As I suggested in the introduction to this dissertation, I think any number of contemporary phenomena can be understood and described in terms of immediacy. The recent case of Susan Smith's murders of her two children is only one example, where the audience shifted from "touched" to "outraged" because of Smith's (though short-lived) ability to manipulate the contemporary media, which brought the event to American homes in painstaking detail.
Another example I discussed in my introduction was the Gulf War as depicted in the media. To me, it wasn't a foreign and distant event. Rather, it seemed like I was experiencing the Gulf War as if I were somehow there, and my proximity to the events because of the advanced technology and methods used to cover the events problematized my role as simply an "audience" member responding to rhetorical events. The Gulf War was something different, as Baudrillard suggests in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place; in his eyes, the media coverage and the technologies of war itself (i.e, "smart bombs") blurred the lines between "real" and "unreal" or "virtual" war. While I do not share what I read as Baudrillard's negative feelings about this "virtual" war, I do agree that the situation which contained and generated the rhetoric about the Gulf War was unique, and can be described as immediate.
But I think the most important contemporary example of an immediate rhetorical situation and the one I intend to discuss in some detail in the closing chapters of this dissertation is the Internet. It not only exemplifies the problematic and dynamic relationships between audiences, rhetors, and messages within a seemingly absent sense of "time" and "place;" it also is one of the most important contemporary media forces creating a greater sense of immediacy. In other words, the Internet is both an example of and a generator of immediate rhetorical situations, a relationship that seems quite fitting with my conception of immediacy.
This of course begs the question "What is the Internet?" Most Americans have heard the term and its close cousins (e.g., "Information Superhighway" or "the Web"), and an ever-increasing number of Americans are interacting with the Internet on a daily basis. Still, it is difficult to manageably define the Internet because it is such a vast and de-centered system, and because it is in a constant state of unprecedented change. Even more challenging is a closely-related question that I think needs to be considered along with any definition of the Internet: "Who is the Internet?" That is, what can we say about the demographics of the population that regularly participates in this medium; by inference, we must also ask, who is not a part of the Internet? What challenges exist in assessing this population? What trends can we assume?
In other words, before I discuss in detail the Internet as both an example and a generator of immediate rhetorical situations (as I will in chapter four), it seems necessary to me to define in clear terms what I mean by the Internet and who is participating on it. Just as not all rhetorical situations are endowed with immediacy (i.e., a face-to-face conversation or a traditional teacher-centered classroom do not seem to me to be rhetorical situations that would necessarily be described as "immediate"), it seems to me necessary to make clear that not everyone will be effected or empowered equally by the immediate rhetorical situation exemplified and created by the Internet. So my goal in this chapter is quite simple. I will first offer a brief history and definition of the Internet, followed by an explanation of what I see as its most significant components: Electronic Mail and Mailing Lists (or "listservs"), USENET Newsgroups, Gopher, and the World Wide Web. Then I will try to describe and draw some conclusions about the ever-changing population of the Internet as it exists in April 1996.
The Internet is popularly perceived as either a definitive and government-created (and controlled) international computer network--as if "The Internet" is an official and closed system, not unlike "The Post Office"--or as a free-wheeling, uncontrolled, chaotic, and unruly frontier. Neither one of these perceptions is entirely accurate because the Internet is, in fact, the result of conscious and controlled governmental efforts as well as independent and anarchistic actions.
Ironically, as most of the histories point out, the Internet originated in the early 1960's as a proposal from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (part of the U.S. Department of Defense) and RAND Corporation to create a computer network that could survive a nuclear attack. A centralized communication network--like telephone networks, where information is shared between users through a centralized switching station--is obviously vulnerable because one successful attack on the center would destroy the system. According to Bruce Sterling's "Short History of the Internet," the RAND proposal (authored by Paul Baran) hypothesized a communication network with no centralized point. Rather, the network would be made up of "nodes" (more or less the equivalent of a single computer) that would each have equal authority and ability to create, pass along, and receive information to other nodes.
Further, the information itself would be divided up into individual units called "packets" that could function independently of the rest of the nodes. As Sterling describes them, packets "would be tossed like a hot potato from node to node to node, more or less in the direction of its destination, until it ended up in the proper place" (n. pag.). In a sense, as Ed Krol points out in The Whole Internet, this system is akin to the way a letter travels through the postal system. "If you put an envelope in the mail in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, addressed to Boonville, California, the Post Office doesn't reserve a plane from New Hampshire to California to carry it. The local Post Office sends the envelope to a substation; the substation sends it to another substation, and so on, until it reaches the destination" (24). If one "node" in the system is down, the "packet" is simply routed to its destination in a different fashion.
This concept was first put into practice in 1969 as "ARPANET," with four nodes connected with high-speed transmission lines in the United States. By 1974, there were about 62 nodes (which are now referred to as "hosts") in the U.S. and Europe as part of ARPANET and other closely related computer networks. The theory of an electronic communication network functioning without a center and capable of withstanding a nuclear attack had thus become a reality, although it was surprisingly used from the very beginning for a variety of less than "official" purposes. Sterling writes that while APRANET researchers were able to and did use these long-distance connections to complete various computer programming tasks, they were "far more enthusiastic" about the possibilities for person-to-person communication. Mailing lists or "listservs" (which I will describe in more detail in the next section) were soon developed, one of the first being the "SF-LOVERS" list for science fiction. "Discussing science fiction on the network was not work-related and frowned upon by many ARPANET computer administrators," Sterling writes, "but this didn't stop it from happening" (n. pag.).
