Cybering Submissions Appeal

     Stand-alone articles, including essays, rants, theories, or confessions are welcome.
You can also create a short post of a few paragraphs about online culture, with or without links to related sites that can be submitted to be added to the weblog (the dated content on the front page).  For both types of submissions, you can choose your own degree of anonymity or crediting, including a link to your own webpage.

     If you're part of a chat, mailing list, discussion group, webring etc. community, I'd be very interested in some writings from the viewpoint of a participants' experience of community formation, cohesion, and fragmentation. I was especially interested in the spinoff of a sysops-nostalgia discussion on weblogs reborn... all these people with their homemade, patched-together systems, pre-the hype and money culture of the net.

how has your participation in online communities changed over time?
how has running a site affected your life?
what sorts of relationship dynamics have you observed online and how do they play out?
has your gender, race, or culture impeded, helped, or been irrelevent to your experience?
have you found yourself needing different computers for different tasks or mindsets?
how do you participate-- chat? mailing lists? surfing? weblogging? feedback to online magazines?
How has your level of technical expertise affected what you do online?
Have you subscribed to any porn paysites?
Have you experimented with alter personae, anonymity?
have you gotten paranoid or really into privacy issues?
 
 

All of these ideas need more thought and better expression; most people who run sites have touched upon them in their own work.. so I'm offering a forum for us to share.

Accounts by people who run popular websites about their privacy and fans.
Textimonials by people who have many different computers for different uses.
People who have run a bulletin board.
Anyone who has become a major player in a given chatroom or channel.
Anyone who believes they are superlative at cybersex and can show or tell why.
Anyone who has firewalls and dummy email accounts and privacy software up the wazoo.
Women working in programming, software development, systems administration or with their own companies.
Converted technophobes.
Former technophiles.
People who have multiple cellphones, voicemail, pagers, palm pilots.
People who spend more than 5 hours a day chatting, gaming, surfing.