CYBERMIND 199

X Cybermind: Paradoxes of Gender and

Relationship in an Online Group
Jonathan Paul Marshall

Introduction
Online relationships seem to violate people’s expectations of closure or
control, becoming simultaneously intense, uncertain, and fragile. In this
chapter, I explore some of the paradoxes, contradictions, and ambigui-
ties of online life and relationships, with a particular focus on gender.
This paper summarizes some results from eleven years of fieldwork
online, primarily on the Internet mailing list Cybermind, which was set
up in mid-1994 by Alan Sondheim and Michæl Current to discuss is-
sues of life online but which soon became a general social discussion
list—the position generally taken by members was that everything that
happened on the list was an example of online life. This made it ideal
for fieldwork, as it was almost impossible to disrupt the list through
open research.1 However, as a result, comments in this chapter refer
primarily to middle-class, white, Western, English-speaking Internet
groups, and it should not be assumed that the effects observed will ap-
ply across cultures.
Living online, for these Western, English-speaking subjects, is em-
bedded within relations that currently appear to be paradoxical, am-
biguous, or contradictory. Sometimes these paradoxes seem to result
from the medium and the way communication is structured, and some-
times they seem to result from paradoxes and ambiguities imported
from the offline world, or which result from the interactions of the sup-
posed polarities of offline and online. Gender is an important principle
in both organization and the interpretation, or resolution, of statements.
It is a framing that organizes expectations and guides behaviour, and it
too is embedded within paradoxes and ambiguities. The most obvious
example of this is that people often deny the importance of gender in
online communication, while at the same time devoting considerable
effort to trying to work out the gender of others and, apparently, being
worried that the gender of others might not be the same as is portrayed
(Marshall, 2003).
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Often, it is claimed that online gender should both be analyzed and

politically motivated through the posthuman figure of the cyborg; a semi-
futuristic hybrid between human and machine, which is also suppos-
edly postgendered. However, it is suggested here that it is much more
fruitful and true to online experience to examine the paradoxes around
online presence and gender than it is to discard them unanalyzed via
this metaphor.
Paradoxes of Presence
Before discussing gender specifically, it is useful to explore the funda-
mental ambiguities affecting a person’s perception of their online pres-
ence and the presence of others, as this seems fundamental to online
relationships. Online being is continually suspended between presence
and absence and within ambiguities of confirmation. I have coined the
term asence to denote these states of suspension of recognition, closure,
and being (Marshall, 2007, chap. 5 and passim). Let us consider some
interrelated examples.
Firstly, the closure of online communication is problematic. Email
exchange, for example, tends to end in silence, when participants have
no more to say or when email gets lost—which seems to happen quite
regularly.2 In comparison, offline conversation usually terminates with
all participants knowing that messages have been received or acknowl-
edged, even if only with grunts, gestures, or farewells, and participants
can expect to have a fairly good idea of how things have gone—there is
a more complete sense of closure. The sense of reception, or of being
recognized, online is often incomplete, and only a few texts issued to a
mailing list are responded to at all, which furthers the feeling that pres-
ence drifts away.
Secondly, presence manifests only in those moments in which a per-
son emits text or has that text acknowledged. In offline societies, it is
generally possible to tell whether a person is present or not. Online,
there is no marker of existence beyond the act of communication itself;
a person may be neither entirely present nor entirely absent. Even with
a text or graphic avatar, we cannot even be sure if the person is present
when we are attempting to communicate. People on a “multi-user do-
main” (MUD) or “MUD object-oriented” (MOO)3 or chat room can just
leave their terminal to go elsewhere without informing the other per-
son, and it also seems common to find that they may be communicating
with someone else, who is hidden to other participants, at the same
CYBERMIND 201

time—which can further disrupt our sense of intimacy or attention.

