[Text should be 346,199 bytes] Rural Grassroots Telecommunication: Big Sky Telegraph and its Community (Neil) Willard Uncapher willard@well.sf.ca.us Abstract (300 word overview- text to follow) The research examines the introduction of a low cost computer mediated conferencing and communication system into the rural Montana one room school system and develops a theoretical framework based on a model of global cultural flows with which to assess computer networking's role in the informatization of the rural community, as well as to assess broader changes in the overall technoscape. Based on interviews, site visits, and an extensive collection of secondary materials, primarily between January 1988 when Big Sky Telegraph first went online, and January 1990, the research provides an ethnographic case study of the way social, cultural, economic, and preexisting communication arrangements, disjunctures, and practices come to frame the definition, acceptance, support, and uses of a new medium. Developing from Prof. Arjun Appadurai's framework of disjunctive global cultural pathways of the ethnoscape, technoscape, finanscape, mediascape, and ideoscape, the research elucidates three additional theories of socially located definitions, of cultural pathways, and of technological or media ecology to explore how these global cultural flows come to be inflected into and redefined by local contexts and cultural politics. The research develops these points in the context of the very important, interactive, information medium of 'computer networking' that has seen virtually no real field research outside of structured, institutional settings. After reviewing the existing state of social research on public computer networking, the study explores the history of the Big Sky Telegraph. Evidence pointed to the importance of considering how new media displace and assume previous media practices and work to disrupt or transform associated relationships. While local informants tended to feel that changes in the technoscape were inevitable, they were divided about how to see this as an empowering advantage. Non-traditional students, including women changing their occupations and self-definitions, provided an important source of change in the communities. ### [Ok, now the main text!] Rural Grassroots Telecommunication: Big Sky Telegraph and its Community (N.) Willard Uncapher, M.A. (willard@well.sf.ca.us) (c) n. willard uncapher 1991 Contents Line Table of Contents .......................... 46 Introduction to Electronic Edition.......... 110 Acknowledgements & Copyright ............... 152 1. Introduction ............................... 194 2. Technoscapes ............................... 393 I. The Theory of Definitions ............. 550 II. The Theory of Paths ................... 857 III. The Theory of the Ecology of Technologies 986 3. Computer Mediated Conferencing I. Overview and History .................. 1096 II. Sonatas On a Single Instrument ........ 1198 4. Methods I. Overview and History .................. 1381 II. Site Selection: From Technoscape to Landscape ...... 1474 III. Sample Selection ...................... 1631 IV. Survey Outlines ....................... 1816 5. Ethnographic Setting I. Sketches and Overviews: Big Sky Country 2124 II. Going to School: The Rural School Systems 2557 III. A World of Change: Dillon and the Larger Communities .. 2709 IV. The Outer and Inner Worlds: A Brief History of Big Sky Telegraph 2982 6. Ethnographic Analysis: The Telegraph in the Community I. Rural Teachers and the New Medium ..... 3360 II. The Rural Community and the New Medium 3791 III. Telegraphing Groups Among the Municipal Community ...... 4034 IV. Crossing Borders: Collaborators, Outsiders, and Power. 4180 7. Conclusion: The Changing Technoscape I. Changing Cultural Flows ............... 4338 II. Changing Definitions .................. 4511 III. Changing Paths and Roles .............. 4793 IV. Changing Technoscapes ................. 4937 -Footnotes .................................... 5118 -Bibliography & Computer Networks Cited ....... 5179 -Appendices -Survey Outlines ........................... 5693 -Map ....................................... (5731) -Wisdom Graduation Speech................... 5746 ****************************** Intro. to Electronic Version The following material is copyrighted by myself, N. Willard Uncapher 1991. The reason for the copyright is that I do *not* want this material published in print form before I get the OK of the people involved, and I don't want the material to be altered. As it is, online publication can be pretty funky as material can be altered pretty easily, and the final product can end up looking like some corrupt, late medieval manuscript.... So if the paper doesn't look right, send me a line at willard@well.sf.ca.us and ask for another elec. version, or better yet, send me $6 and I will send you a paper copy. In line with the rather loose copyright system of Hakim Bey and Semiotext(e), send me a note if you make a copy of this paper! Next, since this is an ascii *electronic version* based on my final version which was in another word processor format, it seems that I have lost my underlinings, highlightings, and so forth, and have had to fiddle with margins. Hope everything is clear! Finally, this paper itself was written for a somewhat academic audience on one hand, but with media activists, and, in a way, future historians of cyberspace in mind as well. The first audience, however, held sway over something of the writing style and the overall presentational format, alas! Likewise, limitations in funding, time, and in the receptiveness of my primary audience further limited what I could do or relate. So just be glad for what is here! I am! The research (interviews, collection of online materials, bibliographies, etc.) was pretty much undertaken in 1988-1990 when there was less material available on what I was interested: not 'online behavior' but *how* behavior gets online, the cultural politics of how to get online! I have left references as they were, un-updated. I could now recommend a lot of new material for different projects, and intend to expand a lot of the material contained herein. Any project of this sort is bound to be to a great extent a collabor- ation, so I would like the dear reader to glance again at the acknowledgements, and recognize how even this small investigation, historical survey, and theoretical outline would not have been possible without the material, intellectional, and compassionate help of the activists and individuals named. ****************** Acknowledgements I thank my fellow students and friends for the work they have done and the ideas they have shared. I thank the people I met in Montana, and hope they understand why my immediate interest here is not just the new medium we have thought about together, but an intimation of the process by which media can bring people together, and separate them. I thank the founders and members of the Electronic Networking Association, including Stan Pokras, Lisa Carlson, Frank Burns, Ed Yarrish, Nan Hanahue, Paul Leach, and Tom Sherman, as well as Dave Hughes for their vision and for helping to introduce me to Big Sky Telegraph. I thank Frank and Reggie Odasz, Gerry Bauer, Jody Webster, as well the many people who kindly allowed me to interview them, for their time, hospitality, and insights. I thank Prof. Robert L. Shayon and Nash Shayon for teaching me so much about how to conduct interviews when there was no such course at Annenberg, and for their help both in and outside of Montana. I am still learning, and hope to continue with the goals of individual, social, and spiritual empowerment which have so inspired them. I thank the many members of the WELL, the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, in San Francisco, CA for their spirited comments and conceptual interventions. I thank Prof. James Russell for his support and for the intellectual example he set for me. I thank the generosity of Mr. & Mrs. Howard B. McLane without whose financial support this study would not have been possible. I thank both my parents, of course, and see such similarities in what I am doing with what they have done. I thank Lisa, her love, and her most spirited and visionary outsteppings. Copyright: N. Willard Uncapher 1991 Subject Headings: Penn theses--Communications Communications--Penn theses Technology--Social Aspects Community Development Information Networks ******************* - Chapter 1 - Introduction The following study focuses on the introduction of a computer mediated conferencing and communication system into the rural Western Montana school system, and develops a theoretical framework with which to assess its role in the informatization of rural communities, as well as with which to assess changes of the overall technoscape. It shows how a general framework of global culture flows and transformations can be further developed and applied to assess the specific social and cultural complexities involved in the introduction of new communications technologies, and thereby seeks to move beyond more traditional theories of the diffusion of innovations. Based on interviews, site visits, and extensive collection of secondary materials, primarily between January 1988 and December 1989, this study in turn provides one the first detailed analysis of computer mediated conferencing outside of relatively formal work environments. The Big Sky Telegraph officially began operation in January, 1988 and was designed primarily to support and interconnect rural educators in western Montana with electronic mail, computer conferencing, a software library, and access to a wide variety of online educational and health care data bases and services. Its secondary mission was to act as a community wide, shared information resource, serving to integrate the business, civic, and educational communities. It is one of the first pilot projects to use a low cost computer network to link up entire communities with one another, perhaps the first. The aptness of such a new communications technology to the rural teaching community is not hard to fathom. Western Montana, a beautiful, though arid land of mountains and broad valleys, of high ranges with scrub grasses, lodgepole pine and yellow birch, quick streams and wildlife, is also a scene of very small, rural towns. The already low population density near these rural towns declines ever more quickly as one heads out into the surrounding wheat and hay farms and cattle ranches. It is also an area still characterized by the persistence of one and two room schools, relatively isolated from one another, as are the communities that they serve. The Big Hole Valley, where most of my research was conducted, has the longest high school bus route in the United States. The Telegraph has sought to link up these schools, and the communities for which they serve, with a computer conferencing and communication system. The term 'conferencing' must be stressed here. Much as Meyrowitz (1985) has noted the persistent failure by investigators of the dynamics of 'interpersonal' interaction like Erving Goffman to consider mediated spaces in their frameworks, so I have had to address a persistent 'broadcast' orientation in the analysis of new information technologies. The older methodological division of mass from inter- personal communication, of mediated from face-to-face is becoming increasingly not simply outmoded, but a source of confusion. Computer conferencing ideally allows users to store messages or files online which other users or groups can 'access' later on. The point is so basic that most communications researchers continue to overlook it in favor of the broadcast characteristics of computer networks, choosing to concentrate on problems of the relatively one way online information flows associated with corporate sponsored videotext and database archiving. (eg. Mosco 1982) Unlike electronic mail in which an individual directs a message to a designated user or group of users, computer conferencing allows messages to be socially shared among participating individuals, leading to what inelegantly might be termed a 'computer augmented network of group social exchanges.' Since messages can be stored over time, conversations which might take place in a matter of hours can be extended over a period of months. Further, individuals who can be online only during the evening can still interact with someone who can only be online during the day. One of the implications of this structure is the possibility of creating a kind of 'living database.' At the other end of a question one asks online might be a host of other people with all their individual information and ideas, rather than a data base of stock responses. The other people online can act as both conduits and filters to information which might not be centrally stored anywhere. The differences between the static and 'living' database can be marked. In the case of the Big Sky Telegraph, a teacher who is having a problem developing a program for a dyslexic child at her rural school, or even in assessing the severity of the impairment, can now ideally draw on the experiences and resources, whether online or off, of other teachers. And at the same time she can still have recourse, whether online or off, to the more traditional materials available from the College or from the County Superintendent of Education. A teacher who had collected pertinent materials (of which no central administrator was aware) could ideally provide or suggest them online. Someone else might have some general advice, or just have some encouraging things to say. The possible professional and pedagogical benefits of such a system are not hard to imagine. The relatively small individual sizes of these rural schools, their isolation from one another, and the lack of ample individual resources, could provide real incentives for them to share what they have, to support and advice each other, and to look for ways to gain low cost access to agencies and individuals interested in helping rural teachers. In a more traditional fashion, the medium could augment access to lists and collections of offline materials, such as movies and books, and include instructions about how to get these things. Further, setting up a regional, professional network in an area where chances to meet one another are infrequent, teachers could not only coordinate resources, but could offer professional empathy and comfort as well. Heather Hudson in her survey of research on the role of satellite telecommunications in Alaskan rural development (Hudson 1984) noted that the introduction of the telephone allowed teachers in isolated rural communities to socialize and consult with each other, resulting in an increased amount of time that teachers were willing to stay in the "bush." Trying to actually quantitize the benefits of telecommunications or to unequivocally interpret the data, as many researchers of the effects of rural telecommunications have tried to do is exceedingly difficult as different co-factors tend to be at work, and the amount of potential 'value' tends to be ambiguous (see Goldschmidt, et alia 1980; Drossinos 1981; Saunders, et alia 1983; Uncapher 1986; Parker 1990 for overviews). This quanititative ambiguity should not disguise the notion that social and interpersonal benefits such as being able to console or advise an isolated teacher or resident can have materially beneficial results as well. If the Big Sky Telegraph could offer such benefits, why wouldn't more teachers be going online? How are we to locate and understand the resistances to going online? With 114 potential schools, only some 30 or more were actively involved at the time of this study in 1989, although the number was gradually growing. The easiest answer would probably be structural: there were not enough modems, nor enough teachers who knew the system, nor enough money to make the initial connections. Perhaps more teachers needed to become 'computer literate' or 'online literate.' Preliminary investigation suggested, however, that the reasons were more complex. There were cases where teachers had taken an 'online course' and knew how to use the system, had access to modems, and had the funds from grants to make the connections, but still didn't use it much. Other teachers, even before they had access to the Telegraph became real enthusiasts about what they felt might be its possibilities. Another possibility as to why teachers might not be going online, and which would demand investigation, potentially lay with the very complex public/private nature of the medium. Even if the Big Sky Telegraph was initially directed to the rural educational community, most of the conferences were also open to the 'online public,' general callers who might want to read these exchanges. Such openness, particularly in the rural setting, can work to the local educational community's advantage when these outsiders, whether they be local, national, or international have their own resources and answers to share. It also can be seen as a liability, inviting panoptic eavesdropping by those with an entirely different agenda of what to do with the information collected. And, in so far as teachers perceived a conference as a public, shared area, there was the possibility that the they felt that only certain kinds of information or needs should be expressed there. Public spaces evolve in the context of complex sets of rules and assumptions so as to maintain a balance between trust and power in the disclosure of wants, needs, resources, and perspectives. In connection with these lapses, I made my general thesis that the dynamics of acceptance, rejection, or oversight of the new technology would not be understood without properly examining the ways in which the new communication system would affect the teacher's position and roles within the general community, nor without examining the differing interests within the general community in either promoting or hindering the new communication order. The effort to situate definitions, support and available uses of the new technology within existing social communication was especially important to undertake when one considers that many of the supporters of the Big Sky Telegraph suggested that this technology could act as bridgehead to what loosely might be termed the informatization of the rural communities. One of the reasons for the importance of this project as an example to other rural areas and developing counties was its relatively low cost, and the fact that it is primarily run by and for the teachers. The central computer, a 386 16 mhz micro, acting as a switch board cost in 1987, along with all necessary software and hardware, less than $15,000. Prices have dropped considerably since then, and technical quality has improved. The system made use of the computers, mostly Apple IIs, which were already at the schools. Since the schools served as perhaps the most prominent focus of most of these small, ranching and farming communities, linking them together could act as an example to the rest of the community, which could gradually follow suit. Indeed in one scenario, the teachers could become information resource individuals to the rest of the community. (Hughes 1987a) But what would the informatization of the rural community mean? How would it transform and shift traditional roles? Here then was one of those special opportunities to follow the dynamics of the introduction of a pervasive new medium or technology, pervasive in the sense that, like the telephone, all sorts of people within the community might find reasons to use it. What's more this was happening in communities small enough that I might with some confidence be able to capture something of how the process was occurring; and yet with a medium important enough to expect some kinds of interventions from outside the community. My research was designed to serve as an ethnographic case study of the way social, cultural, economic, and preexisting communication arrangements, disjunctures, and practices come to frame the definition, acceptance, support, and available uses of a new medium. It argues for a much more contextualized understanding of media and media practices as against approaches that limit themselves to purported implicit characteristics of the medium itself; and it seeks to develop and test a framework for elucidating these contexts. And finally, my research seeks to develop these points, as will be discussed in Chapter 3, in the context of a very important, interactive, information medium that has seen virtually no real field research outside of structured, institutional settings. ****************** - Chapter 2 - Technoscapes In the following section I will outline a general theoretical framework, to be applied later in this research, with which to draw out and assess these complex interrelationships, resistances, resonances, histories and practices all involved in the way new technologies are evaluated, used, forgotten, and re-evoked. To that end, I have added three additional elements or theories to the general framework of the technoscape, that realm where machines and skills of production and information are being phased in and out of use, renovated and abandoned, acquired and redefined by changing conditions of capital and demography, as well as by political, ecological, and cultural limitations. With these three additional theories or elements I hope to come closer to that paradoxical local/global juncture between which local conditions and intentions make use of new technologies, even as they are made use of by them as well. In formulating a general context of the social and cultural changes I have found it particularly helpful to make use of Prof. Arjun Appadurai's fivefold typology of global cultural flows, elaborating a bit more fully a number of his concepts which I hope will augment what he calls his 'tentative' framework, especially in its adaptation as a research tool to specific, regional locales. His first element is termed the ethnoscape, and refers to the movement of peoples, not simply in terms of movement to or from a territory to establish or disestablish a community, but as part of a more general 'landscape of persons' including "tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers and other moving groups." With the movement of peoples comes the movement of capital, ideologies, opportunities for work, and skills as well. Distinct cultural formations can in turn arise from within the diasporic communities, or depopulated, or repopulated areas, such as the invention of 'homelands' that never existed, or traditions which that are new or newly emphasized. (Anderson 1983) The technoscape, the second dimension of his framework, is the one I found most necessary to re-situate, to reformulate, and the one to which my thesis has had to grapple with most persistently. With this dimension of global flow Appadurai seeks to throw into relief issues of "the global configuration, also ever fluid, of technology, and of the fact that technology, both high and low, both mechanical and informational, now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries." And as he goes on to say, "the odd distribution of technologies, and thus the peculiarities of these technoscapes, are increasingly driven not by any obvious economies of scale, of political control, or of market rationality, but by increasingly complex rela- tionships between money flows, political possibilities, and the availability of both un- and highly skilled labor." (Appadurai 1990:8) The finanscape focuses on the 'disposition' of global capital, on its movement in and out of regions, at a pace ever more accelerated by the increasing knowledge of relative economic advantage or disadvantage between different markets. Ethnoscape, Technoscape, and Finanscape deeply interact and involve each other. However, as Appadurai points out, the problem in using his analytical assessment of these different flows to predict the rates and natures of these global flows is limited at this time by their profoundly disjunctive nature: The critical point is that the global relationship between ethnoscapes, technoscapes, and finanscapes is deeply disjunctive and profoundly unpredictable, since each of these landscapes is subject to its own constraints and incentives (some political, some infor- mational, and some techno-environmental) and the same time as each acts as a constraint and a parameter for movements in the others. (8) The mediascape and the ideoscape to which he next turns are 'part of the closely related landscapes of images.' By way of definition he states that "mediascapes refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television stations and film production studios), which are now available to a growing number of private and public interests throughout the world, and to the images of the world created by these media." Finally, the ideoscapes "are also concatenations of images, but they are often directly political and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states and counter-ideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it." He goes on to point out that the most profound element of the ideoscape is the way it inflects different versions of an 'Enlightenment worldview' into the local imagination. The ideoscape is one of the most important sites of the Politics of Enlightenment. Such a politics seeks to engage issues and images of how enlightening practices might be worked out, what the telos, the ends might look like, which are to most important factors to work out immediately, and how these relate both to the individual and to his or her society. These issues and images are political because they implicitly posit just where the metaphysical and social freedoms of the individual can and should reside. I think we can set aside for now the questions of whether these latter two categories, at least as Appadurai describes them, reflect a profoundly visualist bias, and simply assume that the visual here stands synecdochically for aural and other elements, including, for example, dance or the semiotics of the built environment. The main point is to capture how the most powerful elements of media envisionings become manifest in the powerful narratives out of which more localized nar- ratives are constructed. The question of media forms is not out of place when one considers that the medium which this thesis seeks to investigate, computer networking, has the capability to 'broadcast' ideas globally in a matter of minutes, both directly, and as the ideas are picked up and indirectly re-broadcast to other communal forums elsewhere, either online or off.(1) It is likewise a medium that has the capability to allow individuals, globally dispersed, who might have never known of each other previously, to participate in the same forums at the same time with relatively low expense.(2) That is, the issue of the production and dissemination of information, even in a global context, give rise to new kinds of interactions which will transcend simple genre division into mass (eg. radio, film or TV) or one-to-one, interactive media (eg. oral conversations). The functional relationships between the size and nature capital investment and the ability to reach a mass audience also have the potential to change. What will happen to traditional means of video dissemination as the bandwidth of the telecommunications infrastructure widens, as it is doing, and private computer networking systems are able to send images, and whole videos around with world with the same ease with which they have begun to send and receive simple text? The number and nature of points of access into or from the mediascape mutate at an accelerating pace. However, it is the idea of technoscape which for my own research needs the greatest elaboration, especially as I apply these ideas to capturing the nature of social, cultural, and economic divisions and flows in an applied ethnography of the introduction of a new medium. For Appadurai, the technoscape can include all the means of material production, including the mechanical and the "informational." The 'informational' here seems to get at two distinct aspects of production. The first alludes to 'informational' technologies, devices and related skills needed to transform informational resources into usable commodities, often other forms of information. The second I would interpret to include the skill component of information, the ability to know how to use and reproduce a technology. Indeed I would consider the skill of how to use, or even conceive of a technology as part of that technology, of the ways the materiality of a technology expresses and reproduces itself. It is especially within the sphere of the technoscape that the skills needed to 'make use of,' 'work with,' and so forth are located. What's more, my thesis assumes that the skills and ways of conceiving and using technologies, including communications and conceptual technologies are differentially located among social and cultural groups within a society, and that it is part of the playing out of cultural politics that different groups come to adopt or ignore, disrupt or deny new technologies. A new technology or practice, a new medium or a new way of using that medium comes to be diffused through society not simply on account of the temporary global alignments of peoples, technologies, capital, narrative symbolisms, and ideological conveniences, but also on account of the ways by which in the play of local cultural politics different groups play on and come to be defined by the different technologies and media that they understand and use. My thesis then locates itself at this juncture within the technoscape where new technologies are not simply appropriated, but where they also seem appropriate. In order to clarify and organize my field work, I had to first develop three additional elements or theories within the conception of the technoscape: the first I term the theory of definitions, the second, the theory of paths, and the third the theory of media or technological ecology. The Theory of Definitions The theory of definitions seeks to draw out the ways by which new technologies, whether material, communicational, or conceptual, come to come to seem appropriate within the interplay of cultural politics. It seeks to act as heuristic point of departure from which to reveal how power, conceptual frameworks, and social position work together to define and position a new technology. To this end, I have outlined within the theory of definitions a four fold analytical framework. Each of the four components of the schema (1) definition of the technology; (2) acceptance/rejection of the technology; (3) support/disavowal of the technology; and (4) use of the technology have their own associated questions, and it should not be supposed that one part of the scheme, say (1) definition of the technology temporally precedes any other category, although I do assume a temporal tendency from definition to acceptance/rejection to support/disavowal to use. While other communication scholars such as Everett Rogers have elaborated what they feel the process of 'acceptance' or 'rejection' of a technology might be, making use of such rational processes as testability, displacement, and cost, I wish to emphasize that the very definition of what a technology is, and what it is supposed to do are not set, and in fact are subject to all kinds of revision. And whereas in literary studies this approach to the suspending the final, ontological meaning of an 'object' and the consequent interest in the process of reading and deciphering has been in vogue for a number of years (eg. Burke 1941; Derrida 1962, 1981; Jauss 1972), and has lead in turn, and to some extent in parallel, to a number of similar theoretical recastings in the social sciences (eg. Godelier 1970; Murphy 1971; Bourdieu 1972; Giddens 1979), the idea of the instability of the meaning of the object as a tool of analytic study has only been a part of the study of the diffusion of technologies and of cultural transformation for a brief while (eg. the studies inspired by the transformation of the 'technological frame' of Pinch & Bijker 1987). These studies of the 'Social Construction of Technological Systems' (Bijker et alia. 1987) strive to uncover the outlines of the social forces coming to bear in the stabilization of the form of different technological artifacts, such as the bicycle. Pinch and Bijker attempt to organize a synthesis of what they feel are two important interpretive 'programs' for examining the role of social dynamics in the establishment of technological innovations. The first program attempts to develop a sociology of scientific knowledge loosely in terms of three stages. In their three stage process of scientific stabilization, a preliminary stage of 'interpretive flexibility' of scientific results must soon yield to "social mechanisms that limit interpretive flexibility and thus allow scientific controversies to be terminated... A third stage, which has not yet been carried through in any study of contemporary science, is to relate such 'closure mechanisms' to the wider social-cultural milieu." (1987:27) Pinch and Bijker in turn contrast this interpretive program with an alternative one focussing on the 'social construction of technology' during which technological development occurs by a process of "variation and selection" guided by social forces. For Pinch and Bijker, "if a multi-directional model is adopted, it is possible to ask why some variants 'die,' whereas others 'survive.'" (1987:29) Their distinction between what in essence is the classical disjunction between the Spenserian view of cumulative evolution and the Darwinian view of "multi-directional" evolution which has characterized social developmental theory since the 19th century (Ingold 1986), is in fact not so great as to preclude both research perspectives from supposing a common, final resting point of development. In keeping with these two research outlooks, and those of Pinch and Bijker's precursors among the early theorists of the sociology of knowledge beginning with Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim, the lines of questioning of both sociological orientations converge to what Kuhn later called a 'paradigm,' or stable pattern of assumptions. (Kuhn 1970) However, in adapting the concept of the technoscape to the field, I found it necessary to forgo this assumption of a final, synthetic account of what a particular technology is nor how it should be used. Rather I realized it would be necessary to assess how different social groups identify, or fail to identify, and in turn organize themselves around, and in terms of, a new communications technology. A useful concept here turned out to be that of the "technological frame." In the use of Bijker and those inspired by his approach, the technological frame is said to structure the attribution of meaning to an 'artifact,' "providing, as it were, a grammar for it. The grammar is used in the interaction of members of [a] social group, thus resulting in a shared meaning attribution." (1987:-173) The nature of a technological frame can be approached in two primary fashions, either cognitively or socially. Taken cognitively, the technological frame acts to highlight or neglect different features about how an artifact is approached, defined, and imagined. Taken within a social perspective, the technological frame acts to establish social boundaries, tests for inclusion or exclusion that can be made in accordance to the accepted premises and grammar of that group. This more socially oriented conception of the 'technological frame' is similar to Brian Stock's notion "textual communities," communities whose existence develops in accordance to shared 'readings' of particular texts. (Stock 1983; also Anderson 1983) As Carolyn Marvin points out in her adaptation of Stock's 'textual communities' to the context of innovations in communications technology, the establishment of a 'community of interpretation' can actively define itself and the thing it is interpreting, whether it be a gnostic text, bakelite, or telegraph technology, in ways to promote their own social status, as well as their own exclusivity as a group or community. (Marvin 1988) The development of the technological frame does not by any means stabilize social pragmatics. As Bijker says, "The concept of technological frame is intended to apply to the interaction of various actors. Thus it is not an individual's characteristic, nor the characteristic of systems or institutions; frames are located between actors, not in actors or above actors." (Bijker et alia., 1987:17) For Bijker, however, it appears that the technological frames are established in accordance to vaguely defined historical reasons and then become the leading