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Virtual STS Centre.FAQ
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1993-05-24
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* The Virtual Science and Technology Studies Centre on *
* MediaMOO: Frequently Asked Questions *
********************************************************
CONTENTS:
1. What is the Virtual STS Centre?
2. How do I get to the Virtual STS Centre?
3. What does the Virtual STS Centre "look" like?
4. What goes on at the Virtual STS Centre?
5. What is the philosophy behind the Virtual STS Centre?
6. What is MediaMOO?
7. Who designed the Virtual STS Centre?
8. Where can I get more information?
1. What is the Virtual STS Centre?
It's an interactive, text-based virtual environment designed to
foster real-time interaction among scholars investigating science
and technology as social and historical phenomena. Open to all
with research interests in these fields, the STS Centre is
accessible 24 hours a day over Internet. IT is NOT an electronic
bulletin board system. The STS Centre is part of a "multi-user
dimension," or MUD: a program that allows you to chat with
colleagues, manipulate virtual objects, and build new objects and
places. MUDs are similar to the on-line conferencing or "talk"
features available on Compuserve and other networks, but with
the addition of a user-programmable setting providing an
imaginative background for communication. And best of all,
there's no fee!
2. How do I get to the Virtual STS Centre?
The STS Centre is part of a larger MUD called MediaMOO,
located at the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. To reach MediaMOO, you must have telnet access
to Internet. On UNIX machines, the command is typed as
follows: "telnet purple-crayon.media.mit.edu 8888". Or, from a
system running VMS, type: "telnet purple-
crayon.media.mit.edu /port=8888". If you have properly
connected, you will see a message reading "Welcome to
MediaMOO!" Now type: "connect guest".
The online help system will help you get started. Try typing
"help" and "help introduction". Typing "help create" will give you
information on how to register as a permanent user. Another
useful command is: "say Hi! I'm new here. Can you help me?".
You can type "look at <whatever>" and "examine <whatever>".
Examining something will give you a list of the things you can
do with it.
When you first connect to MediaMOO, you will be in a virtual
room called the "Lego Closet." You can step out of the closet by
typing: "out". Now you will be a room called the "E&L
Garden." From there, you can get to the Virtual STS Centre by
typing: "STS".
3. What does the Virtual STS Centre "look" like?
The best way to find out is to go there yourself, but here's a brief
description anyway. The STS Centre is an imaginary building
adjacent to the virtual campus of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (just across the street from MIT's Program in
Science, Technology, and Society). The building contains a
comfortable lounge, conference rooms, a library, a game room, a
rooftop cafe, and offices owned by individual users. It is also
contains interactive objects like the Quotation Machine and the
Hall of Statues. Users are encouraged to contribute their own
virtual objects and to build their own virtual additions to the
STS Centre.
4. What Goes On at the Virtual STS Centre?
The STS Centre officially opened on April 9, 1993. Dozens of
people from Internet nodes around the world attended the grand
opening celebration. The Centre recently hosted a special
"Forum on the Use of Virtual Spaces for Work-Related
Interaction in the Humanities," and it also is the home of a
monthly journal club for historians, sociologists, and others
studying science and technology. The Minnesota Center for the
Philosophy of Science and UCLA's Virtual Center for the Study
of Virtual Spaces have offices located at the STS Centre.
University students and faculty have held virtual course
meetings at the Centre. Just as important as these organized
events, however, are the spontaneous encounters and
gatherings which occur among users connecting to MediaMOO
at random times throughout the day. It may be through these
kinds of unplanned interactions -- analogous to bumping into
colleagues in the hallway during a conference -- that the most
useful professional exchanges will take place in virtual space.
5. What's the Philosophy Behind the Virtual STS Centre?
The reader is probably already familiar with the use of electronic
mailing lists, bulletin boards, or newsgroups for the exchange of
opinions, queries, conference announcements, job offerings, and
disciplinary chit-chat within the humanities. One can think of
an electronic mailing list as a professional journal, published
many times daily and consisting entirely of letters to the editor.
As the technology improves and as access to national and
international computer networks spreads, this kind of electronic
interaction is likely to become more convenient, more
widespread, and ultimately indispensable.
But electronic mailing lists, like e-mail itself, have the defect of
being asynchronous and hence a bit stiff and formal. It's as if
we're signaling to each other from distant islands: Since we've
decided to rearrange the stones on the beach to spell something
new, we might as well dot all the i's and cross all the t's. But by
the time we've got our stones in place, the subject has probably
changed.
If an electronic mailing list is like a journal, then a MUD (for
multi-user dungeon, or multi-user dimension) is like a cross
between an academic conference and a perpetual cocktail party.
At any given time of day, many different users are likely to be
logged on to the system, creating the possibility for spontaneous
and enlightening encounters. Scheduled events bring together
many people for discussions on topics of professional interest.
Two or more users from far-flung institutions can meet by
appointment to chat or collaborate. And as the substrate for all
these activities, there is a world of virtual "rooms," programmed
with settings ranging from the ordinary to the exotic and
furnished with interesting objects to use and modify.
