . Time is the key element in this adaptation" (Parks and Floyd, 1996:82). Sean Rintel and Jeffery Pittam agree that "given sufficient time, users may adapt the communication channels they have available" (Rintel and Pittam 1997:508). Safely said, one may observe, from a distance of ten years passed.

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III. Text as Emotion

Relying on text alone to communicate one’s emotional state of mind is problematic; conversation is slowed to a crawl by continual efforts to input detailed explanatory statements into the computer which render the emotional force behind every bit of text. One may opt instead to simply let others read unqualified statements as they choose to, risking in the option a reasonable chance of misunderstanding; the misunderstanding in itself is generally not as troublesome as the attempts to clear it up that ordinarily must follow. Two or three generations of experienced computer-users have arrived at several strategies to convey the intent behind their text.

• Emoticons

Ideographs created with the characters of the standard alphanumeric keyboard and referred to as emoticons are inserted regularly into many exchanges, where they inflect the emotional context of the immediate text. They are usually placed at the end of a statement, or entered just after transmission. Intended to be read sideways, they are "meant to put the verbal text in context: The writer tries to enforce a univocal interpretation on prose that is otherwise open to many interpretations" (Bolter 1996:108); in other words, they are put there to forestall misunderstandings. Emoticons are "literate symbols with no grounding in oral language" (Lee 1996:289). The following examples are relatively standardized, but idiosyncratic ones do occasionally appear.

Emoticons pepper conversations rather liberally, occurring sometimes as "statements" in and of themselves. An individual may type and transmit a block of text, only to rethink its content while awaiting a response. One may then quickly type and transmit a lone emoticon as an indication of how the preceding statement is meant to be interpreted; such defensive maneuvers are almost reflexive among computer-chatters. The two caricatures illustrated above, however, demonstrate the fact that some emoticons are not as emotionally charged as others; humorous emoticons may be shared in a manner akin to the telling of jokes. Of "very little use in constructing messages," Judith Yaross Lee says such icons "offer denotation nearly devoid of connotation" (288).

Emoticons generally allow for at least two interpretations, connoting either straightforward or ironic messages. In truth, they are densely packed symbols whose decoding requires a skillful reading of their accompanying context. A smile may be genuine or wry, or it may indicate an opposite meaning entirely (Jacobson 1996:467; citing Baym 1995; Marvin 1995; Reid 1994, 1995). Emoticons have a much wider range of expression than they at first appear to, being, themselves, context-sensitive. If a friend transmits the message,

-- one can be reasonably certain that the smile does not indicate any real happiness on the part of the sender. Instead, it may be tacked on to the statement as a way of ironically indicating the sender’s unhappiness, or even a sort of fatalistic acceptance of the situation. Taken on its own, then, the emoticon has little that is definitive to contribute to a particular discourse. While it is intended to provide supplemental emotional context to the textual exchange, it, too, must be read "in context."

•<xyz> Expressions

In some environments, words or abbreviations set off by arrows or brackets may perform the same sort of function that emoticons do. They are somewhat easier for novice chatters to use, since they needn’t be memorized or standardized. Their content, unlimited by one’s level of iconographic creativity, can be rather more finely controlled, and may contain anywhere from a single word to several sentences. Each particular chat group or environment seems to gravitate toward one style over the other, depending, in part, upon the computer literacy of those interacting.

• Emphasis

As the following examples demonstrate, emphasis may be added to a particular statement in at least two ways. Capital letters indicate loudness (Lee 1996:291), and individuals who enter chat rooms with their "Caps Lock" on will be asked to "stop screaming." Alternatively, individual words or phrases may be set off by asterisks or other symbols to indicate what might otherwise be a vocal stress.

• Acronyms

Acronyms, too, are regularly interjected into textualized exchanges. Some perform functions similar to the emoticon by providing emotional cues, while others are simply shorthand abbreviations for common statements, having no particular emotive content of their own.

