text:
A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community
by Howard Rheingold June 1992
Source: EFF.org Slice of Life
Note: In 1988, _Whole Earth Review_ published my article, "Virtual
Communities." Four years later, I reread it and realized that I had
learned a few things, and that the world I was observing had changed.
So I rewrote it. The original version is available on the WELL as
Portions of this will appear in "Globalizing Networks: Computers and International Communication," edited by Linda Harasim and Jan Walls for MIT press. Portions of this will appear in "Virtual Communities," by Howard Rheingold, Addison-Wesley. Portions of this may find their way into Whole Earth Review.
This is a world-readable file, and I think these are important issues; encourage distribution, but I do ask for fair use: Don't remove my name from my words when you quote or reproduce them, don't change them, and don't impair my ability to make a living with them. Howard Rheingold]]]
I'm a writer, so I spend a lot of time alone in a room with my words and my thoughts. On occasion, I venture outside to interview people or to find information. After work, I reenter the human community, via my family, my neighborhood, my circle of acquaintances. But that regime left me feeling isolated and lonely during the working day, with few opportunities to expand my circle of friends. For the past seven years, however, I have participated in a wide-ranging, intellectually stimulating, professionally rewarding, sometimes painful, and often intensely emotional ongoing interchange with dozens of new friends, hundreds of colleagues, thousands of acquaintances. And I still spend many of my days in a room, physically isolated. My mind, however, is linked with a worldwide collection of like-minded (and not so like- minded) souls: My virtual community.
Virtual communities emerged from a surprising intersection of humanity and technology. When the ubiquity of the world telecommunications network is combined with the information-structuring and storing capabilities of computers, a new communication medium becomes possible. As we've learned from the history of the telephone, radio, television, people can adopt new communication media and redesign their way of life with surprising rapidity. Computers, modems, and communication networks furnish the technological infrastructure of computer-mediated communication (CMC); cyberspace is the conceptual space where words and human relationships, data and wealth and power are manifested by people using CMC technology; virtual communities are cultural aggregations that emerge when enough people bump into each other often enough in cyberspace.
A virtual community as they exist today is a group of people who may or may not meet one another face to face, and who exchange words and ideas through the mediation of computer bulletin boards and networks. In cyberspace, we chat and argue, engage in intellectual intercourse, perform acts of commerce, exchange knowledge, share emotional support, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, find friends and lose them, play games and metagames, flirt, create a little high art and a lot of idle talk. We do everything people do when people get together, but we do it with words on computer screens, leaving our bodies behind. Millions of us have already built communities where our identities commingle and interact electronically, independent of local time or location. The way a few of us live now might be the way a larger population will live, decades hence.
The pioneers are still out there exploring the frontier, the borders of the domain have yet to be determined, or even the shape of it, or the best way to find one's way in it. But people are using the technology of computer-mediated communications CMC technology to do things with each other that weren't possible before. Human behavior in cyberspace, as we can observe it and participate in it today, is going to be a crucially important factor. The ways in which people use CMC always will be rooted in human needs, not hardware or software.
If the use of virtual communities turns out to answer a deep and compelling need in people, and not just snag onto a human foible like pinball or pac-man, today's small online enclaves may grow into much larger networks over the next twenty years. The potential for social change is a side-effect of the trajectory of telecommunications and computer industries, as it can be forecast for the next ten years. This odd social revolution -- communities of people who may never or rarely meet face to face -- might piggyback on the technologies that the biggest telecommunication companies already are planning to install over the next ten years.
It is possible that the hardware and software of a new global telecommunications infrastructure, orders of magnitude more powerful than today's state of the art, nowamoving from the laboratories to the market, will expand the reach of this spaceless place throughout the 1990s to a much wider population than today's hackers, technologists, scholars, students, and enthusiasts. The age of the online pioneers will end soon, and the cyberspace settlers will come en-masse. Telecommuters who might have thought they were just working from home and avoiding one day of gridlock on the freeway will find themselves drawn into a whole new society. Students and scientists are already there, artists have made significant inroads, librarians and educators have their own pioneers as well, and political activists of all stripes have just begun to discover the power of plugging a computer into a telephone. When today's millions become tens and hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, what kind of place, and what kind of model for human behavior will they find?
Today's bedroom electronic bulletin boards, regional computer conferencing systems, global computer networks offer clues to what might happen when more powerful enabling technology comes along. The hardware for amplifying the computing and communication capacity of every home on the world-grid is in the pipeline, although the ultimate applications are not yet clear. We'll be able to transfer the Library of Congress from any point on the globe to any another point in seconds, upload and download full-motion digital video at will. But is that really what people are likely to do with all that bandwidth and computing power? Some of the answers have to come from the behavioral rather than the technological part of the system. How will people actually use the desktop supercomputers and multimedia telephones that the engineers tell us we'll have in the near future.
One possibility is that people are going to do what people always do with a new communication technology: use it in ways never intended or foreseen by its inventors, to turn old social codes inside out and make new kinds of communities possible. CMC will change us, and change our culture, the way telephones and televisions and cheap video cameras changed us -- by altering the way we perceive and communicate. Virtual communities transformed my life profoundly, years ago, and continue to do so.
A Cybernaut's Eye View
The most important clues to the shape of the future at this point might not be found in looking more closely at the properties of silicon, but in paying attention to the ways people need to, fail to, and try to communicate with one another. Right now, some people are convinced that spending hours a day in front of a screen, typing on a keyboard, fulfills in some way our need for a community of peers. Whether we have discovered something wonderful or stumbled into something insidiously unwonderful, or both, the fact that people want to use CMC to meet other people and experiment with identity are valuable signposts to possible futures. Human behavior in cyberspace, as we can observe it today on the nets and in the BBSs, gives rise to important questions about the effects of communication technology on human values. What kinds of humans are we becoming in an increasingly computer-mediated world, and do we have any control over that transformation? How have our definitions of "human" and "community" been under pressure to change to fit the specifications of a technology-guided civilization?
Fortunately, questions about the nature of virtual communities are not purely theoretical, for there is a readily accessible example of the phenomenon at hand to study. Millions of people now inhabit the social spaces that have grown up on the world's computer networks, and this previously invisible global subculture has been growing at a monstrous rate recently (e.g., the Internet growing by 25% per month).
I've lived here myself for seven years; the WELL and the net have been a regular part of my routine, like gardening on Sunday, for one sixth of my life thus far. My wife and daughter long ago grew accustomed to the fact that I sit in front of my computer early in the morning and late at night, chuckling and cursing, sometimes crying, about something I am reading on the computer screen. The questions I raise here are not those of a scientist, or of a polemicist who has found an answer to something, but as a user -- a nearly obsessive user -- of CMC and a deep mucker-about in virtual communities. What kind of people are my friends and I becoming? What does that portend for others?
If CMC has a potential, it is in the way people in so many parts of the net fiercely defend the use of the term "community" to describe the relationships we have built online. But fierceness of belief is not sufficient evidence that the belief is sound. Is the aura of community an illusion? The question has not been answered, and is worth asking. I've seen people hurt by interactions in virtual communities. Is telecommunication culture capable of becoming something more than what Scott Peck calls a "pseudo-community," where people lack the genuine personal commitments to one another that form the bedrock of genuine community? Or is our notion of "genuine" changing in an age where more people every day live their lives in increasingly artificial environments? New technologies tend to change old ways of doing things. Is the human need for community going to be the next technology commodity?
I can attest that I and thousands of other cybernauts know that what we are looking for, and finding in some surprising ways, is not just information, but instant access to ongoing relationships with a large number of other people. Individuals find friends and groups find shared identities online, through the aggregated networks of relationships and commitments that make any community possible. But are relationships and commitments as we know them even possible in a place where identities are fluid? The physical world, known variously as "IRL" ("In Real Life"), or "offline," is a place where the identity and position of the people you communicate with are well known, fixed, and highly visual. In cyberspace, everybody is in the dark. We can only exchange words with each other -- no glances or shrugs or ironic smiles. Even the nuances of voice and intonation are stripped away. On top of the technology-imposed constraints, we who populate cyberspace deliberately experiment with fracturing traditional notions of identity by living as multiple simultaneous personae in different virtual neighborhoods.
We reduce and encode our identities as words on a screen, decode and unpack the identities of others. The way we use these words, the stories (true and false) we tell about ourselves (or about the identity we want people to believe us to be) is what determines our identities in cyberspace. The aggregation of personae, interacting with each other, determines the nature of the collective culture. Our personae, constructed from our stories of who we are, use the overt topics of discussion in a BBS or network for a more fundamental purpose, as means of interacting with each other. And all this takes place on both public and private levels, in many-to-many open discussions and one-to-one private electronic mail, front stage role-playing and backstage behavior.
When I'm online, I cruise through my conferences, reading and replying in topics that I've been following, starting my own topics when the inspiration or need strikes me. Every few minutes, I get a notice on my screen that I have incoming mail. I might decide to wait to read the mail until I'm finished doing something else, or drop from the conference into the mailer, to see who it is from. At the same time that I am participating in open discussion in conferences and private discourse in electronic mail, people I know well use "sends" -- a means of sending one or two quick sentences to my screen without the intervention of an electronic mail message. This can be irritating before you get used to it, since you are either reading or writing something else when it happens, but eventually it becomes a kind of rhythm: different degrees of thoughtfulness and formality happen simultaneously, along with the simultaneous multiple personae. Then there are public and private conferences that have partially overlapping memberships. CMC offers tools for facilitating all the various ways people have discovered to divide and communicate, group and subgroup and regroup, include and exclude, select and elect.