This combination of the "official" and the "unofficial" continued to foster the Internet's growth. By the late 1970's, a slightly different and more sophisticated method of transferring the "packets" of information back and forth among "hosts" was developed called "Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol," or TCP/IP. Interestingly, as Kroll reports, while the Organization for International Standardization (ISO) was spending years trying to develop the "ultimate standard" for computer networks, "Internet developers . . . responding to market pressures, began to put their IP software on every conceivable type of computer" (13), thus circumventing the ISO and creating a "standard" by default.
The importance of the TCP/IP adoption in the history of the Internet (at least for my purposes here) is two-fold. First, as Kroll suggests, the new standard allowed for a wider variety of types of packets of information to be transferred on the network. Instead of allowing for only short text messages (as was the case with previous protocols), TCP/IP allows for a wide variety of types of information packets, much like the post office changing from a protocol that allowed for only letters to one that allowed for packages of all shapes and sizes. Second, as Sterling points out, TCP/IP made it difficult to stop people from "barging in and linking up somewhere-or-another. In point of fact, nobody wanted to stop them from joining this branching complex of networks, which came to be known as the Internet" (n. pag.).
As a consequence of this open system, the "Internet" as we know it today began to exist. As Kroll and others have defined it, the "Internet" is in reality merely a "network of networks" that are capable of connecting with each other and sharing information via the agreed-upon TCP/IP methods. There is no "Internet, Inc." or other government body that regulates or controls the Internet; however, there are many large entities (commercial, government, international, military, educational, etc.) and small entities (down to the individual who has set up his or her desktop computer as an autonomous "host") that constitute the system.
By the mid-to-late 1980s, government and commercial organizations other than the DOD (notably the National Science Foundation) got involved with the Internet by creating systems of extremely high-speed "backbone" super-computers that could allow even more users to connect. By 1989, the year the original ARPANET ceased to exist, nearly every university and government entity in the United States was connected and demand for the Internet was growing at an astronomical rate. According to Robert H. Zakon's "Hobbes' Internet Timeline," there were four "hosts" (i.e., computers that have an Internet "address" and that can create, receive, and/or pass along packets of information) on what was ARPANET in 1969; in 1984, there were just over 1,000; in 1989, the year ARPANET ceased to exist, there were well over 100,000. As will become clear later in this chapter when I discuss the demographics of the population participating on the Internet, it has become increasingly difficult to calculate the number of hosts connected to the Internet, but some surveys put the number of hosts on the Internet in 1996 at close to ten million. So, through a combination of government and commercial control and anarchistic activity, the idea of a computer network capable of withstanding a nuclear attack went beyond its wildest expectations in less than thirty years.
While the previous section may adequately describe in general terms the origins and workings of the Internet, it doesn't answer the more basic questions: what do users do on the Internet? what sort of activities do they engage in? In this section, I'd like to describe in general terms the components that typify the Internet and that seem to me to be most relevant in terms of my argument about the Internet as an immediate rhetorical situation (which I will take up in more detail in chapter four): Electronic Mail and Mailing Lists (or "listservs"), USENET Newsgroups, Gopher, and the World Wide Web. Some of this section will be a review for more experienced Internet users, but my goal here is to provide a "user friendly" summary for an audience unfamiliar with the Internet in order to contextualize my more direct discussion about immediacy in the next chapter, and to define what the Internet is in the Spring of 1996, the time of this writing.
Let me first point out, though, that this chapter does not fully describe all of the components available to Internet users. For example, two of the most basic features of the Internet are the ability to perform functions on other host computers connected to the Internet and to retreive a wide variety of electronic files from other Internet host computers. Users can connect to other host computers with simple commands (depending on the software and type of connection) and are then able to work on a computer at a remote location. This was one of the most basic functions of the original ARPANET I described in the previous section. File Transfer Protocol (FTP), a standardized method of moving electronic files from computer to computer, enables users to access and retreive files from computers connected to the Internet. These files can carry almost any type of computer information--text documents, graphics, software, sounds, etc. These electronic files can be transferred from one host computer to another, and even from personal computers connected to host computers via modem or via specific software (such as "Fetch" or "FTP").
Most Internet host computers also support a variety of "talk" components that allow users to type synchronous or "real time" messages to each other. The most popular is probably Internet Relay Chat (IRC), which is sort of a cross between a cocktail party and CB radio conversation that allows participants from all over the world to gather into small groups called "channels" to exchange typed messages with each other. Other frequently discussed and used types of talk functions are MUDs (Multiple-User Dungeon or Design) and MOOs (MUD Object Oriented). MUDs and MOOs vary widely, but they allow users (who frequently assume fictional personas) to communicate and navigate through a textually created environment. Rooms, objects, conditions, and the like are available to users as text descriptions of varying complexity--"You have entered the lounge. There is a coffee machine that always has the freshest brew on the North wall, a cupboard of cups and saucers on the South Wall, and a large and comfortable orange couch and an exit to the hallway on the East Wall" is a typical sort of "room" description in a MUD or a MOO. MUDs and MOOs began as a recreational application very similar to popular role playing games like "Dungeons and Dragons," and they still are most frequently used as games based on specific themes (e.g., medieval or magical kingdoms, interstellar empires, etc.). However, they are increasingly used as educational and professional tools to teach and to hold meetings.
