Community, Interactivity, Anonymity, and Media Theory

The set of pages following are an attempt at an overview of the problem. The literature of both subjects is too vast for more than a cursory treatment, but perhaps this will serve to raise some relevant questions. I take multiple slices through the contents of the net and contents of media theory, from different perspectives, to try to get a handle on the problem; the resulting nonlinearity of presentation is typical of either McLuhan's writing or of Minsky's Society of Mind.

Some of these pages make citations into the course reading; the actual contents of the reader are available only to those who know the right magic word, for reasons I went into in class; those of you who were there will know the magic word. If you have any problems accessing them (e.g., you get an "Access Denied" error from the server), send me mail and I'll fix you right up.

The list below shows some slices through this material; if you start to follow them, of course, you'll discover they the reference each other extensively---most of them are heavily interrelated. You can use this list to sample the smorgasbord without getting completely lost.

• MUDs and a little about their sociology.
• Anonymity and pseudonymity themselves.
• Fighting the last war.
• Media theory aspects.
• Aspects of the media themselves.
• Mergers between media.
• References to non-net resources.
• All of the unbound course reading, including handouts