property of differing groups or communities which come into conflict in defining and promoting a technology in accordance to their particular definition. In the development of the material Bakelite, according to Bijker, the technological frame which conceived of Bakelite as a plastic, artistic material to be used in the making of fancy radios and combs, and not simply an industrial material with particular qualities of electrical resistence, brittleness, and opacity, structured the social environment in such a way so as to ensure funding and the stabilization of the technical production of the bakelite material. Had Bakelite been considered simply as an 'industrial' material, he argues, it might never have been developed as fully. What Bijker fails to properly theorize is the way in which the activity of making the definition serves to further social goals. A more dynamic outlook towards the ongoing definition of an object would be more in line with the original conceptualizations of the social frame as elaborated in the works of Gregory Bateson (1955) and later Erving Goffman (1974) for whom a frame is not a static, tacit possession used to make sense of the life world but a strategic tool by which different people can agree on common assumptions about how social interaction between them might take place. For Bateson and Goffman, individuals do not simply assume a common frame for their discourse, a grammar for their ways of speaking, but actively and interactively define the frame so as to establish the boundaries of acceptable discourse and acceptable activities. While Bijker notes that the original definition of a technology, the establishment of its meaning, can serve pragmatic purposes, such as to encourage diverse support for a new technology, once the definition has been set, it appears in his reading of the 'frame' to quickly stabilize. Accepting this final stability, Bijker returns to his original concern, that of a process of selection between technological pathways and the establishment of a stable and dominant outlook on the technology. A more dynamic view of the activity of definition leads to an important range of theoretical issues not covered by a static view. What are the factors involved in creating a 'technological frame,' that is, a frame about how to conceive the nature of a technology? Carolyn Marvin, for example, in her examination of 'textual communities' suggests that one important factor is the desire of the operators of a tool to profes- sionalize themselves in an exclusionary manner so as to augment their social status. These professionals will in turn define and present their technology, the rules and culture of using a tool as 'difficult' and hard to learn, so as to consolidate their position as the masters and authentic interpreters of that tool. According to Anthony Giddens in his critique of the different forms of symbolic interactionism, this movement towards a dynamic view of definition by one or two groups using a new technology only partially reveals the forces and factors involved in the overall processes of any definition of an object or activity: Goffman implicitly brackets institutional analysis in order to concentrate upon social interaction as strategic conduct... Goffman's sociology, like Wittgensteinian philosophy, has not developed an account of institutions, of history or structural transformation. Institutions appear as unexplained parameters within which actors organize their practical activities. This is therefore in the end more than a methodological 'bracketing': it reflects a dualism of action and structure that has been noted earlier. Being limited in this sense, Goffman's sociology also ignores the possibility of recognizing the dialectic of presence/absence that connects action to the properties of the totality: for this involves the need to generate an institutional theory of everyday life. (Giddens 1979:80-81) The point of an 'institutional theory' for Giddens is not to substitute a mechanist, regulatory, synchronic structure as an explanatory device of 'everyday life' but to explore the ways in which larger scale institutional structures impinge onto the productive and socially reproductive strategies of dynamic frameworking. This is done not by historicizing the ways in which certain subgroups define, isolate, and socially elevate themselves vis-a-vis an emerging technology and in so doing undertake to define what technology is, and the limits of how and by whom it can be interpreted; instead, by avoiding the easy alternatives of either synchronic and diachronic assessments, a more sophisticated institutional theory moves toward examining the ways in which historically and institutionally situated groups manage the continual emergence and ongoing redefinition of social groups and technologies. This process of investigating the historically and institutionally situated management of dynamic enframing, is not without precedent. For example, D. Holaday (1986) in a study reminiscent of Sol Worth (1972) explores the social dynamics of the introduction and first use of film making equipment in a traditional Malaysian village. What Holaday wanted to discover was how the village might organize itself in the making of its first film, a film written, directed, and in some ways produced by whatever elements in the village wanted to take on these engaging tasks. He writes, "The research reported here asks how this new communications technology was made to fit the existing social system in the village, not how it might have changed that system." (1986:2) The Functionalist perspective of his work, that society is like a single biological organism seeking atemporal homeostasis (cf. Malinowski 1922) leads him to investigate how society as a whole seeks to establish a meaning for the new medium. "Adjustment, as I will use the term, refers to symbolic action in the form of microcultural events though which newly acquired technology is classified and assigned a value in terms of the cultural categories of the recipient community." (1986:6) In the end Holaday concludes that far from undermining the 'traditional elders' as a number of Diffusion of Technology theorists might have assumed, the traditional elders acted in a traditional manner to define the role of the new medium within the community. Even accepting his questionable assumption of the duality of social change and social stasis, and his desire to investigate the nature of this stasis, his assumption of categories of a "recipient community" deserves special note. Holaday makes a traditional rhetorical move, common in classical anthropology, of assuming the integration of the beliefs of a tradition into a single whole, one to which the outside interpreter, the ethnologist, seeks special ingress. And reminiscent of Pinch and Bijker above, the impact of this premise is to encourage the cultural interpreter to examine the social politics necessary for a single meaning of a new technology to emerge. I have made no such assumption here. My approach to the organization of society is post-structural in the sense that I assume that a society into which the new medium will have to fit can not be simplified into a unified, hierarchical structure, with one elite or highly interested group deciding the meaning or position of the new technology. (cf. Jameson 1983) Rather, the organization of society consists of many groupings, each with their own agenda, history, and interests. I would include the communications researcher as simply one interpreter among a field of (local) interpreters, and I would conclude that the researcher's perspective on what a technology might be would have to be dialectically bound by the institutional and historical factors which led to his or her practical decisions to undertake the research, as well as by the various institutional and historical factors encouraging and facilitating him or her to pursue it. (cf. Tyler 1986) There were further lessons to be learned from Holaday's thesis which were directly relevant to the conceptualizing of the research on computer mediated conferencing to be done in Montana. Whereas Holaday sought to address the problem of 'how this new communications technology was made to fit the existing social system in the village, not how it might have changed that system,' he did little to examine the factors which would bring such a medium to the village in the first place, nor the factors which might sustain its presence in the village, and how these factors could over time transform village society. Appadurai's schema of global cultural flows clarifies this. He is able to show that along with the influx of new kinds of peoples (such as the anthro- pologist him or herself), new kinds of capital and goods, new kinds of images and ideas, come the many of the complex relationships and obligations which sustain and transport these things across the globe in the first place. Rather than examining the longer term relationships the new medium invokes- after all, for theoretical reasons Holaday dismisses this problem- he concentrates on the moment of the immediate act of the introduction of an artifact. However since neither the youth nor the adults had much acquaintance with the new medium, there was little reason for the youths not to defer to the elders. But what happens when the film device gets connected into the mediascape, to the flow of images, or to the flow of ideology itself? Will the elders still be able to negotiate the meanings and uses of this 'artifact' then? In fact, I would imagine that the television researchers in rural India project which Holaday was criticizing, and who felt that television was empowering the youth at the expense of the traditional flow of authority from elder to youth, were in fact looking at the introduction of TV within the contexts of the changing mediascape, whereas Holaday was looking at the preliminary stages of the changing technoscape. From within this range of different definitions of what the new technology might mean, and what its role in the community might be, comes the further reaction of (2) acceptance or rejection of the technology. This phase is similar to Bijker's stage of the 'selection' of the technology. Is the new tool or medium useful for what one claims it can do? Does the meaning of a technology or art increase at the cost of some other activity deemed more culturally important? The decision of (3) whether to support or disavow the use of the technology in other groups, or as part of the general 'fund' of things within society, involves decisions about the importance and proper roles of other groups. And part of what another group is, are the things it possesses, uses, or encourages. Given an initial understanding of social structure in rural Montana, which we will examine in a moment, this point led me to originally hypothesize that one of the most powerful factors inhibiting the expansion of the use of computer mediated conferencing systems in general, and of Big Sky Telegraph in particular, into the ranching community, was that the ranchers considered this 'tech- nology' as belonging primarily to the teaching community. For the technology to become part of the ranching community, it would have to be 're-phrased.' I hypothesized that the migration of CMC skills and definitions would have to be understood in terms of the social and cultural obligations of the teaching community to the ranching community. How did the obligations of the present user community colored or characterized what was felt to belong to another community? The operative question here, 'what is the role of a particular technology or art in society,' must be explored from a number of socially located perspectives. The final category of (4) the 'use' of the new medium still must be culturally defined. One could try to locate behavioral attributes of use: either one turns on the computer and modem, or one does not; either one leaves a message on a computer bulletin board or one does not. And yet which of these consists of use? While the researcher might invent one standard, another group might have its own criteria. One of the points of establishing the factor of use is to include and adequately ask questions whether a user had the material prerequisites to actually make use of the technology or medium. Did the intention to use something actually materialize? The Theory of Paths How did the teachers or the ranchers or anyone else find out about or even begin to think about the possibilities of the new medium in the first place? To get at this problem I had to develop a second element within the conception of the technoscape, which I called the theory of paths. The theory of paths I have in mind would be general enough to describe the nature and qualities of flow in any of the cultural currents which Appadurai has formulated. However, here I am more immediately interested in the specific problem of the flow or diffusion, the invention and re-invention, of technologies. In developing this theory six issues stand out: The first issue is the notion that the movement of people, skills, capital, narratives, or ideologies along paths is non-isomorphic. That is, movement often proceeds much more easily in one direction than in another. We must begin to identify the different kinds of path differentials which encourage or inhibit, accelerate or disperse movement. People are drawn to where there are jobs, capital to where the rate of return and security is high, and so forth. Secondly, the path by which something comes, the implied or inferred origin, color the conception and definition of what something is. A thing or skill becomes phenomenologically imbued with the characteristics of the path by which it arrives. Thirdly, access has to be constructed. A path must be built. If one doesn't know how to read, one can't get the information from the book, directly, that is. One might still get information from someone else who can read and who can translate the content into an accessible form. If one doesn't know the language, or the concepts, one can't get access to the content or ideas. Fourthly, certain sites or nodes, including temporal ones are privileged. This is a constructed, contingent privilege, but is something to which we must pay attention as we assess the nature of how skills or capital or whatever arrive, leave, or are displaced within an area with which we are interested. A place like a school house in a small town can be a privilege meeting place, both physically and in other ways in so far as what happens there is of interest to many different kinds of people. People and places are more open to transformation or to influences more at certain times in their life cycle or day than at others. Fifthly, as Appadurai showed above, paths and relationships can be profoundly disjunctive from one another. They don't all add up neatly to some kind of spider's web. Rather they can clash and collide. Finally, paths are always being rebuilt. In the context of envi- ronmental entropy and displacements, and at a cybernetically higher level, a path must be constantly remade in a way that it can reproduce itself. These are some of the minimal elements of a theory of the movement of diffusion in the technoscape. While it might seem precocious to enumerate these points before I have the time to adequately develop them, I feel that it is necessary when I am using the concept of social networks in the context of what is generally understood in communications theory as 'network analysis.' In part because of its prominence, and in part because of its dominance over the very term of 'communication network' within communication research studies, Rogers and Kincaid's work, Communication Networks: Toward A New Paradigm for Research (1981) deserves special notice. As its Preface notes, "The purpose of this book is to present what is currently known about communication networks and to illustrate methods of network analysis." (xi) For the authors, a 'link' between different individuals is established when they know of, and can initiate something called 'communication' between each other. Clearly there will be some qualifiers about these links: a demi-link occurs when only one individual tends to initiate communication, when there is a low level of communicational reciprocity (Rogers 1981:101); there are issues of proximity (multiple links to the same person), and strong vs weak ties (1981:127), issues of network stability (1981:316); but the focus of this kind of analysis tends to be dyadic, content-free association. The goal of such analysis appears to be sociometric, leading to such, might I say, common sense conclusions as "An individual is more likely to adopt family planning if a larger proportion of her personal network consists of individuals who have adopted previously." (1981:231) The value of such an analysis might be seen it its ability to identify certain kinds of subgroups, but without a better theory of group closure, of communication boundary conditions, even this level of analysis will be hampered and reduced to truism. This kind of social network analysis needs to be much more developed before it will really prove to be a useful tool for social analysis. Two immediate area of development stand out, areas that were particularly important to conceptualizing my research in Montana. First, the pathways between people and, in a secondary analysis, between groups, need to have some content injected back into them. Are people linked by the sharing of skills, or capital, of ideas or what? It was partly in response to this problem that I began to make much more use of Appadurai's cultural flows typology. The second point is perhaps as obvious, but more important in its implications. We need to come up with a better theory of movement differentials along a path, of the things that accelerate or slow down movement; and in particular we need the problem and metaphor of power in the social network. In another essay I have explored how knowledge is acquired as well as exchanged in the context of power and trust, and the way relations of power and domination inscribe themselves in seemingly disinterested, even objective account of the world. (1988a) Knowledge and information are publicly bequeathed only in the context of certain kinds of negotiations, in part because along with the bestowal of knowledge or information, is also bestowal of power. The metaphor of power manifests itself in the potential to do something, the ability to withhold, transfer, or collect something, but it also manifests itself with a sense of obligation, one of the phases of trust. A field researcher can gather information directly from informants in so far as they accept and trust that the consequent use of that content will be used in acceptable, safe ways, and that the researcher will implicitly understand when to use it and when not to. It takes an act of trust to bequeath information to a researcher; it is an act of power by which the social scientist reveals and takes command of the narrative and assessments of that information. The theory of paths in the context of my research then impels me to delimit who is talking to whom, considered in terms of social or cultural groups, some of the conditions for different kind of exchanges, the exchange of technological skills and definitions in particular, and some of the movement differentials along these paths. In so far as the technical knowledge and skills of computer conferencing were expected to move from the teacher community to ranching community, I informally expected that ranchers would be worried that: 1> accepting this knowledge would obligate them in some way to the teachers whom preliminary research showed to be socially, and economically dependent in many cases on the ranchers, particularly through the intermediary of the school board which I expected to be representative of ranching interests; and 2> accepting this knowledge would make them dependent on the technical skills of the teachers. (3) The access to new technologies, whether material, informational, or conceptual must be constructed. A path must be built. This leaves open the question of what would impel technologies and skills to overcome these movement differentials. This leads in turn to a consideration of the third element or theoretical specification of the technoscape, the theory of media or technological ecology. The Theory of Technological Ecology The final element I found necessary to develop in the context of applying the conception of the technoscape to the field I have called the theory of ecology of communication or technology. The basic idea is that new technologies, be they communicational or whatever, enter a scene by displacing something else, some other means of production or conveyance, and thus disrupt and transform many other associated relationships which presumed, struggled against, or depended upon the medium to be displaced. The very existence and nature of this struggle is quite often misunderstood, or even intentionally overlooked by the proponents of a new technology or practice. I break these media ecology issues into three parts: the migration of skills or means, context shifting, and message dilution. By the 'migration of skills' I refer to the idea that an environment, to paraphrase Husserl, is 'always already' doing what it is supposed to do. An environment is historically located. Where problems exist, there are also local practices, representations, or ideologies will have evolved which cope with, explain, dismiss, or even purposefully ignore the problem. As new practices intervene, and come to be identified, approached, supported or denied, used or abandoned, they do so in the context of something that is already working, albeit imperfectly. A computer network might ideally inform ranchers about pending weather conditions, for example, but if their current system of listening to the radio works, calling friends on the telephone, or not even worrying all the time about weather conditions, and if they have to learn all kinds of new skills to gain access to a different means of communication, why should they try, unless there are some other important factors or interventions, such as media image constructions, some kind of new funding, etc. I call this blindness to the context of existing media practices and needs, 'system orientation.' It is a conceptual pathology closely related to over-reliance on the rhetoric of media or technological determinism. Two more points stand out. The migration of skills is always accompanied by a degree of uncertainty, the gap between the ideal and the real. This uncertainty is admirably captured by the historian William Reddy writing about the decline of guilds during development of the textile trade in 17th century France: But it may be that people resist reform for reasons that have nothing to do with its intellectual merit, and that by the same token, their commitment to the present arises from no deep conservatism. Like the petitioners who appealed for the retention of the guilds in 1779, people may simply balk at the vacuum that results when a thousand familiar practices are abolished and replaced with abstractions. (Reddy 1988:281) Also, the issue of the migration of skills also involves the issues which semiotician Preziosi has termed the 'multi-modality of communicative events.' In Preziosi's dense and often provocative article, he reminds us that a signal, or sign is often meant to work not in terms of one distinct medium, such as writing or television, but in a complex interdependence of several. He states, "A communicative act such as a verbal utterance does not normally exist in vacuo (except perhaps in the fictitious atmosphere of certain fashionable linguistic models); rather, speech acts are invariably co-occurrent with communicative acts in distinct signalling media. This state of affairs is neither accidental nor circumstantial, for on the basis of internal evidence alone, it is increasingly evident that each of the isolable sign systems evolved by humans has been designed from the outset to function both semi-autonomously and in deictic concert with other sign systems. " (1979:44) Investigating the role of signalling even in one medium involves a sensitivity to the way signalling of a single sememe can involve several media. Hence investigating the displacement of one medium may involve signalling activities in several media. By 'context shifting' I refer back to a number of the problems discussed above under the context of definitions, to the way in which a new skill or production technology which might be added to one's repertoire for one reason, may over time, begin to take on other responsibilities and even lose those responsibilities for which it was originally adopted. It is important to keep firmly in mind that the uses of things are continually being reworked in the bricolage of culture. While the original path of entry into an individual's or a group's practice might occur for one reason- one learns to read to read the bible to participate in local religious discussions and to more deeply inform one's religious devotions- feedbacks from practice- one encounters unexpected ideas from new sources- involves one in different social and cultural relationships. Such contingent events may soon even shift why the original skill or practice is maintained or augmented. A practice might be accepted because there is an available niche, but once in that niche, it can act in all kinds of unforseen ways. Finally, 'message dilution' refers to the particularly contemporary problem of the surfeit of 'solutions' to problems, not just to 'information overload' but to a kind of 'solution overload.' The problem was raised by Chris Koepke (1989) in his study of the relationship of television viewing to the adoption of new medical practices when he noticed that messages coming over one medium, say television, could get lost (less correlation to adoption) in houses where a higher number of different media were being consumed. With the changes in the ethnoscape, the mediascape and the ideoscape, solutions can come colliding into focus. I distinguish two kinds of message dilutions: synchronic and diachronic. The first refers to the problem of multiple messages coming at the same time, job solution to being out of work, or in Koepke's case, having too many available media channels with each with a different message stream. The second kind of message dilution occurs as what is perceived as a single source of solutions becomes tainted on account of past failures. If the first messages or practices didn't work, suspicion will be cast on the solutions that follow. All of these theories taken together provide what I consider a basic framework for investigations of transformations and displacements within the technoscape, and in the adaptation of Appadurai's more general framework of global culture flows to field conditions. *************** - Chapter 3 - Computer Mediated Conferencing - Part I Overview and a Brief History Because this is one of the first studies of the medium of computer mediated conferencing outside of structured, institutional settings, I am on many accounts obligated to situate my research vis-a-vis this tradition, especially since I feel that more research on interactive, yet mediated forms of communication, including the telephone needs to be undertaken. While my research seeks to contribute to the field of what has somewhat erroneously been called the 'diffusion of innovations,' it likewise seeks to stand as a contribution to the study of computer networking, and to mediated, yet interactive forms of communication in general. What, then, is computer conferencing? What do we know about it? What questions are important to keep in mind, and what are some of the long term research objectives that need to be kept in mind as social scientist begin to assess its potential roles? Let me first address the question of what computer mediated conferencing is, how it developed, and something of why Big Sky Telegraph can been considered a very significant development in its history. "Computer conferencing systems" have attempted to use "the computer to structure, store, and process written communications among a group of persons." (Hiltz&Turoff 1978:7) The first computer mediated conferencing (CMC) systems were designed in the mid 1960's to help exchange timely messages between computer operators linked to each other via various time sharing devices. During this period, since computers were still relatively expensive, terminals might be set up at one location to access a computer somewhere else. New York University's first terminals were connected to a computer at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. While instructions as to which computer tapes to load, at what time, and so on, were originally coordinated by voice telephone, the operators began to send messages directly via the computers themselves. A message sent from one location would appear immediately on the screen at the other location. Over a period of time, the operators wrote and improved on programs to save and store these messages. (Pokras 1989) Since the IBM PC was originally released in August, 1981, most of these early conferencing systems were done on large, institutional computers, first for the Defense Department, and later for more purportedly academic purposes. The first non-computer oriented computer mediated communication system was designed and implemented in 1970 by Murray Turoff at the Office of Emergency Preparedness of the Executive Office of the President of the United States (Hiltz&Turoff 1978:43). It was not until the late 1970's that public CMC sytems were developed. One of the first of these, using the institutional mainframe computers, was established in January 1980 at Duke University. It attempted to initiate a message exchange system between different Unix (a specific computer operating system) computers. (cf. Daniel 1980; Quarterman 1988). At this time, however, most UNIX computers could only be found in academic, government, or business establishments. The first public bulletin board system was written in 1978 by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess in Chicago for early generation of amateur created computers, and hence was limited to individuals who knew how to create or maintain these nodes. (cf. Christensen & Suess 1978) Not until mid-1983 were the first bulletin board systems being written for computers using the IBM's Disk Operating System (DOS), and not until then was there really the pos- sibility for the general public to establish bulletin boards on non-computer related topics. (Mack 1987:5-6; cf. Glossbrenner 1983; Gengle 1984; Dewey 1987; Uncapher 1988). The only systematic investigations on the nature and use of computer mediated mail and conferencing systems have, with few exceptions (Sankar 1986) concentrated on the medium itself. These studies tend to relate the demographics of the background of the users to their online behavior. Given that the computer can record in numbing and minute detail all kinds of online behaviors, including the number of times a user was online, and the percentage of messages he or she left, and so on, these studies are full of data for potential interpretation. The milestone study of this genre was Hiltz and Turoff's The Network Nation (1978). This study examines a number of different professional groups that made use of the Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES) during a test period of 1977-1978. The problem with these sorts of studies is that they concentrate solely on the 'computer mediated communication system' itself. A CMC system is reduced to a few technical details, and user problems. The unexplicated social issues and contexts are considerable, even in the work of purported sociologists studying the use of computer conferencing. After the 528 pages of The Network Nation, we still are not sure of the actual contexts which led to the computerization of the meetings of the listed organizations in the first place. The number of articles, studies, and books examining computer mediated communication has grown considerably since 1978 when The Network Nation first appeared, and yet on many accounts The Network Nation is, surprisingly, still unsurpassed as a guide to how to examine and interpret online behavior. The research orientation of these studies, like that of the 'social psychology' of telephone use (Short 1976), has been to examine the nature of online behavior, not how behavior gets online. As the field has developed, different communications scholars have taken on different aspects of the overall design proposed by Hiltz and Turoff. Researchers such as Rice (1980a, 1980b, 1982, 1983, 1985), Steinfield (1986a, 1986b), Danowski (1982, 1985), Finn (1986), Fulk (1987), Allen (1987), Barnett (1985), Finn (1986), Johansen (1984), and Kiesler et alia. (1982) have covered such issues as the critical mass or size needed to get and keep an online conference going, online emotions, etc. But the trend is to work from the machine outward to the 'users' and not from social needs and contradictions to the implementation of a new conferencing system. Computer Mediated Conferencing - Part II Sonatas on a Single Instrument Two exceptions to this trend deserve special mention: general speculations about computer mediated conferencing as a medium; and preliminary critical research about the role of information technology in organizations. The speculations about CMC as an autonomous medium make many of the same mistakes as the McLuhanites of the 1960s did: while they alert us to the importance of studying one medium or another, and thus the importance of communication studies in general, they fail to recognize that different social groups have different uses for the same medium, and that how any of these groups actually make use of a medium cannot be isolated from the recursive, structuring rules which constitute and maintain that group in the first place. They fail to ask the important questions about the social influences on the evolution of a technological or artistic form, as was discussed in the introduction. For example, recent, but usually unpublished works by Fulk (1988), Ball-Rokeach & Reardon (1988), and Rafaeli (1985, 1986) have begun to attempt to consider whether CMC is undermining the distinctions between mass and interactive media. These studies attempt to approach CMC as if it were an autonomous entity, independent of the social conditions which sustain and develop it. Another promising, yet still strongly medium-centric view has been the developing consideration of what role CMC might hold for 'Electronic Democracy.' Christopher Arterton's Teledemocracy: Can Technology Protect Democracy? asks whether the new, more interactive technologies such as CMC can propel political change in the direction of direct democracy (1987:196). Whereas books such as Hollander's (1985) lacks empirical force or methodology, Arterton has collected attempted to examine a number of recent experiments using new forms of interactive, electronic media. However, most of his material is still speculative, leaving unexplored some of the most ambitious real life experiments, such as the ambitious 'Public Electronic Network' established in Santa Monica or the French Minitel. The reports from Europe still appear to be coming in. While more systematic research about the development of uses of the Minitel has been promised for some time (eg. Kapoor 1989), most of what has appeared has been of three sorts: either very policy oriented, dealing with the questions of interconnection standards, pricing rationale, and so forth; general works of the promise of primarily one way videotext as a concept, with a few examples, such as the german Bildschirmtext; or else very journalistic. Of note are those works dealing in particular with the 'saga' of the creation of the Minitel, including its heroic beginnings in bringing the telephone directory to the people and its decision to give away terminals, its flirtation with the more sexual explicit messageries which built up its customer base, and its coming to maturity as a friend to the business person. (eg. Abadie 1988) The critical research perspective is in many ways the most pertinent to field research, and is a perspective which will undoubtedly propel new studies. Writers such as Mosco (1982), Robins & Webster (1986, 1988), and Wilson (1988) have explored many of the issues of privacy, potentials for surveillance, unequal access to resources, social fragmentation, Taylorism, and the commodification of everyday life, and with enough bite to demonstrate that the fears that the 'everyday' person might have of either the computer or electronically mediated communications can have real grounds. In a recent work on the introduction of information tech- nologies into industrial organization, Shoshona