When a group of people remain in communication with one another for extended periods of time, the question of whether it is a community arises. Virtual communities might be real communities, they might be pseudocommunities, or they might be something entirely new in the realm of social contracts, but I believe they are in part a response to the hunger for community that has followed the disintegration of traditional communities around the world.
Social norms and shared mental models have not emerged yet, so everyone's sense of what kind of place cyberspace is can vary widely, which makes it hard to tell whether the person you are communicating with shares the same model of the system within which you are communicating. Indeed, the online acronym YMMV ("Your Mileage May Vary") has become shorthand for this kind of indeterminacy of shared context. For example, I know people who use vicious online verbal combat as a way of blowing off steam from the pressures of their real life -- "sport hassling" -- and others who use it voyeuristically, as a text-based form of real-life soap-opera. To some people, it's a game. And I know people who feel as passionately committed to our virtual community and the people in it (or at least some of the people in it) as our nation, occupation, or neighborhood. Whether we like it or not, the communitarians and the venters, the builders and the vandals, the egalitarians and the passive-aggressives, are all in this place together. The diversity of the communicating population is one of the defining characteristics of the new medium, one of its chief attractions, the source of many of its most vexing problems.
Is the prospect of moving en-masse into cyberspace in the near future, when the world's communication network undergoes explosive expansion of bandwidth, a beneficial thing for entire populations to do? In which ways might the growth of virtual communities promote alienation? How might virtual communities facilitate conviviality? Which social structures will dissolve, which political forces will arise, and which will lose power? These are questions worth asking now, while there is still time to shape the future of the medium. In the sense that we are traveling blind into a technology-shaped future that might be very different from today's culture, direct reports from life in different corners of the world's online cultures today might furnish valuable signposts to the territory ahead.
Since the summer of 1985, I've spent an average of two hours a day, seven days a week, often when I travel, plugged into the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) via a computer and a telephone line, exchanging information and playing with attention, becoming entangled In Real Life, with a growing network of similarly wired-in strangers I met in cyberspace. I remember the first time I walked into a room full of people (IRL) whose faces were completely unknown to me, but who knew many intimate details of my history, and whose own stories I knew very well. I had contended with these people, shot the breeze around the electronic water cooler, shared alliances and formed bonds, fallen off my chair laughing with them, become livid with anger at these people, but I had not before seen their faces.
I found this digital watering hole for information-age hunters and gatherers the same way most people find such places -- I was lonely, hungry for intellectual and emotional companionship, although I didn't know it. While many commuters dream of working at home, telecommuting, I happen to know what it's like to work that way. I never could stand to commute or even get out of my pajamas if I didn't want to, so I've always worked at home. It has its advantages and its disadvantages. Others like myself also have been drawn into the online world because they shared with me the occupational hazard of the self-employed, home- based symbolic analyst of the 1990s -- isolation. The kind of people that Robert Reich, call "symbolic analysts" are natural matches for online communities: programmers, writers, freelance artists and designers, independent radio and television producers, editors, researchers, librarians. People who know what to do with symbols, abstractions, and representations, but who sometimes find themselves spending more time with keyboards and screens than human companions.
I've learned that virtual communities are very much like other communities in some ways, deceptively so to those who assume that people who communicate via words on a screen are in some way aberrant in their communication skills and human needs. And I've learned that virtual communities are very much not like communities in some other ways, deceptively so to those who assume that people who communicate via words on a screen necessarily share the same level of commitment to each other in real life as more traditional communities. Communities can emerge from and exist within computer-linked groups, but that technical linkage of electronic personae is not sufficient to create a community.
Social Contracts, Reciprocity, and Gift Economies in Cyberspace
The network of communications that constitutes a virtual community can include the exchange of information as a kind of commodity, and the economic implications of this phenomenon are significant; the ultimate social potential of the network, however, lies not solely in its utility as an information market, but in the individual and group relationships that can happen over time. When such a group accumulates a sufficient number of friendships and rivalries, and witnesses the births, marriages, and deaths that bond any other kind of community, it takes on a definite and profound sense of place in people's minds. Virtual communities usually have a geographically local focus, and often have a connection to a much wider domain. The local focus of my virtual community, the WELL, is the San Francisco Bay Area; the wider locus consists of hundreds of thousands of other sites around the world, and millions of other communitarians, linked via exchanges of messages into a meta-community known as "the net."
The existence of computer-linked communities was predicted twenty years ago by J.C.R. Licklider and Robert Taylor, who as research directors for the Department of Defense, set in motion the research that resulted in the creation of the first such community, the ARPAnet: "What will on-line interactive communities be like?" Licklider and Taylor wrote, in 1968: "In most fields they will consist of geographically separated members, sometimes grouped in small clusters and sometimes working individually. They will be communities not of common location, but of common interest..."
My friends and I sometimes believe we are part of the future that Licklider dreamed about, and we often can attest to the truth of his prediction that "life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity." I still believe that, but I also know that life also has turned out to be unhappy at times, intensely so in some circumstances, because of words on a screen. Events in cyberspace can have concrete effects in real life, of both the pleasant and less pleasant varieties. Participating in a virtual community has not solved all of life's problems for me, but it has served as an aid, a comfort and an inspiration at times; at other times, it has been like an endless, ugly, long-simmering family brawl.
I've changed my mind about a lot of aspects of the WELL over the years, but the "sense of place" is still as strong as ever. As Ray Oldenburg revealed in "The Great Good Place," there are three essential places in every person's life: the place they live, the place they work, and the place they gather for conviviality. Although the casual conversation that takes place in cafes, beauty shops, pubs, town squares is universally considered to be trivial, "idle talk," Oldenburg makes the case that such places are where communities can arise and hold together. When the automobile-centric, suburban, high-rise, fast food, shopping mall way of life eliminated many of these "third places," the social fabric of existing communities shredded. It might not be the same kind of place that Oldenburg had in mind, but so many of his descriptions of "third places" could also describe the WELL.
The feeling of logging into the WELL for just a minute or two, dozens of times a day is very similar to the feeling of peeking into the cafe, the pub, the common room, to see who's there, and whether you want to stay around for a chat. Indeed, in all the hundreds of thousands of computer systems around the world that use the UNIX operating system, as does the WELL, the most widely used command is the one that shows you who is online. Another widely used command is the one that shows you a particular user's biography.
I visit the WELL both for the sheer pleasure of communicating with my newfound friends, and for its value as a practical instrument forgathering information on subjects that are of momentary or enduring importance, from child care to neuroscience, technical questions on telecommunications to arguments on philosophical, political, or spiritual subjects. It's a bit like a neighborhood pub or coffee shop. It's a little like a salon, where I can participate in a hundred ongoing conversations with people who don't care what I look like or sound like, but who do care how I think and communicate. There are seminars and word fights in different corners. And it's all a little like a groupmind, where questions are answered, support is given, inspiration is provided, by people I may have never heard from before, and whom I may never meet face to face.
Because we cannot see one another, we are unable to form prejudices about others before we read what they have to say: Race, gender, age, national origin and physical appearance are not apparent unless a person wants to make such characteristics public. People who are thoughtful but who are not quick to formulate a reply often do better in CMC than face to face or over the telephone. People whose physical handicaps make it difficult to form new friendships find that virtual communities treat them as they always wanted to be treated -- as thinkers and transmitters of ideas and feeling beings, not carnal vessels with a certain appearance and way of walking and talking (or not walking and not talking). Don't mistake this filtration of appearances for dehumanization: Words on a screen are quite capable of moving one to laughter or tears, of evoking anger or compassion, of creating a community from a collection of strangers.
From my informal research into virtual communities around the world, I have found that enthusiastic members of virtual communities in Japan, England, and the US agree that "increasing the diversity of their circle of friends" was one of the most important advantages of computer conferencing. CMC is a way to meet people, whether or not you feel the need to affiliate with them on a community level, but the way you meet them has an interesting twist: In traditional kinds of communities, we are accustomed to meeting people, then getting to know them; in virtual communities, you can get to know people and then choose to meet them. In some cases, you can get to know people who you might never meet on the physical plane.
How does anybody find friends? In the traditional community, we search through our pool of neighbors and professional colleagues, of acquaintances and acquaintances of acquaintances, in order to find people who share our values and interests. We then exchange information about one another, disclose and discuss our mutual interests, and sometimes we become friends. In a virtual community we can go directly to the place where our favorite subjects are being discussed, then get acquainted with those who share our passions, or who use words in a way we find attractive. In this sense, the topic is the address: You can't simply pick up a phone and ask to be connected with someone who wants to talk about Islamic art or California wine, or someone with a three year old daughter or a 30 year old Hudson; you can, however, join a computer conference on any of those topics, then open a public or private correspondence with the previously-unknown people you find in that conference. You will find that your chances of making friends are magnified by orders of magnitude over the old methods of finding a peer group.
You can be fooled about people in cyberspace, behind the cloak of words. But that can be said about telephones or face to face communications, as well; computer-mediated communications provide new ways to fool people, and the most obvious identity-swindles will die out only when enough people learn to use the medium critically. Sara Kiesler noted that the word "phony" is an artifact of the early years of the telephone, when media-naive people were conned by slick talkers in ways that wouldn't deceive an eight-year old with a cellular phone today.
There is both an intellectual and an emotional component to CMC. Since so many members of virtual communities are the kind of knowledge- based professionals whose professional standing can be enhanced by what they know, virtual communities can be practical, cold-blooded instruments. Virtual communities can help their members cope with information overload. The problem with the information age, especially for students and knowledge workers who spend their time immersed in the info-flow, is that there is too much information available and no effective filters for sifting the key data that are useful and interesting to us as individuals. Programmers are trying to design better and better "software agents" that can seek and sift, filter and find, and save us from the awful feeling one gets when it turns out that the specific knowledge one needs is buried in 15,000 pages of related information.