LOL - laughing out loud

IMO - in my opinion

ROFL - rolling on floor, laughing

BTW - by the way

ROFLMAO - rolling on floor, laughing my ass off

BRB - be right back

A brief visit to an online chat room reveals rather quickly that the textual devices discussed above are employed with unusual frequency, occurring far more often than such clarifications might be necessary during the course of an ordinary FtF or telephone encounter. They seem almost reflexive for some individuals, who tack them on to nearly every statement. The temptation to think and re-think the words that have been scrolling by so quickly is fairly irresistible, and individuals who strive for clarity or seek to forestall misunderstandings may find themselves relying heavily on : ) and LOL . Their excessive usage may be a way of expressing discomfort with the ambiguities of textualized communication, of attempting to interpret oneself for others before they are able to do so for themselves. One attempts to assert some control over the impression one creates in a FtF or telephone encounter through the use of a number of techniques that are not available to the computer chatter. In a computer-mediated communiqué, the sender may doubt her ability to express herself clearly in the absence of vocal and visual cues, while the receiver may herself wonder if she is reading the sender correctly. The whole process appears to create anxiety which is alleviated in part by these strategies.

• "Emoting," In the MUD and Out of It

In a multi-user domain, individuals purposely assume fictitious identities as characters in a role-playing game. Some MUDs are purely textual, but some of the newer interfaces utilize a visual environment wherein individual characters are recognizable as idiosycratic icons on the screen. In either environment, there are two ways for players to express themselves: the "say" and the "emote." "Say" commands tell players what a particular character has "said," while "emote" commands tell them what she is "doing." "Emote" statements are not always "emotive," in that they are not necessarily charged with emotion. Often they simply communicate physical activity. In a visual environment, an individual may be able to choose from a menu of options to apply certain physical actions or verbal labels to their corresponding iconographic representations. In a textual environment, if an individual named Galatea wished to speak to the group, she would type and transmit:

Individuals will also emote in this manner outside of the MUD, when engaged in private chat. There, emotive statements are usually set aside in some manner; see for example the double colons employed by "Nitegyrl" in the previous example drawn from Kate Bornstein’s work.

As Shannon McRae points out, emoting such as this allows for an even broader range of nuanced communication than is generally available to participants during "virtual encounters" such as those conducted via telephone or Electronic mail (77). That a textual encounter should turn out to be a somehow more satisfying experience than a telephone conversation is surprising, but may be explained in part by the fact that it is distinctly unconventional for one to narrate one’s activities for the benefit of the individual on the other end of the phone. Generally, we rely on tone of voice or phrasing to provide the necessary contextual cues; the clear exception to this rule is phone sex, where vocalizing one’s activities is fundamental. With CMC, the absence of these cues fosters anxiety.

A textual interface insists that its users be writers, and the conventions of writing, indeed, do call for descriptiveness. Computer-mediated communication makes narrators, if not writers, of us all. Jay David Bolter goes on to suggest that "contemporary electronic writers are not interested in the distancing and ambiguity that prose offers. Instead they want to give their prose a single voice and if possible a face" (108). They are writers, then, who are struggling to assert control over the interpretation of their texts: L’auteur est mort. Vive l’auteur!

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IV. Text as Identity: Authorship of the Self

• Virtual Anonymity

Internet communication allows individuals unprecedented freedom of expression because it frees them of their bodies, as well as their identities. In cyberspace, you are what you claim to be, unless your actions clearly indicate otherwise. And since there is no simple way to quickly and easily check the actual identity of participants, the temptation to fictionalize is great. With most Internet chat programs,

Together these factors create a space safe for fantasy and role-playing, exceptionally popular activities among Internet users. Dinty W. Moore explains:

Even the most honest individuals are encouraged to adopt short pseudonyms, or nicknames ("nicks") online; it is absolutely necessary for accessing most systems, which cannot set aside the space necessary for the recognition of formal proper names. Users assume "IDs" which they access via passwords, and are rarely under any obligation to use their actual names. As far as users are concerned, the adoption of a "nick" is largely a defensive gesture, a welcome protection against the more dangerous traffic on the "Infobahn." The fact, too, that many people flirt or engage in explicitly sexual verbal behavior online further sets the Internet apart as a realm of fantasy which must be kept strictly separate from real life (RL).