Zuboff has examined by questionnaire, observation, and interview, the introduction of a computer conferencing system to a managerially stratified Pharmaceutical Corporation. She explores how a communicational opportunity meant to increase communication across socially stratified boundaries, had in fact "unwittingly exposed once evanescent and intangible aspects of their social exchange to an unprecedented degree of hierarchical scrutiny." (1988:362) The solution to the social problems encountered by this 'hierarchical scrutiny' could only be either to challenge the needs for hierarchical stratification, or to limit one's use of the suspect channel of communication only to those operations in which such 'hierarchical scrutiny' would be benign. The question of challenging the foundations of hierarchical stratification is the most difficult concept to generalize. If we are to examine industrial organizations from the perspective of profits, then a new organization structure might lessen hierarchical stratification so as to maximize profitable advantage. It is part of the examination of researchers like Zuboff to identify and explore the dynamics of existing industrial organizational strata threatened by such changes. What becomes of the roles of 'middle' managers in informatizing industrial organizations, and how are these managers reacting? It had been the orientation of earlier critical evaluation of information technology to explore how this technology can further deepen social divisions. As Mosco has said speaking of the purported democratic promise of 'information' technologies touted by the manufacturers, "Equity here simply means wider access to information that reinforces, if not deepens, existing divisions of whose who control the production and distribution of information and products, and those who don't." (1982) The limit of this perspective is an inadequate exploration of the local management of the ways by which information is put in circulation. The computer mediated communication equipment of the critical theorist of information is usually 'read-only' videotext and as such readily and comfortably situates their discourse within a traditional vein of the critical analysis of mass media. What is to happen when computer mediated conferencing as a more interactive medium, and one premised on relatively low initial overhead took to the field? How might this medium be organized, especially given the diverse inputs of government, business, and individual interests as CMC is taken up as a practical widespread solution to existing communication problems? (cf. Uncapher 1991) A number of projects attempting to make use of CMC as a low cost vehicle of information exchange have been begun, although they seem to be particularly concerned with providing specific information and services for a limited audience. An unpublished Ph.D. dissertation by Bob Rubinyi, then at the communications program at the University of Illinois (Champagne-Urbana), examined how a number of firms intended to use a grant from Apple Corp. to adopt CMC. This work, as I understand it second hand from the author, deals primarily with the relationships between a number of small, non-profit groups with the Apple Corp to which eacg had actively made the grant applications. His research was constrained to examining the expectations and self-reported uses of the non-profit groups themselves, rather than assessing the dynamics of how they might have used they had learned about CMC or how the medium might have worked in the community at large. (Rubinyi 1988) In a particularly interesting (and unstudied) program, the Rodale Carinet project has been disseminating agricultural knowledge to the developing world via an interactive computer conferencing system located in New Jersey. The idea of the Rodale organization is not simply to provide pertinent agricultural information, but to also indicate the original source of the information. The idea is that when the inquirer needs to make similar requests in the future, he or she will more likely contact the person who gave to the other bit of information, rather than use the more distantly located Rodale Press. As the Rodale people stated, the most pertinent advice for a remote country often comes from someone else in the same region. Rodale hoped that by identifying local informants they could create local help networks, so as to bipass Carinet in the future. However, the complexity and expense of initially gaining 'access' to this evolving network in the first place raises many questions of equity and access. In so far as the Carinet's provision of knowledge to one class and not to another could exacerbate class divisions, it would appear that the Carinet project could well be setting the cause of 'development' back by creating new social problems which will take considerable time and resources to solve. (Rodale 1988) Given what some outsiders consider as the Telegraph's preliminary success, many people felt by late 1988 that Big Sky Telegraph could serve as a paradigm for analogous resource coordination at a grass roots level in developing countries. For example, James Waldron, who has been coordinating the use of the international "FidoNet" computer conferencing system for the United Nations, trying to get this international amateur computer network recognized at as a NGO (Non-Government Office) by the U.N, spoke quite highly of using the Big Sky Telegraph as paradigm for rural networks elsewhere (1988). Yet as Waldron admitted to me, he did not know very much about how such technology was being defined or approached on a local level. He was, as I defined the category above in the theory of technological ecology, 'system oriented.' One solution to Rodale's problem of equity might be to first find ways to improve local cooperative knowledge networks, augmented, not directed, by foreign expertise (eg. Rogers 1983). In one scenario, which seemes to have assumed the status of fact for some people, low cost computers, costing something like $200 each, equipped with $100 radio modems (to bypass bad telephone lines) could become community information centers. Such a use of packet radio modems interconnecting computers has already been reported in Zululand and in Southeast Africa where larger distances can be covered by bouncing signals off of balloons. (Quarterman from Hughes 1988:15.13) Local problems could be shared to determine local solutions. When an impasse was reached, the entire discussion could be forwarded to a country like Sweden where presumably it was to be discussed by experts up there, and all their online comments, rather than a single hegemonic summary, was to be sent back to the local networks. At least in theory. Certainly such communications could not address structural problems, but new kinds of formal and informal affiliations might make sharing and international collaboration easier to conceive and conduct. And yet no one had yet examined just how the process of computer conferencing 'innovation' was actually occurring, neither in Montana, nor elsewhere, nor with what consequences. The ongoing technical discussions of how to adapt the Telegraph to countries with fewer computers and how to bypass existing telecommunications bottlenecks using packet digital radio networks with the specially designed packet satellites currently being launched by amateur 'ham' radio operators, really couldn't overlook the need for better social research into the complex consequences of introducing new interactive technologies into rural areas. When I spoke to members of the Rodale organization, they likewise indicated that a project like Big Sky Telegraph could provide some indication as to how to best make use their provision of agricultural 'information' via computer conferencing. ********************* - Chapter 4 - Methods - Part 1 Overview and History I realized the importance of a study of the Big Sky Telegraph, and of establishing the contexts of its diffusion and reinvention in Montana not too long after it was set up. I had helped organize a conference for the Electronic Networking Association in Philadelphia. Set up as a forum for individuals interested in electronic conferencing, the ENA set as its goal to "promote electronic networking in ways that enrich individuals, enhance organizations, and build global communities." The conference of 1988, the first since 1986, and organized to a great extent online, drew some 250 people together from organizations as diverse as the National Science Foundation, Boeing, General Electric, the Presbyterian Church, and PeaceNet, and from countries such as Japan, Canada, France, Great Britain, the U.S., and the Soviet Union. The participants were, at least at this forum, "system oriented," looking practically at what potentials might be realized with CMC. The point was to get people who had had dealings with CMC in one way or another to get together, many face-to-face for the first time, to break out of their specialties, to begin thinking about the medium as a whole, to assess its status at that point and to look to the future. Each of the three elements of the charter quoted above were featured at the conference. By way of 'promoting' CMC, a few software designers criti- cized each other, promoting their own conferencing software, and probably getting ideas about how to develop them; a number of lawyers examined questions of liability, problems of surveillance and the 'information panopticon,' and about the emerging specialty practice which Rees and Wallace called "Syslaw." As an individual, Michael Esserman, blind, explained how blind individuals could adapt their equipment to participate online, for individual enrichment, and potentially for employment. A number of sessions dealt with creating and managing electronic networks, for corporations, scientific or research associations, public interest agencies, 'to enhance organizations.' The director of MCI Communications gave a more corporate view of CMC, while a Bertold Brecht aficionado encouraged people to use his Brecht oriented network. Practical ideas about international standards, 'global boundary bashing,' internetwork gateways, and discussion about developing networks around the world were also discussed. Amid this bustle of new ideas, I had the perception of the convinced talking to the convinced, of networkers finding new ways to interconnect themselves to each other. As Prof. Robert Shayon noted in one of the keynote addresses to the conference, much of the ideology of the mass empowerment and new forms of democracy has been appropriated as part of the ideology at the advent of each new medium; he gave examples from the early years of television, and spoke of earlier media as well. (Shayon 1988) And yet the special qualities of the CMC medium were not lost on us either, or else we would not have been there. About this time I met Frank Odasz and his wife Reggie who had come from Montana to talk about the rural computer conferencing network they had set up a few months before, partly with the help of Dave Hughes, but also with the help and ideas of the teachers themselves, a project designed to link up the one room school houses along the edge of the Rocky Mountains in the valleys of Western Montana. At that time I had the opportunity, indeed the obligation, to undertake an extended research project. It was also clear, however, that working on such a distant and complex ethnographic project as this would involve all kinds of logistical problems that would make it difficult to conclude my research within the normally alloted time for this level of research. In the end, with the encouragement of some important people around me, I decided that the necessity and the timeliness of researching this project were too important to let this opportunity slip by. Having formulated an approach by which to situate and assess change in the technoscape, it was clear that I would need: 1) to choose an appropriate site or sites; 2) to determine the nodes of the communicative pathways, that is cultural roles which were invoking the different communicative pathways; 3) to go on to determine pathways and to assess their movement gradients; 4) and to clarify the issues by which one medium might be displacing which others, for what reason, and with what consequence. Within this framework I then wanted to determine how the Telegraph itself was seen: as a reified 'thing' to be discussed and explained, supported or ignored; and as a practical, already used means of communication. One of the profound limitations of my methodology would be its relatively synchronic nature. I was under no illusion that the uses of the Telegraph would stay the same, that a subset of ranchers or other cultural entities that might have dismissed or ignored the Telegraph at the point of my study might not take it up at some later time. In fact, I think this will happen provided the Telegraph continues its path of gradual growth. Therefore, although it was not to be explicit in my methodology, I wanted to make sure that I provided a baseline of information for later researchers about the earliest phases of the Telegraph so that they could begin to assess diachronic changes, especially the way different cultural entities were reproducing themselves and the way the Telegraph was both inducing and responsible to outside forces and interests. Methods - Part II Site Selection: From Technoscape to Landscape In applying the global cultural flows model outlined above to the question of site, issues of scale emerged quite frequently. For the purpose of this study I identified three scales of demographic and cultural organization. The first, which I call 'local' would be my primary focus. This is the level of the small town, population 50 to 300, situated in the midst of a primary extractive, agricultural, or pastoral region. The schools tended to be primary level only, from nursery school to eighth grade. People generally had to travel a distance to get things done, 5-20 miles to the post office, more to the schools, even more to make use of other services, such as buying equipment of different sorts. The second level of organization I termed 'municipal.' This included the relatively more urban centers, such as Dillon, Butte, and Bozeman, Montana, with populations more in the range of 3000-6000, and it was here that the 'regional' offices of agricultural extension agencies, social service agencies could be found. Schools at this level would go on now to include secondary (high school) and quite frequently tertiary as well (college). There would be a much broader offerings in the service sector. Finally, in this somewhat Braudelian perspective, there was the 'broader' community or ecumene. (Braudel 1984) By way of category I might delimit this region, including 'cities' with populations of more than 6000, as including tertiary educational institutions, as well as a complex array of regional, national and international path connections.5 However, my actual research did not take me to such complex sites, and the category of the 'broader' community was primarily made up of individuals, such as politicians, communication researchers, individuals of the general diaspora out of the state who had returned for awhile, members of the online community, and so on, who had taken an interest in the either of the 'local' or 'municipal' levels of organization to which my research was con- centrating. My 'local' site selection process was similar to the one outlined by Shoshona Zuboff (1984) in her methodology section. I sought to locate sites with a relatively high degree of occupational diversity, so that a presumed tension and comradery within the community might follow a number of different paths. Clearly, I would like my samples to be representative of the different communities involved, but accepting limitations on the generalizability to the full sample was necessary. As S. Zuboff explains, however, "the roles of serendipity and oppor- tunism in site selection cannot be denied." (1984:424) There is an endemic tradeoff between depth and breadth in field research. The Holaday dissertation noted above (1986) used only one site. I sought to concentrate my 'local' research on a site or sites which would rich enough to have a broad yet still representative mix of social elements to it, and that could be feasibly covered within the three weeks that I would have available in the field. I initially hoped to study a site that had been on the Telegraph for a number of months, and where the teacher used the Telegraph with relative frequency, a second site where the teacher may have finished one of the online courses, but who used the system relatively infrequently, and finally a third site where the telegraph might have been used but hadn't been. In the field, however, such tidy compartmentalization of informants would not work. I found that even though informants might be separated by several hundred miles, they quite often knew of each other, and each other's children and so on. A school board member whom I sought out in one town (with high usage) actually lived in the second town (with low usage) I had been interested in researching, some 35 miles away! Indeed if I had been able to spend some time in a research location on the other side of the state (not all the one room school online turned out to be in the Western part of the state) then, indeed, I might have had problems of generalization and validity of my interpretations, at least without a deeper comparative assessment of the demographic, economic, and cultural factors between the two areas. I knew that I could cover only a limited number of informants in three weeks. Concen- trating particularly on a single community proved particularly apt given that members of a single 'community,' who would send their children to the same elementary school, use the same post office, and share the same town designation and page in the telephone book might be separated by 30 to 50 miles from one another. The location which I finally settled on, Wisdom, Montana was located in a mountain valley some 70 miles to the north of Dillon and fit my requirements admirably. Located near the center of the Big Hole Valley, it had a mix of large and small ranchers. Since Wisdom was somewhat centrally in the some 30 mile long valley, there were a number of small businesses locally, including an art gallery, hardware store, and gas stations. A number of my informants described this Valley as one of the most conservative in the region, while others reported that it had also seen a fair amount of change, having lost its bank and a number of other shops over the years. Another factor making Wisdom a good site was the presence of a Federal land management outpost, making it one of the more socially complex localities in Western Montana. While concentrating on Wisdom, and the area surrounding it in the Big Hole Valley, including the schools in Jackson and Polaris, I also sought to broaden the generalizability by including where possible informants from Wise River community on the far end of the Big Hole Valley beyond Wisdom. If in Wisdom there had been some tension between the teachers and the ranchers, Wise River witnessed a much better relationship between teacher and community. In Wise River, the teacher has been at the same school for a number of years. The school has about 40 students. Apparently another difference between this community and Wisdom was that there is the presence of transient 'members' of the community in the form of tourist traffic, connected in part with the ski industry in the winter, and hunting during the summer. The teacher in the Wise River was a frequent user of Big Sky Telegraph a number of times, and had tried out a national educational computer mail network service. In connection with my original idea to see if I could do some interviewing in an community which had not been online, I went down to the Dell area, where there had been a number of important self-help programs for 'displaced homemakers' and for individuals wanting to go back to school to get equivalency exams, but whose schools had not been online. This area proved very illuminating about the nature of the change in the region. In the end I did not have enough time to perform a thorough investigation. A preliminary investigation of this region pointed to 'structural reasons' for teachers not being online- they had not been able yet to get grant money with which to buy modems, although my subsequent research in the Dell Valley showed that several teachers, a rancher, and two service people in the area did know of the Telegraph, and that some of them had connected to it from either home computers or from a computer lent to the individual by a social active organization. Several months after my research, in fact, much more of the region did get modems and go online. However, from the perspective of my thesis the structural bestowal of computers and modems is not an adequate explanation since it would be necessary to determine just how these 'structural' limitations were constructed in the first place and by whom. Next, one of the most important of these 'webs of relationships' lay at the 'municipal' level where I sought to explore who was promoting, designing, or hoping to use the Telegraph. What did the County Extension Agents, the Social Service agencies, and so on know about the Telegraph? What did *they* think its worth might be; how did they get in touch with people as it was, and how did they assess where and the impact of a system like the Telegraph displacing existing means of getting their ideas and services out into the community, and getting people to contact and use what they had to offer. In some ways, then, Dillon, Montana itself (pop 4,000), home of both Western Montana College and the physical equipment of the Telegraph itself was the second community I looked at in depth. Dillon offered a privileged perspective on the surrounding areas since it was here that I could talk to individuals who were part of the general diaspora from the countryside, including from the Big Hole Valley where I chose to do extended field research. Many of the individuals I interviewed here were involved in projects that either demanded or resulted in increased, albeit general knowledge about the surrounding areas, and how they may be changing. Finally, I attempted to include some acknowledgement of the interest and support, or lack of support, that came from the 'broader community.' However, for the purpose of my study, this level was still manifested at either the local or municipal level. Indeed, none of these levels are cut off from the other, and the distinctions are indeed relative. Many of the ranchers on the small 'local' towns were powerful enough to be able to call up their U.S Senator to complain about various local problems. Further, the demographics of even the smallest areas would include a flow of outsiders, especially those involved in some recreational or environmentalist pursuit. I can imagine a more integrated research approach to this 'broader' community, but I would like to see it done in the context of a number of municipalities, the same way as my municipal level involved the input of a number of different 'local' communities. Methods - Part III Sample Selection In applying this framework to field conditions, decisions had to be made as to how to identify and isolate the meaningful social categories with which to establish the configuration and use of the different pathways. It is important to bear in mind that an 'individual' will not belong exclusively to one group in particular. Rather we must be concerned with the patterned accesses and knowledges of the different group identities available to be appropriated by a single individual. A teacher might belong simultaneously to the teaching, ranching, and parenting groups. As Meyrowitz has pointed out in his Goffmanist perspective, "Social reality does not exist in the sum of people's behaviors, but in the overall pattern of situated behaviors." (Meyrowitz 1985:42) At the same time these social categories appear as part of the conscious justifications of when and on what terms people encounter one another. They are part of the strategic self-enframing examined above in the contexts of a dynamic 'technological enframing.' Definitions of social identities, and hence of social boundaries, are part of an intra and inter social strategy, and an individual's definition of and asser- tions about inclusion within a particular social or occupational group is itself part of the working out of power, social position, and conceptual frameworks in terms of implicit structural contradictions of social organizations (see below). In many respects, the following research is a working out of the logic of the inductively recovered social categories in rural Montana. Foucault has asserted the forms of classification of each age depend on considerations of power rather than knowledge. (Foucault 1980; Hutton 1986). If we are not to quickly assume the categories of 'innovator' 'laggard' and such as have been used in the Diffusion of Innovations tradition (cf. Rogers 1983), or other strongly etic systems of categor- ization, it is not that these categories are inapplicable, but that in some sense that they are too applicable; they serve to categorize but not to explain. The issues of ethnocentrism have special pertinence at this point. The time is past when an outside researcher could simply assume that he or she could speak for 'the other.' The rhetorical move of 'speaking for the other' obscured the reality that the exchange of knowledge between researcher and informant takes place within the contexts of power and trust. Given the way my thesis has been formulated it would not correct to simply label one individual or social group as more 'innovative' than another, as might have been done in the manner of the classical diffusion of innovations typology (cf. Rogers 1981). Degrees of innovation can only be compared against a common background, and where interpretations of the context, nature, and meaning of an 'innovation' vary, then assertions of the degrees of innovation become problematic. In studying social problems it is important to leave off overly grand analogical generalization and to return to a more dialogical position which sees the establishment of social and cognitive frameworks as a shared and pressing problems (cf. Tedlock 1986). As communications researchers we must be sensitive to the problem that the use of technologies, including commun- ications technologies, is not so much an 'attribute' of a social group, but quite often one of the ongoing, defining qualities, and that researchers of technological innovation must not quickly assume that the social categories investigated in one intermixing of technology, historical contingency, and power can quickly and isomorphically map onto another locale. The discovery of the social and technological categories are part of the same transcendental research problem. Since the focus of this study has been the role and definitions of the new communications technology within a rural community, and how these reflect different demographic, technological, capital, narrative, and ideological pathways, this research had to make an intensive survey at the community level, rather than employing a sweep methodology, surveying, for example, teacher's reactions to the new technology. Such an analysis of all of the teacher reactions would demand a broader research objective than can be undertaken in a project of this limited size, and will simply have to wait until a research design and funding of a broader scope is possible. During initial field research I asked several teachers and community members to identify some of the different social groups in their local community. Their responses soon converged. I then added several additional groups which were identified by my field informants as being particularly important or active. Again, in the same manner as Shoshona Zuboff's (1988) methodology used to research the impact of 'information technology' in work settings, I sought to determine as many distinct, yet informed perspectives as possible on the meaning of the introduction of this computer mediated conferencing system. I likewise sought to determine what different social groups thought of a computer conferencing system such as Big Sky Telegraph, as well as what they thought technological, social, and cultural change might consist of in Western Montana, and what they thought it mean. What kinds of people did they think were using a computer mediated conferencing system like the Telegraph, and how do they themselves relate to these people and their social groups? What kinds of changes did each of the different social groups foresee for the near future, and what role might a new communications technology such as computer mediated communication (CMC) play? I found that most of my informants initially broke down the overall make-up of the communities into occupational categories, such as rancher and teacher, and I found this a very good place etically to begin to analyze local social patterning as well. The reasons are two-fold. Firstly, differences in occupation would appear to correspond to differences in availability and knowledge of different new technologies. The computer mediated conferencing system of Big Sky Telegraph itself was initially directed to one occupational group, the rural teachers, in their one room school houses, and it has been one of the goals of this research to determine the range of factors encouraging or discouraging the 'adoption,' or, more accurately, the exploration of a new medium among the teachers. Secondly, occupations appear to mark off significant cultural differences in Montana society. Being a rancher, for example, entails more than taking care of cattle herds and the surrounding land; it involves affecting a style of being. A number of local humor books like Gwen Petersen's The Ranch Woman's Manual (1976) have sought to define the archetypal ranching 'style.' More classical renderings of the ranch life, elaborated in American folklore, books, and film, appear to dominate the characterization of the rural 'style.' What is more, belonging to one social group or another would appear in some instances to mark actual cultural boundaries. When I asked one professor why he didn't explain his ideas to some of the more prominent leaders in the ranching community, he claimed that they would have 'closed up' to him, and have seen him as an outsider simply because he was a professor. Whether or not this pessimism about the ability of certain problems to transcend social categories or not is justified cannot be established since in fact this professor did not go into these communities to explain his ideas. The expected conflict never had a chance to materialize. I also wanted to explicitly identify corporate bodies such as school board which might be involved in determining the nature of path flow within each community. A preliminary sketch of the local level yielded: 1) Ranchers and Farmers; 2) Teachers and Educators; 3) Mining groups; 4) Service Sector groups, including those involved in Tourism, Retail, and Religious groups; 5) the Forest Service; 6) Politicians; 7) 'Intentional Change Agents,' including Agricultural Extension Agents and Continuing Education Groups; 8) Women; 9) Children; 10) School Board members; 11) Computer Users; and 12) Outsiders and more transient residents. The more specific nature of these groups will be examined in the following section outlining the ethnographic setting. Let me state for the moment that categories such as 'women' were recovered from the setting as being particularly significant only after the actual interviews and research had begun. Also, let me reiterate that these categories, which vary in type and scope, often overlap, and become difficult to distinguish. The category of 'Intentional Change Agents,' which in this case refers to individuals connected with some *institution* which identifies itself with providing new rural opportunities, quickly slides into the more ad hoc associations of the more generally conceived Service sector, since Service entities are quite often interested in promoting new local behaviors, new customers for products, etc. However, I make the distinction based on whether the group takes as its explicit mission the proselytizing of some new form of behavior vis-a-vis the technoscape. On the basis of these divisions, I conducted 38 formal interviews, of which 30 were taped and transcribed, yielding several hundred pages of transcripts. Field interviews took place in Montana on two different intervals, on March 30-April 4th, 1989 and November 7-19, 1989. I met with individuals connected with or having a deep interest in the Telegraph on a number of other occasions, including meeting during the Spring and Falls of 1988 with Dave Hughes, one of the primary technical and visionary individuals supporting the Telegraph. Also, I conducted two real time, online interviews with other individuals connected with the Telegraph. That is, I was able to ask questions with individuals connected with the Telegraph via computer modem, capturing the conversations to log files which became a kind of instant transcription. I was also able to collect during the period from January 1988 to December 1989 several hundred pages of secondary materials, including reports by or about the Telegraph, descriptions from or about Western Montana or rural telecommunications, as well as what in essence would be, were they printed out, several thousand pages of online material about or from Big Sky Telegraph. I was able to collect materials from a number of other conferencing networks. There were a number of relatively prominent computer conferencing networks, such as the WELL in San Francisco, CA, MetaNet in Washington, DC, and the Chariot in Denver, Co which regularly discussed Big Sky Telegraph, as well as other issues of rural net- working, telecommunications policy, or computer conferencing in general. And of course, at any time, one could (and can) call up the Telegraph (406-683-7680; 1200 8N1) and find out how teachers and other members in the community were/are using it. One could scan requests for text books, ideas for student papers, social salutations, ideas about community development, and so forth. While there were a few other public conferencing systems in Montana during the time of my research, these systems (I tried to contact all of them) rarely had more than 20 individuals registered, and showed particularly slow traffic. One of the new problems of collecting online conference materials is how exactly to cite it. Indeed, the copyright of who owns the materials, and to whom permission must be asked to use the material changes on the different systems. Methods - Part IV Survey Outlines I was able to interview either formally or informally at least one person in each of the 12 different categories above in the 'local' context, primarily around Wisdom, Wise River, or Dell, as well a number of in the 'municipal' Dillon context. I encounter many of the same interview limitations as were encountered by Robert Drew in his research on Art World of graffiti writers in Philadelphia (1988) where cleaving to a rigid questionnaire format would have limited my access to the information which my informants might have. If information and knowledge is transacted only in the context of power and trust, then to maintain a strict adherence to a specific questionnaire, to have allowed information to be transacted only on *my* format and *my* terms would have limited the scope and depth of the answers. The director of the Agriculture Incubator told me in an interview that she had sent out 800 questionnaires the previous summer (1988) to ranchers to determine what their needs and interest might be in a new computer conferencing and communication system. She said that, in the end, few individuals sent back their responses. I can't say much about her research protocols, sample selection, and so forth, but it did corroborate what the County Extension Agent in Beaverhead county likewise told me, that the ranchers and most rural people in Montana tend to be suspicious of outsiders and *particularly* suspicious of abstract protocols like questionnaire and heavily structured interviews! I therefore organized a general interrogatory outline with which to structure my questions. I had to make my actual shifts rather informally, however. There were four basic categories of questions covered: Personal Background, Perspectives on Change in Montana, Per- spectives on Change in Education, and Personal Knowledge and Perspective on the Big Sky Telegraph. The section on personal background gave me a chance to determine four additional dimensions of responses: 1) Where do you come from/How did you get here? (to this place & to this job); 2) What role do you feel you have locally? 