The Written World: On the theory and practice of computer conferencing

In our culture the face-to-face encounter is the ideal paradigm of the meeting of minds. Communication seems most complete and successful where the person is physically present 'in' the message. This physical presence is supposed to be the guarantor of authenticity: you can look your interlocutor in the eye and search for tacit signs of truthfulness or falsehood, where context and tone permit a subtler interpretation of the spoken word. Plato initiated our traditional negative view of the written word. He argued that writing was no more than an imitation of speech, while speech itself was an imitation of thought. Thus writing would be an imitation of an imitation and low indeed in the Platonic hierarchy of being, based on the superiority of the original over the copy. For Plato, writing detaches the message from its author and transforms it into a dead thing, a text. Such a text, however, can cross time (written records) and space (mail), acquire objectivity and permanence, even while losing authenticity (Derrida, l972a). That we still share Plato's thinking about writing can be shown in how differently we respond to face-to-face, written, typed and printed forms of communication. These form a continuum, ranging from the most personal to the most public. The new phenomenon of computer mediated communication (CMC) appears to represent a dramatic step toward total impersonality. For example, authorship seems drastically reduced when messages entered into the computer's memory End of page 22 are accessed in accordance with the recipient's interest rather than the writer's agenda. But is it true that CMC is a sterile imitation of thought, devoid of the personal touch? Computer bulletin boards, electronic mail, computer conferencing, videotex and synchronous dialogue programs are now employed by millions of people all over the world. Yet experienced users of the new medium usually deny that it obstructs human contact. It turns out that many ordinary individuals possess a compensatory 'literary' capability to project their personality into writing destined for the computer screen.