Thirdly, asence is emphasized by uncertainty about audience. List
or newsgroup members have little idea who is actually present or read-
ing—most of their audience will never reveal itself. People may find
that other people whom they would not want to be read by in this con-
text (or any context) are present. Other people whom participants think
might be present may not be receiving mail. They may be off list for a
few days without notification or may be skipping mail if they are busy.
Messages to which a response is anticipated can hence go unnoticed.
You may be engaged in conflict, or make a risky personal revelation,
and those you expect to notice or give support do not; thus, you may
feel snubbed or absent, and group community seems fragile (Marshall,
2007, chap. 11).
Fourthly, feedback is also often compromised. In the asynchronous
communication of a mailing list, a person is not able to adjust what they
are emitting according to an ongoing response. Due to this difficulty in
adjusting communication as it proceeds, it is easy for text to be misin-
terpreted and meanings to diverge or for a new subject to start up en-
tirely. In face-to-face communication, we are constantly checking
up—sometimes vocally and sometimes by body language or behavior—
in order to assess whether a message is being received correctly. As a
result, online communication can seem out of a person’s own control,
with their words being manhandled or ignored.
Fifthly, when communicating on MOOs, text from various people
can intertwine on each individual’s screens, and it can be unclear pre-
cisely who is writing what or exactly what others may be reading or be
responding to. This intertwining may be unique for each person, mak-
ing the uncertainty and the interpretation different for each participant.
Lag can also disrupt the flow of response and make it so that answers to
old questions appear in response to newer questions. These factors can
make the conversation seem disrupted and lead to misunderstandings
and conflicts. This can also happen in email, when concatenation of
messages makes it unclear who is being responded to, and responses
can be lost amidst the quoted lines.
Finally, in these kinds of conditions, with no external markers, sta-
tus tends to drift away and has to be continually re-earned and re-pre-
sented, as audience changes under the influx of new participants and
the loss of old members who share the memories that mark status.
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These difficulties could lead to anxiety, as most social being and sense
of self depends upon the responses of others. In another context, Ruesch
and Bateson have suggested that people can feel helpless or insecure if
they do not receive acknowledgment of their messages and that “the
individual feels paralyzed if correction of erroneous interpretations is
impossible” (1987, pp. 39–40). Asence, or this suspension of presence
and absence, is generally uncomfortable, and people work to reduce it.
Methods of reduction can contribute to many online behaviors, from
flaming to Netsex, and are intertwined with the way people use gender
(Marshall, 2004a).
If the idea of asence is even partially correct, then it is improbable
that we will ever have any kind of simple co-presence online; it will
always be fraught. Even if we had video connections, we still might be
subject to interferences, delays, and the suspicion that the image we
perceive is simulated.
At the extreme, the other person may even be some kind of pro-
gram, or bot, such as, for example, the famous “Julia” described by Foner
(1993, 1997), which was helped in its realism by online vaguenesses.
Foner writes that “the deliberate blurriness of the boundaries both en-
hances Julia’s effectiveness and makes her operation possible” (Foner,
1993). Interestingly, the bot’s gender, and its concern with gender, seemed
important to the programmer’s concerns to make it realistic. Julia was
programmed to guess people’s gender from their names and was also
programmed to strongly declare that she was female. For example, she
“appears to be premenstrual, or to mention her period in some way,
about two days a month.” The real people online seem to treat her as a
gendered and sexual being as a result. Foner remarks, “A large percent-
age of Julia’s code deals with detecting and deflecting passes.” One ex-
ample he gives of interaction with Julia features a man demanding that
she take off her clothes. “Julia gets a lot of this kind of ‘attention,’” (Foner
1993), and the most well-known example of the bot in sustained inter-
action centers on a man’s persistent attempts to pick her up, which says
something about gender and the way that it is used to resolve ambigui-
ties and structure behavior. Rather than give up attempts at communi-
cation, people try sex.
CYBERMIND 203

