Network BookBytes

Cyberville
By Stacy Horn

Review by Tim O'Connor

Echo (www.echonyc.com) is a computer service in New York City that is part bulletin-board system, part Internet access provider and part clubhouse. It's crammed with smart, articulate people (40 percent female -- higher than most Internet demographic surveys indicate), who have perversely differing opinions on any topic imaginable.

The kind of creative friction that results, for good and bad, turns this raw computer system into a living, breathing entity. Readers see how Horn -- a graduate of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program and currently an instructor there -- is often as surprised by Echo as its subscribers are. Echo is not a flashy system. It is text-based, and users type short commands to navigate menus and sub-menus. With edited transcripts, Horn shows how conversations on Echo take place. Excerpts from "I Hate Myself," a thread in which Echoids try to outdo each other in humorous self-flagellation, are scattered throughout the book.

The focus in Echo, and in this book, is almost always on content over form. Even emoticons are banished from Echo (along with personal attacks and harassment). It's about communication. "History likes to tell big stories," Horn says in Cyberville. "Well, people like to tell the smaller ones. Our own cuts and scrapes and ... new jobs, lost jobs, whatever, this is what we think about, gossip about, the things that happen every day, the stuff we talk about endlessly. These are the stories of our lives."

Cliff Stoll, a writer and scientist, spoke out against the mindless use of the Internet in Silicon Snake Oil (Doubleday, 1995). Without entering into a debate about the ethical implications of being online, Horn simply presents a portrait of one online community to demonstrate that such communities do not simply create themselves. They must be seeded, tended, encouraged and vigorously maintained.

As Echo evolved, Horn learned, by trial and error, what works well to encourage a sense of responsibility among people online, and what fails miserably. There is a demand for humane computing. As long as that demand exists, there will be a need for systems like Echo, guides that make the online world friendly. There will also be a need for people like Horn, who claims that she doesn't know about business and grand visions, but emerges in Cyberville as a natural leader. This book is her travelogue, her chance to speculate on what will come next for her and for Echo. Ultimately, it's her attempt to make sense of it all.

As the Echo prompt famously says, "And now?"

Just about anything.

Posted January 20, 1998