The first software agents are now becoming available (e.g., WAIS, Rosebud), but we already have far more sophisticated, if informal, social contracts among groups of people that allow us to act as software agents for one another. If, in my wanderings through information space, I come across items that don't interest me but which I know one of my worldwide loose-knit affinity group of online friends would appreciate, I send the appropriate friend a pointer, or simply forward the entire text (one of the new powers of CMC is the ability to publish and converse with the same medium). In some cases, I can put the information in exactly the right place for 10,000 people I don't know, but who are intensely interested in that specific topic, to find it when they need it. And sometimes, 10,000 people I don't know do the same thing for me.
This unwritten, unspoken social contract, a blend of strong-tie and weak-tie relationships among people who have a mixture of motives, requires one to give something, and enables one to receive something. I have to keep my friends in mind and send them pointers instead of throwing my informational discards into the virtual scrap-heap. It doesn't take a great deal of energy to do that, since I have to sift that information anyway in order to find the knowledge I seek for my own purposes; it takes two keystrokes to delete the information, three keystrokes to forward it to someone else. And with scores of other people who have an eye out for my interests while they explore sectors of the information space that I normally wouldn't frequent, I find that the help I receive far outweighs the energy I expend helping others: A marriage of altruism and self-interest.
The first time I learned about that particular cyberspace power was early in the history of the WELL, when I was invited to join a panel of experts who advise the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). The subject of the assessment was "Communication Systems for an Information Age." I'm not an expert in telecommunication technology or policy, but I do know where to find a group of such experts, and how to get them to tell me what they know. Before I went to Washington for my first panel meeting, I opened a conference in the WELL and invited assorted information-freaks, technophiles, and communication experts to help me come up with something to say. An amazing collection of minds flocked to that topic, and some of them created whole new communities when they collided.
By the time I sat down with the captains of industry, government advisers, and academic experts at the panel table, I had over 200 pages of expert advice from my own panel. I wouldn't have been able to integrate that much knowledge of my subject in an entire academic or industrial career, and it only took me (and my virtual community) a few minutes a day for six weeks. I have found the WELL to be an outright magical resource, professionally. An editor or producer or client can call and ask me if I know much about the Constitution, or fiber optics, or intellectual property. "Let me get back to you in twenty minutes," I say, reaching for the modem. In terms of the way I learned to use the WELL to get the right piece of information at the right time, I'd say that the hours I've spent putting information into the WELL turned out to be the most lucrative professional investments I've ever made.
The same strategy of nurturing and making use of loose information- sharing affiliations across the net can be applied to an infinite domain of problem areas, from literary criticism to software evaluation. It's a neat way for a sufficiently large, sufficiently diverse group of people to multiply their individual degree of expertise, and I think it could be done even if the people aren't involved in a community other than their company or their research specialty. I think it works better when the community's conceptual model of itself is more like barn-raising than horse-trading, though. Reciprocity is a key element of any market- based culture, but the arrangement I'm describing feels to me more like a kind of gift economy where people do things for one another out of a spirit of building something between them, rather than a spreadsheet- calculated quid pro quo. When that spirit exists, everybody gets a little extra something, a little sparkle, from their more practical transactions; different kinds of things become possible when this mindset pervades. Conversely, people who have valuable things to add to the mix tend to keep their heads down and their ideas to themselves when a mercenary or hostile zeitgeist dominates an online community.
I think one key difference between straightforward workaday reciprocity is that in the virtual community I know best, one valuable currency is knowledge, elegantly presented. Wit and use of language are rewarded in this medium, which is biased toward those who learn how to manipulate attention and emotion with the written word. Sometimes, you give one person more information than you would give another person in response to the same query, simply because you recognize one of them to be more generous or funny or to-the-point or agreeable to your political convictions than the other one.
If you give useful information freely, without demanding tightly- coupled reciprocity, your requests for information are met more swiftly, in greater detail, than they would have been otherwise. The person you help might never be in a position to help you, but someone else might be. That's why it is hard to distinguish idle talk from serious context- setting. In a virtual community, idle talk is context-setting. Idle talk is where people learn what kind of person you are, why you should be trusted or mistrusted, what interests you. An agora is more than the site of transactions; it is also a place where people meet and size up one another.
A market depends on the quality of knowledge held by the participants, the buyers and sellers, about price and availability and a thousand other things that influence business; a market that has a forum for informal and back-channel communications is a better-informed market. The London Stock Exchange grew out of the informal transactions in a coffee-house; when it became the London International Stock Exchange a few years ago, and abolished the trading-room floor, the enterprise lost something vital in the transition from an old room where all the old boys met and cut their deals to the screens of thousands of workstations scattered around the world.
The context of the informal community of knowledge sharers grew to include years of both professional and personal relationships. It is not news that the right network of people can serve as an inquiry research system: You throw out the question, and somebody on the net knows the answer. You can make a game out of it, where you gain symbolic prestige among your virtual peers by knowing the answer. And you can make a game out of it among a group of people who have dropped out of their orthodox professional lives, where some of them sell these information services for exorbitant rates, in order to participate voluntarily in the virtual community game.
When the WELL was young and growing more slowly than it is now, such knowledge-potlatching had a kind of naively enthusiastic energy. When you extend the conversation -- several dozen different characters, well- known to one another from four or five years of virtual hanging-out, several hours a day -- it gets richer, but not necessarily "happier."
Virtual communities have several drawbacks in comparison to face-to- face communication, disadvantages that must be kept in mind if you are to make use of the power of these computer-mediated discussion groups. The filtration factor that prevents one from knowing the race or age of another participant also prevents people from communicating the facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice that constitute the inaudible but vital component of most face to face communications. Irony, sarcasm, compassion, and other subtle but all-important nuances that aren't conveyed in words alone are lost when all you can see of a person are words on a screen.
It's amazing how the ambiguity of words in the absence of body language inevitably leads to online misunderstandings. And since the physical absence of other people also seems to loosen some of the social bonds that prevent people from insulting one another in person, misunderstandings can grow into truly nasty stuff before anybody has a chance to untangle the original miscommunication. Heated diatribes and interpersonal incivility that wouldn't crop up often in face to face or even telephone discourse seem to appear with relative frequency in computer conferences. The only presently available antidote to this flaw of CMC as a human communication medium is widespread knowledge of this flaw -- aka "netiquette."
Online civility and how to deal with breaches of it is a topic unto itself, and has been much-argued on the WELL. Degrees of outright incivility constitute entire universes such as alt.flame, the Usenet newsgroup where people go specifically to spend their days hurling vile imprecations at one another. I am beginning to suspect that the most powerful and effective defense an online community has in the face of those who are bent on disruption might be norms and agreements about withdrawing attention from those who can't abide by even loose rules of verbal behavior. "If you continue doing that," I remember someone saying to a particularly persistent would-be disrupter, "we will stop paying attention to you." This is technically easy to do on Usenet, where putting the name of a person or topic header in a "kill file" (aka "bozo filter") means you will never see future contributions from that person or about that topic. You can simply choose to not see any postings from Rich Rosen, or that feature the word "abortion" in the title. A society in which people can remove one another, or even entire topics of discussion, from visibility. The WELL does not have a bozo filter, although the need for one is a topic of frequent discussion.
Who Is The WELL?
One way to know what the WELL is like is to know something about the kind of people who use it. It has roots in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in two separate cultural revolutions that took place there in past decades. The Whole Earth Catalog originally emerged from the counterculture as Stewart Brand's way of providing access to tools and ideas to all the communes who were exploring alternate ways of life in the forests of Mendocino or the high deserts outside Santa Fe. The Whole Earth Catalogs and the magazines they spawned, Co-Evolution Quarterly and Whole Earth Review, have outlived the counterculture itself, since they are still alive and raising hell after nearly 25 years. For many years, the people who have been exploring alternatives and are open to ideas that you don't find in the mass media have found themselves in cities instead of rural communes, where their need for new tools and ideas didn't go away.
The Whole Earth Catalog crew received a large advance in the mid- 1980s to produce an updated version, a project involving many geographically-separated authors and editors, many of whom were using computers. They bought a minicomputer and the license to Picospan, a computer conferencing program, leased an office next to the magazine's office, leased incoming telephone lines, set up modems, and the WELL was born in 1985. The idea from the beginning was that the founders weren't sure what the WELL would become, but they would provide tools for people to build it into something useful. It was consciously a cultural experiment, and the business was designed to succeed or fail on the basis of the results of the experiment. The person Stewart Brand chose to be the WELL's first director -- technician, manager, innkeeper, and bouncer -- was Matthew McClure, not-coincidentally a computer-savvy veteran of The Farm, one of the most successful of the communes that started in the sixties. Brand and McClure started a low-rules, high-tone discussion, where savvy networkers, futurists, misfits who had learned how to make our outsiderness work for us, could take the technology of CMC to its cultural limits.
The Whole Earth network -- the granola-eating utopians, the solar- power enthusiasts, serious ecologists and the space-station crowd, immortalists, Biospherians, environmentalists, social activists -- was part of the core population from the beginning. But there were a couple of other key elements. One was the subculture that happened ten years after the counterculture era -- the personal computer revolution. Personal computers and the PC industry were created by young iconoclasts who wanted to have whizzy tools and change the world. Whole Earth had honored them, including the outlaws among them, with the early Hacker's Conferences. The young computer wizards, and the grizzled old hands who were still messing with mainframes, showed up early at the WELL because the guts of the system itself -- the UNIX operating system and "C" language programming code -- were available for tinkering by responsible craftsmen.
