Ethnography

• Casual look at IP addresses shows a wide range of locales and cultures represented; England, Germany, Russia, all across the US, Japan and Australia.

• People are broken into different ‘Ranks’ by the owners of a channel, based on relationship to the owner, experience with the subject the channel’s oriented on, time spent in the channel, or how sociable they are.

• Due to these requirements, people of higher rank tend to be more social/popular than people of lower rank.

• People who cause unneeded drama are looked down upon, often times either temporarily or permanently banned from the channel in question.

• People rarely pull rank, except if someone is being openly and unnecessarily hostile.

• Some people stay out of channels so they can talk to only the people they want to talk to and avoid drama.

• When people come on and talk about a problem, people usually offer advice or sympathy, while others abhor bringing personal problems on and complaining. There’s an undercurrent of distrust, though, since it’s nearly impossible to tell when people are telling the truth.

One of the most distinguishing characteristics of the internet is its ability to bring together people of all backgrounds. Even though internet access has been long viewed as a priviledge, the increase in people who are logging on is astonishing. One of the most common forms of socializing on the internet are Internet Relay Chat (IRC) programs. Though one might expect that something that is, by default, supposed to bring together all types of cultures would not have its own distinct social patterns, there is a slight bit of culture at play here.

One of Simone de Beauvoir’s main ideas on the struggle for women’s rights comes from the idea that there is an ‘Us and Them’ mentality; however, from the interactions I saw, there was very little of that. The groups were too diverse for them to all link to one culturally outstanding trait that unified them. There was a clean representation of many different groups, and they were much more willing to joke about their differences than be honestly offended by anything. For instance, one of the persons in one channel, or chat room, was gay, and the majority of people teased him about it and he would fire back quips accordingly. In the one case that someone did give him flak for it, a lot of the other people there came to his defense. While certain channels might have had a slight bias for certain things based on topic (such as there being more chargers fans in a channel dedicated to Southern California or more gamers in a channel about video games) there is a general cultural blend, since even in the regions or fandoms mentioned there is a blend of cultures.

The problem of language is one that many people would expect to encounter in this type of international environment, but it was maybe only in the background. Despite all the unique cultures represented, there was only a minimum of slang, probably to keep confusion to a dull roar. The conversations had to be very precise, since you couldn’t look through the screen and see the person was smiling sarcastically at a joke. Some examples of it still slip through, such as when British people mention going back to ‘University’ for the new school year. The internet itself has developed its own slang, too, and since it takes a certain skill with computers to work one of these programs, there is a slight lean in the direction of people with higher technical knowledge or education. English is the language of choice, though that may have also been the consequence of me going to a primarily English speaking network and only going to English speaking channels. I did notice some channels focused on German and Spanish, though didn’t enter them due to a lack of fluency. While Sausser may have been correct in the idea that certain places have differing ideas about signs and signifiers, it does seem possible that there is, at every language’s heart, a core that can be accessed by study of the lingual patterns. Even the internet shorthand of acronyms and inside jokes can be easily learned, and represents a culture itself.

Now, one of the main points of this assignment was to look for romance, of which there were few. Due to a heavy (but not total) male population, this is obvious. However, even when surrounded by men and with the veil of secrecy and anonymity that comes from the internet, there was still a polite air about the conversations. Joking around was permitted, but if the insults became much less playful than pointed, people would either tell those involved to take the dispute into a private chat, or the people running the channel would personally step in and settle the dispute. There wasn’t any need to thump your chest and prove your manliness, and even the one instance of that, where someone starting talking down about another because he was gay, and therefore less classically masculine, everyone got behind the victim. The basic goal of these rooms is to keep the conversation going, and being unnecessarily mean drives the conversation in the exact opposite direction from where it really needs to go. There may be some boasting about accomplishments, but it’s not done so much that it’s the only thing that’s going on. People are generally on to talk to friends, discuss topics that are relevant to their interests, and relax.

Though the internet often serves as a joke about people who are unable to socialize in any other capacity, these networks are genuinely used to help people connect despite far reaching differences in status and physical location. The internet has often been called one of the greatest examples of democracy of our time, and in many ways these idle discussions are keeping this fledgling nation strong.

For this project, I noticed there were a lot of roles it seemed the playwright was trying to hint at and design characters to fill. So, when we decided as a group to look at certain categories of the play, I tried to assign each character to what they're stereotypical role was, both from what I saw in the play and what I imagined Tennessee Williams to have been aiming for. I'm very used to looking for the 'psychology' of characters or things I'm looking at. I wrote 5 questions that I gave to Charles on Saturday, though I came up with the idea during our first meeting on the Tuesday before this project was due.