Public and Private: Gender, Intimacy, and Property

Another ambiguity important to online life, which is often used to try
and reduce asence and to help the framing of communication, is the
division between public and private. This division, although usually
treated as a steady polarized dyad in the West, is more accurately a
shifting matter of context. Often, researchers will pronounce that, online,
it is clear what is public and what is private and then seem surprised
when other people define things differently.4
As well as the ambiguity being important online, it is also impor-
tant offline in the formation of information capitalism. For example, in
the offline world, people can dispute whether the actions of a private
company dealing with the government are of public concern and thus
open to criticism in the public domain or whether the connection should
be protected by defamation laws and privacy agreements.
Legal theorist James Boyle (1996), among others, argues that, under
current information capitalism, there are constant collisions between
concepts of the public sphere of largely unconstrained and uncharged
information exchange and ideas of private intellectual property and
copyright. Boyle claims that what he calls “the romantic notion of the
author” is central to the way the system works, as the author stands
between these problematic public and private realms, “giving new ideas
to the society at large and being granted in return a limited right of
private property in the artifact he or she has created” (1996, p. xxii).
This claim of authorship and origination acts to suppress any claims
made by sources, context, and audience. It is even used to give employ-
ers the right to strip the ownership implied by creation from their em-
ployees. As it is impossible not to use the public domain of prior ideas
and discoveries to create, this regime inevitably creates paradoxes. A
central contradiction of modern capitalism is that wide, free (or easy)
public distribution is essential for the movement and development of
knowledge, while constraint is necessary for private profit.
The public/private distinction is not just important for property and
space, but also surfaces continually in the agitation for protection of
privacy against the accumulation of digital records. In some ways, this
focuses on the most influential virtual body we have,5 namely, the al-
most invisible records compiled on us by corporations and governments,
which can affect how we are treated as much as our real body does and
which is exploited in identity theft.
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The category of the public is intertwined with our ideas of gender

and of being oneself. The public tends to be classified as male, the place
of social action, artificiality, attack, and danger, while the private tends
to be classified as female, intimate, genuine, and, ideally, protected
(Strathern, 1988, pp. 88–89)6 Meyrowitz (1985) has argued that new
media/communication technologies often shift previously stable pub-
lic and private divisions and that it takes a while for new conventions to
be worked out. It is also reasonable to assume that people may con-
struct these divisions differently, depending upon their social position
and their aims, and that conflicts over these interpretations may have
effects on social life.
Online, it can seem that ambiguities of origin, present in author-
ship, are more marked. In an email, for example, words written by one
person can be overtly intertwined with another; the borders of property
and authorship are markedly unclear—not just because people con-
stantly confuse who is who, but because it shows that any innovation
arises out of others.
Although people can complain that they might be being observed
by invisible others, they still generally behave as they normally might
in private. Similarly, on lists, the normally private or offlist activity can
spill over into the list, despite the relatively easy provision of invisible
communication. Private offlist mail can be posted deliberately, or other-
wise, to the public list, or offlist conflicts can suddenly appear on list
without explanation. Furthermore, most of the life of an online group
may not be public. The list can be surrounded by what Cybermind list
owner Alan Sondheim calls the aura of personal communications and
meetings in other online forums or even offline, and, yet, all one can
perceive is the public; the offlist life is almost completely hidden. Again,
in offline life, much may be hidden, but we may be able to observe that
something is going on. Online group dynamics are not completely avail-
able for study; they are always gliding away into invisibility. They are
subject to asence.
One Cybermind member described to me at length how their own
offlist interactions gave particular on-list messages different and per-
sonal meanings. Public mail could contain references to offlist corre-
spondence and actions that were either deliberately secret or simply
concealed because not explained. I was unsure how common this was
CYBERMIND 205

and whether it was a personal or social phenomenon, but it seems rea-

sonable to assume that offlist contact provides another context with
which to interpret messages and increase divergencey of meanings.
Given then, that, on a mailing list, there are basically two forms of
sociality—on list and off list—if we take the private/intimate and pub-
lic/communal as divisions that come easily to Westerners, then it is worth
investigating whether the traditional association of women with the
private/intimate (or offlist sphere) and men with the public/commu-
nal or (on-list sphere) has any effect upon modes of exchange and per-
formance.
We can certainly read how the on-list public sphere is constrained
by gender: how women can be harassed;7 how, in many places, women
are relatively silent in comparison to their numbers; or how concerns
posed by women are not followed up as much as they are by men. Men
can take up the public space and set public agendas.8 This does not
seem to be the case everywhere (cf. Marshall, 2007, appendix I),9 but,
nevertheless, it may imply that, in many online groups, women could
well avoid the on-list environment, being more comfortable off list—
the offlist environment being apparently more intimate or private. Sadly,
offlist aura is hard to research. Anecdotal evidence in my own field-
work suggests that most continuing offlist exchanges involve at least
one woman and that intimate exchanges will also tend to involve a
woman. It has been reported from an admittedly small sample that men
can be more open off list than offline when the other communicant is
female (Bennett, 1998); this also stresses the importance of identifying
gender for determining what is private. It is therefore possible that the
intimacy value of being a woman can be exaggerated online; this may
be one of the things that contributes to harassment—men seeking inap-
propriate intimacy from ideal women—but it may, in turn, mean that
males, from these cultures, have a tendency to become less intimate with
each other online. This conflation of women with intimacy and men
with publicity is one reason why it seems to cause more panic that a
man may be impersonating a woman than the other way around, as it
potentially betrays the intimate.
So, we can hypothesize that (a) public and private divisions can be
shifting, ambiguous, and sometimes conflictual; (b) the public life of the
list may be embedded in a primarily female-centered set of offlist ex-
206 MAKING CONTACT