3) What role would you like to have? 4) What are the constraints you feel on your occupation. These general questions allowed me to determine something of the background of my respondent. I wanted to determine just how they might fit into the different path networks, as well as how they would assess the network. I also wanted to determine such demographic materials such as whether they had originally come from Montana (and thus could be viewed as relatively local in the cultural network) or had come from further afield. The section on Perspectives on Change in Montana and the local area broke down into six additional questions: 1) How has the area been changing during the last few years? 2) What are the threats of change? 3) And what are the possibilities for positive change? 4) How might new jobs be secured in the area? 5) How has the role of women changed? 6) 3 Questions on Information and Media Use: a) What kinds of media do you use? b) where do you tend to meet your friends? c) How do you get information on different things? This set of questions sought to determine not just what the material changes locally might be, but to get a sense of phenomenologically just what the most important of these changes locally might be. It was during this question set that I would ask questions about what the informant thought of outsiders, of foreigners buying up properties, or moving into the area, or natives moving out. The inquiry into their perspective on changes in the role of women was one of those special questions in that the longer that I was out in Montana, the more I began to appreciate just how important this change was- for example, it was typically the wife or mother or single parent who would be the first person on the ranch to use a computer. While the scope of my research limited just how deeply I was able to investigate the questions on media use, I sought as best as I could to determine just what messages they might feel that they were getting over it, just how they felt themselves located potential communicative uses of CMC within the general mediascape. My next set of questions about the perspectives of my respondent on change in education in general sought to situate their impressions on social and cultural change discussed previously, and to determine their relationship to the schools in general. This section broke down into five questions: 1) Have you have any family member or friend in the educational system recently? 2) What are the children doing in school right now? 3) What support do the schools get, from parents, from the school, from the community? 4) What are they going to be doing in the future? 5) What should they be doing? By getting at this crucial area in which the local culture reproduced itself, and an experience which everyone in the region had gone through, answers to questions such as these appear to get at what the respondent thinks of change in the region, and what they think should happen, and it sets the stage for their assessment of the Telegraph. Even still, I tried not to limit or prejudice the accounts of the Telegraph as simply an educational device. And after I had gotten a few questions as to what they might think of the Telegraph in general, I would finally suggest a few new ideas about what being online might do for them, and how Big Sky Telegraph might fit in. This led to the final set of questions. The questions about their knowledge of the Big Sky Telegraph broke down into six additional questions: 1) What *is* the Big Sky Telegraph? 2) How did you find out about it? 3) How do you think others found out about it? 4) What role do you see it playing? 5) Who do you think uses it? and 6) What do you know about other electronic Bulletin Board Systems? These questions are a lot more 'system oriented' on the face of them, and they attempt to answer a number of the questions which had eluded the members of the ENA in their conference, but they also serve to fill in important points in the global cultural flows model, getting at the questions of pathway, definition, and technological ecology, at least for this technology. In reporting the results of this section I had to be sensitive to the problems of privacy and confidentiality. Many times after I had turned the tape recorder off, my informant would give me particularly interesting accounts of more socially dangerous information, such as their perspective on the rural configuration of local power, why certain changes occur and others don't. I have done my best to respect any possible confidences, implicit or otherwise, and have not been overly revealing when the information could have originated from most any local source. Doing ethnography is not like doing history in this respect: the people who told me these things can possibly be hurt or isolated by the some of the things which I have revealed. We live in an era in which even when one does an ethnography in the remotest of Papauan jungles, one might find that one's 'natives' have already read much of the same background literature as the researcher, leading to disorienting paradoxes of recursion as the local past becomes partly constructed with some of the fragments of misunderstanding of distant observers. (cf. Marcus & Fischer 1988) Frank Odasz for example was reading a good amount of material on distance education, especially online and via satellite, and was distributing many of these reports online, especially in so far as they might help teachers with material for their arguments in the local community in favor of the telegraph. I am not uncomfortable with this situation, for it points to the deeper conditions knowledge itself, and to that fact that this research is part of a shared understanding. ********************* Garrett was a hunting and fishing guide by profession who was called into the project because she was one of the few people who had had some experience with an IBM computer. The system began to take off as soon as it was online, making use of pre-existing communication networks between the teachers, and their communities. According to Hughes, "In the first 40 days of it being up, it has been called 1,612 times by people - 75% of whom are total novices - all over that rural dispersed state of Montana. They have left 975 messages which is a message-to-call ratio of over 60%. *That* meets my standard for 'user friendliness' of a dial up system." (Hughes, EIES, C685:153:275, 2/19/88) Further, the system was not designed solely for educators. Said Hughes: There is an important point though, reflective of the way these technologies *ought* to evolve over time. That is, as in many small towns in America, the concept of 'community' is so strong, that nothing is 'just' school, or government, or business, or private group. Schools are frequently a social center, a place where other elements of the community can do their own thing so long as the kids are educated and the school gym is available for the basketball games scheduled. So without any great intellectualizing - because it is a perfectly natural extension into the 'electronic society' - Big Sky has warmly welcomed anyone to log on, free. And [it] has sections where the local Women's Resource Center 'hang out' electronically, where a Medical Clinic's professionals chit chat in the 'Wellness' section - besides the specific educational 'resource' activities, and the current principle activity goes on - a formal, for credit, one room-school teacher recertification course in Telecommunications goes on. (Hughes, Ibid.) As time went on, different conferences had different successes. The Wellness section was later dropped, while others, such as a Writing Conference added, only to be later replaced by other another conference later on. By August, just 8 months later, the over 7000 messages had been exchanged between 300 people, and more than 30 teachers had completed the accredited formal online training. It is hard to estimate the time and effort that both Frank and Reggie put into this project. They were certainly constant friends and companions to most of the people there, ready to fine tune the system. Messages like the following were quite common: No. 194 08/01/88 21:46:18 From: Frank Odasz To: Ruth Carlstrom Subject: (R) (R) (R) (R) Scie Message class: Public Message base: CoffeeShop Go for it with the Sciencelab conference Ruth, I'll create a Science files area for uploading and down- loading too. Did you know we have 150 very special science essays from Walt Robertson? They are listed in the files file area as science and scienceb. Telegraph is the first time they are being made available to the public. We are working on a U.S space foundation link also. ;-) Notice that the presence of something we might call 'soft publishing' in which signed articles, in this case by a Walt Robertson are being widely shared ultimately nation wide, directed to specific audiences in many cases, and yet they may have never actually seen the wrinkle and creases of physical paper. What's more something of the constant sense of innovation about being online at the Telegraph comes through. The Coffee Shop conference was a general conference, or message exchange area where people would send public greetings or share announcements with each other. One of the main technical problems of the system comes through on this message as well. I will call the problems of 'message threads.' There was a decided inability to keep the same conversations going for some time in any conference since all messages in a particular conference would simply follow one after the other, only to be distinguished by whether they were public or private, or by their title. The problem was that if someone were to make a comment at one place, a number of unrelated responses might soon intervene disrupting conceptual continuity. One can try to follow the titles, but they can get obscured (cf."Subject: (R) (R) (R) (R) Scie" above), or the titles of a responses belonging to the same message chain may begin to differ. The reason was that the Xbbs conferencing software which they had chosen in part because of its compatibility with Xenix did not have either the ability to allow specific topics areas to be branched off from the main discussions, or some way to link the different responses of the same topic together. Computer conferencing software designers and users commonly debate how best to organize the generation of distinct topics, such as whether each user should be able to start a 'topic,' or some moderator, or anyone else. On a number of other Unix/Xenix comparable conferencing softwares like Participate (eg, as once run on the Source), PicoSpan (run on the WELL), or Caucus II (run on MetaNet) there is considerable flexibility to the discussions that can be generated because they can be organized by topic, and not just by conference. It would appear that the lack of this kind of logical organization will preclude for now deeper topical discussions. When I asked Frank Odasz about this he replied: Most online messages on the system now are not in discussion mode; if they are, they would be between a couple individuals and they happen to leave it public which maybe a third or a fourth might come in for a very short discussion. There have been no real ongoing discussions as such mainly because the format at this point is more hodge-podge messaging, and I'll admit that. What's more, it is not clear when this problem will be addressed for two reasons. First, much of the important energy has been going into managing the continuing accelerating expansion of the use of the system. Secondly, as both Frank Odasz and Dave Hughes have said to me, changing a user interface is serious business since it involves training ones users to do new things. Even still, the Telegraph continues to expand. According to Hughes and others involved with the system, this is because of the inherent appreciation for the importance and difficulty of rural communication. Said Hughes, 153:294) Dave Hughes 2/20/88 15:03 ... As I began to suspect about 5 years ago after travelling to Regina, Canada, Alaska, rural Colorado, and now Montana -there is a distinct possibility that the *rural* areas of the world will become far more 'telecommunications literate' faster, than the Urban centers. Because rural people know the necessity, and costs, of 'communications.' Now it remains to be seen whether those in the Power Centers of America accept the necessity for publicly supported Highways of the Mind - as they did the Homestead Act, Rural Electri- fication, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Inter- state Highways System, the Federal supported Air Port and Sea Port System. Or whether they miss the future entirely.... (Hughes 87-89, EIES, ported to MetaNet Old Salon) While there are policy issues yet to work out, such as whether there should be a publicly supported data network (Hughes' "Highways of the Mind" or privately supported system, "Data Toll Roads"), these have not slowed the Telegraph's progress since most of the data for my research was compiled. Recently, on June 5, 1990, for example, Frank Odasz gave a laptop demonstration of the system to a Native Americans from 7 different reservations in Montana, such as Assiniboine-Gros Ventre, Crow, and Blackfeet, showing, he reported, how telecommunications could link communities together (Hughes, WELL, Telecom, Top679:184). According to Hughes, the Native Americans in attendance in Great Falls, Mt expressed considerable interest in setting up a their own computer conferencing system, one which in turn would be linked with the Telegraph. Many new organization have been joining the Telegraph, including the National Diffusion Network organization (450 teachers nationwide), the Office of Public Instruction, and the Montana Associated Students, the Telegraph is being itself linked up to other existing, national and international net- works, expanding both its access to the rest of the world, and beginning to permit easier access to it from the outside world. The Telegraph has been gated (opened) to the international UUCP/USENET network with its 8000 systems world wide, and some 250,000 users. An experimental system is just beginning to link even more remote, local bbs systems, which have been encouraged by the Telegraph, first to the Telegraph, and then via a link there to the international amateur computer FIDO computer network, with its some 10,000 systems world wide. By October, 1990 two of the 4 'outlying-area' systems were already online (5 more were expected in the near future) and were in turn to be connected through the Big Sky Telegraph Fidonet Gateway both to the International FidoNet, and via its own gateways, potentially to other networks such as UseNet, and potentially at some point in the future, using gateways on FidoNet and UseNet to the InterNet (or NSFnet), JaneNet, EARN, JunNet, and other networks worldwide. One of these local nodes was the Russell County BBS in Hobson, MT set up for Native Americans, the very BBS proposed by the Native Americans only some 2 months before. The importance in undertaking research is obviously not in cataloging alleged successes, or cataloging possibilities, but in getting at the sense of resistances to change, to how new technologies get to be inflected into a culture. In balancing too close to the 'system' or 'medium'-centric view, we lose sight of greater context within which new media fit. For a system to grow equitably, it takes more than the simple stringing together of new inter-mediated groups since the presence of one group might well serve to curb its acceptance by other social or cultural groups. What research can do, then, is to give voice to the dissatisfaction and worries of different groups constructing the presence and accessibility of a medium. It should work so that their concerns and worries can be given voice and addressed. It should serve to deepen our understanding about the social, and to a more limited fashion, the cultural implications of the media. And, taking advantage of the scope of such initiations of new media, it should recover and illuminate something of the process by which new media are defined, accepted, supported, and used. - Chapter 5 - The Setting - Part I Sketches and Overviews: Big Sky Country The following section will establish the setting of the Big Sky Telegraph, and by examining the degree of isolation attaining in the region near Western Montana, will provide an overview as to why a mediated, interpersonal means of communication might be and remain particularly useful. It will then go on to outline a number of prominent rural social and economic factors discovered during the course of research which have particular bearing on framing the nature and significance of social and cultural change in Western Montana. Western Montana is located along the Rocky Mountains. It is characterized by a number of broad mountain valleys, some high peaks, and a good amount of wildlife. The streams have been full of trout and grayling. The hay and vast pastures in the valleys gradually give way to the higher areas of high mountain grassland and timber. The hillsides are covered with sage brush and stands of yellow aspen, and at higher elevations lodgepole pine. It is an area of relatively low population - density. While statewide there are only some 12 towns with a population of over 10,000, the Western Montana region itself has been characterized by even lower population density than the rest of the state. Few of the participating schools are located in towns listed in the 1980 U.S. Census data which only details towns with a population of 2500 or greater. Western Montana College, which is sponsoring Big Sky Telegraph, is located in the town of Dillon, MT and had a population of 3,976 in 1980, and is now probably closer to 4,000. To the east of the mountains stretches a relatively dry plain characterized by isolated groups of low mountains, and which consists of a number of productive agricultural areas, such as the Yellowstone River valley (cf. FWA 1949). With the decline in mining derived income, much of the income of the state comes from these lowland ranching and farming operations. The economy of the western part of the state in turn is characterized by four major components: (1) wheat farming, (2) cattle raising, (3) mining, and various service sector activities, including (4) federal land management, (5) tourism, (6) education, (7) retail sales, (8) construction, (9) health care, and (10) civil administration. The health, attitudes, and futures of each of these different sectors should not be conflated. Each of these eight categories, even as they overlap, were taken as preliminary points of departure in the recovery of the regional social categories discussed above in the section on sample selection. This preliminary sketch of the social system was supported by a number of teachers, ranchers, civil officials, and merchants. One of the most important factors in understanding the dynamics of the local social and economic life is the fact that the state tax burden in unequally shared among these groups. There are three basic components to Montana tax structure: income tax, real estate tax, and property tax. Property tax should not be confused with the real estate tax. Property tax is based on an assessment on the cost of doing business based in turn on the actual property that a business has. Originally it was designed as a tax on the mining businesses, based on the amount of hardware they were using for their extractions and processing. However, with the decline in mining fortunes, this 'property tax' burden has fallen on the ranchers and farmers. What's more, without a state sales tax, the tax base has been unable to recoup its share of many of the more dynamic portions of the economy, such as tourism. Tourists, including skiers in the winter, campers in the summer, and hunters in the Fall are able to spend considerable time in Montana and yet only contribute to the tax base indirectly through relatively small assessments made on the business catering to the tourists. The Ranchers, and the Farmers to great extent, therefore see themselves as bearing the burden of any state initiative. This impression was verified by the ranchers, farmers, forest service personnel, intentional change professions, and the teachers. Spending on things such as education or telecommunications is often translated by the ranching community into the terms of increased taxes to themselves. Hence, their suspicion of change on a local and state level quite often seems a reflection of their own fear of an increase in taxes. At the same time, according to the ranchers I interviewed, the perennial suggestion of instituting a sales tax is considered political suicide. Apparently, Montanans don't trust that if they accept the institution of a sales tax, any of their other taxes will be lowered in consequence. New taxes are seen as simply a new way for the state government to increase its income. Another issue interrelated to the tax burden of the ranchers and farmers is the number of students who leave Montana to pursue their careers elsewhere. Students, especially advanced students, were jokingly referred to as a bad investment. While the increase in teachers and other related learning related can bring new life to the State, the sensibility is that the investment in a person's education is repaid in another state. Said one farmer, "we export about 90 per cent of our young people out of this area." However, most of the ranchers said that this was an investment they had no deep qualms in making. After all, what were their children supposed to do otherwise? Ralph Nichols, the rancher from Wise River, and on the school board in Wisdom replied to my questions about how he saw the local school systems in relation to this problem of children leaving the area: RN: My idea of education is to get the kids to want to learn, and to make education interesting enough so that they will continue to learn, whether it's for working in the valley or outside. [etc.] WU: What about the problem of people leaving the valley? Especially some of your brighter students... some of them might stay around and some of them might take off. I don't know how many people it takes to run a ranch. RN: Some children were raised on ranches and then they want to go. They want something different. And some people will stay on the ranch, for their whole lives. It is hard to tell what influences these kids to want to stay or to want to go. I guess it's just in their own makeup. I don't think there are any set rules. Other ranchers made it clear that the reason their children were leaving the local area, and often the state was a problem of resources: there was just too little land available at prices which young ranchers and farmers starting out could afford. One rancher and spouse whom I interviewed in Dell had four children. All of them went to college. Only the eldest was able to buy into the farm, helped in part by a federal loan program for young ranchers and farmers. The second got a real estate licence and learned about real estate appraisal, and is now in the State of Washington. The third whose allergies made ranching difficult became a coach and secondary school teacher. And the fourth is in the service, in the Air Force, so it is too soon to say if he will go into ranching. The ranchers see themselves as the upholders of the Montana way of life as well. The Federal land management employees, the teachers, even the merchants might come and go, but according to the ranchers themselves, it is up to the ranchers to decide the future of the state. In fact things are changing, and in ways in which the ranchers do not appear to be reacting to or taking advantage of. While the larger ranchers and farmers continue to swallow up smaller ranches and farms, now international and investment concerns appear to be taking increasing interest in buying out even the larger owners. One of the largest ranches in the Dillon area was purchased in 1988 by a Japanese consortium which wanted to raise and export its own beef. While some of the new interactive, information technologies promise ways of coordinating local collaboration, such possibilities are only rarely discussed, let alone acted upon. A third important issue in assessing the status and image of the ranchers has been their increasing conflict with Federal land rangers who manage the public lands in the state. Montana is one of the states in which a high portion of the land is federally owned and thus federally managed. Vast tracks of mountains, wilderness, lakes, and forests are included under the purview of these managers. The public land management systems, bringing in people trained in ecology, forestry, wildlife management, geology and other specialties often introduces fairly well educated individuals into the rural areas, individuals who are acquainted with the use of newer technologies. While these individuals do have access to many kinds of information, their impact on the local cultural scene will vary since they are often seen as fairly transient. At the same time, since they are responsible for a large portion of the local land, and land is seen as one of the great common resources, and federal policy about how to deal with the land can be so volatile, the federal land management rangers appear to be quite often at the center of a great deal of local controversy and debate. Since the parcels of land deeded by the homesteading act were too small to run an average size ranch, the government, seeking to encourage the ranching industry, allowed them in 1897 to graze on these public lands. Because of the short, 90 day growing season, it takes much more land, at least 100 acres in Montana (compared with an acre in Georgia) to support a cow. (Royte 1990:62) And ever since the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 put an end to unregulated grazing, the Ranchers have had to put up with getting Federal permits to graze their cattle on public lands, such as the Beaverhead National Forest above the Big Hole Valley. In recent years, this agreement had come under increasing criticism. In 1988, a government survey by the Bureau of Land Management cited 68% of public lands in unsatisfactory condition. Said one ranger, 'the West's ecology could collapse like the Amazon rain forest.' Indeed it has been cost the government more to maintain their range management program than the revenue which ranching fees have brought in, a kind of subsidy to the cattlemen. This problem has been setting many ranchers against a group of environmentalists, recreationalists, and land management specialists. Indeed when I first made my visits out to a number of isolated ranches in The Big Hole Valley, the ranchers first wanted to know if I was an environmentalist or something. The Federal rangers have not been without considerable controversies of their own. Under the influence of Reagan policies to commoditize the public lands, according to a number of ranchers I interviewed, lumber was sold off during the mid to early 1980s at a loss and was strip cleared. The ranchers, I was told, feared for their watersheds and organized the Big Hole Ranchers Association to fight the government. Ralph Nichols, a rancher from Wise River: This country up here is high: it's really a high desert. Rain fall about 15 to 20 inches a year. The altitude right here at the house is 6000 and real short growing season so it takes a 100 years to grow a tree. And then it was all clear cutting. At least half of the sales were at a loss and they weren't recognizing any of the value of the watershed. Everything was based on board feet. We had this fellow, Jim West, he was an outsider and they put in a ranch behind his ranch which supposed to be in the roadless area. The forest service at that time did whatever they pleased. They built roads wherever thy wanted to. Jim organized a program to influence people and influence congress, and spent a lot of money at it. He was sort of classed as an outsider and an environmentalist, and so on, to start with. Finally, in the end, he got a lot of the ranchers in here organized on his side and they organized their own Big Hole Rancher's Association and went ahead to fight the forest service policy. I don't know. I think a lot of the work that we started to do in here went nation-wide. And there is now so much more interest in preserving the forest aside from the timber potential. The other ranchers I spoke with echoed this sentiment. They were preserving the land, as they had done before, especially against the incursions of outsiders who, for the most part, had no real experience with the land or with what would keep it productive over the long run. Feeling that they know about the way the resources on the land reproduce themselves, the ranchers see themselves as being key players in reserving its value for recreational use as well. The folks on the East and West coasts, they point out, have not been too good in maintaining their own economies, nor their own resources. Many of the new brand of Federal rangers would not agree that the ranchers have been the best custodians of the land. The deleterious changes have been too slow to see. Cattle represents to them the number one cause of 'non-point' pollution, that is pollution which emanates not from a stationary source such as a factory. (Royte 1990:62). Cattle destroy the fragile and narrow riparian areas along the sides of the small stream. While these riparian areas represents some only 1% of the Western public lands, still some 75-85% of wildlife depend on them. Cattle muddy the sides of stream raising the temperature there and making these areas unfit for the different kinds of fish that had traditionally lived there. Finally, it takes a certain cost to maintain the infrastructure to allow the cattle onto the public lands in the first place, and according to a number of the Federal Rangers, they had not even been able to recoup these costs. Shouldn't the ranchers be able to pay for the resources that they use? The perspective I gathered from rangers I interviewed diverged from that of the ranchers. Responding to my questions about the founding of the Big Hole Rancher's Association, a ranger from the Wisdom station replied: They [the ranchers] had essentially a private park behind their ranches, and they controlled the access to it. There was no way to get in. And as the forest service began to build roads, and there became more interest in timber, they [the ranchers] felt like there was a need to organize, and get their views out. They were opposed to such radical change. They did a pretty good job of it; they set up an organization, incorporated, constitution and bylaws, and they had some good money backing them. They've done one lawsuit against the Beaverhead canyon. We don't know what their next step is going to be. At the same time, this Forest Ranger from Wisdom admitted that in the context of all these controversies, the role of the Ranger him or herself had been changing: The rangers are growing in their sophistication. They are becoming more politicians. They used to be a [simple?- garbled] forester. Now things are becoming more administrative, because of politics... and they really need the input. Communications, because there so many things happening so fast. The ordinary ranger is not isolated; they are interlinked. They need to be able to talk to each other, and to the Washington office... so they are linked in many ways, via the telephone, telemail... A number of important points are broached here which I will unpack later. Minimally, we can note that the Forest Rangers are trained, on the whole to be more literate in different kinds of new communication tech- nologies, and that they are not in any way obligated to teach the ranchers how to use them, even if they live at the local level. However, when I explained the idea of putting some of the ranchers online, setting up a ranchers' network, and added that one of the County Extension agents had finally gotten a modem for his computer, the ranger reacted positively: good, very good.... That would be so good for agri- culture. The agriculture community is still a step behind the rest of the world in electronics and com- puters. The way they do ranching in the Big Hole they are still living in the 1930s. There are a few of the ranches that are a getting a little more intense. Far from seeing the opportunity for linking to farming and ranching communities together as a threat, jeopardizing the organizational advantages of the Federal Land's Management people, this Ranger saw advantages in being able to share his perspective with the ranching community as a whole, and said that he did not see what he was doing as in open conflict with this other community. This conflict between the ranching and public lands community can also be seen in a struggle about how to even conceive of the 'rancher.' Traditionally, the Rancher had been seen as the upholder of the values of the region, of hard work, the frontier, taming yet respecting the wilderness. This image is itself then at the center of a controversy. Said one conservationist, Tom France, "People come to look at the situation and they fall in love with these cowboys. It's the myth of the American West. The cowboys come off as the paragon of great American values. Now we're saying they're destroying public lands." (Royte 1990:70) Inversely, the myth of the cowboy features in computer networker and Telegraph mentor, Dave Hughes's vision of a rugged individualism possible on account of computer conferencing. He has called himself the 'Cursor Cowboy' and has described at some length CMC as a populist medium which can allow its users to maintain their independence and way of life, precisely because does allow new, more direct kinds of collaboration. The myth of the cowboy revives in a new light. At the same time the Ranchers have increasingly accepted that their own lives, and that of their children and spouses is changing. When I asked ranchers how the valley was changing, the first response was inevitably to mention the great diaspora, the loss of people: It's changing... 