These components (and others) are certainly important parts of the Internet, and are also arguably examples of the Internet as an immediate rhetorical situation. However, I have decided not focus on these components in any great detail for several admittedly arbitrary reasons. While functions such as FTP are important in interacting with the Internet, they seem to me to be more or less utilitarian rather than rhetorical; they aren't so much about communication as they are about the mechanics of connecting and switching information on the Internet. I won't be discussing IRCs or MUDs/MOOs in part because they still seem to me to largely be "games" that occupy few users of the Internet (especially compared to the components I will be considering), but also because these components place heavy synchronous demands on the users. Participants logged in to a MUD have to be present at the same time and in the same agreed-upon electronic space, not unlike a phone conversation.
In contrast, the components I am examining in more detail in this dissertation--Electronic Mail and Mailing Lists (or "listservs"), USENET Newsgroups, Gopher, and the World Wide Web--are all types of asynchronous communication. While they, of course, require a computer and a connection to the Internet, they are not dependent on a specific time or place. Typically, users can access these components in any number of different ways (computer labs in schools and libraries, from computers in an office, modem connections from home, etc.) and at any time, which in my mind makes these functions a better example of the Internet as an immediate rhetorical situation than IRCs or MUDs/MOOs.
Electronic Mail (or "e-mail"), probably the best known and most used of these components, is a clear example of the Internet as facilitating and generating immediate rhetorical situations. E-mail allows individuals to send electronic messages to other individuals on the Internet; it is the most basic sort of "packet" of information passed between "host" computers. To use e-mail, individual users need to have access to a host computer connected to the Internet, which is typically in the form of an "account" on a larger host computer. Users access their accounts from a terminal directly connected to the host or through a connection made from a desktop computer facilitated either by a variety of networking softwares or by a modem connection through conventional phone lines.
Each e-mail user's account has an "address" that is based on rules that allow for messages to reach their specific destinations, much like zip-codes or telephone numbers. My e-mail address, "skrause@bgnet.bgsu.edu," is an example of the "rules" that all e-mail addresses must follow: "skrause" represents my "username" on the "host" computer, which is always the word that comes after the "at" symbol (in this case, "bgnet"). The "bgsu" part of the e-mail address is usually referred to as the "domain." Its presence here suggests that there is more than one host computer within this particular domain. For example, within the "bgsu" domain, there are also host computers named "ernie," "chip," "opie," and "bgsuvax." While an e-mail message sent to "skrause@ernie.bgsu.edu" would go to the same domain as a message sent to "skrause@bgnet.bgsu.edu," it would not go to the same host computer and thus wouldn't end up in my "bgnet" account. The last component of the address, the "edu," is the "top-level" domain. This provides some information about either the type of organization or the geographic location of the host computers. For example, "edu" indicates an educational organization, "com" usually suggests a business organization, and "gov" is for non-military governmental organizations. Sometimes, geographical top-level domains are used instead--"au" is for Australia, "hn" is for Honduras, "zw" is for Zimbabwe, etc.
In order to manipulate their e-mail, users also need some sort of e-mail software. These programs vary from system to system, but they generally allow users to access and read incoming e-mail, save e-mail as electronic files, print e-mail on paper (a "hard-copy"), create and send new messages to other users, reply and forward messages, and attach other pieces of text or files to an e-mail message. For example, it is possible for one e-mail user to send lengthy texts composed using a desktop word processing software, graphics, and even other pieces of software to other users as attachments. Figure One shows a screen image of "Pine," a typical e-mail software.
As Sterling's comments in the previous section suggests, e-mail has always been an extremely popular feature of the Internet. It's fast: messages are usually transmitted instantaneously, and even if there is a system backlog or other computer problem, it rarely takes more than a day to receive a message from anywhere in the world. This makes e-mail a significantly different rhetorical situation than face-to-face communications and phone communications (where users are synchronously engaged) or from traditional mail communications (where the delay between messages can be quite significant). E-mail is also cheap. Even when a user is paying a commercial service for access, e-mail is a communication bargain when compared to conventional postal delivery, overnight packages, or long-distance phone costs. And, as Daniel Dern suggests in his chapter on e-mail in The Internet Guide for New Users, e-mail is a convenient tool for all sorts of communications. Dern goes to great lengths to describe the wide range of communications he is able to accomplish with e-mail, from official letters and correspondence with co-workers to friendly and casual messages from acquaintances, without "leaving my desk, using or discarding a single piece of paper, making any long-distance telephone or fax calls, [or] using any overnight delivery services" (132-134). As I will discuss further in chapter four, the quickness, convenience, and international capabilities of e-mail all contribute to create what I perceive as a uniquely immediate rhetorical situation.