changes; (c) these exchanges do serve particular functions for women,

such as allowing expression and intimacy and commentary on the on-
list proceedings (this may also be the case for men); and, hence, (d) they
effect the group as whole. If this is correct, then we must be aware that
ethnographies could simply be a study of male or public behavior pass-
ing itself off as the behavior of a group.
Paradoxes of Authenticity, Body, and Intimacy
Communication on the list was also bound up in a degree of conflict or
paradox, between demands for openness or authenticity and the kinds
of hiddenness that actually resulted.
Contrary to early expectations that, online, people could easily ex-
press multiple selves in some kind of postmodern manner (Turkle, 1995,
pp. 178–180, pp. 263–264; Reid, 1994), there seems to be a demand that
we are to be authentic (Marshall, 2007, chap. 6).10 What we present should
be true to ourselves; we should not deceive or misdirect. We should be
open and aboveboard, etc. (or at least other people should be). It would
be considered odd for me to write, proposing something to any online
group, that which I do not believe, even though this might be interest-
ing. I might be derided as hypocritical at best. Observationally, people
seem to spend quite a lot of time and effort reducing the anonymity of
others (rather than accepting it), and it seems that gender is one of the
things that people are most eager to discover. This becomes even more
the case the closer and more intimate we become to another. Such
behavior produces problems, because authenticity is not just as is; it has
to be recognized and conveyed. Thus, it is surrounded by the following
assumptions.
Firstly, conventions undermine authenticity. We are caught in para-
dox almost immediately. In this society, as the relationship becomes
important, ritual (particularly public ritual) tends to be discarded as
inauthentic or contrived. As an example, Deuel suggests that prepro-
grammed MOO actions are used less as Netsex or the relationship be-
comes more real (1996, p. 140). The more emotional involvement
increases and becomes private intimacy, the more authenticity becomes
important, and indications of direct typing (such as mistakes) are taken
as transparency.
Secondly, strength of feeling denotes authenticity. However, modes
of coding emotion as being strong can also be decoded as denoting an-
CYBERMIND 207

ger, which can then pull people apart and undermine the appearance of
group harmony, rather than joining people together.
Thirdly, emotions and body states are assumed to be underlying,
irrational, largely uncontrollable, and real. This allies with the second
convention and might be said to encapsulate the psychoanalytic theory
of the id. In consequence, sexual behavior, for example, is usually taken
as displaying something genuine about people. Continued mood, pro-
duced by the repetition of emails with an apparently similar emotional
content, can be important for the ways that people will interpret mails
and interpret the ambience of the list. Usually, list mood is quite frag-
mented in unconnected emails, and, thus, strong reiterated moods, like
anger or mourning, are easily overgeneralized; a whole list can seem
swamped by flames even if the proportion of flaming messages is rela-
tively small. Expressions of grief, through their relative unity, can also
overwhelm other messages to give the list an appearance of unity. Re-
ports of body pain seem to be usually taken as genuine as well, but they
do not seem as popular or as widely taken up and thus are less influen-
tial on list mood as a whole.
Fourthly, secrecy, hiddenness, and unpleasantness equal truth. If you
find something out about someone that was hidden, you are more likely
to believe it. This perception of truth increases with the unpleasantness
of the discovery. Few Westerners seem to believe that anyone is trou-
bled by underlying and secret niceness. As a result, privacy can indicate
both intimacy and danger.
Fifthly, the more private (secret) and close to the offline world the
communication, then the more authentic and accurate it is taken to be.
Thus, a statement has the least effect in public online, more of an effect
off list in private, even more of an effect via offline mechanisms such as
the telephone, and, finally, the greatest effect in face-to-face communi-
cation. In reality, these places could be equally deceptive. You don’t know
that the person you are meeting offline is, in fact, the same person you
have conversed with online.
To some extent, these conventions gather around the idea of the prac-
tice of Netsex, which almost always involves the use of gendered sym-
bolism (Marshall, 2002). Netsex is supposedly revealing—because of its
rawness, and because people’s truths are supposedly anchored in their
bodies—even though people generally acknowledge that it is easy to
fake sex online.
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Netsex is a marked and reiterative communication anchored in bod-