'cause of the accessibility to a lot of ground... additional roads being put in. The Big Hole Valley over a period of quite a few years [has changed] in that there are how many less people than there were 50, 60 years ago. Bigger ranches have bought up smaller ranches. Towns are really shrunk in size. Jackson is not as big as it used to be. As far as highways and the ease of getting out of the valley to another town where you can do your shopping and whatever business you have to do you can go outside and do. At one time Wisdom had a bank, and newspaper, and a hotel [it still does, two in fact]- more businesses, and a lot more ranchers throughout the valley. So it has changed in that respect. I think the total population is less, towns are smaller, there has been a lot more development in land. People who wanted to shop for something special might get into the car now and make the 90 or more mile trek to Butte to buy what they might need. People could drive on through the old, smaller towns. The ranchers and farmers were also worried about overextend themselves financially by buying too much new equipment, including computers and modems. They had all seen many ranches that had been in families for years (and the ranches of people just starting out) lost to a downturn in land and produce prices during the early 1980s. A number of the ranches had switched to exotic breeds of cattle. Whereas they had traditionally bred Hereford and Angus, "when the financial realities of the seventies dawned" many ranchers began to experiment with the new, larger breeds coming on the market: Charloais, Simmental, Maine Anjou, etc, which yielded heavier calves, which in turn created a demand for larger cows, which raised the prices for the cows. These larger cows were seen as a key to becoming more productive, and the higher prices it was necessary to pay at the beginning would in the end more productively. However, when the market for these cows was found to be over inflated and suddenly dropped, many of the ranchers found that they were no longer able to pay off the loans with which they had originally bought them with. Further, the larger cattle demanded more feed and field space, which itself was becoming more scarce. And the effects of the Federal rangers not wanting to have the public lands 'overgrazed' has not been fully felt yet! When I asked a Wisdom School Board member if outsiders were coming in and buying ranches and what he thought of about it: Some, last few years. Quite a few outsiders. And prices have gone so high on ranches that the rancher couldn't afford to buy a ranch. It took somebody with other money, made someplace else, to buy a ranch. A lot of them will be here for a little while and then they find out ranching isn't all they thought it would be and then they sell to somebody else. Just very few that come from the outside that stay here permanently. Most of them are short term, four or five or ten years, and then sell to somebody else. At the same time when I asked ranchers what they thought of the Japanese and other large investment groups buying the larger ranches, they were not angry, seeing it as part of the general commerce with Japan: Yeah they have been marketing American beef, and then they come in and buy the land that is producing the beef, so they are quick to take advantage of anything like that. Foreign ownership, you get a lot of publi- city over it, but it really isn't a very large amount of the country that is owned by foreigners. And Americans have investments in other countries, which compensate for the investment here. We [would] have a hard time without... buying japanese products. But you can't get around it, there's so much stuff that's made over there. You buy anything, and a good deal of it is going to come from japan or foreign producers. When he looked over at his tractor, he noted that even though it had an American name, many of the parts in it were made outside of the United States. In the end the ranchers and farmers wanted to find ways to keep productive enough so that they could stay in business, and to maintain what the felt was their way of life. The local economy and cultural scene in Wisdom and the other small towns included other local individuals of importance in understanding the flow of ideas and skills in the community. There were a number of people who were involved in construction as carpenters and other kinds of contractors. And there were a number of other positions in these towns as well. The father of one of the children at the Wisdom school worked the local telephone exchange box in town. The area merchants, from the owners of cafes and stores, to hardware stores managers seem to be local individuals, born in the area, married to people in the area, and who, according to my research, followed the attitudes and values of the more economically and culturally substantial ranchers and farmers, as did the other occupational groups. The merchants and cafe owners provided many of the common spaces where local people could meet one another. What's more, these merchants and waitresses were real 'information resources' about the local life. When asked in a restaurant near Alder, Mt. who the local county agricultural extension agent was, our waitress asked the cook who asked yet another person, and gave us their names and an idea of how we might contact them before the meal was over. At the same time, the merchants, and the individuals connected with seasonal tourism (hunting guides, fishing guides, etc.) have more dealing than most of the other local individuals with 'outsiders.' It would appear that culturally one of their roles was to act as an interface between the inside and the outside world. However, in practice they appeared more prepared to initiate the outsider into the regional culture, to which they are part, such as finding the names of a County Agent to people passing through than to expose the 'insiders,' the more traditional elements of the local culture to the heterogenous, 'outside' cultural values. The Setting - Part II Going to School The educational component varies in size from the Western Montana College in Dillon, or the University of Montana in Helena, to the much smaller schools in the small rural communities. In fact, these most rural schools are among the smallest remaining in the United States. This once again has a lot to do with the local geography. Around these middle size towns, lies the vast landscape of broad valleys, mountain ranges, rivers, and ranches. The two counties near Dillon are said to be larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, but to have a population of less than 8000 people. This low population density, and the relatively difficult transportation through the mountainous areas and across the broad, low land plain has encouraged the creation and survival of a system of 'one-room schools.' These schools often have only one or two teachers, some 30 students, and must teach a student body ranging from kindergarten to 8th grade (primary school). The graduating class of the K-8 school in Wisdom, Montana included two students. When there are two teachers, often one teacher educator will teach the upper grades, 4-8 and the other will teach the elementary grades. While in some schools, such as that in Lima, there can be several rooms and teachers, other times, as in the case of the Polaris, Mont. school, located right before the entrance to the Big Hole Valley on the Dillon side, there is only one teacher. During the day, the teacher in such a school might have no other adults with whom to speak on a regular basis. The importance of this schools might quite often be obscured by the number of students actually in attendance. While only two students actually matriculated in the graduation ceremony in Wisdom, Montana mentioned above, not counting the 5 kinder-gartner also 'graduating' to 1st grade, the commencement was attended by over 100 people (cf. Appendix C). Several teachers and members of the community told me that this was far from uncommon. Such numbers point to a complex role and presence of the school in the local community. The schools can also serve as regional community meeting places. They were places in which parents meet parents, neighbors meet neighbors, and quite often they provide a space in which more general community activities can take place. The schools were generally very 'modern' in appearance, and this was in part due to the support from the general community. They would have good lighting, books spilling out of shelves, drawings made by the students, as well as educational posters and maps, all on the walls. And all with usually ample room. Outside, there were playgrounds. The school at Jackson, some twenty miles sought of Wisdom, had a small indoor gymnasium, some 40 feet long, with a performing stage at one end. The name one room school was in a sense a misnomer in many cases since many of these schools would have a number of rooms. The students would generally all learn in the same room, or else divided into two groups, one lower school of grades 1-4, and the other upper, of grades 5-8, each then with their own teacher. The teacher would then provide lessons for each of the grades in the same room. In Jackson the 5th-8th grade group consisted of 11 children, with 23 students in the school all together. In Wisdom, there were a few more children. With so many students together in the same rooms, students in one grade could hear what the other grades were doing, and could perhaps help or ask for help from one another. In Polaris, just before the entrance to the Big Hole Valley, however, there were only some 8 students overall, with one teacher at a very small school. Teachers found that the advantage of these rural schools to be the small class size, and the fact that each student could get close attention. They felt, as did the parents I talked with, that their children learned to be more independent since the teacher might be off helping another student when they needed help. There were two basic disadvantages to such small schools. The first would be the limitations of the skills of the teacher. If the teacher did not feel comfortable teaching art, music, or some other subject, then the school board would have to hire someone else part time to take over these subjects (which they did). Second, it was always difficult to field competitive sports teams since there were never enough kids! The sport activities generally consisted of things like field activities including running, and in the winter, including things such as skiing. A good portion of a school board meeting I attended in Jackson dealt with arranging skiing lessons for the kids that coming Winter. In a few special cases, a number of different schools, such as Jackson and Wisdom, would field a single team for a special event. Locally the schools are overseen by a school board elected from the area school district. Given the large physical expanse of the counties, these districts could be much smaller than any individual county. The Big Hole Valley, all part of Beaverhead County, includes such school districts as that of Jackson, Wisdom, Divide, and Wise River. School boards generally contain from three to five members, elected from the community for generally two year terms. The school boards meet from time to time, or when expensive purchases need to be made. These meetings are usually open to the general voting public since the cost of the running the school in large part is borne by the local taxpayers. From time to time the County Superintendent of Education will visit the school during a school day, making recommendations, and making reports to the School Board. The county superintendent belongs to the educational system on the municipal scale. He or she is supposed to provide the teachers with occasional new material and ideas, and to mediate as best she or he can the disputes that might develop between a school board and a school teacher. His or her position in this sense is analogous to that of the county extension agent to the surrounding ranchers and farmers, with the exception that on occasion she must sometime intervene in real disputes. The public school board meetings are where all (or most) of the different sections of the community come together to talk about their collective futures and to argue about the most expensive item in the local budget: the school. According to a former forest ranger from Wisdom, "Attendance varied from very few, to nearly the whole community if there was a 'hot topic' such as the new classroom or the purchase of computers." When I asked him about what size he meant by the 'whole com- munity' he replied, "I would say that about 50 adults at the meeting (with the entire community being from 100 to 150 depending on how many dogs you counted) was a full house." Some school boards, such as in Wise River, Mt seemed to have a close relationship with their teachers, while other districts, such as in Wisdom, had a reputation for hiring and firing their teachers relatively frequently (until their current teacher, who grew up in the valley and is the daughter of one of the prominent ranchers in the valley). Many factors might go into this relationship. In Wise River, the teacher had grown up in the area, had gone to same school in which she taught, and had known many of the ranchers in the area all her life. They seemed willing, she said in an interview, to listen to her ideas about what the school might need to buy, or how the curriculum might need to be changed. In Wisdom, on the other hand, the previous head teacher (there were three teachers) had come originally from Pennsylvania in search of new teaching opportunities. She related a series of happenings in which her own innovations were thwarted by the school board. She said, for example, that when she wanted to teach dancing after school (on top of all her official school chores) to the general community, the school board stopped her, allegedly citing 'insurance problems.' The school board itself is generally made up, my informants said, of the ranchers themselves. Exceptions had included a carpenter in Jackson, and a hunting and fishing guide in Wise River. A number of school board members reported that it was a thankless job, since they were in fact at the center of so many different local controversies. During an "election" in Jackson the day after one of my visits, there was only one candidate, and that person had been drafted to the position when no one else wanted to run. A good number of the members of the board whom I interviewed had children in the schools and gave that as one of the primary reasons that they wanted to be involved. Other members who didn't have children in school spoke of their interest in education. It was the school board who had the power to hire and fire the teachers. In an interview with the County Superintendent of Education for Beaverhead County, she told me that at best she only can make suggestions to the school board. Her position was simply to make sure, from the State's perspective, that certain educational standards were being met. If they were met, then it would be up to the school board to hire or fire a teacher. Into this sometimes tense and awkward meeting of different interests and people comes the promise of a new communications system. The Setting - Part III A World of Change: Dillon, Mt and the Larger Communities In the following section I will briefly look at some of the elements of the Municipal level, particularly as it pertains to the Telegraph, postponing a look at the 'Broader Community' of individuals and groups from outside of the region until after I have been able to situate to context of the Telegraph more fully. At the municipal level in the larger cities like Dillon (pop. 4000), there are larger scale merchants, state officials, and different educational institutions. While there are many of the same social groupings as were noted above, social relationships and activities are transformed by the difference in scale. Mary Douglas makes the apt point that as researchers we cannot assume that there is more (or less) social and cultural integration in a smaller scale society than in a larger one. (Douglas 1986:21-30) Larger scale entities do include their own distinctive elements. At a 'municipal' level there was more concern for explicitly 'planning' changes in the local, municipal, and even state or interstate economy. Even in the stores there was more talk about how to make up for the waning mining income, how to keep the profits of what was produced in the state and so on. There were also more organization developed to address the social needs of the larger region. Take the County Extension Agent. This individual was supposed to act as an intermediary between the agricultural departments of Montana State University (MSU) and local ranchers. It was unclear to what extent this person in Beaverhead County, the county which includes Dillon, Wisdom, and Dell, actually went into the field to persuade or enlighten the ranchers and farmers about new developments in agriculture, with what methods, with what directives, and with what respect or 'success.' When I asked one knowledgeable but non-rancher whether this county agent came around often, he replied that he didn't think so, but that he heard him on the radio early some mornings. In fact, when I interviewed him about new strategies and technologies for rural development, and asked him in particular about setting up a rural computer conferencing and communication system, especially designed for ranching, and possibly making use of the facilities of Big Sky Telegraph, he leaned back in his chair and pointed over to a large, defunct piece of computer equipment in the corner of the room which he said had been sold to him in a similar way as solving the 'information' needs of the rural community. This was one of the pieces of a proto- computer network which had been designed a few years before to connect ranchers and farms to a multi-state library of technical information. The experiment had failed dismally. However, as Dave Hughes, and other pointed out, none of the ranchers ever needed this kind of information in the first place. As in the 'broadcast model' of one way information flow, there had been no capabilities for the ranchers and farmers to collaborate with each other, to share what they knew. To people like Hughes and Odasz, this was an example of starting with the alleged power of the technology, not with the needs of the people. Following the lead of what he described as the model of the Statewide Agricultural Extension service emanating from Montana State University, there was an emphasis on satellite oriented distance education. The regional supervisor, who oversaw the entire Western part of Montana told me that satellites remained an important way to get information out to ranchers. After all, most ranchers these days have satellite dishes, if only to get distant television broadcasts, and so far as he knew only a few of them had computer terminals. On further query, he also pointed out that Montana State University had made an expensive investment in a 'video production lab,' and that sending out programs was one way for them to make use of their investment. Other than that, a lot of the interactive communication on the more local level was done, according to the extension agents, by telephone. This is not to assess the real role of the County Extension Agent. First, opinions differed on their efficiency. At least the Agent in town did reflect the values of the ranching community, even down to his sense of skepticism! He was willing to explore new products and crops, such as the Cannola crop being touted as the new local crop for Montana's farmers, and which is used to produce cooking oils. Secondly, the structure of just what the duties of an extension agent varied from one part of the state to the next, according to the Agricultural Extension people I talked with at Western Montana College. In some places the Soil Conservation Agencies took the lead in bringing new ideas to the field; in other places, it was local agencies which had been specially set up for this purpose. In a kind of local ecology of services, different groups would take up the challenges of bringing out new ideas. Finally, the service itself is in beginning to change more. Rick Williams, the regional director of the western 18 counties of Montana, was trying to get local agents to get modems, and to attend a training session in Bozeman the very month that I was out there. However, when I asked him just what these modems were supposed to connect to, what kinds of services would be offered, and so on, he maintained that they had not fully explored that yet. He did suggest that they could prove useful in helping extension agents to keep in touch with each other, and with new ideas. Such an use still seemed to follow more along the lines of electronic mail. There were a other extension-like agencies bringing new ideas to the rural areas, including the Agricultural Incubator Without Walls Project; the Women's Resource Center; the Headwaters Resource, Conservation, and Development Coop, which had offices in the seven SW Montana counties, and which was particularly involved in economic development; the technical education departments at Western Montana College; the Small Business Administration; the Montana Office of Public Instruction; the Anaconda Jobs Corps; and Wedgo, a Missoula based women's economic development organization. I was able to talk to many of the individuals involved with these projects. Funding for these projects would come from a variety of sources, such as from Carl Perkins grants, or from different agencies in the government, groups in other words, from outside the municipal region. One potent source of funding had came from the departing mining corporation, Anaconda, as part of their attempt to stimulate the regional economy following their departure from the Bozeman region. The director of the Agriculture Incubator was, according to Frank Odasz supposed to actually go out into the field and show the farmers and ranchers more directly how to use such tools as computer mediated conferencing. As it was, however, she spent much time studying the Cannola projects in Billings with a group of socially progressive farmers there, the Magpie collective, and not long after my interview, left to work with them. Another group that might have used a computer conferencing system more was the Headwaters Economic Development group, a seven county wide organization interested in promoting economic development and increased employment in the South West Montana region. They even were provided with an independent conferencing section on Big Sky Telegraph called the 'Headwaters Regional Conference.' Each of the County Development coordinators was theoretically online, and could potentially be availability to interested business people locally and further afield. One of the results of the online partnership between the Telegraph and the Headwaters Economic Development group has been the creation of a publicly accessible online database of South West Montana Development information. However, the database was also available in printed form, and according to someone working in their offices, this was how most of the requests for its information came in. On the other hand, even if the this resource were not being fully realized, it could perhaps encourage the development of the skills needed to access such databases in the future, and open the way for people from outside of the immediate Western Montana region to begin to look into development opportunities in SW Montana. Each of these groups was gradually gaining experience and direction, while in the background the Telegraph was gradually forging a new strand in the communication order of the region. Frank Odasz, the director of Big Sky Telegraph, claimed that all of these groups had been on the Telegraph, and would sometimes use it (Odasz 1989b, Append. A). A resource may have been developing, but its utilization was taking place very slowly. The Women's Resource Center, however, which I will also discuss later, deserves special mention. It provided one of the most penetrating views on the region. They would get funding, often project by project, primarily to aid the women in the region to get new jobs, to learn new self esteem, and to protect women and their rights. In fact, to a great extent the use of the Telegraph took off first in the general community in the hands of women, and the kinds of issues this center addressed revealed why. Indeed, most of the rural teachers were women. For one thing the Center reached out to help 'Displaced Homemakers.' This latter term was meant to be gender free, and was a program to help with retraining and re-skilling of single parents, people who had lost their jobs, and so on. The actual definition relates to the loss of income. The Center, which had some 4 individuals working full time, and a part time staff made up from a general collective, would also handle other issues, such as providing general legal and other kinds of support to abused spouses, rape crisis, health support, etc. From the perspective of the Telegraph, one of the more interesting aspects of the Center was that they did in fact, as part of their job training activ- ities, teach courses in 'computer literacy' (open to men as well as women), and have several computers which they were able to loan out for a limited amount of time. And as an online resource, they included a number of individuals who could answer or give people directions for more complicated health and social issues. When I visited a woman ran her connection to Big Sky Telegraph from the Lima Stop 'n Shop gas station which she and her husband ran near the Idaho border, it turned out that that computer had been loaned to them by the Women's Resource Center. A deeper issue, and one difficult to assess without much more specific field research, was the fact that quite often it was the women on the ranches who were the first to even use computers, let alone think about using them as part of a regional network. For one thing it was traditionally the women who did the financial accounts on the ranches. They were therefore quite interested in getting what might be perceived as a labor saving device. They had the skills which could make use of part of the resources of the computer right away. Secondly, at this historical juncture, it was often middle aged women who were most open to new opportunities when the ranching incomes declined. It was as if when the ranchers and farmers had to spend more time and energy keeping their ranches and farms intact, or trying to get them back, the women were able at the same time to explore how the occupational sphere had changed. As Jody Webster, the program director of the Women's Resource Center said to me: I'll tell you what, I think there is something that's happening with middle aged women right now, and I'm including myself in middle aged women. I think it's because we are learning, living longer. I know so many people are just ready for information. They're just enthusiastic about all kinds of things, and I don't know if people are late bloomers or blooming again. I was privileged to meet a number of women, who, with their children grown, had now taken an active interest in a variety of social and cultural causes. One women, Carla Hanson, after going back to school herself, had encouraged all of her friends to get their equivalency exams. While two men had started with her effort, it was six of her women friends who finished, and successfully passed their exams. Since Carla didn't get any money for this effort, all of the women got together and made her a special quilt which Carla proudly showed me. Western Montana College in turn was situated at the meeting point of different kinds and scales of education. What's more, Western represented another kind of meeting place. Jody Webster taught one of her non-credit computer literacy courses at night up at the College. While Western Montana College's mission was primarily to train teachers, there were on its faculty and among its students many individuals from the ranching community, as well as from the local educational and service communities. There was, for example, a limited extension project from the College into the more rural areas, but at the time of my research it was open to people from ranches and farms to come in to the physical space of the College; they are not prepared to send people out to these areas. While the two or three people connected with this rural education center were originally from ranches themselves, the emphasis of even this group appears to be to provide training for teachers, to extend the world of the teachers, as it were, and only secondarily to intervene outside the immediate school system. This was in keeping with the official mandate of the College itself which has had a tradition of providing education and support to the teachers of Montana, as well as in the area states. It was founded in 1893 as the State Normal College with the sole purpose of preparing the teachers for the schools of the State and the Northwest Territory. Said one Professor there, John Rogan, "Although other institutions of teacher education grew up around the state in later years, the College has continued in its main role as a teacher education center for more than eight decades." (Rogan 1989) While the University of Montana was well endowed and generally well known nationally, Western Montana College (WMC), like Eastern Montana College, was one of those smaller, local colleges, 90% of whose students (in the case of WMC) came from the state itself. The College, however, reached a turning point in 1969. At that point it reached a peak enrollment of one thousand students. With the decline in teaching opportunities during the early 1970s, the student body dropped to 600. From that time until 1984, the student body didn't rise above 700. A title III educational grant in 1985 helped to modernize the physical plant and educational programs. Still, in 1987, faced with a depressed economy, the State Legislature demanded that the Board of Regents come up with some money saving measures. The Board responded by attempting to eliminate duplication, programs were cut statewide, and WMC lost all its degree programs except for those directly related to teacher education (Rogan 1989). At the same time, "the State reaffirmed Western's mission as focusing on teacher education, with special responsibility for rural education." The Big Sky Telegraph entered the scene precisely at the beginning of this period of enforced reexamination at WMC. It is really too soon to say how the Big Sky Telegraph will serve in its way to expand the offerings of the College, as well as to expand their 'mission' to the teachers, and to reaffirm the very necessity of teaching oriented towards rural education, since it had been online only a relatively short time before I was able to undertake my research. However, in some ways, the Big Sky Telegraph would appear to have become part of the College's very fight for independence. The fight has been very successful. Enrollment has risen back to 1000, with 37 full time instructors. When I talked to a few of the students on the campus during my field research, most said that one of the important reasons they came to Western Montana College was that on top of their innovative rural education programs, that they had heard (in very general terms, however) that the College had begun to investigate the ways in which computers and telecommunications could be used in education. And since the College was so small, many of the incoming students spoke of the teacher/class ratio's were much better than at some of the much larger schools. People were choosing to come to WMC over the main University of Montana campus. The Setting - Part IV The Outer and Inner World: A History of Big Sky Telegraph The initial concept of setting up a "conferencing system" owes much of its inspiration to Frank Odasz, now an Asst. Prof. of Computer Science at Western Montana College. He approached Dave Hughes of Colorado Springs, Co., a nationally known proponent and expert of computer conferencing for community development around 1987 with an idea about setting up a conferencing system in Western Montana. Over a period of several months, Dave Hughes taught Frank Odasz online at 300 baud on a very simple system, how to set up and organize a regional computer conferencing system, and both began to draw up additional plans about how the system might be expanded to take into account additional communicational activities which might make use of a regional computer conferencing system in an area as relatively isolated and sparsely populated as Western Montana. Frank Odasz had originally come from around Caspar, Wyoming, not too distant from Dillon, Montana. However, at the age of 11 in 1963, he moved with his folks to Los Angeles, and then at 12 to San Francisco, CA where his father was to have an Engineering position. He stayed in San Francisco area until 1970, including the 'Flower Power' years. After attending a community college, where he met Reggie, his wife, he went on to the University of California at Davis where during the late 1960's he took a degree in Psychology, while Reggie took a degree from Davis in English. They then returned to the Rockies, and after a series of jobs including working on a dude ranch in Wyoming, Frank went on in 1981 to return to school to get a Masters in Instructional Technology. It was at this point that Frank got interested in Computer Conferencing, having heard of Dave Hughes' Chariot BBS in Colorado Springs. Frank said that such a use of computers was new to him, even though he had a degree in instructional technology and there had been personal computers around for some time. As he says, the computer science program at his university didn't 'do micros' or smaller computers. As far as he could see, they were missing out on the advantages and potentials of the new technologes, advantages which books such as Naisbitt's Megatrends (which came out at the same time, and which he mentions reading at the time) had so clearly posited. While more popular books of the time were beginning to speculate on the telecommuting, interactive, distance education, and trends towards decentralization, the degree granting educational institutions were still working out the advantages and ideas of a previous era of massive mainframes acting as centrally organized and controlled databases. Reggie, Frank's wife, has also been involved in many of the everyday details of getting the Big Sky Telegraph online, and has served has helped coordinate some of its distribution of materials, including course outlines, books, and software. As an English instructor, she has also been involved in experimenting with teaching English composition online. She has also been very active in answering or coordinating the daily flow of messages. Indeed, together they have been involved in a metamor- phosis in 'instructional technology' away from simple 'broadcast paradigm' of 'providing' information, via video disks and satellite downlinks, and mainframe oriented databases, to something more interactive. Perhaps we could call this the emergence within the educational field of the 'communications professional,' and relate it to two facts: first, that education is being conceived as something that occurs not in one formal setting at just one point in an individual's life; and secondly that the variety of so-called 'instructional technology' has increased to the point where individuals can specialize in different media. Dave Hughes, the technical mentor of Big Sky Telegraph, and co-visionary of its early stages, combined both the background of a 'communications specialist' with that of a professional educator. A West Point graduate and instructor, he had not only been a Major in the army, with a large staff under him; he had reputedly been a very unusual one, promoting a degree of lateral communication and initiative. He had been a college english instructor as well. At the point when he retired from actively involvement in college instruction and the military, he began to explore the possibilities of one medium in particular, computer mediated conferencing. As he explained, he now could get more done online and in a shorter amount of time! For Dave Hughes, the new medium was computer mediated communications, and with it will come, if we pursue the possibilities assiduously enough, new forms of electronic democracy and interpersonal communication, provided we safeguard our liberties. He has also long argued for what he has called, the 'Highways of the Mind' proposal, seeking to establish a nationally funded, public computer network, on the same principles as the interstate highway systems. Dave Hughes had already received some national recognition for his successful efforts to get the town council of Colorado Springs 'online' with each of the members of the council having a computer with a modem, and also providing public access places, where the public who might not ordinarily have access to a computer with a modem could at least offer their opinions about council actions and other items of interest. The idea was not to create some kind of instant electronic voting system, but simply to provide a forum where often heated discussions could take place. One of his early coups was working successfully to defeat a local incumbent over the telecommunications issue. (Hughes 1988). He went on with his 'electronic city hall' idea so that read only city news, listings of city jobs, electronic mail, and so on could be added to interactive discussions. According to Hughes, the movement towards new forms of interactive communications, "not just one-way press and media" represented and will increasingly represent, a new phase in representative democracy. Said the Deputy City Manager of Colorado Springs, "now we can put out information the way we want to," meaning, Hughes claimed, "not just the way the press chooses... I will be able to get it [information] from the City - and [the] elected official's *full text* as well as 'according the press' which will let me make better decisions in the end." (Hughes, 1989:top3:5). What struck Hughes most about the Big Sky rural schools, he said in an interview, was that they already had computers, remnants of the era (circa 1982) in which educators had felt that computers should be included to every school. They had been granted apparently with State and Federal money. All one needed to do, both he and Frank Odasz agreed, was to add a modem, a central computer to switch the calls, and hopefully a way to keep telecommunication costs down. While Frank Odasz had come up with the idea, and had apparently discussed it with some of the rural teachers, Dave Hughes sought to involve the broader community in an effort of rural self-development. His idea was not to bring specific ideas to the area (other than interactive telecommunications), but to provide an augmented means by which the rural communities could acquire and exchange their own ideas and resources, beginning with the rural teachers. The Big Sky Telegraph represented an extension, thereby, of his own online efforts. Initial funding for the project came from grants from the M. J. Murdock Charitable Trust of Vancouver, Washington and the Mountain Bell Foundation of Montana, each for about $50,000. The Mountain Bell grant was to cover some of