All e-mail users have the capability of sending messages to many users at the same time, which makes e-mail a particularly useful conferencing and collaborative tool. It's also possible for e-mail users to join mailing lists (also commonly referred to as "listservs"), which are topic-oriented forums where the discussion is distributed from a central e-mail address to all of the participants. As I will suggest in more detail in chapter four, listservs are a prime example of an immediate rhetorical situation because they are electronic "spaces" (without any physical place) where individuals come to speak, listen, argue, and agree over a period of "time" (which is not dictated by synchronous communications), and which grow and shrink depending on the needs of the individuals and the communities they form.
Dern writes that in 1993, there were about 3,000 mailing lists on the Internet (482); undoubtably, there are more now. Listservs are focused on all sorts of topics, though most tend to be more academically and/or professionally oriented than USENET Newsgroups. Listservs are different from a user simply sending the same message to many other users at the same time in at least two respects. First, participants are responsible for controlling their involvement with a listserv. Through a series of commands issued with simple e-mail messages, users join (or "subscribe"), leave (or "unsubscribe"), and alter in other ways how they interact with the listserv. Some listservs have moderators who selectively re-distribute messages to the other listserv members, but usually, individual users control how they interact with the list once they've joined. They can choose to remain on the list and only read the posts of other listserv members without ever posting a message, a practice commonly known as "lurking." Or users can choose to post their opinions on any given topic and/or engage the other members of the listserv in discussion. This interaction takes place either by starting a new topic of discussion or by responding to a previous line or "thread" of discussion.
Another one of the differences between being on a listserv and from one user sending e-mail to many other users is that members of a listserv don't send messages to the other members of the group per se; rather, they send them to the Internet address for the group. For example, anyone who is a member of the "College Activism Information List" does not send messages to all of the other members directly, but rather sends messages to "actnow-l@brownvm.brown.edu," which automatically forwards them to all of the subscribed members. In this sense, listservs are electronic communal spaces, distinct addresses or locations on the Internet where rhetors and audience members alike come to exchange messages offered in this space for consideration.
If listservs are the Internet's version of subscription-based newspapers, magazines, and journals, USENET newsgroups (as Dern puts it) are the Internet's "bulletin board, its supermarket tabloid, classified ads, cable TV, magazine rack, giant wall of Post-It notes, and collective unconscious" (195). Like listservs, newsgroups are topic-based electronic forums where users gather to read messages, post new messages, and contribute to on-going discussions or "threads." But instead of receiving e-mail messages sent directly to their e-mail address, users read newsgroups by looking up the specific groups with various software packages called news readers (for example, "nn" or "rn" for Unix, "netnews" for IBM CMS, or "NewsWatcher," for the Macintosh).
In this sense, USENET newsgroups offer immediate rhetorical situations similar to listservs: USENET newsgropus are spaces without physical place where discussions take place out of definitive time. Like listserv communities, newsgroup communities change rapidly depending on the needs and wants of the participants and the nature of the conversation. The main difference between listservs and USENET newsgroups (besides the wider variety of topics and the need for newsgroup users to "go" to the messages as opposed to having the messages come to them via e-mail, which re-enforces the concept of the newgroup as distinct electronic "place") is that newsgroups tend to be read more casually. As Kroll says, a USENET newsgroup is ideal for browsing because it "doesn't require a lot of commitment. If you're marginally interested in an obscure hobby, you can 'drop in' and read up on the latest discussions once a month, or once a year. You don't have to subscribe to a mailing list, and you won't receive lots of mail that's only vaguely interesting--which, at best, you'll have to delete" (151). In terms of immediacy, this suggests that the level of audience involvement within particular newsgroups can vary tremendously because of the "openness" of these discourse communities.
Figure Two on the following page is a screen image of what a list of articles currently available looks like (in this case, the group "rec.music.rem") when viewed with the software NewsWatcher. The small triangles in the left-hand column indicate different "threads" of discussion, and the numbers next to the triangles indicates the number of messages posted about the thread. This is followed by the name (more often than not, a nickname) of the author of the message, and the subject of the message or thread.
USENET started in 1979 when Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, two graduate students at Duke University in North Carolina, and Steve Bellovin, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina, thought of hooking up computers to exchange information with the use of a facilities called Unix-to-Unix-copy (UUCP) and a software they designed called "News" (Dern, 200). USENET has evolved into a very loose affiliation of computers all over the world that store and switch messages, allowing for a wide variety of access. While many point out that USENET is not the same as the Internet (depending on the specificity of the definition of the Internet), nearly everyone who has access to the Internet in general has access to USENET.
According to Carol Lea Clark's A Student's Guide to the Internet, there are currently about 8,000 or so USENET newsgroups (47). Some newsgroups are obviously more popular than others, but according to "Hobbes' Internet Timeline," there were about 72,755 articles posted to newsgroups every day in 1994 (n. pag.). These groups and their articles are loosely organized according to subject, which is indicated by the prefix of the group. The seven "basic hierarchies" that have been around the longest are: "comp" (for computer software and hardware-oriented discussions); "misc" (for miscellaneous); "news" (which includes mostly news and administrative information about USENET); "rec" (for recreation groups); "sci" (for science and research other than computer science), "soc" (for groups covering social issues, politics, culture, etc.); and "talk" (discussion on "controversial" topics). There are also several other hierarchies, such as "K-12" for elementary and secondary teachers and students, "bionet" for newsgroups about biology, and "alt" for alternative newgroups on a wide (and frequently strange) variety of topics.