ily response and continued mood. It can help restore closeness when
people move into areas of mutual disinterest. It also reduces asence,
because, as it is not possible to simply be together online, you must emit
messages to mark your presence, and consensual Netsex requires mu-
tual emission of messages within a conventional and easily understood
framework. Sometimes, this point can appear to be a good thing, as
when one of my informants claimed that men actually speak with women
on MOOs as opposed to at them offline, because they have to get women
to respond to prove that they are not talking to themselves.
An obvious contradiction about Netsex arises in claims by some List
members (and academics) that, on the one hand, Netsex is safe sex and
frees people of physical restraints and the demands of beauty, while
also being therapeutic, and, on the other, equally strong claims by other
members that Netsex can be emotionally devastating and can involve
exposure, betrayal, the transfer of computer viruses, or being trapped
in fantasy. Similarly, there were interpretive disputes as to whether be-
ing married and having Netsex with someone other than the person’s
spouse was equivalent to adultery.
Netsex can be caught in different interpretations of public and pri-
vate and whether it is a game or intimate. It is frequently alleged that
you can express yourself as you are online; however, to confirm this
expression as authentic, it has to go offline (into a still more genuine
private), where you apparently cannot be who you are. Discovering
deceit about the other’s body undermines every other truth that a per-
son may have communicated, and body includes gender. Furthermore,
people tend to use exaggerations, especially exaggerations of gendered
discourse, in order to trigger sexuality, and these exaggerations can be
perceived as deceits and set up problems for the participants around
reality and authenticity. Is your partner really as they described them-
selves in the moment of passion, or are they simply manipulating your
fantasy? So, a mode of producing truth also becomes a mode of produc-
ing uncertainty.11
Paradoxes of Online Community
Community is not so much a thing but a term with political and social
import that carries ideals of legitimacy. It is, as a result, more interesting
to look at how the term is used and recognized in a situation, or among
CYBERMIND 209

a group, than it is to try and identify its characteristics (Marshall, 2007,

chap. 11).
On Cybermind, it seemed that a sense of what people called com-
munity was built up, partially at least, by the redundant off-topic emails
that rendered the list more personal. In this case, expressing the per-
sonal was identified with constituting the communal—as the personal
is more real by convention. However, the off-topic emails that built this
sense of community and belonging could also drive people away by
swamping emails dealing with the topic for which they had joined the
list. Another paradox that arose was that the stronger the personal ties
between people became, then the more those ties tended to go off list,
thus removing the posts that gave presence to the list and displayed its
conviviality. In a way, the list itself can become asent through personal
intimacy. Also, intimacy might lead to people leaving the list after they
have broken up with each other.
Increased levels of off-topic and offlist emails could also make it
hard for new members to understand the relationships between people,
and the content of these messages could often require knowledge of
previous encounters to interpret; thus, the list becomes unwelcoming.
Thus, a technique that generates feelings of closeness in a group can
make it hard to maintain levels of membership, especially given that
people continually drop out. Nothing forces people to stay on or be in-
volved with a group.
As well, a very small proportion of the group was responsible for
most of the emails to the group. This has been true of every mailing list
I have been on and is generally necessary. If even half of a list of three
hundred people posts once a day, the list would become unreadable.
Therefore, there was a constant tension between stated desires for every
list member to participate and the need to keep the list traffic at a man-
ageable level. High volume might indicate community and activity, but
it would also lead to people skipping emails and missing much of what
was going on, thus fragmenting people’s contact with the group and
diminishing their understanding of what was happening. It could also
result in people leaving the list, as they could not cope with the volume.
We might say that maintenance of an open online community involves
voluntary suppression of most people’s expression.
210 MAKING CONTACT