the telecommunications costs by providing for an 800 toll free telephone number for instate teachers. Mountain Bell, the regional representative of US WEST, has been interested in the Big Sky Telegraph from the beginning, and while they did not rush in head over heels with funding, they quietly increased funding in the system over 1988, and into 1989. According to Hughes, he was instrumental in getting the seed money grant from US WEST approved: One little effective electronic end run that Chariot was helpful in, was a Mtn Bell Grant they had applied for... [It] was being held up by some grumbling skepticism by the Big University types who just couldn't believe that 'lil old Western Montana College could do what they said, when all the Big Mainframers had trouble getting a suitable economic level of participation in things such as AgNet, and the state level dial up systems. Tony Sees-Pieda, the Denver-located Mountain Bell Public Relations guy who moderates a 'regulatory public policy' conference on Chariot, paid for by Mountain Bell, saw the obstacle and lobbied Montana Mountain Bell Foundation to approve the grant it went through! The main contact between Tony, (Denver), Frank (Montana), and me (Colorado Springs) was on Chariot! In order to attempt to 'de-mystify' the technology, when Dave Hughes initially brought the physical components of the conferencing system to Dillon around Thanksgiving, 1987, he did whatever he felt he could to stay out the way. Teachers were encouraged to assemble the hardware themselves. With the exception of Dave Hughes, none of the educators involved with the project had extensive background in computer science (and even his knowledge was self-taught). He stated that he wanted the teachers to be in 'control' not just of the messages they sent, but of the system sending and coordinating the messages as well. Hughes felt that if this was a system which the teachers wanted, they would try to learn how to use it (with the organized help of other teachers.) If a local teacher, for example, did not have the necessary equipment or know-how to access or make use of some part of the conferencing, messaging, or database facilities, then he or she should be able to draw upon the help of one of his or her 'peers.' And if a teacher knew something of what the capabilities of the equipment 'might be' (since the definition of a medium as we have seen is in social flux) then he or she might suggest something new. The emphasis was supposed to be on collaboration and collective experience. Big Sky Telegraph was originally set up on a generic 16 megahertz 386 microcomputer running the SCO Xenix 386 operating system, assisted by 8 (or 7) modem ports, expandable to 32 ports capable of handling thousands of users. The Telegraph used FoxBase Plus as its database software (db III compatible), and a customized version of the Xbbs conferencing software, with all software and hardware costing less than $15,000. The technical reason for using Xenix over, say, DOS was to ensure flexible multi-tasking. In fact, Dave Hughes, customized the configuration of the Xbbs software so that the system could run several 'BBS's simultaneously on the same machine. This movement towards both creating different BBS systems and finding ways to share resources between them was possible in Xenix, an IBM oriented variation of the Unix operating system. Before not too long, Hughes had customized the system so that at the initial login prompt, one could enter 'bbs' to enter the teachers bbs, and 'hrn' to enter a bulletin board system of the "Headwaters Regional Network" to access the more business oriented computer conferencing and database section. And both bulletin board systems could share the same data bases (via the Foxbase Plus). (cf. Odasz 1988a:1; Hughes, EIES, C685:153:279). As Hughes proudly exclaimed, there was no local DP ("data priest," an unaffectionate term for systems operators who run their complex computer systems according to arcane rules and access schemes) on this system, the constant, and lordly presence in the era of main frame computers. He saw in Frank and Reggie ordinary people (at least as far as computers were concerned) who were quite unfamiliar with more advanced computers. "I noticed that *every* person involved in that small town's 'computer culture' [where it might be found!] was at the Apple II, low end MS DOS, 'community college type' level of educational computing." (Hughes, Ibid.) He noted that their assistant sysop, or 'systems operator,' Elaine Garrett was a hunting and fishing guide by profession who was called into the project because she was one of the few people who had had some experience with an IBM computer. The system began to take off as soon as it was online, making use of pre-existing communication networks between the teachers, and their communities. According to Hughes, "In the first 40 days of it being up, it has been called 1,612 times by people - 75% of whom are total novices - all over that rural dispersed state of Montana. They have left 975 messages which is a message-to-call ratio of over 60%. *That* meets my standard for 'user friendliness' of a dial up system." (Hughes, EIES, C685:153:275, 2/19/88) Further, the system was not designed solely for educators. Said Hughes: There is an important point though, reflective of the way these technologies *ought* to evolve over time. That is, as in many small towns in America, the concept of 'community' is so strong, that nothing is 'just' school, or government, or business, or private group. Schools are frequently a social center, a place where other elements of the community can do their own thing so long as the kids are educated and the school gym is available for the basketball games scheduled. So without any great intellectualizing - because it is a perfectly natural extension into the 'electronic society' - Big Sky has warmly welcomed anyone to log on, free. And [it] has sections where the local Women's Resource Center 'hang out' electronically, where a Medical Clinic's professionals chit chat in the 'Wellness' section - besides the specific educational 'resource' activities, and the current principle activity goes on - a formal, for credit, one room-school teacher recertification course in Telecommunications goes on. (Hughes, Ibid.) As time went on, different conferences had different successes. The Wellness section was later dropped, while others, such as a Writing Conference added, only to be later replaced by other another conference later on. By August, just 8 months later, the over 7000 messages had been exchanged between 300 people, and more than 30 teachers had completed the accredited formal online training. It is hard to estimate the time and effort that both Frank and Reggie put into this project. They were certainly constant friends and companions to most of the people there, ready to fine tune the system. Messages like the following were quite common: No. 194 08/01/88 21:46:18 From: Frank Odasz To: Ruth Carlstrom Subject: (R) (R) (R) (R) Scie Message class: Public Message base: CoffeeShop Go for it with the Sciencelab conference Ruth, I'll create a Science files area for uploading and down- loading too. Did you know we have 150 very special science essays from Walt Robertson? They are listed in the files file area as science and scienceb. Telegraph is the first time they are being made available to the public. We are working on a U.S space foundation link also. ;-) Notice that the presence of something we might call 'soft publishing' in which signed articles, in this case by a Walt Robertson are being widely shared ultimately nation wide, directed to specific audiences in many cases, and yet they may have never actually seen the wrinkle and creases of physical paper. What's more something of the constant sense of innovation about being online at the Telegraph comes through. The Coffee Shop conference was a general conference, or message exchange area where people would send public greetings or share announcements with each other. One of the main technical problems of the system comes through on this message as well. I will call the problems of 'message threads.' There was a decided inability to keep the same conversations going for some time in any conference since all messages in a particular conference would simply follow one after the other, only to be distinguished by whether they were public or private, or by their title. The problem was that if someone were to make a comment at one place, a number of unrelated responses might soon intervene disrupting conceptual continuity. One can try to follow the titles, but they can get obscured (cf."Subject: (R) (R) (R) (R) Scie" above), or the titles of a responses belonging to the same message chain may begin to differ. The reason was that the Xbbs conferencing software which they had chosen in part because of its compatibility with Xenix did not have either the ability to allow specific topics areas to be branched off from the main discussions, or some way to link the different responses of the same topic together. Computer conferencing software designers and users commonly debate how best to organize the generation of distinct topics, such as whether each user should be able to start a 'topic,' or some moderator, or anyone else. On a number of other Unix/Xenix comparable conferencing softwares like Participate (eg, as once run on the Source), PicoSpan (run on the WELL), or Caucus II (run on MetaNet) there is considerable flexibility to the discussions that can be generated because they can be organized by topic, and not just by conference. It would appear that the lack of this kind of logical organization will preclude for now deeper topical discussions. When I asked Frank Odasz about this he replied: Most online messages on the system now are not in discussion mode; if they are, they would be between a couple individuals and they happen to leave it public which maybe a third or a fourth might come in for a very short discussion. There have been no real ongoing discussions as such mainly because the format at this point is more hodge-podge messaging, and I'll admit that. What's more, it is not clear when this problem will be addressed for two reasons. First, much of the important energy has been going into managing the continuing accelerating expansion of the use of the system. Secondly, as both Frank Odasz and Dave Hughes have said to me, changing a user interface is serious business since it involves training ones users to do new things. Even still, the Telegraph continues to expand. According to Hughes and others involved with the system, this is because of the inherent appreciation for the importance and difficulty of rural communication. Said Hughes, 153:294) Dave Hughes 2/20/88 15:03 ... As I began to suspect about 5 years ago after travelling to Regina, Canada, Alaska, rural Colorado, and now Montana -there is a distinct possibility that the *rural* areas of the world will become far more 'telecommunications literate' faster, than the Urban centers. Because rural people know the necessity, and costs, of 'communications.' Now it remains to be seen whether those in the Power Centers of America accept the necessity for publicly supported Highways of the Mind - as they did the Homestead Act, Rural Electri- fication, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Inter- state Highways System, the Federal supported Air Port and Sea Port System. Or whether they miss the future entirely.... (Hughes 87-89, EIES, ported to MetaNet Old Salon) While there are policy issues yet to work out, such as whether there should be a publicly supported data network (Hughes' "Highways of the Mind" or privately supported system, "Data Toll Roads"), these have not slowed the Telegraph's progress since most of the data for my research was compiled. Recently, on June 5, 1990, for example, Frank Odasz gave a laptop demonstration of the system to a Native Americans from 7 different reservations in Montana, such as Assiniboine-Gros Ventre, Crow, and Blackfeet, showing, he reported, how telecommunications could link communities together (Hughes, WELL, Telecom, Top679:184). According to Hughes, the Native Americans in attendance in Great Falls, Mt expressed considerable interest in setting up a their own computer conferencing system, one which in turn would be linked with the Telegraph. Many new organization have been joining the Telegraph, including the National Diffusion Network organization (450 teachers nationwide), the Office of Public Instruction, and the Montana Associated Students, the Telegraph is being itself linked up to other existing, national and international net- works, expanding both its access to the rest of the world, and beginning to permit easier access to it from the outside world. The Telegraph has been gated (opened) to the international UUCP/USENET network with its 8000 systems world wide, and some 250,000 users. An experimental system is just beginning to link even more remote, local bbs systems, which have been encouraged by the Telegraph, first to the Telegraph, and then via a link there to the international amateur computer FIDO computer network, with its some 10,000 systems world wide. By October, 1990 two of the 4 'outlying-area' systems were already online (5 more were expected in the near future) and were in turn to be connected through the Big Sky Telegraph Fidonet Gateway both to the International FidoNet, and via its own gateways, potentially to other networks such as UseNet, and potentially at some point in the future, using gateways on FidoNet and UseNet to the InterNet (or NSFnet), JaneNet, EARN, JunNet, and other networks worldwide. One of these local nodes was the Russell County BBS in Hobson, MT set up for Native Americans, the very BBS proposed by the Native Americans only some 2 months before. The importance in undertaking research is obviously not in cataloging alleged successes, or cataloging possibilities, but in getting at the sense of resistances to change, to how new technologies get to be inflected into a culture. In balancing too close to the 'system' or 'medium'-centric view, we lose sight of greater context within which new media fit. For a system to grow equitably, it takes more than the simple stringing together of new inter-mediated groups since the presence of one group might well serve to curb its acceptance by other social or cultural groups. What research can do, then, is to give voice to the dissatisfaction and worries of different groups constructing the presence and accessibility of a medium. It should work so that their concerns and worries can be given voice and addressed. It should serve to deepen our understanding about the social, and to a more limited fashion, the cultural implications of the media. And, taking advantage of the scope of such initiations of new media, it should recover and illuminate something of the process by which new media are defined, accepted, supported, and used. *********************** - Chapter 6 - Ethnographic Analysis The Telegraph in the Community - Part I Rural Teachers and the New Medium Implicit in this research has been the issue of grassroots, the means by which the different social, cultural, and gender communities can take new tools such as these into their own hands, defining them and redefining them in ways that would empower themselves and their neigh- bors, and so as to connect themselves in strategic ways to the many other changes around them, changes in the ethnoscape, technoscape, finanscape, mediascape, and ideoscape. To get at this issue I first attempted to find out how the teachers had found out about the Tele-graph, what impact they felt they could have on its organizations, both online and off, what changes they would like to see, and what expectation they had that these changes would take place. Overall, many teachers with whom I spoke mentioned that someone from Western had contacted them first, often during some kind of orientation they had had at Western Montana College. Once online, however, they quickly would meet other people, especially other teachers. A less frequent, but upcoming path of transmission follows from the direct instruction of another teacher, often from the same school, as in Wisdom. The teacher-teacher path will undoubtedly become more active as more teachers get online. In one district, the school board had first told the teacher about the Telegraph during her initial job interview. One teacher, Theresa Murdoch at the Jackson School joked, "Actually my eighth graders taught me about it, because they know more about it than I do!" In fact she learned the Telegraph from all three sources. Responding to the question how she first learn about the telegraph: When I came to Jackson. Actually when I came for the interview they told me about it. They said they were hooked up to the Big Sky Telegraph. I wasn't sure exactly what they were talking about. They kind of explained it to me. And then when I got the job, and... the other teacher has been here for a few years and she was telling me about it. And then the girls, the 8th grade girls showed me how to do it, some. And then I talked to Frank Odasz and went to the College and talked to him so I could understand it a little better. And that's how I really got going. Two other teachers said that their older students were able to translate a general skill with the logic of consumer electronic devices, including education oriented computer games from school, into skill about how to make the most with computers and computer mediated communication. Since all of the teachers worried about the phone expense, and, to a great extent, they in many ways still saw the network as something to be used sparingly anyway, they did not feel that they had the technical expertise, nor the time or money to deeply influence what was going on in Dillon. Many of the teachers did in fact have some decided preferences about how they would like to see the Telegraph change. Patti Monaco, the head teacher in Wisdom during my second visit, said that she had asked Frank to several times change some of the prompts, set up some conferences that were oriented specifically for the different areas of the curriculum: I made some suggestions to Frank as to how I would change the menu selections. And I would love to see him change the menu selections just so the simplicity would be there. And what I think it could is help someone.... let's take math, and you are trying to teach multiplication, and you need a new innovative idea, because Johnny is not getting it. And what I suggested is to have different subject areas listed, and under mathematics to ask if anyone has an idea about teaching multiplication, or a book, or a computer program... Indeed, several teachers mentioned that when they did have problems or questions they weren't sure in which conference or section into which to put their questions. When I forwarded Patti's concern above to Frank Odasz, he reflected on the kinds of 'resources' which the Telegraph might have available, and suggested, in perhaps a lapse into more 'broadcast' paradigm of information dissemination, that Patti or someone like her could simply e-mail Otis Thompson, a mathematics professor at Western Montana College, and ask questions directly. Such a direct communication could be construed as demonstrating the importance of the Telegraph in establishing new connections between people. What's more, Frank was concerned that if too many separate conferences were created, then the traffic, the amount of messages in any one conference might drop to almost nil, and other users, not expecting much to be changing in that conference, wouldn't read it regularly. The only problem was that Patti and others appeared to be looking for a way to share their concerns publicly. Patti had immediately realized the importance of conferencing as a shared medium, and I think she really wanted a shared public space, and was lamenting that she was limited to trying to upload ideas to a few predefined conferences which she didn't feel reflected her way of dividing her problems up. As for the problem of micro small conferences, most conferencing software will sweep through all of the conferences to determine where there might be new mail. The pathway to finding out about how to get online, and what it meant to be online, was generally not a verbal or written description of some sort, but physical hands on demonstration. It is not enough to hear about being online; someone has to physically demonstrate it. This was something with which Dave Hughes, Frank Odasz, and nearly all the people who had been on the Telegraph agreed. You can talk to people all you want about what telecommunications and computers might mean together, but it isn't until you actually get out, open a laptop or some already hooked up computer, make the connection to a BBS, and go through the different conferences, file sections, mail sections, and so on, that people realize just what you have been talking about. For Dave Hughes, this is part of what he sees as the importance of having a laptop computer. His initiation stories which he has written up in many online forums, follow a recurring rhetorical strategy of playing up the ignorance, the boredom, even the open naivete of the people he is talking with, to be met in turn by the sudden flash of enlightenment as he turns on his laptop or demonstration desktop and begins to log people into some distant city, followed by a burst of enthusiasm and new ideas as a pent up desire to communicate with people is released. The problem is that his analysis does not lead to any real sense of just what this original ignorance consisted or how it was constituted, and must stoop to being too amazed at just how readily people take to his new technologies. Still, teachers, forest rangers, and members from all the 12 social/cultural categories outlined above who had worked with computer conferencing stressed the need for someone to actually go step by step through a demonstration before they really understood the nature of the medium, which is to say, before they could construct possible uses. One of the problems appears to be that there are no ready cultural archetypes about what being online might mean, no reservoir of shared understandings. My interviews revealed that most of the ranchers, teachers, and general members of the community usually had their first experiences with 'computers' in terms of finance or word processing packages. The possibility of linking computers up together was seen in terms of 'electronic mail,' a fusing of images of normally delivered mail and perhaps being on the telephone. This lack of a variety of images, of ready concepts about Computer Mediated Conferencing could well explain something of the general lack of interest by social science researchers into public CMC as well. At this point, one might generalize that CMC simply exists in pockets where a physical hands on transmission of skills and orientation has already taken place, except for a few hardy individuals, who like ham radio operators, are ready to pioneer new communications technologies as the are developed. The more recent Sears/IBM initiative to establish for a nationwide Prodigy computer service initiative proves interesting in this context and clarify further some of the issues of here. Such highly capitalized, national computer information services may begin to add to the general reservoir of concepts and images about what CMC might be, how it might be used, with what difficulty, by which people, and at what approximate cost. Overall, it would appear that Prodigy has been stressing concepts connected to the ease of getting interactive access to services, primarily data bases. From the perspective of the ecology of (communicative) technologies outlined above, this can lead to a paradox. If the potential users in general are satisfied (and more confident) with their existing ways of getting airline reservations, and other such services, they will not want to incur the dubious expense of time and money involved in trying to do the same thing through a Computer Mediated Communication system. On the other hand, there may be general and otherwise unanswered interest in getting involved in national conferences centered on topics of interest, but the nature of this medium might not really be clear until one has already gone online! As Bonnie Conley, of the Agricultural Incubator Project said: I thought it would be innovative to have computer workshops, to kind of follow through [with the questionnaires sent out to the ranchers]. They can't understand it unless they get onto the network and use it. I didn't [understand what being online meant] until I got on the network... what benefits there were... it's not something to be scared of.. using a computer is easier than riding a tractor, as far as I'm concerned, and I think once they understand that... big steps, and then once the neighbor sees how they are using it, you [will] get more people on the network. At this stage in the project much of the innovative animus or force behind developing the form of the project still appears to be coming from the project originators, although ideas could come from anyone online. Does this compromise the 'grass roots' nature of the project, and other projects based on this example? What about the $50,000 provided by US West to subsidize phone costs? How can we even call it 'grassroots' when so much of the funding, know-how, and enthusiasm seems to come 'from above' or 'from outside?' Herein lies one of the paradoxes of grassroots activism. While I found that much of the impetus of the project came from the outside the immediate social and cultural worlds of the 'local' and municipal levels which I examined, from the inspirations of such 'activists' as Dave Hughes, and Frank & Reggie Odasz, as well as from the intervention of US West, at the same time there was a high degree of diffused re-invention occurring. This reinvention, I would argue is just what the diffusion of innovations theorist, Everett Rogers, finally came to identify in his 'decentralized diffusion model,' and which I see as the same thing as a grassroots effort. When people understood something of the new medium, then they would use existing social and cultural networks to reinvent the medium. Rogers might loosely be said to have theorized about three different paradigms, although he is best known for his second. The first, developed by Schramm, Lerner, and others, was called by revisionists the 'Dominant Paradigm.' It sought to formulate steps in the process by which presumably more efficient, perhaps healthier, technologies or practices could be enrolled into the practices of local behavior- the long, straight road to ourselves. Rogers revision of this perspective, termed the 'New Paradigm' (1976) offered a varied and substantial criticism of the use of a Euro-centric historical model for developing countries, of capital intensive solutions to local development problems, a recognition of the extent to which global political economic interests are involved in local development undertakings, and in ways which are often not obvious, a criticism of the equation of economic growth with national development. In turn he offered encouragement to make use of more local input into organizing and implementing large scale technological substitutions and transformations. However, this stress on trying to encourage 'local involvement in planning' still did not address the problem that the central goals of development all too often were set out by central planners. 'Local involvement' often meant trying to enlist local sponsors to figure out how to implement goals formulated by, and quite often in the interests of, a few central planners. (cf. Uncapher 1990) In a much more recent work, he has begun to criticize even these notions of the diffusion of 'centralized' innovations, suggesting that often the actual means by which innovations were picked up and defined, involve numerous individual redefinitions of the skill and object to be 'diffused.' In turn, this can reset of the final goals to which these objects or skills were to be used. As he himself states: during the late 1970s, I gradually became aware of diffusion systems that did not operate at all like the relatively centralized diffusion systems that I had described in previous publications. Instead of coming out of formal R&D systems, innovations often bubbled up from the operational levels of the system, with the inventing done by users. Then the new ideas spread horizontally via peer networks, with a high degree of re-invention occurring as the innovations were modified by users to fit their particular conditions. Such decentralized diffusions systems usually are not run by a small set of technical experts. Instead, decision making in the diffusion system is widely shared with adopters making many decisions. In many cases, adopters served as their own change agents. Gradually, I began to realize that the centralized diffusion model was not the only wheel in town. (Rogers 1986) Rogers here finally seems to be admitting that 'diffusion' involves a process of re-invention, which in turn renders a simple scheme of tracking local 'decisions' about the worth of a technology problematic. It is within this latitude wherein local redefinition of the goals and nature of the technology serving to empower individuals within and across peer networks can occur that I would call grassroots. Frank did in fact do what he could to implement what he felt the conferencing software and hardware was technically capable of achieving- and using what little time and funds he had free to accomplish his outreach!: Then the plan was to serve as a coop for whatever groups were interested- to try and design some medium where they could have a piece of the system, like a 'conference'- and I am somewhat limited by the software that we have running. I could give them their own conference, like the 'Women' for the Women's Center, and then they use that until they really get going and start to want file transfers. Then I could give them a file area. Then, when they are ready, then give them a complete partition. The thing being that it is expensive, too expensive for me to create a complete partition, with all features for six to use occasionally. The separate 'partition' he mentions here would be a separate bulletin board system using the same computer and telephone numbers, and potentially the same data bases and files, but having its own login, conferences, files, general messages, and so forth. At the initial login prompt, instead of typing 'BBS' to get onto the teacher's partition, one could potentially type HRN (Headwaters Regional Network) to get into a separate, business oriented area. And the same for any additional area that might be created. Two points are central here. First, notice that new conferencing areas are expected to grow out of the old. That is, at that moment in the development in the organization of the Telegraph, a ranchers conference would be expected to grow out of the teachers conference. As a business conference develops, then a more agriculturally oriented section would be expected to grow out of that section. This pattern of organization serves to assure that a new conference won't have too little traffic, since it could count on synergy with its neighbors to keep new ideas flowing in and through the fledgling conference until it can have its own partition, that is, independent electronic bulletin board system within the overall Telegraph system. A possible feeling of es- trangement between the new subgroup, a business conference within a teaching bulletin board system, or later a ranching conference within a business oriented bulletin board system, however, cannot be overlooked. Will the ranchers simply dismiss an overall educationally oriented bulletin board system as something belonging to the teaching community before they can learn enough, and give enough energy to the conference to in turn give it enough traffic and interest to warrant its own file areas and even its exclusive partition? Secondly, notice that his work involves a degree of interpretation and activity. The Sysop, the Systems Operator who manages the bulletin board itself, and who edits what conferences are where, must decide to a great extent how to organize the limited resources of the Telegraph. Given the relative limitations in the resources Frank sought to provide some clear guidelines. For example: O.K. So I have a group size that determines what I do with software. On the other hand, part of it has been the challenge to stay organized, and stay on purpose; you know, not get too diffused, since a lot of these failed systems, like AppleLink- though I don't know if it is officially failed or not- they tried to be everything to everybody, and they end up being nothing to nobody. And this business, 'we have games, we have a dating service'- that is going in the opposite direction of answering needs. So, as much as possible, we have tried to stay as close as possible to the actual needs. What does a rural teacher really need?