A third cultural element that made up the initial mix of the WELL, which has drifted from its counterculture origins in many ways, were the deadheads. Books and theses have been written about the subculture that have grown up around the band, the Grateful Dead. The deadheads have a strong feeling of community, but they can only manifest it en masse when the band has concerts. They were a community looking for a place to happen when several technology-savvy deadheads started a "Grateful Dead Conference" on the WELL. GD was so phenomenally successful that for the first several years, deadheads were by far the single largest source of income for the enterprise.
Along with the other elements came the first marathon swimmers in the new currents of the information streams, the futurists and writers and journalists. The New York Times, Business Week, the San Francisco Chronicle, Time, Rolling Stone, Byte, the Wall Street Journal all have journalists that I know personally who drop into the WELL as a listening post. People in Silicon Valley lurk to hear loose talk among the pros. Journalists tend to attract other journalists, and the purpose of journalists is to attract everybody else: most people have to use an old medium to hear news about the arrival of a new medium.
Things changed, both rapidly and slowly, in the WELL. There were about 600 members of the WELL when I joined, in the summer of 1985. It seemed that then, as now, the usual ten percent of the members did 80% of the talking. Now there are about 6000 people, with a net gain of about a hundred a month. There do seem to be more women than other parts of cyberspace. Most of the people I meet seem to be white or Asian; African-Americans aren't missing, but they aren't conspicuous or even visible. If you can fake it, gender and age are invisible, too. I'd guess the WELL consists of about 80% men, 20% women. I don't know whether formal demographics would be the kind of thing that most WELL users would want to contribute to. It's certainly something we'd discuss, argue, debate, joke about.
One important social rule was built into Picospan, the software that the WELL lives inside: Nobody is anonymous. Everybody is required to attach their real "userid" to their postings. It is possible to use pseudonyms to create alternate identities, or to carry metamessages, but the pseudonyms are always linked in every posting to the real userid. So individual personae -- whether or not they correspond closely to the real person who owns the account -- are responsible for the words they post. In fact, the first several years, the screen that you saw when you reached the WELL said "You own your own words." Stewart Brand, the WELL's co-founder likes epigrams: "Whole Earth," "Information wants to be free." "You own your own words." Like the best epigrams, "You own your own words" is open to multiple interpretations. The matter of responsibility and ownership of words is one of the topics WELLbeings argue about endlessly, so much that the phrase has been abbreviated to "YOYOW," As in, "Oh no, another YOYOW debate."
Who are the WELL members, and what do they talk about? I can tell you about the individuals I have come to know over six years, but the WELL has long since been something larger than the sum of everybody's friends. The characteristics of the pool of people who tune into this electronic listening post, whether or not they every post a word in public, is a strong determinant of the flavor of the "place." There's a cross-sectional feeling of "who are we?" that transcends the intersecting and non-intersecting rings of friends and acquaintances each individual develops. My Neighborhood On The WELL
Every CMC system gives users tools for creating their own sense of place, by customizing the way they navigate through the database of conferences, topics, and responses. A conference or newsgroup is like a place you go. If you go to several different places in a fixed order, it seems to reinforce the feeling of place by creating a customized neighborhood that is also shared by others. You see some of the same users in different parts of the same neighborhood. Some faces, you see only in one context -- the parents conference, the Grateful Dead tours conference, the politics or sex conference.
My home neighborhood on the WELL is reflected in my ".cflist," the file that records my preferences about the order of conferences I visit. It is always possible to go to any conference with a command, but with a .cflist you structure your online time by going from conference to specified conference at regular intervals, reading and perhaps responding in several ongoing threads in several different places. That's the part of the art of discourse where I have found that the computer adds value to the intellectual activity of discussing formally distinct subjects asynchronously, from different parts of the world, over extending periods, by enabling groups to structure conversations by topic, over time.
My .cflist starts, for sentimental reasons, with the Mind conference, the first one I hosted on the WELL, since 1985. I've changed my .cflist hundreds of times over the years, to add or delete conferences from my regular neighborhood, but I've always kept Mind in the lede. The entry banner screen for the Mind conference used to display to each user the exact phase of the moon in numbers and ASCII graphics every time they logged in to the conference. But the volunteer programmer who had created the "phoon" program had decided to withdraw it, years later, in a dispute with WELL management. There is often a technological fix to a social problem within this particular universe. Because the WELL seems to be an intersection of many different cultures, there have been many experiments with software tools to ameliorate problems that seemed to crop up between people, whether because of the nature of the medium or the nature of the people. A frighteningly expensive pool of talent was donated by volunteer programmers to create tools and even weapons for WELL users to deal with each other. People keep giving things to the WELL, and taking them away. Offline readers and online tools by volunteer programmers gave others increased power to communicate.
The News conference is what's next. This is the commons, the place where the most people visit the most often, where the most outrageous off-topic proliferation is least pernicious, where the important announcements about the system or social events or major disputes or new conferences are announced. When an earthquake or fire happens, News is where you want to go. Immediately after the 1989 earthquake and during the Oakland fire of 1991, the WELL was a place to check the damage to the local geographic community, lend help to those who need it, and get first-hand reports. During Tienamen square, the Gulf War, the Soviet Coup, the WELL was a media-funnel, with snippets of email from Tel-Aviv and entire newsgroups fed by fax machines in China, erupting in News conference topics that grew into fast-moving conferences of their own. During any major crisis in the real world, the routine at our house is to turn on CNN and log into the WELL.
After News is Hosts, where the hottest stuff usually happens. The hosts community is a story in itself. The success of the WELL in its first five years, all would agree, rested heavily on the efforts of the conference hosts -- online characters who had created the character of the first neighborhoods and kept the juice flowing between one another all over the WELL, but most pointedly in the Hosts conference. Some spicy reading in the Archives conference originated from old hosts' disputes - and substantial arguments about the implications of CMC for civil rights, intellectual property, censorship, by a lot of people who know what they are talking about, mixed liberally with a lot of other people who don't know what they are talking about, but love to talk anyway, via keyboard and screen, for years on end.
In this virtual place, the pillars of the community and the worst offenders of public sensibilities are in the same group -- the hosts. At their best and their worst, this ten percent of the online population put out the words that the other ninety percent keep paying to read. Like good hosts at any social gathering, they make newcomers welcome, keep the conversation flowing, mediate disputes, clean up messes, and throw out miscreants, if need be. A WELL host is part salon keeper, part saloon keeper, part talk-show host, part publisher. The only power to censor or to ban a user is the hosts' power. Policy varies from host to host, and that's the only policy. The only justice for those who misuse that power is the forced participation in weeks of debilitating and vituperative post-mortem.
The hosts community is part long-running soap opera, part town meeting, bar-room brawl, anarchic debating society, creative groupmind, bloody arena, union hall, playpen, encounter group. The Hosts conference is extremely general, from technical questions to personal attacks. The Policy conference is supposed to be restricted to matters of what WELL policy is, or ought to be. The part-delusion, part-accurate perception that the hosts and other users have strong influence over WELL policy is part of what feeds debate here, and a strong element in the libertarian reputation of the stereotypical WELLite. After fighting my way through a day's or hour's worth of the Hot New Dispute in News, Hosts, and Policy, I check on the conferences I host -- Info, Virtual Communities, Virtual Reality. After that my .cflist directs me, at the press of the return key, to the first new topic or response in the Parenting, Writers', Grateful Dead tours, Telecommunication, Macintosh, Weird, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Whole Earth, Books, Media, Men on the WELL, Miscellaneous, and Unclear conferences.
The social dynamics of the WELL spawn new conferences in response to different kinds of pressures. Whenever a hot interpersonal or doctrinal issue breaks out, for example, people want to stage the brawl or make a dramatic farewell speech or shocking disclosure or serious accusation in the most heavily-visited area of the WELL, which is usually the place that others want to be a Commons -- a place where people from different sub-communities can come to find out what is going on around the WELL, outside the WELL, where they can pose questions to the committee of the whole. When too many discussions of what the WELL's official policy ought to be, about censorship or intellectual property or the way people treat each other, break out, they tended to clutter the place people went to get a quick sense of what is happening outside their neighborhoods. So the Policy conference was born.
But then the WELL grew larger and it wasn't just policy but governance and social issues like political correctness or the right of users to determine the social rules of the system. Several years and six thousand more users after the fission of the News and Policy conferences, another conference split off News -- "MetaWELL," a conference was created strictly to discussions about the WELL itself, it nature, its situation (often dire), its future.
Grabbing attention in the Commons is a powerful act. Some people seem drawn to performing there; others burst out there in acts of desperation, after one history of frustration or another. Dealing with people who are so consistently off-topic or apparently deeply grooved into incoherence, long-windedness, scatology, is one of the events that challenges a community to decide what its values really are, or ought to be.
Something is happening here. I'm not sure anybody understands it yet. I know that the WELL and the net is an important part of my life and I have to decide for myself whether this is a new way to make genuine commitments to other human beings, or a silicon-induced illusion of community. I urge others to help pursue that question in a variety of ways, while we have the time. The political dimensions of CMC might lead to situations that would pre-empt questions of other social effects; responses to the need for understanding the power-relationships inherent in CMC are well represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others. We need to learn a lot more, very quickly, about what kind of place our minds are homesteading.
The future of virtual communities is connected to the future of everything else, starting with the most precious thing people have to gain or lose -- political freedom. The part played by communication technologies in the disintegration of communism, the way broadcast television pre-empted the American electoral process, the power of fax and CMC networks during times of political repression like Tienamen Square and the Soviet Coup attempt, the power of citizen electronic journalism, the power-maneuvering of law enforcement and intelligence agencies to restrict rights of citizen access and expression in cyberspace, all point to the future of CMC as a close correlate of future political scenarios. More important than civilizing cyberspace is ensuring its freedom as a citizen-to-citizen communication and publication medium; laws that infringe equity of access to and freedom of expression in cyberspace could transform today's populist empowerment into yet another instrument of manipulation. Will "electronic democracy" be an accurate description of political empowerment that grows out of the screen of a computer? Or will it become a brilliant piece of disinfotainment, another means of manipulating emotions and manufacturing public opinion in the service of power.