Within each of these hierarchies, the basic subject of individual newsgroups is usually indicated by the full name of the group--"comp.mac," "misc.fitness," "soc.college," etc. Most newgroups are actually "sub-categories" of these more general groups, such as "comp.mac.lang," "misc.fitness.aerobic," "soc.college.grad," "rec.music.rem," etc. Many newgroups have several levels of hierarchy to indicate the specificity of the discussions that take place there ("misc.forsale.computers.pc-specific.cards.video").
The "alt" hierarchy of USENET newsgroups is somewhat unique because the USENET guidelines makes it easier to start an "alt" newgroup. As a result, there are a lot of "alt" newgroups that are fan-oriented communities of users (e.g., "alt.books.tom-clancy," "alt.cult-movies.rocky-horror," "alt.fan.woody-allen," "alt.tv.friends"). There are also a lot of "alt" newsgroups devoted to exchanging pornographic and other "adult" material (e.g., "alt.sex.exhibitionism," "alt.sex.fetish," "alt.sex.pictures.female"), and a lot of newgroups that seem to be elaborate and collective jokes (e.g., "alt.tv.dinosaurs.barney.die.die.die," "alt.pave.the.earth," "alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk"). Most of these groups are, of course, short-lived, but they are nonetheless Internet communities with rules and patterns governing the discourse.
While Listserv and USENET newsgroup communities are based on the exchange of relatively small and personal texts between individual users, Gopher and the World Wide Web are navigation and publishing systems that allow Internet users to find and interact with a variety of frequently larger texts and other Internet resources. As I will discuss in more detail in chapter four, both Gopher and the World Wide Web (like e-mail, listservs, and USENET newsgroups) redefine modern conceptions of "space" and "time" for carrying out discursive events, and facilitate and encourage a more dynamic definition of "rhetor," "audience," and, ultimately, "message." Further, Gopher and the World Wide Web raise new possibilities about the sorts of information that are available within any given situation and the techniques used by rhetors and audiences to navigate that information.
Both Gopher and the World Wide Web had curiously small beginnings considering how instrumental they are to the Internet community currently. Gopher was developed at the University of Minnesota (whose mascot, the "Golden Gophers," helps explain the system's name) as a means of delivering Internet information on the Minneapolis campus. In effect, it is an automating software that makes it possible for users to find Internet information without having to encounter more complicated connection and file transfer softwares. This ease of navigation revolutionized the "space" of the Internet by not only making it much easier for more users to navigate from host computer to host computer, but also by increasing the amount of information available to users regardless of their location. Gopher makes it as easy to access the Library of Congress computer cataloging systems in Bowling Green, Ohio as it is to access it in Washington, DC. In addition, software of all sorts can be traded between users from all over the world, and hard-to-find abstracts, bibliographies, and indexes of all sorts are available via Gopher, as are many complete volumes of electronically published texts. In other words, Gopher changes and problematizes our previous assumptions about what information is "present" in any given situation, regardless of time and place.
Mark P. McCahill, who was the project leader who developed Gopher, said that the intent of the software was to offer "a variety of Internet services to novice/naive users" to students, faculty, and staff at the University of Minnesota (Dern, 311). While the intent was limited to the campus community, Gopher was a software that soon caught on. By 1993, only two years after Gopher was developed, "'Gopher Space' on the Internet included over 1,100 Gopher 'servers' [which are host computers that distribute Gopher information], which in turn gave users access to over a million files, 1,000, directories, and 50,000 other resources and services" (Dern, 311). Figure Three shows a typical Gopher directory menu viewed with a Unix-based software:
As is apparent at the heading information at the top of the image, this Gopher directory or "Gopher Space" is called the "Virtual Reference Desk" and is a service offered by the University of California, Irvine. Each of the numbered lines represents an item that can be chosen by the user, though there are several different types of items listed here. Items that are followed by a "/" indicate that they lead to another level of Gopher directories (not unlike directories or "folders" on a desktop computer, Gopher directories can contain many other directories). Items followed by a "?" (as in item 15) are "searchable indexes." If users select item 15, they will be taken to a screen that will ask them to enter in the name they are seeking. Items that don't have anything after them (as in item 2) are text files available to the user.
Like Gopher, the World Wide Web (WWW) is another Internet component that exemplifies and creates immediate rhetorical situations because it problematizes modernistic conceptions of "space" and "time" for carrying out discursive events (as I've already suggested with e-mail, listservs, and USENET newsgroups), and it raises new possibilities about the sorts of information that are available within any given situation. Further, because it is easy to access the WWW as both a "rhetor" and an "audience" member and because it supports a variety of hypertextual and multimedia features, the WWW raises even more profound questions about the nature of the immediate rhetorical situations.