- resources, lesson plans, contact with other teachers, contact with libraries and resource providers. Ok, and some means of social contact... Frank Odasz was able to make use of an existing social network to which he had immediate access, that of the rural teachers, in part through the 'prestige' and connections of his position at the College, and the fact that he had spent time learning 'educational' technology. He likewise had the ready support of other people around him in the College, and indirectly, a number of people beyond the College to help him to negotiate this social network, and to put him in a position that he becomes a co-facilitator with the forces within that social network which can further define it to meet its needs. And indirectly, as an educator, he could begin to penetrate into a number of closely related communities, such as might be made available in part through the auspices of the Women's Resource Center. The concern of a broad number of women in 'further education' would appear to lead them to investigate the general educational community. However, when Frank and the Telegraph begins to make the next step into the general business, and agricultural communities, he didn't have the same degree of initial success. This would appear in part because both Frank and Dave begin with identifying the abstract possibilities of the 'medium,' such as avoiding the problems of 'telephone tag,' 'having access to central data bases' rather than identifying how these needs had been met in the past, and the degree to which the old solutions made sense to people. Frank envisioned that one of the deeper reasons why individuals do or do not join a network was a matter of the degree of development or nature of one's 'consciousness.' There seems to be two strands in this perspective. Firstly, a change in consciousness can be seen as part of a larger paradigm shift in how to organize and locate skills. One of the most remarkable insights which Kuhn (1962) showed in his work on scientific paradigm shifts is that a new scientific paradigm often does not begin with greater explanatory power than that the old way of seeing a problem. In fact, when people began using the Copernican heliocentric way of thinking about problems of celestial dynamics, the results of this system were not greater than those of the Ptolemaic system, simply because the epi- and epi-epi-circles of the older system had been refined enough to provide a relatively accurate system of observation and prediction. For Frank, the leap of faith reorienting one's communi- cational skills to accommodate CMC is a leap of faith, a conceptual leap reorganizing tasks and expectations. Secondly, in a McLuhanist manner, Frank concentrates on a shift in 'consciousness' as occurring because of something specific to this medium, to the way by which ideas can be jointly created and evolved, perhaps experienced. Online ideas and stories don't even have to follow one another; they can be jointly edited and augmented by individuals who never are able to meet face to face. Shifting around the many online tasks and obligations involves a transformation in consciousness itself, and that even getting online reflects a kind of change in consciousness: It's more a consciousness thing than anything else. And I'm in the business of teaching new ways, new levels of thinking, new levels of intellectual interaction. Communicating with a person in writing seems to be unfathomable to many of these people... who know business letters, but know nothing about the written word beyond the business letter. And a business letter is stodgy. You are limited. You've got to be kind of conservative. Whereas online tends to be a pretty different animal- being more folksy, more intimate in a hurry, more mind to mind; and I leave spelling mistakes in. Sometimes I do. Just for the heck of it. So as I think about this more and more, at East Germany and Russia, and... and what I'm doing, and it's like consciousness. Not hardware or software, not purposeful communication, so much as consciousness of new possibilities. And that's what the computer seems to open up, is literally new levels of conscious, interactive... new levels of interaction for con- sciousness for partnership. When I e-mail with Dave, or when I e-mail with you, that is more consciousness than any other single thing. So we are not just computer networking, when you and I share comments back and forth. It's in a context that to me is much more a consciousness thing. It's literally, as I have said tongue in cheek before, working as an electronic analogy for telepathy. I don't even think that's right. I think it's something more. I think, in a sense, it is shared consciousness. It does not lie within the scope of this thesis to unpack this second perspective. The logic of this concept does not submit to Popper'esque rules for scientific, positivistic proof, at least not as it is stated. One question will have to be asked even now: How medium specific is this transformation? In concentrating on one medium, such as writing, we can see that on some level it is possible to see all people participating with or with it as sharing 'consciousness.' As each new person learns to write, they gain access to a new world, to a new consciousness. How far can this metaphor or perspective work? The extended quotation above are the reflections of someone thinking at the level of a medium reified into a thing, where each medium can be seen as an enveloping, self-subsistent link between people by itself. Consciousness begins to be used as an explanatory device as to why or why people do not go online in the first place. Such an explanation spirals away from the correlated question of how do people obtain this consciousness, or not obtain it? How is consciousness formed or bestowed: naturally? in the context of the consciousness formed by other media? or by the nature of what is going on in the communities socially, culturally, and economically. In unfolding and getting at even as transcendental an explanation as this, a deeper investigation of the social and cultural communities themselves is called for. Ethnographic Analysis The Telegraph in the Community - Part II The Rural Community and the New Medium Despite its interest in regional economic development, the Telegraph appears to have not yet to make any specific efforts to become a service to the ranchers themselves. The 'RuralNet' proposal, authored by Dave Hughes, Frank Odasz, and Gordon Cook (cf. Odasz 1989b) speaks of merging the interests of the educational, business, and civic cultures in rural society for economic and social development. However, they have failed to adequately take into account that the business community cannot be so easily condensed into one entity. The business ventures that they speak of seem to represent more of the interests of the small towns, interested in tourism and attracting new industries, than of the ranchers and farmers. Could the ranching 'partition' gradually develop as a conference out of a general business partition? In general, as might be expected, I found that few ranchers knew about either the Telegraph or computer conferencing in general, unless they were on the school board and had learned about it from the teacher there, or from their kids who were in school. And even if the School Board had to approve the expense of the connection to the Telegraph after an initial free period, still the expense was so small that the Board did not feel they had to become too involved in knowing all the details. There did not appear to be many general media representations or narratives about CMC either. Where ranchers had heard about it, or when they were first trying to understand the Telegraph or computer communication and conferencing, almost always its image was quickly conflated with that of 'computers' in general, and with the more general computational model of computers. This computational model sees computers as time saving devices in the computing, storing, and manipulation of data, especially in the West, data about ranch or farm finances and resources. Computers were not seen as communicational devices. With the issue of computer communication quickly seen as a question of 'computers' and not of 'communications,' an array of relatively established attitudes and narratives became manifest. The concern for 'independence,' manifested itself as a worry about becoming dependent in their daily work on any new devices which they could not fix. There was also a concern about losing older, more useful skills in the face of a limited, fragile few. One more colorful example of this comes from a rancher in Wisdom: Technology's great if you happen to have somethin' to go with it. You still gotta have some brains. The fuckin' world ain't going to run on buttons. Some- body's gotta dig the post holes, and plant the corn.... When we got the road built, then it will be fine, but we haven't got the road built yet. For some, then, new technology is seen as a new dependence. Elsewhere the computer screen itself is associated with TV, and hence with a kind of cultural dependence. If someone can play music, why simply listen to it on the radio: I mean, if we've got a golden ear, we've gotta figure somethin' out, ourselves. Let's not wait for some shows on the fuckin' screen. Let's be able... I mean its nice to have the choice to do it on the screen. It's wonderful. And I think it's great. But what I'm saying let's don't depend on that sonafabitch screen. What I'm saying, let's be able to do this for our- selves. You understand what I'm sayin'? As Shoshona Zuboff (1988) has noted in her study of the introduction of information technology into the work environment, there is a decided fear that with this new dependence on a few new devices will come a loss of old skills: Like I say, my grandkids... course they live in a different environment, but, shit, they know two things. They know them computers and baseball.... yeah, they couldn't load a twenty-two rifle or kill the gopher, or pound a nail, or, well they just can't! And who's goin' to drive the nail and [garbled] to build the house, you see. The computer isn't going to do it. I mean it's fine to know how to punch the button to tell you where to drive the nail, but you have to know how to drive it after the computer tells you how. Another rancher said in another colorful exaggeration that he didn't want to be dependent on the calculator industry. Even in the citations above, there is an implicit acceptance of the introduction of computers and associated mechanisms. However, the concept of 'work saving' must be balanced against being truly 'productive' in the long run. In the end, this appeared as a case of exaggerated, acted out skepticism since all the ranchers accepted, as was examined above, that the Big Hole Valley was changing. They said they were willing to learn new things to keep up with these changes. They had no choice they felt. They had seen too many of their fellow ranchers go out of business, some for changing their businesses too fast, others for changing it too slowly. When I asked about whether they were going to be learning about computer conferencing, the topic generally shifted to computers, and then to their children: Maybe, I don't know. it'll be a long time coming. Older ranchers I suppose are like I am, with the knowledge of computers. These younger kids that are coming back from school now will be computer oriented. Like the kids here, they're starting out right away, first and second grade. They'll be more at home with them. When you start getting those kids back into ranching there will be naturally a lot more use. Older ranchers right now are probably too busy to learn about them and don't have the interest. And don't have the knowledge to get into anything like that. I'm sure that it is something that will be increasing. When I asked about the extent of computer use among the parents, the teachers felt that there were few users and reported that a number of the parents had in fact joked that they were waiting for their children to learn about things computers (and related activities like being online) so that then they would in turn learn about it from them. For the few computers that I did find in the field, the two most common initial uses as might be expected were accounting and word processing. Jody Webster of the Women's Resource Center had noted that it was often the wives who had traditionally done the accounting for the household, and that they were often the ones to argue for getting computers in the first place. The other common route of word processing also served to initiate the families into other uses, migrating to other uses such as households finance, children's entertainment, the same as probably occurred in most American families. When it came to being taught how to use them, or who corrected their mistakes many of the ranchers cited grown children, their spouses, or other family members that had taught them. The difference here from many other families is that usually there was no computer supply store for hundreds of miles around, no salesperson that could stop by easily, no school nearby with night classes, few friends who had computers, and little exposure to them even in the retail stores in town. The communities in the small towns in the Big Hole Valley, as well along the Red Rock River to the south of Dillon (Dell, Lima), and nearby (Polaris, Alder, Twin Bridges, Sheridan) did not appear to have much acquaintance with the idea of computer networking or the Big Sky Telegraph, unless they had learned about it via some pathway leading usually to the children at school (their own, a friends, etc.). This is not hard to fathom, as there were few public computer bulletin boards operating in all of Montana, or in nearby Idaho or Wyoming. Mike Jatczynski, a forest ranger stationed now in Dillon had recently set up a second computer bulletin board in Dillon called Montana Gold (1-406-683-6285), but it was still little known, had little traffic, and only some 30 users (including myself), all of whom, as far as I could determine from reading their online list of users at Montana Gold, were also on Big Sky Telegraph. There was a half dozen or so specialty computer bulletin boards elsewhere in Montana, but they tended to be located in the larger cities, such as Missoula, home of the University of Montana, Hellena, the state capital, Billings, or in Bozeman. I was told that the computers at the University of Montana still tended towards the older large main frame, centralized style of computing, and therefore did not encourage its users to learn about the velocity of information exchange occurring online. One board called BikeNet in Missoula (1-406-549-1318) has maintain a national presence as a well known bicycle oriented board by using the FidoNet amateur network. While some users could call Montana directly, most would have their messages relayed to it via FidoNet. (6) A number of other boards have appeared only to disappear not to soon after. One computer BBS called HomePort BBS was run from over a gun shop in the small northern Montana town of Poplar, Montana. It ran on an almost improbably powerful machine for that part of the world, 386 computer, at 33 mhz, with co-processors and a cache, making it more powerful in terms of processing speed than Big Sky Telegraph itself (demonstrating that the physical components of the Telegraph are not beyond the reach of many communities!). After a few months, however, this board lapsed into dormancy. The online world out in Montana has gradually been changing. I did hear stories of a number of people who had moved into the state with relatively advanced computer networking skills, and were now trying to work at home for example. I was told by Helen Andres, a historian in Dillon, about Dan Andrus who had moved to Montana with his wife and children on account of his allergies and had set himself up in the rural site of Melrose, near Glendale. As Helen Andres put it, Dan already had some "computer skills" and could, as he had told her, work anywhere. She believed that he was using a modem to keep in touch with people. However, she admitted that she liked to tell this story "since it's so unusual." Another more notable case is that of Dave Martin in Deer Lodge, MT who had set up a nation wide recreational data base on the CompuServe network. This effort had proved so phenomenally successful, he had had to buy a much larger computer (a 'mini' computer as opposed to the desktop or laptop 'micro'), and hire a permanent staff. As Frank Odasz put it, Dave Martin was an information pioneer in Montana. The problem is that cases like these are hard to find out about. Being online doesn't leave any obvious trace in one's everyday activities, and thus more and more people can be going online unbeknownst to one another. An underground 'Survivalist' group just over the Idaho border near Pocatello probably has a computer network operating since that has been the pattern of a number of other survivalist groups (eg., Ken's Survivalists' BBS in St. Louis, 314-821-2815, 8N1, 3/12/2400 baud). The only person in the area who was selling or servicing computers in the Dillon area, and might be in a position to estimate the extent of computer penetration, was just starting out (enthusiastically, I might add, 813-683-6179), and still got much of his own preliminary hardware and software via mail order. The few other people who had their own computers, and didn't get them mail order, went to the Computer World shop in Bozeman, quite a distance away. The exceptional, and in some ways exemplary rancher who was online, and used networking extensively was John Morse, the ranch manager at the Japanese owned Zenchiku Ranch. Although his father had been a medical doctor in Billings, the family had taken an interest in ranching, and for a number of years had had their own ranch not far from Dillon. Even at that time Morse was known for using a number of very innovative techniques, and had, I believe been online at that time. However, with the downturn in land prices at the beginning of the 1980s, Morse had found himself overextended and lost his ranch. He was later to be hired to run a ranch that a Japanese firm had bought during the late 1980s. Both the size of this ranch, also known as the old Selkirk ranch, and consisting of the 'whole side of a mountain' near Dillon, and the fact that it had been bought by the Japanese made it unusual. I was told that their were a few other, smaller Japanese investment properties in the area, but that this was the one which they were using to 'test' the waters. They had bought the property so that they could provide 'hormone free,' lean meat directly to Japan. Given the backing of their capital, Morse was able to not only keep in constant touch with Japan via modem, he was able to expand his operations to Malaysia and other areas around the Pacific rim, apparently offering managerial advice, as well as coordinating his activities online with the rest of the group around the rim. Since the Japanese way of business has been to 'make good neighbors,' and to encourage friendship with their business associates, they have been quite open about their operations at the old Selkirk ranch. While I was in Dillon, John Morse in association with the Beaverhead Chamber of Commerce, gave a presentation entitled, "Report to the Community," which I attended. During it, he outlined the progress of the ranch, and presented a 25 minute video about the Zenchiku (in Japanese) which had aired on Japanese television in 1989. The video featured scenes of Dillon, its people, the surrounding area, a "rancher round up," and the sometimes hilarious adventures of two Japanese office workers who had been tapped to become 'ranch trainees' in Montana. The presentation, which stressed more the fact that the ranch had been bought by the Japanese than any particular technical innovation was well received by those who attended. Ethnographic Analysis The Telegraph in the Community - Part III Telegraphing Groups Among the Municipal Community Big Sky Telegraph had already begun to overtly reach out to become more a part of the business and civic communities in Western Montana during the time of this study, trying to explore ways of connected with both the economic and health care development on the region, and it was clear that it would continue to do so. As was explained above, because of the flexibility of the actual conferencing software, simultaneous 'partitions' or bulletin boards can be established online independently of one another. One of the first such partitions to be established for the business community, was seen as potentially including the agricultural community. Among the groups which were represented online were, as was mentioned above, the 7 county Headwaters Resource, Conservation, and Development Group, which tended to specialize in economic development; the Agricultural Incubator without Walls Project, several Women's centers state wide, and so on. There had apparently been more initial enthusiasm for the project than during when I was doing more research. As Jody Webster of the Women's Resource Center replied when I asked her about when and why she first went online at Big Sky Telegraph: when I saw that the teachers were online... and there are two teachers in Madison county, and there were five or six that were pretty active in Beaverhead county, I saw this as another way to do outreach. Not to replace the outreach- we don't do enough as it is- but, I thought this would be another in addition, too. I didn't work out quite the way I had it planned. I know, Willard, everybody's busy, but I did have one teacher, where it kind of worked the way that I thought that it would. She had a single parent that had concerns. And she said could you get this information back to me by Friday, by Parent-Teacher day, so that worked. And that's they way, part of the way I had pictured it working. Otherwise I saw it as a way to put out information so that people would know what different programs we do have going on, up to date, and... and maybe they would share it, the ripple effect. Maybe you are the teacher, and you need it and you would go home and tell your spouse about it or you tell your sister about it. You know, just little things like that. But it hasn't worked as strongly as I had wanted it to, that way. That was one of the initial reasons. Other administrators echoed this sentiment. They had hoped to use this online medium to extend their out reach programs, but had found that it was not achieving the penetration they had desired. Failing this, they continued with their traditional means of outreach, whatever they might have been. Frank Odasz wished that some of these individuals who had initially expressed such interest would stay in more direct contact, instead of, as happened in a number of cases, using their secretaries to see if their were any new online messages for them. The secretaries were continuing to serve traditional roles as information intermediaries. The disappointment lay in the fact that where secretaries were introduced into the chain of communication, there could be lost immediate input back into the medium. One crucial factor which might be identified here is the problem of critical mass. 'Critical mass' is a concept that has been used for a long time in connection with computer mediated conferencing (Hiltz & Turoff 1978; Hiltz 1984; Steinfield & Fulk 1988; cf. Mueller 1989). The problem is that people won't join a new medium unless there are other people to communicate with, but if they don't join, then other people won't have anyone to communicate with, and they in turn won't join. The way to break out of the vicious circle is to devise some way to get a minimum number of people to join, to become active in the medium so that other people in turn will want to join. As has been said about the telephone, with each new user on the telephone network, the value of the network as a whole increases. The minimum number of people needed to make the reaction, the desire to join the network self-sustaining has been called the 'critical mass.' Since the Telegraph was in its infancy, it was still getting to point of critical mass. Many of the services were indeed being offered online, but inconsistently, although there were a few exceptions. Special indi- viduals like Jody Webster continued to plug away to answer questions, to encourage people. Much of her outreach still took place over the telephone, in courses she set up, at the Center, or in visiting people as well. Others were more reticent. The director of the Agricultural Incubator would post her monthly field schedule on the Telegraph, but did not appear to be overly active online. When I questioned her about this she replied, "It needs more than just a few people. On the regional network right now there are not enough people to make it worth while, for those who use it." A second problem with getting more municipal level and business involvement with the Telegraph was a technical one, which might have been fixed most any time, but never was. As was explained above, there can be a number of different 'partitions' on the Big Sky Telegraph, the Telegraph itself properly being only the rural educational partition. It is only in either the online notices, or in the offline public literature (which I only saw during hands-on lectures by individuals connected with the Telegraph), that one learned that there were other options one could choose. When one first connects to the Big Sky Telegraph at the time of my research one was faced with the following prompt: Type 'bbs' in lower case bigsky!login: The problem was that if you took the advice, indeed the apparent command and typed bbs, then one immediately entered the Big Sky Telegraph partition which was devoted to the rural teaching community. At that time, one could type at this login prompt, 'hrn' to get into the business partition. Now consider a rancher or business person who had never before been on the system, and who had little experience with computer mediated conferencing anyway. Given the instructions to type, bbs, most would, and would then suddenly find themselves, uncomfortably for many, on a rural teacher's network. If they did find the right login command in the initial bulletins, they would still have to disobey the initial injunctive. For those who had a personal login, either by having paid $10 a month, or having been of special help to the Telegraph, they would get the approximately the following screen: Type 'bbs' in lower case bigsky!login: willard Password: Make yourself right at home, the company is casual, but polite. BIG SKY'S MAIN STREET 1)Rural Teachers' Resource Services 2)Headwaters Regional Network 3)Community Support Services 4)AKCS - Advanced Global Conferencing, members only. 5)Logoff from this system (hangup) Since the 'default' board was still the "Rural Teachers' Resource Services BBS," the overall board appeared to be dominated by and directed to the symbolic presence of the teaching community. A number of people I talked with complained about this problem. For example, for a while, there was a paid classified ad section in the "Community Support Services BBS" section. The problem was the number of steps one would have had to go through to even get to that section! The solution to this problem would have been to find some way to include this Main Street menu at the initial login prompt. The general proposition here is that if there are too many intervening steps between the initial login and the information one desires, there will be an attrition in individuals using the system. Ethnographic Analysis The Telegraph in the Community - Part IV Crossing Borders: Collaborators, Outsiders, and Power The following section will briefly consider something of the broader context into which the Telegraph as a whole might fit. I will consider primarily forces immediately 'connected' with the Telegraph, but we must realize that at this interfacial level Big Sky Telegraph becomes a different kind of commodity than it had been before- it begins to acquire a new range of semiotic values and abstractive qualities which attract and repel a new range of narratives and ideological allegiances, and so begins to play in even more complex environment of capital, politics, and imagination. It is impossible, therefore, to identify all the different circles into which the Telegraph as imago is drawn, except as these involvements become public and explicit. I will, however, begin to make a preliminary assessment of some of the trends. Despite its relative youth at the time of my research in Fall, 1988, Big Sky Telegraph had already apparently reached one stage of success. It was becoming known both to the outside world as showing the possibility of a grassroots intercommunication and had generated interest among people concerned with the cause of rural development. According to Frank Odasz and Dave Hughes, the initial reaction to the project by potential sponsors and by other people acquainted with rural information projects was apparently fairly negative and skeptical. One such project, according to them, consisted of a regional multi-state library effort attempting to link six regional, multi-state libraries to an online computer for the support of rural education. The initial grant application to US West was nearly turned down in this context as an even more underfunded project than the previous library scheme, a scheme that had burned such people as John Maki, the Beaverhead county extension agent in Dillon. However, Dave Hughes concluded, "no one bothered to start with the substantive material that would be delivered. The 'system' was everything." It is unclear just how prominent this failure really was, since I have not had a chance to talk to any of the other funding agencies, but the sense of the outside perspective was, as presented by Odasz and Hughes, that if a well endowed computer aided project failed, why should one which demanded so much less money, and which did not official computer experts actually succeed. However, despite allegedly dire predictions, the Big Sky Telegraph system maintained its vitality. Frank Odasz' 'demonstration' to 15 'key' members of the Montana Governor's Task Force on Telecommunications was apparently well received. When the two major candidates for Governor in 1988 were in the region, they stopped by, and soon began to laud this initiative as being very significant, and began to wonder why larger institutions like the University of Montana with its large computers weren't doing something like this. Big Sky Telegraph evoked images with strong political themes or hooks: high technology, education, family, grassroots, and a kind of rugged, popular, local individualism. One of the gubernatorial candidates was apparently so impressed by the demonstration, or by the idea of it, that he "broke three later appointments to stay and absorb what was going on, online! Then at a dinner that night [he] praised Big Sky, which was echoed by all the subsequent speakers, while the [Western Montana] College President beamed." [Hughes 1988a: Metanet 153:303]. In so far as the Telegraph is successful, it begins also to acquire the 'critical mass' to get other groups involved, groups that might have in fact wanted to start up their own computer conferencing system. As Hughes later reports, "according to Frank... there were some hunched down college presidents in the audience when the Governor's Candidate at dinner asked 'Why aren't all the Montana Colleges doing this?" (Hughes 1988a: Metanet 288:3). It is one of the paradoxes of the online environment that a local group at one of the other Colleges could set up their own network, and then have its messages ported or sent to the Telegraph, much as content on public broadcasting stations can be produced by member stations. A somewhat moribund agricultural network at Northern Montana University ("they didn't look to needs" F. Odasz) can be swung back into orbit by getting some of the message flows and increasing general computer networking skills and direction from the Telegraph, inviting new kinds of collaboration. Nor was the apparent success of the system lost on US West itself. As the Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC), one of the 7 "Baby Bell" companies created by the divestiture of AT&T in 1982, US West was left with some of largest operation problems. While it might appear that having the largest land coverage of any of the Baby Bells was an advantage, in fact this has meant that on average each new subscriber would need wires strung out over a greater distance. New subscribers to the overall telco network thereby are costing US West on average more than in any of the other RBOCs. This in turn has led US West to consider more creatively new ways to justify any line expansion. One such way is to introduce information services over the their lines. One consideration which must be taken into account while examining just how US West sees Big Sky Telegraph, is Judge Greene's March 1989 revaluation of the Modified Final Judgement which allows the RBOCs the opportunity to create information highways, now called gateways. BellSouth opened its first gateway in Atlanta November 1988, and both PacBell (through San Francisco) and US West (in Denver) have begun their final stages in organizing their gateways. Bell of Pennsylvania opened its gateway in Philadelphia in January 1989. This is only a small accounting of the many gateways in operation or about to begin operation. Clearly US West would see such an expansion as part of the next phase in the integration of information services and telecommunications, and Big Sky Telegraph was not only a proto-typical information 'gateway' it was one that has been obtained a degree of local success. As early as 1988, Big Sky Telegraph figured in both US West's 1988 Annual Report, as well as in their corporate magazine. When I talked to the head of the Educational Programs for US West, their general funding agency, Tony Seese-Pieda of Denver, Co spoke highly of just how quickly and effectively he saw the Telegraph expanding. He also mentioned his interest in the ways in which the Telegraph was beginning to merge the Educational, Business, and Civic communities. He spoke of their billion dollar capital investments fund which US West has in reserve for US West's own investment portfolio, ready for most kinds of investment, 'provided that they don't contravene Judge Greene's telco line of business restrictions,' as well as 20 million dollars designated for local economic and social development. While it lies outside of my immediate research time frame, just as I was leaving Western Montana in November 1989, US WEST granted the Telegraph $250,000 expansion grant (from the second fund noted above) to be used to provide circuit riders to go into the communities, new equipment in the field, to better support the Telegraph's administrative staff, to provide the ability for the Big Sky Telegraph project to include more business, social, and educational projects, and to further consolidate the extension of the project into Wyoming, Colorado and Idaho. Even still, US West has said, according to Frank Odasz, that this was to be their only funding of a large BBS system. Perhaps this appeared to them as a proto-rural information gateway, the kind of gateway which the telephone company itself could administer, and the idea of funding many small conferencing and communication systems, in which many individuals would provide their own services seemed to lead the process out of their hands. Finally, a survey of the broader connections to the Big Sky Telegraph cannot overlook that the Telegraph has assumed a virtual place in a realm loosely designated by William Gibson (1984) as Cyberspace. While this term is coming to signify visual and tactile, three dimensional interfaces as well as the verbal (cf. Benedikt 1990), it is still meant to include a metaphoric, visual resonance of this 'immense region of virtual meeting places,' an electronic intermediated network consisting of "thousands of nodes in the United States, ranging from PC clone hamlets of a few users to mainframe metros like CompuServe, with its 550,000 subscribers. They are used by corporations to transmit memoranda and spreadsheets, universities to disseminate research, and a multitude of factions, from apiarist to Zoroastrians, for purposes unique to each." (Barlow 1990). The Telegraph had and is still becoming a destination of sorts, reachable by a variety of electronic highways and pathways. The Telegraph was already linked to the international UUCP Unix Network, a network with some 9,700 hosts on 5 continents, and an estimated 265,000 users (Todino 1988; Quarterman 1988:91), a system over twice the size of the 'academic' BitNet/Internet network. At the time of the research, such a connection consisted mostly e-mail traffic since access was confined to more advanced levels of the Telegraph. A FidoNet node, called TinySky and gated to Big Sky Telegraph would be introduced later. And of course there was always direct dial connection. Not only did the Telegraph accept and send traffic from the Network, it also came to represent something about telecommunications and rural development. A number of large computer nodes around the country discussed its progress, a real experiment unfolding virtual connections worldwide. ************************* - Chapter 7 - Conclusion: The Changing Technoscape - Part I Changing Cultural Flows The Big Sky Telegraph, then, fits into and acts on a profound set of social, cultural, and economic relationships, and to understand how a new 'technology' enfolds and is redefined, anticipated, and postponed involves unpacking these relationships. It has been the intention of this research to provide a general strategy more advanced than the traditional 'diffusion of innovations' paradigm with its simple narratives of introduction, testing, and rejection/acceptance. The 'global cultural flows' paradigm augmented by specifications in the analysis of the technoscape elicits a variety of new ways to assess these interrelationships. In terms of the ethnoscape, one of the most profound aspects of change in Western Montana, which was almost always referred to first by long time residents of the state, and has been explored above, was the diaspora of people from Montana. Inversely, this generated the desire to find ways to capture new jobs, both to keep children in the state, as well as to provide new wealth for those already there. In so far as the Telegraph is seen as addressing this issue, and it certainly has tried to in its business portion, it found at least qualified support even from the most conservative elements of the population I interviewed. One of the more compelling images beginning to be elaborated among supporters of the Telegraph is, in the words of such popular writings like those of Toffler (1980 & 1990) or Naisbitt (1984) that of the 'Electronic Cottage.' With the Electronic Cottage, individuals can work at home and commute electronically to where their services of expertise might be needed. When I raised the issues of dangers of spread of underpaid piece work (cf. Robins & Webster 1988), I was told by Jody, Frank, and others of the 'municipal intentional change agent' categories that the first order of the day was to get more jobs, and that the fight for adequate compensation would just have to be part of that struggle. At the same time the physical beauty of the place continues to attract new people into the region. As Jody Webster said, people are will to exchange "wages for life style." Along with this tentative influx of people comes new skills and this introduces new interdependencies into the technoscape. As we saw above, one new tenants to the region who came to Montana on account of allergies has apparently continued to do his work online. The beauty of the land, and the abundance of game and fish, campsites and wilderness trails also brings in a seasonal flux of tourists. One of the first attempts of the Big Sky to set up a separate partition, or quasi-independent BBS, was to provide a tourism oriented exchange center. In it hotel operators and trail guides could give rates, tourists could give reviews, and tourist agencies and operators could provide an ongoing calendar of events for the region. Different from a normal travel agency, the idea was that a tourism BBS could act as a cooperative, with many people sharing information. In the end the problem of critical mass intervened and the space, while still present, has gone into