Who controls what kinds of information is communicated in the international networks where virtual communities live? Who censors, and what is censored? Who safeguards the privacy of individuals in the face of technologies that make it possible to amass and retrieve detailed personal information about every member of a large population? The answers to these political questions might make moot any more abstract questions about cultures in cyberspace. Democracy itself depends on the relatively free flow of communications. The following words by James Madison are carved in marble at the United States Library of Congress: "A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." It is time for people to arm themselves with power about the future of CMC technology.
Who controls the market for relationships? Will the world's increasingly interlinked, increasingly powerful, decreasingly costly communications infrastructure be controlled by a small number of very large companies? Will cyberspace be privatized and parceled out to those who can afford to buy into the auction? If political forces do not seize the high ground and end today's freewheeling exchange of ideas, it is still possible for a more benevolent form of economic control to stunt the evolution of virtual communities, if a small number of companies gain the power to put up toll-roads in the information networks, and smaller companies are not able to compete with them.
Or will there be an open market, in which newcomers like Apple or Microsoft can become industry leaders? The playing field in the global telecommunications industry will never be level, but the degree of individual freedom available through telecommunication technologies in the future may depend upon whether the market for goods and services in cyberspace remains open for new companies to create new uses for CMC.
I present these observations as a set of questions, not as answers. I believe that we need to try to understand the nature of CMC, cyberspace, and virtual communities in every important context -- politically, economically, socially , culturally, cognitively. Each different perspective reveals something that the other perspectives do not reveal. Each different discipline fails to see something that another discipline sees very well. We need to think as teams here, across boundaries of academic discipline, industrial affiliation, nation, to understand, and thus perhaps regain control of, the way human communities are being transformed by communication technologies. We can't do this solely as dispassionate observers, although there is certainly a huge need for the detached assessment of social science. But community is a matter of the heart and the gut as well as the head. Some of the most important learning will always have to be done by jumping into one corner or another of cyberspace, living there, and getting up to your elbows in the problems that virtual communities face.
-- Howard Rheingold (email@example.com)


text: FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 2ND WORLD CONGRESS CELLULAR AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Ottawa, Canada, September 1 - 7, 1996 The scientific investigation of any kind of cell, despite the differences in morphological structures, is based on one general dynamic scheme, a common conceptual basis with no separations or frontiers. The 1st World Congress on Cellular and Molecular Biology provided the opportunity for not only a general account of the latest achievements in this fundamentally interdisciplinary field, but also the specific accomplishments of individual researchers. The 2nd World Congress will continue to build on this foundation to correlate apparently different structures and functions with common biochemical features at the molecular level, keeping in mind that almost all living organisms function according to common chemical mechanisms and metabolisms. The key role of many aspects of cellular and molecular biology in processes surrounding cancer and biotechnology has led to a virtual renaissance in the field. Cellular and Molecular Biology is a logical concept, because to understand living matter, we must know the morphological stages upon which various molecules perform. Cellular and Molecular Biology tries to understand how living things work and how they may be regulated or dysregulated. To reach their goals, scientists and researchers in life sciences can improve their knowledge in this growing interdisciplinary field through the 2nd World Congress on Cellular and Molecular Biology. The 1996 Congress will take place in Ottawa, Canada's Capital, September 1 - 7. The Congress will focus on the growing linkages between the various life sciences. The Congress will be organized around a structure of ten sessions of symposia at which all paper presenters will have the opportunity to address the delegates. Abstracts and full papers will be published in separate issues of Cellular and Molecular Biology Journal. Ten Continuing Education Credit Workshops, presentations at plenary sessions and invited lectures by Nobel Prize Laureates and the chairs of sessions will further enhance the Program. For the 2nd World Congress, it has been decided to add a major exhibition of the latest biotechnical equipment, products, services and scientific publications. A social program including several receptions and the "President's Banquet" will round out the Congress program. REGISTER BY JANUARY 15, 1996 AND SAVE $300 OFF THE LATE REGISTRATION FEE. PRESENTATIONS: If you wish to submit an abstract, please contact the Congress Coordination Office or check the "Abstract Information" box on the back page of this brochure to receive complete instructions for Abstract submission. Scientists wishing to present a paper must submit a one page abstract in accordance with the detailed instructions before March 1, 1996 for Lecture Committee Review. If an abstract is accepted by the Scientific Board, it will be published in a special issue of Cellular and Molecular Biology Journal. Presenting authors will also be invited to submit, for "internal peer review", a manuscript of their presentation for consideration to be published in a separate special issue of Cellular and Molecular Biology Journal. PROGRAM: ======== 10 concurrent sessions with a total of 76 symposia are planned. SESSION I: ADVANCES IN INSTRUMENTATION AND TECHNIQUES ------------------------------------------------------ Advances in Microscopy Advances in Autoradiography Chromosomes and Their Replication Cell and Tissue Culture Cytospectral Analyses Immobilized and Reticulated Enzymes Immunochemistry In Situ Hybridization Histochemistry and Cytochemistry Molecular Cloning and Expression Monoclonal and Polyclonal Antibodies Magnetic Resonance Polymerise Chain Reaction Spectrographic Methods SESSION II: BIO-TECHNOLOGY --------------------------- Bio-Computers New Biological Energy Sources Plant and Plant-Animal Transgenesis Antibodies and Protein Engineering Novel Therapies and Pharmaceuticals SESSION III: MOLECULAR CELL BIOLOGY ------------------------------------ Adhesion Molecules Blood Sugar Regulating Hormones Calcified Tissues: Bone and Bone Diseases Cell and Tissue Markers Mitotic Proteins Chaperones, Chaperonins and Stress Proteins Cytokines and Messengers Cytoskeleton Gene Structure, Function and Expression Growth Factors Trophoblast and Tumour Markers SESSION IV: CELLULAR PHYSIOLOGY AND REGULATION ----------------------------------------------- Biology of Stem Cells Calcium Channels Cell-Cell Communication Cell Death, Apoptosis and Anoikis Cholinergic Muscarinic Receptors Chronobiology: Molecular, Cellular and Social Aspects Cytokine Regulators of Infection and Immunity Ion Pumps Glial Cell Receptors Hematopoiesis Liver Cell Metabolism: Regulation and Disease Neurotransmission: Molecular, Genetic and Clinical Aspects Nero-Modulators Neuromuscular System Neuropeptides, Their Genes, Storage and Secretion The Evolution of Hormone Receptors Receptor Expression and Regulation Immune Cell Regulation Cellular Organelles Signalling for Cell Growth and Differentiation Transmembrane Transport SESSION V: CELLULAR AND MOLECULAR PATHOLOGY -------------------------------------------- Retroviruses and Related Diseases Tissue Injury and Repair Biology of Aging Antihypertensive Drugs Autoimmune Diseases Cancer Preventives and Therapeutics Cellular and Molecular Biology of Cancer Oncogenic Viruses Genetic Diseases Lymphomas and Immune Reactions Human Molecular Genetics Hypertensive Factors SESSION VI: MICROBIOLOGY, PARASITOLOGY AND VIROLOGY ---------------------------------------------------- General Microbiology General Parasitology General Virology Sexually Transmissible Diseases Virus-Host Cell Interactions PCR Technology and Infectious Diseases SESSION VII: TOXICOLOGY AND XENOBIOTICS ---------------------------------------- Bioimplants and Their Influences on Organisms Cellular Toxicology Metal Toxicity SESSION VIII: PLANT MOLECULAR AND CELLULAR BIOLOGY --------------------------------------------------- Phyto-Estrogens Plant Cell Chemistry Plant Molecular Biology and its Practical Application SESSION IX: NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN MARINE BIOLOGY ----------------------------------------------- SESSION X: ETHICS AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES ------------------------------------------------------------------- CONTINUING EDUCATION CREDIT WORKSHOPS: -------------------------------------- Ten Workshops on the following subjects are planned. 1. Radioautography 2. Nuclear Microprobes in Biology and Medicine 3. Microspectographic Probes 4. New Strategy for Aids Therapy 5. New Strategy for Various Vaccines Against Hepatitis C 6. Apoptoses and Cell Cycle 7. Securing Grants in Life Sciences 8. Polymerase Chain Reaction in Life Science 9. Alternatives to Animal Testing 10.Transgenic Models in Life Sciences and Pharmaceutical Research CELLULAR AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY EXHIBITION: ------------------------------------------ The Congress will also feature a technical exhibition of scientific instruments, products, services and publications. Booth space rental rates are available by contacting the Congress Coordination Office. CONGRESS ORGANIZATION: ---------------------- Canadian Organization Board M.M. Ennaji, President, Ottawa R. Athanasious, Institut Armand-Frappier, Laval L.A. Babiuk, Vetrinary Infectious Disease F. Bishai, Canadian College of Microbiology, Toronto L. Chalifour, McGill University, Montreal F. Erchiqui, Infocentre Professionnel, Quebec F. Famili, NRC, Ottawa Y. Geoffrion, NRC, Ottawa K. Hamelin, NRC, Ottawa Z. Jafarzadegan, Universite de Laval, Quebec A. Merzouki, B.C. Centre of Excellence in HIV AIDS, Vancouver S. Mounir, Universite de Montreal, Montreal J. Phipps, NRC, Ottawa C. Poirel, McGill University, Montreal S.J. Siddiqui, NRC, Ottawa M. Wegmann, General Manager of Publications and Editions, Paris, France I. Kazmi, CA, Congress Finance Officer, Ottawa Golden Planners Inc., Congress Management, Ottawa Congress Presidential Board J.A. Grimaud, (Institut Pasteur, Lyon, France) M.M. Ennaji (NRC*, Ottawa, Canada) R.F. Ochillo (Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans, USA) International Steering Board M.M. Ennaji (Canada) J.A. Grimaud (France) K.J. Halbhuber (Germany) S.A. McNairy (USA) T. Nagata (Japan) R.F. Ochillo (USA) R.J. Wegmann (France) * NRC refers to the National Research Council of Canada For more information , please contact: Cellular and Molecular Biology 2nd World Congress Coordination Office c/o Golden Planners Inc. Suite 401, 126 York Street Ottawa, ON (Canada) K1N 5T5 Tel: (613) 241-9333 Fax: (613) 565-2173 Email: 74117.370 at compuserve.com PRODUCED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE WORLD SOCIETY ON CELLULAR AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY 2nd World Congress on Cellular and Molecular Biology Registration Form Please retain a copy for your records First Name: Last Name: Title: Department: Organization: Address: City: Prov./State/Terr.: Country: Postal Code: Telephone: Facsimile: E-Mail: Special Requirements: Please indicate the applicable category: Student Fee * Early Registration (before January 15,1996) C$300.00 [US$230] Regular Registration (before April 15, 1996) C$375.00 [US$290] Late Registration (after April 15, 1996) C$450.00 [US$350] Registration Fee ** Early Registration (before January 15,1996) C$550.00 [US$425] Regular Registration (before April 15, 1996) C$700.00 [US$540] Late Registration (after April 15, 1996) C$850.00 [US$655] Total Payment: [__________] [____] Tickets to the President's Banquet @ C$85 [US$66] each * Students require a letter of accreditation from their University ** Registration Fees in equivalent US funds at the time of printing are shown in brackets. The Organizing Committee reserves the right to make any necessary adjustments based on exchange rate fluctuation. Registration Payment: --------------------- Payment will be accepted in either Canadian Dollars drawn on a Canadian Bank or in American Dollars drawn on an American Bank. Method of payment: ------------------ Cheque or money order payable to "Cellular and Molecular Biology 2nd World Congress" VISA Eurocard / Mastercard Account Number: Expiry Date: Name on Card: Signature: Date: Cancellation Policy: Cancellations received in writing by the Congress Coordination Office prior to June 30, 1996 will be eligible for a refund, less a 25% administration charge. Cancellations received after this date will not be eligible for any reimbursement. ( ) Please send me more information about submitting an Abstract for consideration ( ) Please send me more information on the Partners Program Hotel Accommodation: At the time of printing, negotiations with the local area hotels had not been completed and consequently the rate structure is not available. As soon as it becomes available, a hotel accommodation reservation form will be sent to all early registrants. All hotels are within at most a 15 minute leisurely walk from the Ottawa Congress Centre and range in price from approximately C$85 (single) to C$170 (for a two bedroom suite). Please complete this form and return it, along with your payment to: Cellular and Molecular Biology 2nd World Congress Coordination Office c/o Golden Planners Inc. 126 York Street, Suite 4O1 Ottawa, Ontario (Canada) K1N 5T5 Tel: (613) 241-9333, Fax: (613) 565-2173 E-mail: 74117.37O at compuserve.com For Office Use only: DR: Ent: PR: PO: PC: CF: HF: RN: Please share this information with your colleagues CELLULAR AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY 2nd WORLD CONGRESS Ottawa, Canada, September 1-7, 1996 Name _____________________________________________ (This person must be registered* for the Congress and must be an author on the paper) Mark one: ( ) Enclosed is my registration for the Congress ( ) I am already registered for the Congress Telephone No. ___________________________________ Fax No. ___________________________________ Mail Address: ___________________________________ ___________________________________ E-mail address: ___________________________________ Symposium Designation No. Title ( ) _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ ( ) _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ Keywords: _________________________________ *Presenters must be registered either before submitting the abstract or send their registration with their abstract.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
LOS ANGELES (AP) — For its inaugural lunge into the mobile gaming business, Nintendo isn't relying on bouncy plumber Mario or sword-wielding hero Link. Instead, the Japanese gaming giant is looking to its legions of cutesy avatars.
Nintendo is launching the "Miitomo" app in Japan on Thursday featuring its customizable characters called Miis. The avatars can be created with the app using a smartphone camera and then outfitted with virtual fashions and quizzed by other Miis.
"Miitomo" — "tomo" meaning "friend" in Japanese — is scheduled to come to the U.S. and other markets later this year, but Nintendo has yet to announce a release date.
Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America, believes "Miitomo" is app-ropriate as Nintendo's first foray into mobile gaming because it's a socially focused experience. It's also less challenging than bringing "Super Mario Bros." or "The Legend of Zelda" to touchscreen-only devices — not that Nintendo has ruled that out.
"You have your smartphone with you and you're engaging with social media on it all the time, so it made sense for us to go down this path with Miis," said Fils-Aime. "Additionally, creating more traditional gameplay experiences with our intellectual property on these devices is going to take time."
The app represents a big leap for a company known for being fiercely protective of its intellectual properties. Nintendo rarely produces content for other platforms than its own, ranging from the original Nintendo Entertainment System to the Wii U console, which has lagged behind Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One in sales since its 2012 release.
"Miitomo" is the first of five Nintendo apps that will be released over the next year in a partnership with Japanese mobile gaming company DeNA. It's an opportunity for Nintendo to possibly reach billions of consumers. Despite the jump into mobile gaming, Fils-Aime said Nintendo remains committed to creating dedicated gaming experiences on consoles.
"The smartphone device space allows us to reach many more consumers with our intellectual property and to provide them with new and difference experiences, monetize those experiences and have it be an additive part of our business, not a replacement," said Fils-Aime.
"Miitomo" users can add real-world friends' Miis to the app by finding them through social networking apps. The characters will then ask users questions and spark conversations while using the app.
In a demonstration of an English-language version of the "Miitomo," a Mii character was shown buying a new astronaut helmet to wear and learning that another Mii was a fan of the FX series "The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story."
The app's quirky style is reminiscent of the "Tomodachi Life" series for the hand-held Nintendo 3DS system. "Tomodachi Life," which featured Miis cohabitating on an island, was a top seller in Japan but faced criticism in the U.S. for not allowing same-sex characters to engage in romantic relationships.
"Miitomo" forgoes many of the features of Tomodachi Life" and mostly focuses on festooning avatars. The app is free but users can purchase coins with actual money to buy virtual clothing and accessories. The currency can also be earned through competing challenges and engaging in Q&A sessions with other characters.
The app will also serve as a launch pad for the My Nintendo rewards program and Nintendo Account, a new multiplatform system that will connect users across Nintendo apps and systems, including Nintendo's next console, codenamed NX.
"We're migrating the current Nintendo Network ID to Nintendo Account," said Fils-Aime. "As we look to the future with NX, Nintendo Account is going to be the way you engage with Nintendo."


text:
2Laps (Firm)
Pub. Date
When teens mysteriously develop powerful new abilities, they are declared a threat by the government and detained. Sixteen-year-old Ruby, one of the most powerful young people anyone has encountered, escapes her camp and joins a group of runaway teens seeking safe haven. Soon this newfound family realizes that, in a world in which the adults in power have betrayed them, running is not enough and they must wage a resistance, using their collective...


text:
Provide us with valuable feedback!
CPSC is looking for people 18 years of age and older who are willing to provide us with their opinions, perceptions, and experiences with various consumer products through a Consumer Opinion Forum. There is no cost to join the CPSC Consumer Opinion Forum, and by joining, you will have the opportunity to provide us with valuable feedback on important product safety issues. Topics covered in the Consumer Opinion Forum might include, but are not limited to, how you use a particular type of product, what a particular warning means to you, or how a recall notice could be written more clearly.
To participate:
Register with the Forum
While we do collect your email address and certain demographic information, we do not collect your name, address, or telephone number. After you register, you will occasionally receive email invitations to participate in brief surveys. You will not receive invitations more often than once every four weeks, and you will have at least two weeks from the date a survey is posted to respond.
Once registered, sign in to update your registration information.
Receive an Invitation to Participate in Survey
If you received an invitation, participate in a survey.
Participation in the Consumer Opinion Forum
Participation in the Consumer Opinion Forum is entirely voluntary. If you register to participate in the Consumer Opinion Forum, your email address and personal password will allow future access to the Forum. Your email address will also be used to notify you about new questions that have been posted to the Forum or about other information relevant to the Forum. Neither your email address nor your personal password will be disclosed or distributed outside the agency.
No surveys currently


text:
Is it just me or have the subclade names for Y-DNA just gotten out of control? I work with DNA all day long and I can't even keep up with all of the changes, so I have decided to start using the Terminal SNP labels exclusively. May I gently suggest that you do so also?
I frequently receive emails from otherwise well-informed people asking what their Y-DNA haplogroup subclade means, and it isn't their fault they are confused. You see, if they try to Google it, they are often unable to find information. If they try to locate academic papers on it, they are usually unsuccessful. Why is this? Well, the subclade name that they are given by their testing company may not be the same name that another testing company uses, or even the same as it was when they were first assigned it...and, quite likely, it isn't the same as the one on the most up-to-date tree at the International Society of Genetic Genealogy.
I have to admit that when R1b1b2 was changed to R1b1a2, I just started saying "R1b...whatever" when referring to it. Isn't it easier to just remember the defining SNP name R-M269?