The anonymity of the Internet allows its users to be whomever they wish to say they are, to transform everything about themselves, from job to gender, to "experience" life as someone "other" than that which they believe themselves to actually be. Text reveals naught but what is textualized. With anonymity, however, comes irresponsibility, and sometimes illegality. Much has been made in the news media of predatory pedophiles who use the Internet to seduce and abuse youngsters, and of the alarming ease with which one may obtain elaborate instructions for building a bomb or poisoning one’s husband. Irresponsible jokers and outright crazies, as well as sincere libertarians, post freely- accessible web pages on everything from do-it yourself trepanation (http://www.trepan.com/instruments/selftrepan/; website currently under construction) to "cooking" crack cocaine (http://www.lycaeum.org/drugs/plants/coca/crackinf.html), little concerned about the potential fallout. Even the most cursory web search may return sexually explicit or morally objectionable material, posted and freely available because its creation and dissemination carries little threat of legal recrimination. This lack of individual accountability carries over into more intimate interactions as well, since individuals may easily elude personal responsibility for their actions online.

• Cross-Gender Surfing

One of the most intriguing aspects of computer-mediated communication is the "tendency of individuals to assume a gender other than that with which they identify in real life" (McRae 1997:79). McRae explains that, since gender on the Internet is chosen rather than assigned, opportunities for gender subversion are ripe. Cross-gender web-surfing is exceptionally popular, even among "young, heterosexual males between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five. A surprising number of these young men take the opportunity to experience social interaction in a female body" (79).

One may easily imagine why a woman such as Sherry Turkle might be more comfortable online in a male persona, since such a guise would instantly provide her with a semblance of "male privilege" while simultaneously warding off unwelcome sexual advances. What is more interesting to consider is why so many young men are interested in adopting a female persona and posing as members of "the weaker sex." Stephen Shaviro, one of McRae’s informants, provides us with one possible explanation:

But irony wins the day, because "the girls these guys meet usually turn out to be other guys."

Other explanations are of course possible. It may be the case that men feel just as restricted by their gender role as women do, and that CMC has given them an unprecedented opportunity to express their discomfort. The passivity and vulnerability often equated with femaleness, so repulsive to the "modern woman," may look rather welcoming when held up against an equally impractical model of maleness which calls for constant aggressive activity and unyielding physical strength. Even popular wisdom has it that the most aggressive men secretly desire to be sexually dominated -- a desire traditionally associated with femaleness -- and many of us know at least one stressed-out male executive who dreams of the day he can stop making important decisions -- another traditionally "female" desire. One can imagine the flood of relief which must accompany a shift in identity from male to female; for insight one may look to the writings of male-to-female gender switchers like Kate Bornstein.

There remains, for some, the possibility that identifying with the opposite gender online is an expression of latent homosexual or transgender tendencies, but no more so for men than for women. But the fact is that all such identities are muddled when no one is being honest. If two straight men posing as women fall in love with each other online, believing all along that, in reality, they will form a heterosexual couple, then their experience is homogendered in two dimensions (as two men, and as two women), and heterogendered in one (as individual men who believe that they have fallen in love with individual women). To add cybersex to the equation is to invite more complexity than a homophobic heterosexual may wish to entertain. McRae puts it best: "In many cases, gender becomes the effect that one individual can have upon another" (80).

This brings us to the bigger question of why so many people cross-gender "surf" in the first place. Is it simply because they can? Because perhaps the most important and most securely fixed determinant of individual identity has finally been freed up to individual choice, and we are all lining up to choose? Perhaps, in an age of post-modernism and post-gay-ism, individuals have simply grown weary of living in the little "gender boxes" to which they have been assigned (Bullough and Bullough, 312).

• Multiplicity and Fragmentation

The individual computer-user takes a seat at her desk, bringing to the context her identity in real life and the physical reality of her presence; she leaves both of these behind the moment she logs online with a pseudonym. She may interact with others as "herself -- by another name," but at some point may begin carving out a fictional or semi-fictional identity. In cyberspace, she lacks corporeality, so there is temptation to construct an alternate body for herself; since she’s virtually anonymous, she may construct a past, as well. If she enters a "room" or a MUD, she then moves into an imagined physical space. Even when everyone in a room is being completely genuine, the very nature of the Internet makes time, place and space all exceedingly relative; why not agree, then, to settle on one in particular?