The WWW is a dynamic global network (part of the larger Internet network) that supports hypertextual, graphically intense, and interactive documents commonly referred to as "pages" or "homepages." "Hypertexts" are documents that contain "links" to other documents and resources which are possible (and even advantageous) to read and browse in a non-linear fashion. Many hypertexts contain images, video, and sound, frequently making them "graphically intense." (For many critics and theorists, this is the distinction between "hypertext" and "hypermedia," though I feel these terms are interchangeable.) The idea of hypertext has been around for quite some time--most credit Ted Nelson as coining the term in the 1960's--and a number of software packages have made hypertextual documents possible (e.g., "HyperCard," "StorySpace," and, to a certain extent, even the previously discussed "Gopher"). But the WWW takes these capabilities to a global level. WWW page writers can create links to their pages, to other pages that they've created, or to any other WWW page.
Some WWW pages are "interactive" in the sense that users can fill out a variety of surveys and forms or do a variety of searches. As the technology for the WWW improves (as it is rapidly doing currently), users will be able to access an increasing array of software and features from WWW pages; in effect, it is quite likely that the WWW will soon be as "interactive" as any desktop computer.
The WWW was brought on-line in 1991 and has grown at a rate that is almost impossible to perceive. "Hobbes' Internet Timeline" said that in 1993, the WWW was proliferating at an annual growth rate of 341,634% (n. pag.). Nicholas Negroponte claimed in the February 1996 WIRED magazine that the Web is doubling in content every 50 days (188), and Steve Steinberg wrote in the May 1996 issue of WIRED that at its current growth rate, the WWW will contain more words than the Library of Congress by the end of 1998 (109). This growth has been facilitated by two major factors. First, WWW pages are made possible by a relatively simple coding system called "Hyper Text Markup Language" (HTML) which is substantially easier to learn and use than most computer programming languages, thus making the creation of WWW pages well within the reach of anyone who wants to and who has access to the proper computer equipment and accounts. Second, a number of software packages (notably Mosaic and Netscape) have been released that make navigating the WWW as easy as operating a mouse on a desktop computer. Quite literally, WWW readers need to know very little about how the connections on the Internet work (as compared to Telnet, FTP, or even USENET Newsgroups); all a user needs to do is "point and click."
Figure Four on page 103, an example of a typical WWW "page" as viewed with the popular WWW "browser" program, Netscape, is my "homepage." It leads to other WWW pages I've created, so, in many ways, it is like a table of contents. I've included a picture of myself and some simple graphics (typical of WWW pages like this), all of which appear in color on a computer screen. The underlined, bold words are "links" to other WWW pages that I've created. By clicking on this text with the arrow of the mouse, users follow these links and go to other pages. From these new pages, users can follow still more links. For example, clicking on "Steve's List of Links" leads to another WWW page that has a list of links to a wide variety of WWW resources all over the world, which I've set up for users to select. This particular browser, Netscape, also offers users a number of very useful features indicated by the large buttons at the top of the screen. To print the page, users simply click on the "print" button; to go to a specific WWW page, users click on the "Open" button and enter in the "Universal Resource Locator" (URL) or "address" to the page (for example, the URL for this page is "http://ernie.bgsu.edu/~skrause/Steve.html"). In addition to navigating the WWW, Netscape also enables users to upload and download softwares, to read and write e-mail, and to read and write to USENET newsgroups. In effect, Netscape represents a new generation of softwares that allow users a centralized place for a variety of Internet services.
As I will argue in Chapter Four in more detail, all of these components--E-mail, Listservs, USENET Newsgroups, Gopher, and the World Wide Web-- raise profound questions about the nature of the categories of "message," "rhetor," and "audience" within a given "right" or "critical time." The hierarchies of who is put in the place of "rhetor" or "audience" within any given situation are problematized not only by the interactive possibilities of these components, but also as a result of the ease with which individuals can create and read text in these spaces. This seems particularly true for WWW pages. It is literally as easy for a user in Australia to call up my homepage on his or her computer as it is for the same user to call up the Time Magazine web page, which completely thwarts modernistic assumptions about who is allowed to be the "rhetor" within any given situation and who can be a member of the "audience".
So far, I have offered a brief history and definition of the Internet and have described in some detail the functions of the Internet (at least the functions I am focusing on in this dissertation). However, neither of these sections offers an adequate answer to the question of Internet demographics--who has access to it and who is using it? I think these are especially important questions for me to address as part of my consideration of the Internet as both an example and generator of immediate situations in chapter four. Not everyone is able or willing to participate within this ever-changing situation, meaning that the assumptions I am making about immediacy are contextually and culturally based. While the context and culture of the Internet is changing quickly, I think the information we currently have about users suggests that the Internet is currently a relatively homogeneous and atypical population.
The two major studies I'll be discussing in this section come from the Graphic, Visualization, and Usability Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Nielsen Interactive Services, and have been frequently cited in the popular press as being the most accurate available. Nonetheless, there are problems with both studies. GVU's study is based on a survey about the WWW distributed over the WWW, which (as they acknowledge) has severe self-selection implications. While all surveys suffer from some self-selection problems, WWW distribution seems to be a particularly dramatic limitation of this survey because the population that participated in the study had to actually find the survey on the WWW, which suggests that these users spend an unusual amount of time using the WWW.