Attempts to build a space for authentic, free, and friendly discus-

sion also increased the need for some kind of social control and regula-
tion to remove obstacles and disruptions to this discussion. Regulation,
as pointed out earlier, contradicts valued ideas of authenticity, and these
attempts at control frequently resulted in flame wars. It proved difficult
for the moderator to act as arbitrator in disputes or to prevent flames
without starting further flame wars, provoking people to leave in pro-
test, producing splinter lists, or increasing the difference between those
on opposing sides and thus lowering the chance of free and friendly
discussion, which was supposedly the aim. People also tend to inter-
pret what is aggressive behavior or flaming differently (and this differ-
ence of interpretation can be gendered), and lists can frequently be
disrupted by arguments as to whether an argument is happening.
Flame wars tended to cluster around external world fractures (such
as politics, gender, race, nationality, and so on), which were often used
to interpret what was going on or what people were writing. These in-
terpretations did not always seem relevant to what people were trying
to say. External world identity factors often overpowered any sense of
identity as an Internet grouping—perhaps because it is hard to build up
group identity as an Internet group through acting in relation to other
such groups. To some extent, it can be alleged that flames arise in many
cases, not because of people’s anonymity or lack of responsibility but
because of asence. A flame guarantees a response, and thus confirms
that you exist and have presence, and encourages exaggeration. Para-
doxically, such exaggeration can lead to a greater sense of involvement
for some people in the group, at the same time as the bonds that main-
tain the group may be being destroyed for others. Such wars do not
require that people are naturally aggressive; the situation merely mag-
nifies the possibility of such a response.
The sense of the group as community, with a group style and with a
status or popularity hierarchy reflected in the visibility of persons, needs
continual prestation, as it only exists in this prestation—so the group as
a whole is also asent. An influx of new members can change the group
identity, as they would not be aware of this identity or the ways it is
maintained. They might post in unusual ways on different topics and in
great volume (inappropriate to their status as newcomers) and cause
other, more established members to leave or to go no-mail. In other
CYBERMIND 211

words, if the list is welcoming, then the new members can disrupt its
functioning simply by participating.
Conclusion
Presence online is asent and bound up with uncertainties, suspensions,
ambiguities, and paradox, which can rarely be resolved, even though
people continually attempt it. This chapter has briefly looked at some of
the ways these ambiguities constrain, enliven, and threaten online life.
Particular forms of category important to online life have been shown
to include the distinctions between public and private, authenticity and
deceit, and the categories of gender and community. The shifting and
unstable divisions for public and private also govern some of the para-
doxes of modern information capitalism and so must be expected to
produce problems online.
Demands for authenticity, usually tied to the offline body, override
acceptance of multiplicity, especially when it is necessary to show inti-
macy. The conventions surrounding authenticity undermine the attempts
to find it. Attempts to identify offline gender are common in these situ-
ations, especially when intimacy is involved, but are often fraught.
Netsex is another way of reducing ambiguities of presence and sustain-
ing relationships, but it too is caught up in paradoxes. Gendered char-
acteristics can be exaggerated to generate the sexual tensions that build
gendered intimacies and a sense of mutual presence and reference, while
these exaggerations are also recognized and negotiated as deletions of
presence or even as betrayal.
It is not clear, at this stage, whether these paradoxes arise from the
structures of communication online or from lack of familiarity with the
medium or whether they derive from artificial or incoherent opposi-
tions, such as public and private or offline and online, which, rather
than being complete oppositions, shade into one another. However, ex-
ploring the way these category borders are used would seem more in-
teresting than transcending them as hybrids or as cyborgs. I hope a word
like asence, which draws attention to the process of boundary uncer-
tainty, of suspension and oscillation, without attempting to bridge them,
and which leaves the categories with the force that they have, is more
profitable and truer to online experience than smoothing them over or
proclaiming that they no longer exist.
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Chapter Summary
• Presence online is asent and bound up with uncertainties,
suspensions, ambiguities, and paradox, which can rarely be
resolved, even though people continually attempt it.

