[Air-l] development of social codes around a technology

Denise N. Rall denrall at yahoo.com
Thu Jan 27 17:04:23 PST 2005


Well, Amanda -

Are you looking at the hacker context - if so, Eric
Raymond explains the history of some hacker words. But
the USENET community, as far as I know, is where the
all caps as YELLING comes from.  Here's some core
(old) documents on the formation of hacker
communities. Hafner is good on the community aspects
of the WELL, not sure about the rules of interaction -
such as you could yell at people in person but not
broadcast it to the whole community.

Raymond, E. (1998). The new hacker's dictionary.
Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

Levy, S. (1984). Hackers: Heros of the computer
revolution. New York, Dell.

Hafner, K. (1997). "The world's most influential
online community (and it's not AOL), the epic saga of
the Well." WIRED May(5.05): 98-142.  She wrote this up
later in a book.

Diana Hacker (yes that's her name) had a pocket manual
on Email style - I own the book, couldn't find it on
amazon.  One of her books is called _Research and
Documentation in the Electronic Age_  It's about
proper email citation but informal rules about using
email have been published in these style guides.

The 'Netiquette' websites abound.  As I understand it,
Brandon Kehoe was the first to put some of the
informal rules into style guides. Finally his style
guide for USENET made it into print after making the
rounds electronically for many years. I think I first
saw it in 1986.

Kehoe, B. T. (1994). Zen and the art of the Internet:
A Beginner's guide to the Internet, 2nd edition,
Prentice Hall.
	
Of course, FAQs were initially designed to help
newbies not mess things up, again from USENET.

Here's another ref on USENET:
Lueg, C. and D. Fisher, Eds. (2003). From Usenet to
CoWebs: Interacting with Social Information Spaces.
London, Springer-Verlag.
	
Cheers, Denise

	


=====
Denise N. Rall, PhD candidate, School of Environ. Science,
Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 
Sustainable Forestry Mentoring Coordinator & Internet Researcher
Room T2.12, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 Tuesdays or Mobile 0438 233 344
http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/rsm/staff/pages/drall/index.html



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