For example, if you are R-L21+, then according to Family Tree DNA's Haplotree, you are R1b1a2a1a1b4, the ISOGG 2011 Haplogroup Tree's name for it. At 23andMe, you are R1b1b2a1a2f in agreement with the 2010 ISOGG Haplogroup Tree. If you tested in 2008, you might still think you are R1b1b2a1b6. On ISOGG's 2011 Haplogroup Tree , L21+ was R1b1a2a1a1b4, but on ISOGG's 2012 Haplotree, you are R1b1a2a1a1b3. Apparently, R1b1a2a1a1b4 is now referring to L238/S182! I mean, really, how can anyone keep track? (Ah, for the days of the simple little R tree.) I don't know how our ISOGG Haplogroup Tree Committee* does it anymore! Apparently, the academics are getting tired of it too and it's just going to get worse when results from Geno 2.0 start rolling in with LOTS of new SNPs and subclades being defined.
Take look at the history of R-M222, the "Ui Niall Subclade", on just the ISOGG SNP Tree:
2007 = R1b1c7
2008 = R1b1b2a1b6b
2009 = R1b1b2a1a2f2
2010 = R1b1b2a1a2f2
2011 = R1b1a2a1a1b4b
2012 = R1b1a2a1a1b3a1a1
Reportedly, Geno 2.0 will define at least three new subclades beneath M222, but I hear it may be more. Do you think those subclade names might get even longer?
The R Haplogroup Tree is definitely the worst, but the problem is starting to affect other haplogroups too. At FTDNA, my dad is I2b1. Same at 23andMe. Sounds simple, right? Not anymore! The subclade name was recently changed to I2a2a on the ISOGG 2012 tree. I am so confused! This was one subclade name that I felt very comfortable with. I think I will just learn to call it I-M223 from now on. (I'll just ignore that his brother recently tested Z2062+, which isn't even on any of the trees yet!)
Actually, there is some rhyme or reason to these discrepancies, so let me share it for those of you who have no idea what I am writing about. FTDNA last updated their Y haplogroup tree in 2010 and 23andMe in 2011.* So, they are going by the subclade names that were recognized at those times. In contrast, the ISOGG Haplogroup Tree has been updated over 60 times JUST THIS YEAR! Every time a new SNP is discovered that is upstream of a known SNP (which is happening faster and faster all the time), it has to be inserted into the tree, thus changing the subclade naming pattern. This is why it is so much simpler to just learn the Terminal SNP label.
The ISOGG Haplogroup Tree is a tremendous resource that anyone who is doing Y-DNA research should be utilizing. It helps to keep things straight by giving the various names of the SNPs that are being used by different companies and labs. When two or more SNPs are identical, meaning that they are on the same place on the Y-haplogroup tree with the same mutation, ISOGG shows the names in a series punctuated by "/". For example, let's look at M173/P241/Page29. M173 comes from Peter Underhill's lab at Stanford; P241 comes from Michael Hammer's lab at the University of Arizona and Page29 comes from the Page, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. They appear in academic publications with these names and ISOGG lets you know that they are identical SNPs. That way, if you are Googling or looking for academic papers about your SNP, you know to try those ones too.
Going back to my first example of R-L21+; Wikipedia states, "R1b1a2a1a1b4 (R-L21) is defined by the presence of the marker L21, also referred to as M529 and S145." The label L21 comes from Thomas Krahn's FTDNA lab in Houston, M529 comes from Peter Underhill's lab at Stanford and S145 comes from Jim Wilson's lab at University of Edinburgh. ISOGG shows the SNP as L21/M529/S145. The bottom line is that if you test L21, M529 or S145 at any company, your assignment is in an identical place on the Y-DNA tree, so the subclade name is not the significant factor, the SNP name is.
Of course, with so many new SNPs being discovered and assigned to the tree, there will likely be a certain amount of continuing confusion among those of us doing Y-DNA research for the time being, but I hope you will all consider joining me in taking the next step forward in the evolution of Y-DNA research in genetic genealogy and stop trying to remember those mind-bending sublcade names! And, while we're at it, let's give our ISOGG Y-Haplotree Committee a well-deserved virtual pat on the back too!
The Y Chromosome Consortium (YCC) is a cooperative association of geneticists, led by Dr. Michael Hammer, who first published the paper in 2002, "A Nomenclature System for the Tree of Human Y-Chromosomal Binary Haplogroups", introducing the modern haplogroup nomenclature of Y-DNA. The tree was subsequently revised in 2003 by Mark A. Jobling and Chris Tyler-Smith in another paper, "The human Y chromosome: an evolutionary marker comes of age". Next, Family Tree DNA created the 2005 Y-Chromosome Phylogenetic Tree, which was the first online tree and only available to their customers. Soon thereafter, ISOGG created the first public online tree in 2006. Tatiana Karafet of Dr. Hammer's lab (and others) published a paper further refining the Y chromosome tree in 2008, "New binary polymorphisms reshape and increase resolution of the human Y chromosomal haplogroup tree". As a result, both FTDNA and ISOGG updated their trees at that time. Then in 2010, FTDNA came out with a YCC-sanctioned tree which was distributed at the FTDNA conference and, as a result, ISOGG promptly did a major update to stay in alignment with the YCC. Since then, no updates have come from the YCC. Undaunted, the ISOGG Y Haplogroup Tree Committee has continued to add information as it becomes available from various sources and is now the most up-to-date source of this information. In November 2011 at the FTDNA Project Administrator's Conference, Spencer Wells of National Geographic, Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona, Thomas Krahn and Bennett Greenspan of FTDNA and Alice Fairhurst of ISOGG, reportedly agreed to all stay in alignment with the most current Y-DNA nomenclature to the best of their abilities. As always, there is new research that has not yet become public. As it is released, ISOGG will again align its tree with the most current information and will continue to add updates as they become available. With the upcoming launch of Geno 2.0, the ISOGG Committee will have their work cut out for them! Current ISOGG members who work with the tree and deserve our great appreciation are: Coordinator: Alice Fairhurst. Design team: Tanmoy Bhattacharya, Tom Hutchison, Richard Kenyon, Doug McDonald. Content experts: Abdulaziz Ali, Whit Athey, Ray H. Banks, Katherine Hope Borges, Aaron R. Brown, Phil Goff, Gareth Henson, Tim Janzen, Bob May, Eugene Matyushonok, Lawrence Mayka, Charles Moore, Ana Oquendo Pabon, Marja Pirttivaara, David Reynolds, Bonnie Schrack, Vince Tilroe, Aaron Salles Torres, Steve Trangsrud, Ann Turner and David Wilson.


text:
Joint Statement on Further Restrictive Economic Measures
We, the leaders of the European Commission, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States condemn Putin's war of choice and attacks on the sovereign nation and people of Ukraine. We stand with the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian people in their heroic efforts to resist Russia's invasion. Russia's war represents an assault on fundamental international rules and norms that have prevailed since the Second World War, which we are committed to defending. We will hold Russia to account and collectively ensure that this war is a strategic failure for Putin.
This past week, alongside our diplomatic efforts and collective work to defend our own borders and to assist the Ukrainian government and people in their fight, we, as well as our other allies and partners around the world, imposed severe measures on key Russian institutions and banks, and on the architects of this war, including Russian President Vladimir Putin.
As Russian forces unleash their assault on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, we are resolved to continue imposing costs on Russia that will further isolate Russia from the international financial system and our economies. We will implement these measures within the coming days.
Specifically, we commit to undertake the following measures:
First, we commit to ensuring that selected Russian banks are removed from the SWIFT messaging system. This will ensure that these banks are disconnected from the international financial system and harm their ability to operate globally.
Second, we commit to imposing restrictive measures that will prevent the Russian Central Bank from deploying its international reserves in ways that undermine the impact of our sanctions.
Third, we commit to acting against the people and entities who facilitate the war in Ukraine and the harmful activities of the Russian government. Specifically, we commit to taking measures to limit the sale of citizenship—so called golden passports—that let wealthy Russians connected to the Russian government become citizens of our countries and gain access to our financial systems.
Fourth, we commit to launching this coming week a transatlantic task force that will ensure the effective implementation of our financial sanctions by identifying and freezing the assets of sanctioned individuals and companies that exist within our jurisdictions. As a part of this effort we are committed to employing sanctions and other financial and enforcement measures on additional Russian officials and elites close to the Russian government, as well as their families, and their enablers to identify and freeze the assets they hold in our jurisdictions. We will also engage other governments and work to detect and disrupt the movement of ill-gotten gains, and to deny these individuals the ability to hide their assets in jurisdictions across the world.
Finally, we will step up or coordination against disinformation and other forms of hybrid warfare.
We stand with the Ukrainian people in this dark hour. Even beyond the measures we are announcing today, we are prepared to take further measures to hold Russia to account for its attack on Ukraine.


text:
Information Possibly Outdated
The information presented on this page was originally released on October 27, 1997. It may not be outdated, but please search our site for more current information. If you plan to quote or reference this information in a publication, please check with the Extension specialist or author before proceeding.
MSU Edam Cheese Is Holiday Tradition
MISSISSIPPI STATE -- The resolute bulldog and cowbell are widely recognized symbols of Mississippi State University, but at the holidays, MSU's distinctive 3-pound Edam cheese "cannon ball" is not far behind.
During the holiday season, MSU sells more than 46,000 balls of Edam cheese. Another 5,000 are sold around Easter.
Noel Hall, MSU dairy plant superintendent, said the Edams have always been popular, but getting one was difficult in the early years.