The Nielsen survey is statistically more representative of the US and Canadian population because its results are based on the responses of more than 4,200 completed telephone interviews--not just responses from users of the Internet. However, this study too has potential problems. The goal of the Nielsen study (and the GVU study, for that matter) was to provide information to commercial enterprises interested in exploring business opportunities on the Internet. While this certainly doesn't make the results invalid, the goals of Nielsen's survey were to convey information to corporate clients about advertising and selling products on the WWW. Still, with these qualifications in mind, it seems clear that these surveys reveal a great deal about who is (and who is not) participating on the Internet.
Nielsen's survey suggests that about 37 million "persons aged 16 and above in the US and Canada have access to the Internet" (n. pag.). Twenty-four million Americans and Canadians 16 and older used the Internet in the past three months (n. pag.). According to Peter H. Lewis of the New York Times, these users--about 17% of the total populations of the US and Canada--spend about as much time "surfing the Internet each week as adults devote to watching rented videocassettes" (D5). Of those users responding to GVU's WWW survey, 78.4% reported that they browsed the WWW on a daily basis (n.pag.)
Results like these may seem to lend some credence to those who claim that the Internet has become as significant a discursive space in American culture as television or the popular press. As Hal Abelson, a professor in computer science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggested in the April 1, 1996 New York Times, "Now you have such a large percentage of the population on the Net, it just is not sensible to talk about this as some other place anymore. What you're really talking about now is the communications fabric of the country" (A14). There is no question that there is a significant percentage of the population participating in some form on the Internet. However, a closer examination of the survey results suggest that the 24 million or so regular users of the Internet are largely male, young, well-educated, financially well-off, and white. Given that this population is unusual in almost every way compared to the rest of the US population, this is hardly the statistical norm one would expect to find in the "communication fabric" of the nation.
To begin with, both the Nielsen and the GVU surveys suggest that about two-thirds of the Internet population is male. Nielsen reported that male users comprise 66% of the Internet population, and account for 77% of the total usage of the Internet (n. pag.). GVU's survey suggested that 70.7% of users are male, though they also suggest that female participation on the Internet is growing substantially faster than male participation (n. pag.).
On the one hand, this high percentage of male users confirms conventional assumptions that are all too obvious in cultural stereotypes (the male "computer geek"), the computer industry, and the discourse practices of the Internet. On the other hand, it would be wrong to over-generalize about this gender disparity. As Michael Joyce says in an article about Sherry Turkle, the author of Life on the Screen, "Perhaps the single most underreported aspect of our time is that the most compelling and serious discourse about new technologies and cultural change proceeds from women" (109). He goes on to list a number of prominent theorists (Sandy Stone, Donna Haraway, Kate Hayles, Carolyn Guyer, and many others) on his way to praising Turkle's influential work on identity and computers.
In other words, while there are indeed more men than women participating on the Internet, this does not mean that there are few women critiquing the Internet and participating within its communities. As Laura Miller suggests in her essay "Women and Children First: Gender and the Settling of the Electronic Frontier," there is a "significant and vocal minority of women (who) contribute regularly and more than manage to hold their own" in Internet discourse communities (55). Furthermore, Miller points out that it is difficult to say definitively which users are "men" and which ones are "women" since posing as a member of the opposite sex has been a long established element of Internet society. "Perhaps what we should be examining is not the triumph of gender differences on the Net, but their potential blurring" (56). Thus, while there are obvious and important disparities in the participation of men and women on the Internet, I think it is important not to over-simplify and essentialize this disparity.
Also not surprising is the conclusion from both studies that the majority of Internet users are relatively young. The GVU survey suggested that the average age of WWW users is 32.7 years old and is getting younger (n. pag.). The "Baseline WWW User Demographics" portion of the Nielsen survey suggest that while 61% of the US and Canadian populations are 16-44 years old, 78% of WWW users are in this age group. Further, while 37% of Americans and Canadians are 45 and older, only 22% of WWW users are older than 45 (n. pag.). These trends are perhaps not surprising considering the high number of Internet users who are students (as I will discuss in a moment), but I think the fact that this trend is at odds with the general populations of the US and Canada should raise questions about the perceived pervasiveness of the Internet.
Besides being predominantly male and relatively young, the Internet is also an exceptionally well-educated community. According to the Nielsen survey, 64% of Internet users have at least a college degree, and 26% of WWW users had post-graduate degrees or professional certificates. Considering that only 17% of the general US and Canadian populations have completed college and only 8% have completed post-graduate education, it's clear that Internet users are an atypically well-educated group (n. pag.). This makes a certain amount of sense since much of the Internet population is involved in education. According to the GVU survey, about 31% of WWW users report their occupation as "Educational," and about 22% of those users are college students (n. pag.). Interestingly, the Nielsen survey does not list "education" as a category in its reporting of occupational demographics, though it too points out that about 30% of respondents had access to the Internet from school (n. pag.).