• Attempts to identify offline gender are common in these

situations, especially when intimacy is involved, but are often
fraught.

• It is not clear whether these paradoxes arise from the structures

of communication online or from lack of familiarity with the
medium or whether they derive from artificial or incoherent
oppositions, such as public and private or offline and online.

Recommended Reading
Any of the references below provide a good overview.
Notes
1 As always, thanks go to the members of the list who have not only patiently engaged
with these various projects but have also contributed to them—particularly the list
owner, Alan Sondheim, who has been engaged in productively theorising the
Internet for a long time. It is of the nature of such work that it is hard to disentangle
what emerges from myself and what emerges from other list members. However,
the inaccuracies always remain mine.
2 Langa (2004) reports sending out bulk emails to people who had volunteered to
respond to him and suggests that up to 40% of emails could get lost. Despite
reservations as to how this result might affect more normal personal emails, it is
still suggestive of how spam filters, faulty systems, and lack of response can affect
personal communication.
3 I’m using the term MOO to refer to all derivatives and varieties of MUDs, simply
because I have more experience with them. A MOO can be defined as a way of
communicating with others over the Internet that resembles an interconnected set
of spaces that is set up on a single computer. In a MOO environment, people tend
to construct and play characters and are eventually able to build rooms and objects
with properties. Communication tends to be synchronous and unarchived, so it is
not usually possible to access conversations that occurred while you were not there.
4 This division is frequently a matter of debate on the Association of Internet
Researchers Mailing List. Although the code of ethics promulgated by the association
treats these issues carefully, there always seem to be researchers who claim that
CYBERMIND 213

anything that can be found on the Web, or even in an open mailing list, is in the
public domain and should be quotable. Some of these researchers appear to claim
that, if people who use the Internet do not realise this, then they are foolish, rather
than that they are using a different criteria of public and private or that the issue is
complex.
5 The term virtual also incorporates contradiction. It is primarily used to refer to
simulations and hence has the connotations of being both powerful (even numinous)
and a lesser replacement. This ambiguity is important to its use, although it is rarely
stated explicitly. In its secondary meaning of online, as in virtual communities, the
paradoxical connotations remain similar, with the groupings sometimes being seen
as lesser in some way to offline groupings and sometimes as more intimate, rather
than just different.
6 Strathern (1988) sees the domestic as “infantile,” but it is more likely connected
with a need to protect intimacy and gentleness from potentially hostile strangers.
She appears to be polarizing, making one side good and the other bad, rather than
perceiving counterpositions, where sometimes one is good and sometimes bad,
depending on situation.
7 Although female list members often reported harassment off Cybermind, the
reported incidence of harassment by other Cybermind members was not large,
and, when it did occur, it was universally condemned. However, I do know some
cases in which offlist behaviour by some males was considered threatening, but
these were harder to act upon, as they were largely ambiguous. The behaviour
reported to me was unusual, such as a man showing knowledge of the woman’s
life in other Internet forums, rather than overtly sexual or violent. However, it was
the unusualness, together with problems of interpreting the behaviour, that made
it threatening. Sometimes, people might argue about who was approaching whom
sexually—in which case, the standard list response was uncertainty and a refusal
by most members to take sides. In other cases, the harassment came from people
who read but did not interact on list and who seemed to misplace their familiarity
with reading someone as a mutual familiarity. To some extent, such events arise
from, or are aggravated by, asence.
8 See, in particular, the work of Susan Herring (1993, 1994a, 1994b, 1996, 1999, 2000).
9 Alexanne Don (forthcoming) will significantly disagree with my interpretation of
statistics for Cybermind in a forthcoming special issue of the Transforming Cultures
eJournal, on online gender.
10 Even meanings tended to be imposed and singular. In a list in which the postmodern
uncertainty of the text was held as a given, it was interesting how often people
were convinced that a post to Cybermind had one clear meaning alone or that, if
they were read in a way that they had not expected, their words were being
deliberately distorted.
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11 In Marshall (2004b) I discuss how treating gender as a polarity can ‘ghost’ experience
and cause further anxieties and problems around authenticity and the imagining
of bodies.

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