One may thusly exist on two planes, in two forms, and in two places simultaneously. The number, however, is not limited to two; an individual may chat with several people in several guises at the same time. Multiple identities may express aspects of one’s personality, or they may be complete fabrications. With all of the usual barriers to fakery gone, it might be surprising to find someone who had never fictionalized their own identity online. Mark Lipton explains that online, identity "becomes fragmented as we change who we are in a multiplicity of ways. How we construct and reconstruct the self very much depends on the increasing number of different people we meet and how they respond to us" (1996:343).

Ron Deibert points out that while modernist conceptions of the self were based on the ideal of a stable, unchanging identity, post-modernism sees the individual as "a historically constituted identity that is continuously being reconstructed." Turkle claims that the Internet has made significant contributions to postmodern conceptions of personal identity as something complex and decentered (1995:20). The Internet, she says, is but "another element of the computer culture that has contributed to thinking about identity as multiplicity. On it, people are able to build a self by cycling through many selves" (1995:178).

• The "Author," part one

Multiplicity, however, did not begin with CMC, for it is already implicit in text. Roland Barthes reminds us that "a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash" (1977:146). "A text’s unity," he asserts, "lies not in its origin but in its destination" (148), which is, of course, multiple. The "author" is but an amalgamation of other people and other ideas, read and interpreted by still other people with their own ideas, and there is multiplicity on both sides of the pen (or keyboard). Even if one is to ascribe an anti-Barthesian level of originality to an author, Foucault’s "author-function" itself assures a "plurality of egos" (1981:130):

Foucault explains that all writing, fictional or not, is characterized by a distance that separates the writer from what she writes; the creation of this distance is the very condition of authorship, and the device which sets up the second self in relation to the first. On the Internet, we are all writers, writing our multiple selves into existence.

It is possible that with all of this writing, the Internet is nudging more and more people to write more than ever before; a nation of authors in transformation from the semi-literate, television-watching couch potatoes we used to be. While it’s true that the quality of the writing can be exceedingly poor, the medium does encourage improvement. Spell-checkers are fast becoming standard in most E-mail programs and grammar- checkers, too, are often available. Those who have access to the Internet tend to have access to money, and to education, so whatever tendency to "dumb-down" may be present is counterbalanced by a reasonably high baseline level of education. And while basic chat can be very simple-minded, context-providing "emote" statements can be rather artful indeed, while more elaborate encounters can be downright novelistic. How far separate are those who go about fictionalizing their lives and their identities online, whether secretly or by agreement, from those who call themselves "writers"? As McRae points out, during cyber-sexual encounters, "the individual must maintain her powers of language at a moment when the power of coherent verbal expression is customarily abandoned" (1996:84). She continues:

All jokes about one-handed typing aside, it truly is a feat of verbal heroism to be able to achieve such facility of words in such a situation. How many Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelists could pull it off?

• The Proper Name

All of these multiple identities must first be named; it is the process of naming, in fact, which draws them into existence. The only name that is forbidden, placed under erasure, as it were, is the originary one, the utterance of which is truly a Derridean act of violence in CMC. As with the Nambikwara discussed by Levi-Strauss, with CMC, the originary "proper name has never been, as the unique appellation reserved for the presence of a unique being, anything but the original myth of a transparent legibility present under the obliteration" of itself (Derrida 1997:109). Individuals protect their names carefully, and the relation of such is considered an index of personal closeness. An individual who reveals the legal name of someone who seeks to keep it secret commits a violation, one which is likely to draw inspired criticism. The revelation of the proper name, seen as an intensely personal and possibly dangerous bit of information, is a serious breach of proper "netiquette."

To be named is to be classified, an act of some small violence in itself. Michel Foucault reminds us that the proper name is " more than a gesture, a finger pointed at someone; it is, to a certain extent, the equivalent of a description" (Foucault, 121). For this reason, the choice of a pseudonym, or "nickname" for CMC is invested with great importance. It is the first piece of personal information that is conveyed to others, and therefore crucial to "initial impression formation" (Rintel and Pittam, 1997:513). In busy public chat rooms, people often decide whether or not to respond to private messages purely on the basis of the sender’s "nick." It is also possible to encode the kind of encounter one seeks into one’s "nick," which is then subjected to contextual interpretation. A heterosexual woman wishing to attract only heterosexual men might call herself "QueenofHearts" in a straight environment; upon entering a gay environment she would be taken for something else entirely.

