> Not a D&D fan. But I have spent a fair amount of time on MUDs. Have you?
> I find your remark about "phone sex" rather reductive, but perhaps you just
> meant that as conversational repartee, and you'd welcome the opportunity to
> elaborate on the other social phenoms occurring on MUDs? For me, there is
> a clear danger in assuming that a MUD is synonymous with the media's
> representation of MUDs, VR, and the Internet. Wherein I define "danger"
> according to an ethnographer's agenda.
>
I'm not sure where the media comes into play here, but I agree with you.
Phone sex occurs under the sign of capital, for a specific purpose; a mud
or talker or MOO or any of these other text-vrs (IRC, haven, lorien, etc.)
reflects all of the social problematic of community; there are also auras
that occur around these applications, as contacts are made outside of them
(sometimes they remain a base, sometimes not). After all the research that
has been done on MUDs, say, to reduce them to the level of a phonecall is
absurd.
> You're missing one of my points: AOL is a centralized authoritative
> experience, the Internet in general is not. Centralization of authority
> keeps a lot of people from getting lost. In fact, most people would say
> this is the primary service that AOL offers: "it's easier to navigate."
> The tradeoff for that ease of navigation, is AOL's authority over its site.
> Its usage policies, its discussion groups, its advertizing accounts, etc.
>
AOL is not that authoritative; I teach cs and recommend it for beginners.
It _is_ easier. But authority is easily bypassed; with the expert command
you can pull in any newsgroup for example (it's designed this way) and
there's little problem in using Netscape or _any other tools_ that require
ppp to operate. They ride as satellites.
Alan
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