Programming itself is straightforward and open to all, so that the
virtual world grows and changes along with its community of
users. The Virtual STS Centre is, in essence, an ongoing social
experiment designed to test whether the MUD environment can
enable new kinds of meaningful professional interactions
between scholars in humanistic fields, especially the social and
historical study of science and technology.
6. What is MediaMOO?
The use of MUDs for professional communication is very new.
The Virtual STS Centre is part of MediaMOO, a MUD which
primarily serves researchers in the areas of interactive media,
computer science, artificial intelligence, and computers and
learning, and which opened in January, 1993. Scholars who
visit the Virtual STS Centre, therefore, will be helping to explore
the frontiers of this new medium.
MUDs have been around for about ten years, and have been
used primarily by computer programmers for socializing or role-
playing adventure games. David Steffen, a cell biologist at Baylor
College of Medicine who is helping to develop a virtual
conference facility for the use of biologists, has written to his
colleagues: "First, a confession. A MUD is a game, descendant of
a long line of games. Our current interest in the MUD is as a tool
for scientific communication, but if this bastard lineage is too
distressing to your puritanical soul, read no further."
There are now some 250 publicly announced MUDs around the
world. The MOO programming language, which emphasizes
easy customizability, was developed by Xerox researcher Pavel
Curtis in the late 1980s. (MOO stands for MUD, Object-Oriented).
Lately it's become clear that the kinds of human interactions that
have been occurring on MUDs for years could also be useful in
professional work.
For this reason the core of MediaMOO's geography is a virtual
representation of many of the rooms in the real MIT Media Lab.
The STS Centre is a separate installation, although users can
easily "travel" between the two locations. The researchers who
created and administer MediaMOO (the "janitors") invite STS
users to inhabit this area of their virtual world in the hope that
mutually beneficial and productive interactions will occur
between the two populations of users.
7. Who Designed the Virtual STS Centre?
Wade Roush ("Wade" on MediaMOO) is a science journalist and
a doctoral candidate in the Program in Science,
Technology, and Society at MIT, researching the social and
political meaning of technological disasters. The Virtual STS
Centre emerged from conversation and collaboration with
MediaMOO's creator and arch-janitor, Media Lab researcher
Amy Bruckman. Roush "built" the STS Centre to provide
scholars in his field of study with a thought-provoking
environment in which to gather, converse, and explore the
MOO medium. His original hope was that the STS Centre
would become known as a virtual crossroads for the profession:
a perpetual academic fair, a place where all kinds of interactions -
- planned and unplanned, individual and collaborative -- would
take place. Initially, he envisioned that these interactions would
take the form of real-life academic institutions such as colloquia,
seminars, and conferences. With the benefit of a little
experience, however, he has come to see his original plans as
somewhat misguided. He had fallen into the "If you build it,
people will come" syndrome. He believed that the kinds of
interactions familiar in real academic life would naturally begin
to take place in virtual space if he merely provided an
interesting stage. Things didn't quite happen that way. Roush
came to see that interesting, imaginative, and useful
developments would not occur at the STS Centre as a product of
his own heavy-handed intervention. All he could do, he
realized, was to encourage others to take advantage of the
medium in any way they see fit. The medium *does* have
immense potential, thanks to its essential Constructionist
nature. But to *create an environment for the users*, as he first
tried to do, goes against this nature, which dictates that the
*users be allowed to create the environment.* (You can be
certain that this is an accurate account of Roush's thoughts on
the matter, since he wrote it himself.)
8. Where Can I Get More Information?
MediaMOO's on-line help system is quite thorough, and can
answer many questions about navigating your way through the
MOO environment. You can find out how to register as a
permanent user by connecting as a guest and then typing: "help
create". Registration requests and requests for other kinds of
help -- for example, if you have trouble connecting to
MediaMOO -- should be e-mailed to "MediaMOO-
Registration@media.mit.edu". Information is also available via
anonymous ftp (file-transfer-protocol) from the MIT Media Lab
and Xerox PARC.
Files available for ftp from the Media Lab at
the address "media.mit.edu" in the directories
/pub/MediaMOO/Papers and /pub/MediaMOO/Transcripts
include: a paper by Amy Bruckman entitled "Identity Workshop:
Emergent Social and Psychological Phenomena in Text-Based
Virtual Reality"; another paper by Amy Bruckman under the
filename "MediaMOO-3Cyberconf.{ps,rtf,txt}" entitled "Virtual
Professional Community: Results from the MediaMOO Project";
a paper by Wade Roush under the filename "STS-Centre" entitled
"The Virtual STS Centre on MediaMOO: Issues and Challenges as Non-
Technical Users Enter Social Virtual Spaces"; an article on
MediaMOO by Wade Roush entitled "Have Computer, Won't
Travel"; and transcripts of various events and forums which
have taken place at the Virtual STS Centre.
Documents available from Xerox PARC at parcftp.xerox.com
in the directory /pub/MOO include a MOO programmer's manual
and tutorial, as well as client programs to improve your MOO
interface and a number of interesting papers.
See you online!