Derrida might here point out that "nicks," too, are "already no longer proper names, because their production is their obliteration, because the erasure and the imposition of the letter are originary" (109), because they are merely traces of a presence which is, at its origins, absent. Pseudonyms rapidly become names for people whose constellation of qualities do not actually exist in real life. Any presence is illusory, merely the trace of an individual under erasure.

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V. Text As Simulacrum

Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations, published by Semiotext[e] in 1983, brilliantly anticipates the intense hyperreality of an Internet which was in its infancy at the time. While the surreal, Baudrillard explains, is "still solidary with the realism it contests, but augments its intensity by setting it off against the imaginary," the hyperreal eliminates the distinction between real and imaginary entirely. He continues:

The very definition of real, he goes on, becomes "that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction" (146). Virtual reality, a space in which human beings in industrialized societies are spending increasing amounts of time, "has become so immediate that what constitutes ‘the real’ is called into question" (McRae 1997:74). As Sherry Turkle explains, we are "moving toward a culture of simulation in which people are increasingly comfortable with substituting representations of reality for the real" (1995:23). We arrive, then, at a Derridean crossroads, where the representation claims to be the presence of the thing itself.

With computer chat, individuals interact with one another via text, the traces of their respective presence in different places at differing times. For Derrida, text in itself is "a play of presence and absence, a place of the effaced trace" (Spivak 1998:lvii), but CMC replaces the absence with a simulated presence which passes itself for actual presence; a perfect simulacrum where Baudrillardian hyperreality confronts Derridean absence. Virtual reality becomes real life, a fact one discovers the moment one begins interacting with real life friends online. The things one says and does online among people one knows in real life are taken just as seriously as real life actions, and business deals carried off via the Internet are just as real as those transacted in person. MUDs, MOOs, and sometimes private rooms simulate a specific environment and consciously create fiction; while all involved are at some level aware of the imaginative pretense, the interactive experience arouses real emotions nevertheless. Online "rape" has even been reported in cases where individuals have wrongfully transmitted sexually abusive text to unwilling participants (Turkle 1995:251 - 253).

Turkle shows just how seriously participants can take these games in her description of "Achilles," his engagement and subsequent online "marriage" to a woman known as "Winterlight" on a MUD she refers to as "Gargoyle":

Although Stewart, a.k.a. "Achilles," and "Winterlight" have never actually met, they are able to experience together an imaginary event with consequences in reality -- and both have been affected at the heart.

One of the more intriguing simulacra possible through CMC is cyber-sex, described as "lascivious on-line banter, [which] if done correctly, leads to one-handed typing, resulting in a digitally-induced climax" (Lipton 1996:338; quoting Robinson and Tamosaitis 1993:154^§). Turkle explains:

As was mentioned earlier, some people simulate sex while in the guise of the opposite gender: Men pose as women to "experience" sex with other men, women pose as men seeking other "gay" men, and straight men pose as lesbians to attract other women (Turkle, 1995:223). In any event, the CMC environment allows a wider variety of possibilities for sexual experimentation than presently practicable in the real world.

When Baudrillard describes hyperreality, he offers us one possible explanation for the ability of the cyber-sexual simulacrum to evoke a visceral response:

Tactile mysticism indeed, requiring the contact of fingertips with plastic alphanumeric keys; like that of actual physical contact, the tactility of textual communication forms impressions on flesh. With cyber-sex, tactilized textuality inspires "sensorial mimetics" to an extreme degree. The text evokes a visceral response, aided, in part by the visceral aspect of its own creation and, as Turkle has pointed out, the visceral response draws forth a rush of words; the equivalent, one may muse, of a literary orgasm. Perhaps it is a case where, as Baudrillard says, the "very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction" (1983:146).