"At one point, you had to have your name on a list to get the cheese and it was pretty much limited to alumni," Hall said. "Since the 1970s when we started to produce large amounts of Edam cheese, it became very popular at Christmas time."
The idea to make a cheese to represent MSU originated with dairy scientist F.H. Herzer in 1938. At that time, the area surrounding what was then Mississippi State College was one of the South's leading dairy centers. Herzer wanted a product that symbolized the college's work in support of the dairy industry.
The decision was made to manufacturer Edam. This was based on its distinctive shape, traditional quality and the fact that MSU would be the first to produce Edam in the South.
Edam originated in Holland, and Herzer placed a rush order with Dutch manufacturers for 10 teakwood hoops, or molds, in 1938. The order was shipped just before Dutch ports were closed by the outbreak of World War II.
The small number of hoops available for Edam production limited output to just a few hundred balls per year during and following the war years. As demand increased, production was expanded in 1957 with the purchase of 50 new hoops.
By 1963, production was up to 2,400 Edams a year and research had improved methods of aging, pressing and salting the cheese. The technique of dipping the Edams in bright red wax, which minimized surface mold growth and made the cheese more attractive, also had been perfected.
The addition of an airtight Cry-O-Vac plastic bag provided additional assurance of quality and permitted the Mississippi State seal to be placed on the product.
In 1970, the cheese-making operation moved into the new Herzer Dairy Science Facility and production capacity increased to 165 Edam balls per day.
Production capabilities have continued to increase and improve. Today, a team of full-time employees, food-science students, and researchers produce about 50,000 Mississippi State Edam cheese balls each year.


text: For over 50 years Mark Pack Inc. has been a leading distributor of "top-of-the-line" industrial packaging and warehouse supplies, packaging machinery and materials handling systems. We are committed to helping you improve the efficiency and safety of your material handling and industrial packaging processes. Backed by decades of industry expertise and relationships with top manufacturers, Mark Pack's competitive pricing and commitment to our customers make us your one-stop-shop for packaging and material handling equipment. Whether you have a one time need or are looking to build a long-term relationship with a packaging and materials handling expert, Mark Pack's full-time customer service team is here for you and averages over 30 years of industry experience! Prefer to shop in person? Visit our large showroom of demonstration machinery and meet with a team member in Rockford, Illinois.


text:
I have listed a new property at 410 2285 Bowker AVE in VICTORIA.
Welcome to Oak Bay's newest premium residence by award winning Abstract Developments. This brand new 1 bedroom plus den home is located on the quiet side of the building overlooking the exclusive Secret Garden. This bright and open floor plan offers 9' ceilings, wide plank oak floors and plenty of natural light throughout. A luxurious kitchen with quartz countertops, under mount s/s sink, Bertazonni natural gas range, counter depth Fisher Paykel fridge, double drawer dishwasher and plenty of storage. Spacious living, dining and bedroom with a flex space for office or den. Beautiful 4pc bathroom with Kohler fixtures, under-cabinet lighting and heated floors. Quiet home technology with concrete topping and Soundloc acoustical underlay between floors. Covered 12' balcony with views of Mt Tolmie and the Sooke Hills in the distance. Full time concierge with a shared electric BMW and e-bikes. Steps to the Estevan Village and Willows Beach. Secured parking, bike storage and pets allowed.


text:
After a long hibernation, TheoPol is stirring and muttering something about a review in the current issue of America magazine. It's an appraisal of the latest book about a pope who continues to surprise, and about his colorful tribe, the Jesuits.
The recent Vatican synod on family issues has invited skepticism about how strongly Papa Francesco is prepared to push for his Church-altering ideas. But what the skeptics might be overlooking is Francis's "Jesuit DNA," as limned by the acclaimed journalist Robert Blair Kaiser.
The book is Inside the Jesuits: How Pope Francis is Changing the Church and the World (Rowman & Littlefield). Here's the review, published under the headline, "Spiritual Exercisers."
In July of last year, aboard a plane returning to Rome from the World Youth Day celebration in Rio de Janeiro, Pope Francis made clear to the world that he was pontificating in a new key. He walked back to the press compartment and stood in the aisle for 81 minutes, answering every question in a spontaneous exchange with reporters and uttering his now-emblematic "Who am I to judge?" remark about gays. Scarcely noted was another comment by this product of the Society of Jesus: "I think like a Jesuit."
Robert Blair Kaiser contends that the latter quote is most revealing about the Jesuit pope and where he is taking the Catholic Church. Kaiser's book—idiosyncratic though interesting at almost every turn—is largely a journalist's probe into what it means to think like a Jesuit in the Age of Francis. He argues at the outset that Francis "has been driven by his Jesuit DNA to make changes in the Church that have been up to now unthinkable."
Kaiser is a former award-winning religion reporter for The New York Times, CBS News, Newsweek and Time (which sent him to Rome in 1962 to cover the Second Vatican Council), and so his journalistic credentials are palpable. He is not, however, a detached observer. Kaiser spent 10 years as a Jesuit in the California Province, leaving the order before ordination for a career in journalism. He says he remains "a Jesuit at heart."
One of the book's early chapters is a fleeting history of the nearly 500-year-old Society of Jesus, beginning with St. Ignatius Loyola and the early Jesuits, who "had a conviction that most problems have solutions and that they should try to solve them with imagination, perseverance, and an openness to new ideas." Managing to figure into the 10-page overview is the West Coast Compañeros Inc., Kaiser's group of former Jesuits ("Like Marines, we have a special identity," he writes). Less oddly, Jorge Mario Bergoglio plays a standout role in this remade history. Kaiser surmises that Bergoglio was a "lousy leader" serving as Argentina's Jesuit provincial during the 1970s, a dark period of bloody repression there. The author concludes that the man now called Francis is "a poster boy for Cardinal Newman's observation that 'to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.'"
The most thematic chapter is "The Jesuit DNA." Kaiser traces no small part of this genetic structure to Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises, which turn Jesuits into "men who are self-aware, with a confidence and a sense of freedom that compels them" to take risks for God and the greater good. At that point, Kaiser runs with another Pope Francis quote, that "the Society of Jesus can be described only in narrative form." This methodology brings us to the least edifying part of the book, as Kaiser devotes 28 pages to his own Jesuit story. Along the way he settles old scores with fellow Jesuits and religious superiors who underappreciated his ministerial talents (he supplies real names). Part of the literary problem here is that Kaiser is cribbing from his engaging 2003 memoir, Clerical Error, a genre better suited to these recollections than a book subtitled How Pope Francis is Changing the Church and the World.
Kaiser is perhaps most eloquent when writing about Vatican II and the Jesuits (John Courtney Murray, for one) who helped shape the Council, which in turn "helped us all be more real, more human, and more loving." He is simply brilliant when profiling contemporary Jesuits including the likes of Paolo Dall'Oglio, "a tall, animated man on the move with flashing eyes," who has devoted his ministry to dialogue with Arab Muslims. The Italian calls himself "a Jesuit Muslim …because Jesus loves Muslims, the same Jesus who is alive in me." Kaiser also throws much light on the world of former Jesuits, with profiles of several including California governor Jerry Brown.
Throughout the book, Kaiser's contentions and observations are rarely dull and often intriguing.
In a chapter on liberation theology, he digresses into the question of priests who fall in love, naming among them Karl Rahner, the preeminent 20th-century Jesuit theologian. He also infers (partly from the 2013 biography Francis by Argentine journalist Elisabetta Piqué) that Bergoglio was one such priest. The pope has spoken of a passing infatuation with a woman he met while a seminarian, but Kaiser speculates about a 50-year-old Bergoglio, in Germany, pursuing a doctorate. The author resumes this conjecture later in the book, writing, "No wonder Francis can laugh at himself: he, a sinner, who is also now a pope."
Kaiser's conclusions are lively and often bracing. In the final chapter, he argues that Francis is perfectly positioned to "bury the Church's thousand-year-old blunder, the non-biblical understanding of papal primacy." Francis is already reorienting Catholicism with his message that "we should care more about Jesus than the Church," he writes, alluding to a back-to-basics Christianity that preaches "in the key of mercy." (On the other hand, Kaiser acknowledges Francis's limitations and urges reform-minded Catholics to cut him some slack—"If birth control is a sin, Daddy cannot give them permission to practice it. And if it isn't, he doesn't need to.") He links these and other expectations to Francis's Jesuit genes, which program him to reach for the "magis," or more without fear of failure.
One suspects Kaiser is saying unreservedly what many Jesuits are whispering among themselves. If this is so, and if Francis does think like a Jesuit, then there are undoubtedly more papal surprises in store.
William Bole is an editorial consultant at Boston College and an independent journalist.


text:
Kicking off our long weekend in Chicago for Flatstock Poster Show at the Pitchfork Music Fest, the great crew from Soundscreen Design & Rock Paper Show: Flatstock Volume 1 book are having a party this week, and you're invited.
Come out for the Chicago release party for Rock Paper Show: Flatstock Volume 1 at our superfriends shop, the Renegade Handmade store in the Wicker Park neighborhood on Thursday, July 15 from 7-9pm. The book, posters and collaborators will be on site. And we're quite excited to be finally getting to visit the Renegade Handmade store since it's one of the biggest carriers of my prints and posters. Totally can't wait! So if you live in Chicago, or are in Chicago for the Pitchfork Music Festival or just love gigposters, come say "hi"! We'll be there hanging out, chatting with everyone, and yeah…probably shopping a little bit too 🙂
What's the connection you ask? We're super proud to have a nice set of Flatstock posters featured in this really rad new book, including an exclusive poster designed just for this book all about Flatstock Poster Shows. Read more about the book and why we love it here!
Hope to see you there. For more info and directions to the Renegade Handmade store click here.