But despite its strong connections to educational institutions, the Internet is clearly no longer exclusively the realm of teachers and students. The most recent counts of the number of "top-level" domains suggests that there are more "com" or commercial domains on the Internet now than "edu" or educational domains, meaning that more users are connecting to the Internet for reasons that are not educational. Both the GVU and Nielsen surveys confirm this. According to GVU, the "three main areas of primary Internet providers are: local online providers (41.6%), educational providers (31.6%), and via work (10.0%)" (n.pag.). The Nielsen survey reports dramatically different results. For survey respondents who had accessed the Internet within 24 hours of the survey, 66% of users "last used the Internet" from work; 44% had last used it from home; and only 8% of respondents had most recently accessed the Internet from school (the percentages are due to the fact that people who accessed the Internet within the last 24 hours on average accessed it at 1.2 locations) (n. pag.). The disparity between the different results of these studies are probably the result of the different study methodologies and the wording of the questions--the GVU study asked users who provided their Internet access, whereas the Nielsen study asked only where users accessed the Internet, meaning that many users who have access from a local or educational provider could actually be at work or at home while accessing the service.
Even with these differences however, both surveys suggest that most users of the Internet are involved with occupations that facilitate easy access (not typical of blue-collar or unskilled labor jobs), have been able and willing to purchase a home computer and an Internet service, and/or are students in higher education. In short, the Internet is comprised of an atypically "privileged" portion of the US and Canadian population. The Nielsen survey found that "50% of WWW users consider themselves to be in profressional or managerial occupations. In contrast, 27% of the total US and Canadian population categorize themselves to have such positions" (n. pag.). The GVU survey reports similar results, though, as I've already suggested, this survey seems to draw a clearer distinction between "educational" and "professional" occupations than the Nielsen survey.
Given these types of occupations, it is not surprising that the average income of Internet users is higher than that of average Americans and Canadians. The GVU survey found that the estimated average income of WWW users was $63,000, though it was decreasing (n. pag.). The Nielsen Survey found that "25% of WWW users earn household income of more than $80,000 whereas only 10% of the total US and Canadian population has that level of income" (n. pag.). However, as the Nielsen "Baseline WWW User Demographics" suggest, a substantial portion of WWW users (43%) have household incomes less than $60,000 a year (n. pag.).
Finally, Internet users are largely white and American. The GVU survey reported that 83.2% of Internet users are white Americans, reflecting "certain fundamental problems with the Web and the Internet in general: replication of services and multilingual support" (n. pag.). The Nielsen survey specifically limited its study to Americans and Canadians, and while the GVU survey did have some response from Western European and Australian participants, their study is also found that most users of the Internet are American.
This is not at all surprising when we consider the locations of Internet host computers as indicated by the "top-level" domains. According to Netware Wizards, a software company that conducted a very rough count of the host computers (those computers that have an Internet "address," and that can create, receive, and/or pass along packets of information), there are about 9.5 million host computers on the Internet. Almost 6.5 million of those host computers have "top-level" domains that suggest they are located in either the US or Canada. Most hosts not located in the US or Canada are located in Western Europe (the United Kingdom, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, etc.), Australia, and Japan. Very few host computers are located in countries that are typically associated with developing and third world countries (Malaysia, Estonia, Thailand, Colombia, Guam, Kenya, Senegal, etc.).
I think these demographics are important in considering the Internet as an example of an immediate rhetorical situation for two reasons. First, while I think the Internet is a community of users that is large and diverse enough to be considered indicative of postmodern American society, the claims I will make in the next chapter about the Internet as an example of an immediate situation are ultimately limited. The majority of the population not on the Internet is still, of course, affected by the Internet in both negative and positive ways. However, those not on the Internetobviously are not affected by the situation's immediacy to the same extent as Internet participants.
Second, as I will discuss in more detail in the concluding chapter of this dissertation, these demographics suggest that as long as a substantially large segment of the population (both in the US and internationally) is not involved with the Internet, the possibilities offered by the Internet will be limited. As rhetoricians, educators, and Internet "citizens" interested in fostering the tremendous possibilities of community in this discursive space, we need to take much stronger steps to include those who have been excluded: women, the working class, minorities, and the third world.
No summary of the Internet is possibly adequate, in part because it is a space that needs to be experienced to be understood, but also in part because of its rapid changes. Writing this in the Spring of 1996, I can only be confident that this description of the components and demographics of the Internet is adequate for my purposes here and it will remain "accurate" for the next year or so. As I have attempted to indicate in this chapter, I think the most popular and significant components of the Internet are E-mail, Listservs, USENET Newsgroups, Gopher, and the World Wide Web. Each of these components both exemplifies and creates rhetorical situations best examined through the lense of immediacy; they each also raise questions regarding time and space in the asynchronous and electronic context of the Internet, and they each demand an extremely fluid understanding of the concepts of "rhetor," "audience," and "message." Further, while the community of participants on the Internet is substantial, I think the homogeneity of this group requires us to be cautious about overstating the impact of the Internet community on American and World society as a whole. Still, it would be foolhardy to assume that my explanation of "what" and "who" the Internet is will remain accurate for long, which is one of the most compelling reasons for viewing the Internet as an example of immediacy.