It is difficult to imagine, without having experienced it for oneself, the popularity of the cyber-sexual pastime; suffice it to say that partners are easily found. Perhaps its prevalence is a post-modernist answer to the dilemma posed by AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases; perhaps it is merely a reflection of the degree to which industrialized peoples have separated body from mind, flesh from spirit. The fact that a mental exercise can have such profoundly visceral effects has already been demonstrated by print pornography, but CMC adds a dimension of interpersonal interactivity to an otherwise solo pursuit -- it’s the closest one can get to having sex without having to touch anybody. While phone sex provides a similar option, it has the drawback of revealing gender as reflected in one’s voice. Cyber-sex allows participants to remain completely anonymous, and therefore invulnerable, having divulged nothing of themselves. Likely this accounts for some of its popularity.

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VI. Simultaneous and Multidimensional Text

• Chat

CMC defies many of the conventions of ordinary interpersonal communication, favoring simultaneity over linearity. Of singular importance is the fact that one can carry on several chats at once on the same computer. In one-on-one private "rooms" or in larger groups, both private and public, users may carry on as many simultaneous "conversations" as their systems -- both technological and psychological -- can handle. Multiple interactions can occur simultaneously in three dimensions: between rooms, within rooms, and between people. A single user may engage in several simultaneous interactions with different people in different rooms, and/or with different people in the same room. But perhaps more important is the fact that, unlike ordinary communication, the Internet chat environment encourages the conduction of multiple simultaneous conversations -- or at least multiple trains of thought -- between only two people. This is due exclusively to the unique temporal nature of Internet chat.

While FtF conversations tend to flow in a nearly linear fashion, where topics are covered sequentially and divergences are generally short, computer-mediated chat can be multidimensional and non-linear. Under ordinary circumstances, an individual types a statement and then transmits it through telephone wires to the carrier she is paying to provide her with this service. The carrier transmits the signal to another computer, which other individuals may use their machines to access. The second party then types and transmits her response. Each chatter’s textual input at any one time is limited to some degree by considerations of time, space, and typing ability, so individual statements tend to be relatively brief. Since typing, for most, takes longer than speaking does, there can be a significant delay before the second party’s response appears on the first party’s computer screen. The delay is often increased -- sometimes considerably -- by the presence of heavy traffic on the signal carrier. In the interim, the first party may have grown bored and continued to type and transmit further statements, to which the second party will need to respond, one at a time. Alternatively, one statement may pose a series of questions that require several different responses, which the respondent must usually deliver one at a time due to computer memory and buffer space constraints. Under these circumstances one often finds oneself engaging in what can eventually become several different threads of conversation with the same person, in a roughly alternating fashion. Some threads begin and are ignored, only to be picked up again moments later, while others go entirely unnoticed by one or the other party. Internet chat is, in short, far more disjointed and multidimensional than ordinary conversation.

• Hypertext and Polylogue

There is, of course, far more to the Internet than chat and cyber-sex; the World-Wide-Web, for example, has fast become an information resource rivaling the Yellow Pages. Following the conventions of print media, screens viewed through the "web" are referred to as "pages" of text. But because the web offers spatial and temporal possibilities impossible with books, textual content is supplemented by hypertext, a term coined by Theodor Nelson on the mid-60’s to describe "non-sequencial writing" (Moulthrop, 1996:237). Stephanie B. Gibson tells us that "any program that allows readers to navigate nonlinearly through a body of text, sometimes a single text, but frequently a database of related materials with hundreds of nodes of text linked together forming a network of relevant material, may be considered a hypertext" (1996:244). Stuart Moulthrop explains:

Hypertext, then, can almost be called "Barthesian text," because it is never teleologically closed; dynamic and mutable, it changes with each individual reading. It delivers polylogue, rather than monologue, since its trajectory differs for everyone who enters its space (Moulthrop 1996:237). As such, it is "impossible to put hypertext into traditional page-bound print; doing so would so radically alter its nature so that it would simply no longer be hypertext" (Gibson 1996:244). The multidimensionality of a web "page" marks it off as something decidedly different from a page in a book: Rather than standing as an immutable object to be taken in as a whole, a web "page" offers the reader a multiply forked path through which to wander. Lance Strate suggests that hypertext nay finally have broken the "tyranny of the two-dimensional page" (Strate 1996b:362).

The practical results of this multidimensionality render the computer-screen equivalent of a desktop littered with several books open to several pages at once, where any one of them can instantaneously cross-reference, pull up and open yet another. Where ordinary readers may engage one text at time, writers and researchers are familiar with the muddled-desk scenario described above. The Internet provides them with access to a volume of information only approached by the best of libraries, while hypertext allows its navigation from a seated position in one’s own home or office.

• Polychronic Time

While absolute time refers to the kind of objective time that is kept by a digital clock, real time refers to the subjective experience of actual or electronically transmitted events as they are happening. Delayed time, which communicates events that have already occurred, is exemplified by the technology of audio and video recording. In an article entitled "Cybertime," Lance Strate introduces the additional concept of virtual time to refer to the subjective experience of time within a framework of a virtual reality (1996b:359). Players in a virtual reality game or MUD fall into a sense of time dictated by the action of the game, just as movie-goers are transported by the setting or the pace of a film; indeed, a film which fails to do so is a disappointment.

One knows that one has been living in virtual time when, after having spent what seemed like only a few minutes chatting online, one looks at the clock to discover that nearly an hour has elapsed. Virtual reality distorts one’s sense of time:

Virtual time, according to Strate, encompasses all other concepts of time, from absolute time to clock time, narrative time -- "in which the idea of time is conveyed through verbal description" -- to dramatic time -- "in which the time represented through performance may move faster or slower than the corresponding clock time" (1996b:360). When one is online, different moments in time may be represented via various hypertextual web "links," while MUDs may offer historically located venues and plot devices. It thus becomes a simple matter for an individual to navigate through multiple timelines: it is 8:15 p.m. on a Sunday night in New York, 5:15 in California and 2:00 a.m. the next day in Berlin, the year 1776 on one MUD and the year 10 B.C.E. on another, a Saturday afternoon in Aruba in one chat room and a Thursday night in Casablanca in another. Who needs cloning now that everyone can be in so many places at once?

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VII. Text as Property

• The "Author," part two: Birth

In the beginning, there was the Word, and it belonged to no one. To copy it was a divine act, to disseminate it, evangelical -- the Biblical metaphor is an apt one, since historically, the Bible has introduced so many peoples to the Latin alphabet. Before the advent of the printing press, manuscripts were scarce, and copyists spent untold hours reproducing texts by hand; the terms "plagiarism" and "copyright" held no meaning for them (Kleinman 1996:67). As Foucault would have it, the question of "authorship" first came into relevance as a legal and political issue, and not simply because movable type had been invented:

In an age of Christian monarchy, somebody had to be held accountable for the production of treacherous or blasphemous text. For Foucault, it was the "author."

Roger Chartier, while not specifically contesting Foucault’s hypothesis, suggests that the birth of the "author" had something to do with economics, as well. In France and England during the 17th and early 18th centuries, a printer agreed to publish a text in return for exclusive rights to the work; the writer was paid a small lump sum. The writer "freelanced," as it were, for the printer, who then owned his work and all the profits he could make it earn. When the crown attempted to limit these privilèges, Diderot voiced one response: "I repeat: the author is master of his work or no one in society is master of his wealth. the bookseller possesses it as it was possessed by the author" (Chartier 1994:33). Thusly was the printer’s right considered inalienable, through an extension of the author’s implicit right to the ownership of his own work. The privilèges of the bookseller could not be limited, said Diderot, because they were granted by a sovereign author. Only later on did this come to have any financial significance for the authors, themselves.

American copyright law seems like a strange beast indeed when contrasted with the older system of privilèges. Capitalist laws are interested primarily in capital, and not so much in ideas. In order to be subject to regulation, a thing must be physically present in a form which allows for its exchange as a commodity. Neil Kleinman explains that text must specifically be rendered in a tangible form in order to be considered as intellectual property, thusly defensible under copyright law. Words and ideas are not physical commodities to be owned, but books are; intellectual property exists only when physical property exists (1996:69).

Citing Walter Ong (1971), Kleinman concludes that the movable type press was an inevitable step for a society rapidly "moving toward commercialism and the values encoded in ownership and property rights" (1996:61).

One immediately recognizes a problem here: Cyberspace is not tangible. Hypertext cannot be made to be tangible. Text on a webpage exists nowhere in an originary tangible form, unless it is reprinted from a book. What becomes, then, of the copyright in cyberspace?

• The "Author," part three: Death? or Transcendence?

Before the "author" existed, manuscripts were indefinitive. They were edited, changed, elaborated upon, illuminated and revised by countless nameless others; the author, true to what Barthes has told us, was a composite entity. Now again, we can manipulate texts freely and without consequence, leaving behind nary a mark of our own identity. The Internet allows its users to cut and paste nearly any bit of text or graphic design out of or into nearly any other document. One cannot alter the content of a posted web page, but one can certainly post one’s own by grabbing bits and pieces from a number of other places. As Deibert points out, it’s a concept that has found a home in popular music, where "samples" taken from older recordings are built up to construct or layered over an "original" composition. Since those recordings hold a prior copyright, permissions must be secured for their use. With the Internet, however, no such rules apply.

Some see "an inevitable end to modern intellectual property rights" (Deibert). In an environment where little exists in originary tangible form, one which is fundamentally constructed around the idea that the user should be able to manipulate whatever appears on her computer screen, there seems little application for existing copyright law. Commercial entities, concerned with the threat of "cyberspace piracy." are faced with the task of re-formulating global copyright legislation if they wish to maintain control over their web-disseminated products:

Discussions of the imminent "death" of intellectual property are only fitting in light of the deceased author of post-modernity; if the author is dead, his rights are necessarily suspended. Barthes has rewarded that death with the birth of the reader, in whom all interpretive energies are focused. But CMC, making writers of us all, refuses to distinguish between the two, heralding the one as the other. The author, born into singularity, dies and is reborn into multiplicity as the reader who writes, the writer who reads, the individual whose textual actions are connected to all others through the networked community of cyberspace.

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•Conclusions•

Writing, it seems, has "spoken" back to Phaedrus: I am no dead thing! it screams, rising from the grave of the author. Imitative of speech it may well be, but it is no mere shadow. For in CMC it fairly embodies the author (Lee 1996:294). Text, having been granted its own milieu and given a chance to prove itself in the absence of overshadowing speech, has risen to the occasion, proving itself to be in fact the more liberating of the two. For with speech, the same quality that encourages honesty -- the vocal cue -- limits choices. A woman’s voice will nearly always give away her gender, but text allows her to hide it. The same can apply to race, class, or nationality. While the conventions of speech require an individual to engage others one at a time in a somewhat linear fashion, computer-mediated chat and hypertext allow individuals to carry on a multitude of non-linear simultaneous conversations, to virtually exist in several places at several times, even at the same absolute time. And while speech usually insists that individuals remain firmly attached to their established identities, cyber-text allows them to experiment in ways never before possible.

Cyber-text forces us to recognize the communal nature of communication, to face the fact that what we write is never really ours alone and what we read reflects a multitude. Speech forces one to take personal responsibility for its contents and must be therefore be censored; it claims itself to be originary by its proximal attachment to its source. Text, by contrast, is characterized by the distance between the individual and itself. This distance, like the space between your home and that of your parents, can be emancipating.

If writing, then, is to be seen as but a "limb on the torso" of human language, surely orality is but another limb. Arms, perhaps, to reach out to whatever it is that surrounds us, to select and shape it to fit our needs. Text must be the legs, then, because it can take us places speech can never go.

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References

Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext[e], 1983.

Bolter, Jay David. "Virtual Reality and the Redefinition of Self." In Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment, ed. Lance Strate, Ron Jacobson, and Stephanie B. Gibson. Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, Inc., 1996:105-120.

Bornstein, Kate. My Gender Workbook. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Bullough, Vern L. and Bonnie Bullough. Cross Dressing, Sex and Gender. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.

Chartier, Roger. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994.

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Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974; corr. ed. 1998.

Foucault, Michel. "What is an Author?" In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. New York: Cornell University Press, 1981: 113 - 138.

Geise, Mark. "From ARPAnet to the Internet: A Cultural Clash and Its Implications in Framing the Debate on the Information Superhighway." In Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment, ed. Lance Strate, Ron Jacobson, and Stephanie B. Gibson. Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, Inc., 1996:123-142.

Gibson, Stephanie B. "Pedagogy and Hypertext." In Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment, ed. Lance Strate, Ron Jacobson, and Stephanie B. Gibson. Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, Inc.,