dormancy: not enough people knew the number or could reach it yet. Once again, however, we have a change in the technoscape, in the development of online conferencing and the development of databases, being used to take advantage of, to consolidate, changes in the ethnoscape. The regional finanscape follows a similar trend. We have seen in the sections above, an increasing investment by outside interests in the resources of Montana, for example in the Zenchiku ranch outside of Dillon. With that investment has come an interest in maintaining close informational and managerial ties with rural localities, and this has apparently introduced an improved acquaintance with information technologies, such as networking and financial accounting practices. Along with this has come the desire to have a work force with competent information processing skills. Whether this will lead to an increasingly subservient role of local investment properties, and the exploitation of piece workers, as critics on the left would probably argue, or whether new information skills could lead to an increasing regional empowerment as it learns to manage global networking access and increasing dis-intermediation from middle people in reaching global markets is far from settled. New information skills leads also to new consumption of information products, and it has not been surprising, of course, that US West has shown increasing interest and support for the Big Sky Telegraph. As was argued above, US West could foresee expansion of the Telegraph as part of the next phase in its integration of information services and telecommunications, with Big Sky Telegraph serving not only a proto-typical information 'gateway,' but as having already successfully settled on and expanding in, valuable information real estate. Even if US West does not end up with some kind of de facto control over a Telegraph rethought as a gateway, it stands to gain from the increasing viability of regional businesses, educational projects and institutions, and their new habits of information consumption. An official with US West said to me that whether or not US West itself became value added information provider, it stood to gain from greater business stability and information traffic. He admitted that this was why US West was willing to invest in local projects which were not immediately related to information 'services.' With the acceleration and increasing density of business and personal transactions will increase the traffic and necessity for and revenue from telecommunications. The interrelation of the media and ideoscapes to the Telegraph and its reconfiguration of the technoscape is not as obvious. One of the problems discussed above was the lack of a viable image which captured and expressed something of the nature of networking to people who were not already familiar with it. Being online is not at all captured by the image advertised by Sear's Prodigy information service of a middle american mom or pop surprised and happy at the ease with which they can make airline reservations over the telephone using their computer screen. Most people, myself included, would just as soon use the telephone, or talk to a travel agent for more complicated travel agendas. Being online is still a craft that it is generally taught one-to-one. As always, there are a few souls who, like amateur ham radio users, feel challenged to pioneer a new form of communication. However, as yet, there is no obvious momentum driving the average non-users to go to the book store to pick up a book on electronic networking. Those that do often already have computers and are trying to find some way to find additional uses for it. Only in a few instances, such as the Grateful Dead conference on the WELL in San Francisco, have online forums proved so compelling, and unavailable in any other medium, that they obliged interested people to go out and buy computers and/or a modem, and to get linked up. The promoters of this new form of communication, this new configuration of the technoscape, have not been afraid to employ powerful images and narratives from the media- and ideoscapes. The mythos of 'electronic democracy,' for example has been particularly powerful, as it was with the telephone before it, and with other new means of communication before even the telephone, using what James Carey has called the rhetoric of the 'technological sublime' (Carey 1989a. cf. Pool 1983; Staudenmaier 1985; Marvin 1988). Says the anonymous 'Rough Writer' in an essay found in the Telegraph files section: Just what is this mystical power of "being online"? It is something that must be experienced directly to be understood. One person cannot give his wings to another in this regard. It is for each of us to take this experiential step toward a true, global, participatory democracy. Being "online" means it is now possible for each of us to have a meaningful impact toward effecting positive change. The humblest of messages can be heard around the world. The rules change when information technology allows convenient electronic mail access to elected representatives. Instant access to legislative updates means near immediate response to actions on the floor by the representative...who formerly had only his voting record, after the fact, to defend. And so on. As Carey notes, "Despite the manifest failure of technology to resolve pressing social issues over the last century, contemporary intellectuals continue to see revolutionary potential in the latest technological gadgets that are pictured as a force outside history and politics... In modern futurism, it is the machines that possess teleological insight. Despite the shortcomings of town meetings, newspaper, telegraph, wireless, and television to create the conditions of a new Athens, contemporary advocates of technological liberation regularly describe a new postmodern age of instantaneous daily plebiscitory democracy through a computerized system of electronic voting and opinion and polling." (Carey 1989b:192). The point is not to dismiss computer networking as not being an empowering technology, and one that will have a decided impact on the nature of democracy- however, as Carey and other have examined, such change will not occur by virtue of something intrinsic to one medium or another, but in terms of the social conditions out which these technologies are used. Where new access has opened up to people, new means and designs of privacy and control have likewise been formulated. And where one party with less power has seen the new technology as a means to gain access to those with more power, often a new technology comes to be used by those with more power as a means of intrusive access to those who previously had had more privacy. Put imperatively, it would appear the most aware position is not to simply dismiss or accept a new technology on its own terms, but to insist on renewed vigilance on how the terms of access are being changed. While the potential of computer networking for 'electronic democracy' have not yet been realized, neither have the premonitions of the 'electronic nightmare' been fully realized either. (Wicklein 1979; however, Uncapher 1991) The stress on different aspects and potentials of a communication technology occur within configurations of the social context, a social context which this research has sought to investigate. Conclusion: The Changing Technoscape - Part II Changing Definitions When I asked each of the 12 groups what they thought of the potential problems of surveillance and socially incongruous online meetings between people, the problem was usually dismissed. It was felt that either the medium had not progressed far enough for such dangers to be a problem yet. What might be the occupational problems of having the school superintendent online along side teachers who were revealing their problems and misunderstandings? I had the feeling that I was also defining the problem for the first time, designating the categories I was then trying to interpret. For those who had been on the Telegraph saw it as a cooperative, and issues of internal conflicts were considered premature. While Frank Odasz admitted that if the County Superintendent of Education were to finally come online, there might be fewer public exchanges on some issues, he felt that the problems would be out weighed by the positive benefits of more direct and constant communication. Others echoed this position. One teacher, who had come to Montana from another state, suggested to me that the Telegraph could be used to unionize the teachers, an intriguing idea! She pointed out that the teachers only made from 11 to 13 thousand dollars a year. The low wages, she said, stemmed from the fact that the teachers could never act together. Here was a very interesting issue. If the teachers began to unionize over the Telegraph, would the school board which granted a de facto permission to join still be so supportive? I brought this issue up with several teachers, 'intentional change agents,' women's organizers, and others who were comfortable online. Their answers revealed unresolved issues. They did not seem particularly worried with online organizing jeopardizing offline cooperation. Said Frank, referring to a paper I had written on the relation of social and communication change in Iran: And as the 1880s telegraph provided a market for Mullah opinions [in Iran], so could the 1980 Telegraph provide, or redefine the political structure of education in Montana. Yeah, I think that potential exists. And so I wonder sociologically how to really get people to take notice of Telegraph and particularly of the advantages it offers. And there are a number of different tacks along the lines of that rural teacher network, legal services banding together. I could see where that [would be] the reason for teachers getting on telegraph... Is it that they are forming a legal services group to protect rural teachers from getting screwed. Or something like that. The theme of rally together- nothing works better in a diffuse system than a crisis. And that's why many wars have been created because [someone] falsely accuses somebody else as being the enemy because their power is weakening and they know that as soon as there's a common enemy people will rally together. And that gives them a pivot point to strengthen their own political views. So, with Telegraph the way to make people really rally around it is to identify a common enemy or need or problem. And then let that become the focus. Are we then to forge ahead, letting the chips fall where they may? But then Frank goes on to admit that the teacher's position is tenuous, and that they will not want to have open conflicts with the board or the community: WU: If they're empowering themselves, and using it for recourse for legal services, then it seems like it won't be the 'official' system, but it might be a more unofficial one the teachers are using to get in contact with each other. FO: I definitely picked up a lot of hesitancy. Teachers are cagey about the school board. When they decide that you're going to be asked to stay, they come back next year. And there are a lot of things which do go wrong in rural communities and anybody that's been a rural teacher for a year knows that. They've seen people take the fall. So, something like, 'the school board not really comfortable with the long distance.'It's like, 'You're right, Frank, you may be right, but if my school board doesn't see it, I'm not going to be the one to put my head on the line,' on the chopping block, just to say what's right. 'What's right may be right, but I don't want to lose my job, being the one to say it, but that's not what they [the school board] want to hear. The problem of controversy was seen as an online problem which has the potential to actually create the critical mass necessary to get the system as a whole moving! If there is to be a problem, the argument went, let's *have* the problem, and deal with its consequences. Others, among them the 'intentional change agents' realized that there were many potential conflicts. The resolution of this paradox went unresolved. In its way, then, this kind of unresolved paradox ran through most of the definitions and assessments of what being online might mean, and what the Big Sky Telegraph was all about. As I went to the different social groups and tried to elicit responses on similar potential online conflicts as a way to get at how the telegraph as a tool was being understood, I found that my initial hypothesis that the social conflicts would intervene in how the new medium was defined was not particularly operational, in part because the social tensions offline were not as polarized as I might have expected. The ranchers seemed willing to learn from the teachers, although often it seemed that the information might have to go along some indirect pathway, such as via the children, so as to avoid embarrassment of trying to do something new such as working with the computer and the network, and not being able to manage it well. Where the individual had not been online, the Telegraph was quickly conflated with other technologies or more general skills. Whenever I talked about the computer mediated communication, especially with Ran- chers, the conversation would quickly turn to the more general topic of computers, or even the still more general topic of 'button pushers' (usually only with the oldest ranchers). Where the new medium was accepted as an important thing to learn, it was quite often initially seen as a tool of empowerment. For individuals like Sue Roden who had a kind of public access terminal to the Telegraph from her gas station in Lima, there was hope for a new job, a second income. When people had been on the Telegraph for a few months, it was seen more readily in immediately practical terms. It could be used to make use of specific services, such as getting a book or piece of software from the online circulating library organized by Reggie Odasz. However, it should be noted as well that such a stress on 'usefulness' served a strategic purpose vis-a-vis the school board- these are not teachers who are wasting their time on some kind of entertainment. The ranchers who knew about the telegraph, considered it primarily as a medium for teachers. It was phrased as an educational device, something to do with distance education. They really had no need to get in touch with circulating software for kids. Frank Odasz said that he had distributed literature about the business uses of the Telegraph in Wisdom, but that there had been little enthusiasm. The existing self-definition of the Telegraph on one level appears to be relatively open: it is simply a tool for mediated cooperative activities, and individual access to stored materials. (Odasz 1989b) If it is to be defined as a business tool, a ranching tool, or something in between, then it would have to, as I have been arguing in the 'theory of media or technological ecology,' displace similar means of doing the same things. And since such a shift in practices would involve many new uncertainties, including the long term stability of the new medium, the nature of its control, its reliability, the time it would take to learn the necessary skills, whether there really would be other people online to talk with, it would demand some real thoughtful consideration before ranchers and farmers might use it. Whereas for the promoters of the Telegraph, shifting its definitional 'mask' from educational to business might be seen as simply putting business or ranching terms where once there had been educational or teaching terms, for those in business and agricultural enterprises, such a redefinition involves a reassessment of their own daily practices. Better to leave it as an 'educational' technology for now, or a 'city' technology (ie. 'button pushers'), until there is time or clear and present need to make such a reassessment of practices. The politics of definitions is thus intertwined with the ecology of technological practices. What kind of tool something is, what kind of skills it needs, and what kinds of mistakes one might be subject to making, are all questions which involve not just an assessment of a 'thing' out there, but an assessment of one's self and practices as well. To shift the limits of whether or not the Telegraph belongs to the educational or even business communities involves deep issues. Within the rural teaching community, computer networking can have a range of definitional qualities... so long as the Telegraph is seen as a non-threatening, practical tool with potentially visionary applications. If the way one make one's definitions of things 'out there' reflects back on one's self assessments, then redefining things involves many of the deepest forces in one's own psyche. As runs the classic gnostic apothegm from the Apocryphal Acts of Peter XX-XXI, 'Talem eum vidi qualem capere potui' ("I saw him as I was able to receive him"; cf Corbin 1960:91-92). The 'Theory of Paths,' has already touched on the issue that access, including access to change itself, must be constructed. And the most salient access into the psyche was the issue of self-esteem. The question of self-esteem, of the estimation of self, was brought up many times with people I interviewed. Developing the skills and practices involved in using a new tool draws on one's self esteem. Just as success can raise one's self-esteem, so failure, or the risk of embarrassment can serve to lower it. As Jody Webster at the Women's Resource Center so admirably put it: Some of it is attitude. All your skills aren't the physical skills, like typing or shovelling. A lot of it is attitudinal skills. [wu: 'social skills...']. yeah. communication skills: how to ask for a raise, or how to ask for a job or not ask for a raise; the fact that you need to sell yourself; the difference between self-esteem and conceit. When I grew up a lot of the things would have been immodest or conceited, and now you can say the same things in a different way, and you are simply letting people know something about you. You didn't say 'I'. Learning to define something 'out there,' to relate to it, involves setting up a complex of empowering relationships. Relating to a 'thing' involves relating to other people as well. For example, one has to learn how to ask questions: I don't know anyone with too *much* self-esteem. And I think they sometimes don't want to bother anybody. I heard my online students saying that time was such a factor. The closer I got to the problem, and I know that Frank and Larry are real encouraging, and they know people have to ask questions - they [people online] don't know that they need to ask questions. They don't know what question to ask. The issue of 'computer literacy' or 'network literacy,' then, involves a lot more than simply learning or not learning a few rules. It involves establishing certain kinds of relationships, many of which do not at all directly relate to the computer, the network, or whatever tool or practice one is to acquire. These relationships are bound up in the webs of power and trust. In the rural situation changing these equations and balances of power and trust, of self-esteem and self-empowerment can involve other inspiring or explosive situations. When I asked Frank Odasz about some of the difficulties I had heard about the roles of women in these rural areas, he commented: There's a lot of wife abuse, violence, real hard luck stories, and I run into women with very low self- esteem, very often. And it's kind of strange, because I don't get a sense that the men have very high self- esteem either. In a world with so much unforseen displacement, much of the sense of anxiety can be internalized. Frank gave his own situation as such an example: And that it's a literacy thing, self-concept, today's part in what you know. I have had a number of people who have been my students, that were carpenters and could no longer make it as carpenters, so now they are driving buses part time, doing things like this... When Reggie and I went back to school, I had a UC degree in Psychology, but I also had been through oil rigs, self-taught carpentry, dude ranching, and, then ended up unable to get work in my own home town at the age of 30, with all that experience and a four year degree. I could not get work in my own home town. That threatens your ego, pretty seriously! So with a lot of patience I went through a whole master's program and then I still couldn't get work. So I spent a whole year in Walden, Colorado with my wife supporting me, reading InfoWorld, online with Dave Hughes, meditating, expanding my mind... All of sudden you have this whole new role to get into. And, so I... it was pretty tough on the self- confidence. Course I know, patience always sees you through. But it was a real self-confidence issue. A real test for me. I knew I would make it eventually, but I know that a lot of people are in situations that are similar, perhaps without the personal resources to eventually transcend. And I met many teachers, for example, who told me more than their share of real hard luck stories. One teacher's husband had been blinded in a mining accident at Anaconda, only to get hardly any compensation from the mining company. With their seven children, they then attempted to start a farm, and the very day of the bringing in the first crops, her husband died of a heart attack. Even still, she continued to develop those personal resources 'to eventually transcend.' To define something is to set oneself in relationship with that thing. To define it as approachable, do-able, in turn makes demands on oneself. I have been arguing that these definitions are not in some Aristotelian fashion simply attributes of a thing; they are part of what that thing actually is. When some intentional change agent comes in from afar with a new tool, he or she has already mastered a set of skills and attitudes, not just physical in nature, but experiential and semiotic as well. Together they will make that tool part of a stable repertoire. A new tool or practice arrives with more than one function, and with more than one result. To get at these functions and results, it is necessary to grasp something of the pathways of change, and the technological ecology into which the thing, skill or practice will come to defined and redefined. Conclusion: The Changing Technoscape - Part III Changing Paths and Roles People belong simultaneously to several cultural groups. A teacher might belong to a prominent ranching community, be a parent, and have once had a job in town or another state. As such the path differentials between general communities of 'ranchers' and 'teachers' will carry from one region to the next, depending on the arrangement of these contingencies. Even still I found a more open relationship between the rural teaching and ranching communities than initial impressions might have indicated. Still, as neither group was changing much more quickly than any other, tensions could not be assessed. Since the Telegraph did seem to be putting the teachers in the lead in informatizing the community, their positions had not been overly exposed yet. Whether this will change remains to be seen. As Jody Webster said when I asked about the potential from problems if the ranchers and farmers had to learn their skills from the teachers: I don't know if that was a concern. I don't think they thought of it that way. I don't think they thought of it as empowerment. Probably just because they simply didn't have enough information on it, they might have said this is not a legitimate expense, or whatever. I don't think they, and I could be wrong, I don't think they saw it as an empowerment issue: "We don't want women to have this power, or teachers to have this power when the ranchers don't." One of the new pathways which appeared to be opening up where ever I looked was among women, many of the middle aged, and often from different backgrounds, seeking to empower themselves. There was a sense that there were new local organizations still being created. The last I heard of Carla Hanson of Dell, she was trying to get people interested in what was trying to get her friends and acquaintances interested in a 'computer sewing machine.' And she and some of the other women with whom I talked in that area said that they intended to get online sometime soon. At other junctures, the pathways appeared blocked, but it was not clear whether the reasons were structural or social. For example when I asked Frank why he didn't send more people beyond the teaching community to explain the Telegraph and computer networking, he said that he didn't have the time nor funds to really undertake something like that: I haven't gone back and pushed and pushed and pushed the one room teachers that did not respond initially. Instead, as soon as I've got a full class, I just start teaching those teachers, whether they're from two, three, or four room schools or whatever. And that's to get the network going. When it came to talking to ranchers, Frank Odasz said that he had hoped that some of the other groups in the community, such as at the Agricultural Incubator Project, the Headwater's Regional Conference, or eventually the County Extension project would take up some of the load. Frank Odasz said that when they finally got more grant money, he would love to send out 'circuit rider.' Even still he saw these circuit riders as having the primary mission of getting the teachers online. I therefore could not clarify if it was a problem of structural or one of social distance. As it was, technical support in the rural areas came along at best contingent, unstable pathways. In Wisdom, some technical computer and networking help had come from Mike Jaczynski, then in the Wisdom Forest Rangers office. He would go over to the school to offer help now and then. Another support path lay within the families themselves, primarily where people had family members who had learned about computers elsewhere. The septuagenarian town historian in Dillon, who possessed the only MacIntosh computer I came across in Western Montana, learned about them from her son-in-law who sold computers as a living and recommended them for desktop publishing. ("But I only had two lessons. He sells them. I only called him twice. And there are some good books.") Along with new technologies, comes new social roles, and new ways for both the technical system and for the society to reproduce itself. One of the original ideas behind introducing the teachers to computer conferencing was that they in turn, being so centrally located in their communities, could introduce the rest of the community to new ways of gathering, processing, and exchanging information and ideas. Dave Hughes and others had seen the teachers as being traditional information resource people in the community. The problem with this idea was that implicitly it would invest the already overworked teachers with new responsibilities. As Marsha Anson, a minister's wife in Wise River and who was studying to be a 'school librarian' noted: They [the teachers] are overworked to start with, and then to become information people for an entire community is too much to expect for what they are making, and for the time they have. The development of the role of 'change agent' involves the evolution of new patterns of communication, meaning, and domination within the community. But lest there be any misunderstanding here, a number of the teachers with whom I spoke during my research already spoke of them- selves as embarking on new roles as 'information specialists' to the whole community. Many saw their role as informing not just the children, but the whole community. I was constantly meeting teachers who would go out of their way to provide new courses, new ideas, and new input not just to children but to community at large. But they still complained about low pay, their vulnerability, and lack of time. Part of the problem of vulnerability comes up from misunderstandings. One teacher mentioned that she was getting complaints from parents over her use of computers for writing. The problem was that writing with a computer didn't generate enough homework, since the students were correcting their essays as they were writing them. "My parents are worried that I am not sending enough homework home, and the parents don't know what they [their kids] are doing. And they want you to have corrected it. And the parents are worried that their kids aren't getting attention. And yet they want computers." Marsha Anson is a good example of how local conceptions of roles have been changing, especially in terms of newer information oriented occupations: Well, I went back to school the first time- when I first started- before I took Ed. Tech- I felt like I needed to do something, my kids were both in school. And I only have a two year degree. But I didn't know what I wanted to do. So I thought I would take children's literature since I can pick books for my kid and find out what's out there, what's available. And then I started thinking about being a librarian. It would be fun to work with kids and not have to be a teacher. The advantage of a librarian is that you do not have to mess with the parent... Perhaps a new kind of public librarian, resource position will evolve in the community, although it is unclear under whose aegis, or in what form. Marsha Anson saw her potential position as evolving towards something like that, and did hope that she could actively 'evolve' it from within the contexts of the rural school. So Marsha was working with her ideas about 'educational technology,' including plain old books. Frank Odasz had likewise found his calling indirectly while he was getting a masters degree in 'educational technology.' From Marsha and other people's perspective, there would be new information occupations in rural areas. But she also noted that for now the teachers themselves would be too busy to take direct charge of the new responsibilities. Conclusion: The Changing Technoscape - Part IV Changing Technoscapes A new technology or skill enters into a landscape already full of solutions to the perceived problems. As I outlined earlier, the basic idea of the theory of the ecology of technologies is that new technologies, practices, media, techniques, and perspectives enter a scene by displacing something else, some other means of production or conveyance, and in so doing disrupt or displace many other associated relationships and practices. What's more, the impulse to change in the technoscape does not come as a distinct, self-contained elemental force, but as part of a set, a bundle of other related forces, including flows and transformations in the ethnoscape and finanscape. After inquiring as neutrally as possible, after what the individuals knew about the Big Sky Telegraph, what changes they saw occurring in the Valley, and all the rest of the questions found in the survey outline, I would begin in a somewhat more engaging manner to present some of the possibilities of computer networking which other people in the field had suggested to me. Several people, for example, both in the local, rural, areas, and in the municipal region suggested that an agriculturally oriented network could help coordinate temporary employment: If I were to do it for ranchers the first thing- once they had logged on would be... maybe, a big title, RANCHERS, and then, employment needs, or mechanical needs, or sales, or... and have it titled so that.... and maybe you could link up with an employment office. And those things I think would be wonderful. But it would be a matter of making a program simple e- nough.... One of the facts of ranching and farming is that there are certain times of the year when it is important to hire temporary help, such as during haying season. Could a computer bulletin board be useful to have different employers post availabilities, for ranchers to request people, and so on? Perhaps: A neat place to start if you were interested in Ranching would be employment. I could see that being a real positive thing. But could you get an agency to link up with an employment agency... or would that pretty much replace their job? Because you could just load in who needs a job, but then does your agency become obsolete. The role of the employment people in Dillon and elsewhere turned out to be much more complicated than simply sending people out to the ranches and farms; it involved remembering and matching needs and special requirements. Helen Andres, the Dillon historian pointed out: Have you been to the job service. We have quite a good job service here. You should talk to them. And they advertise over the radio everyday. And they help people. If you hire young people they will pay 50% of the salary to get them trained. So you should go there. In fact, the employment group also did some job skills training and already used the media of radio, television, telephone, and periodic face-to-face contacts. Certainly they might begin to add a kind of interactive service over a computer network if the demand were there, but this probably wouldn't be a driving force to get people online in the first place. Might the ranchers want to get in touch with friends of theirs, to avoid 'phone tag' by simply leaving messages online, to meet new people? Replied one rancher: I suppose something like that could work here, if there were enough computers: talk to the local ranchers, neighbors and find out what they were doing and what their advice was. Most every night we telephone now, or visit... And what would it mean to 'go online' and not pay one's neighbor a visit at the end of the day, or not to spend some time chatting on the telephone? Even if a network were to come in there was no firm consensus about how things would change. Sometime people end up doing the same old things with new technologies, I was told. In connection to questions about change, one rancher told me a story about a family that liked to go to the movies every saturday. "When televisions came in they got one, and they never went to the movies again, but now everyone would come over to their house to watch TV together." A computer network could offer some unique opportunities, just as changing from going to the movies with friends to watching programs at home would create a new communicational connectedness between that group and the rest of the world. Changes in the rules of the banking industries, the need to reach foreign markets quickly, the need to consider and act collectively in relation to changes in the Federal Lands Management objectives, a desire to deal with problems in health care, re-employment, child care, their own land management, and the simple sharing of skills and concerns- all pointed to unmet needs. The question is how would a match between these needs and possibilities evolve. When the ranchers felt they needed to organize against the Federal Land Management Policies, they had done so, forming the Big Hole Ranchers Association. Such skills of organization were already imbedded in the community. How these skills could 'migrate' from one medium, face-to-face meetings, to another, computer conferencing, is a complex issue. Might computer conferencing replace public, physical debate, or serve as an adjunct to it. I would suspect the latter. Some computers and ideas about networking had been accepted in the general rural and municipal communities at the time of my research, often via the mechanism of 'context shifting' discussed in the theoretical sections above. Computers which had been acquired for one purpose proved useful for something else. Said one teacher in answer to whether many parents had gotten computers or been interested in computer networking: So far in my school everyone's afraid of the computer. They respect them, they want their kids to use them and a lot of them are waiting to buy them for their business until their kids know how to use them. This is true. This has been discussed. Several families are looking into computers. The parents are not comfortable with them, but they see their necessity. They are very conservative. Several ranchers who had gotten computers reported that they had first gotten them simply for word processing, and that after they had gotten comfortable, they went on to find new uses, such as managing their books, and now potentially going online. With a tool in place, uses begin to shift over it. Ranchers, and extension agents agreed that the rural adaption of satellite television had been quite rapid after 1981. The Big Hole Valley, Western Montana, and other rural areas are in a period of unaccustomed flux right now. Sudden changes in land values, the difficulty in even passing down property to one's children because of high inheritance taxes, the continuing change in demographics, including the large number of local children who have had to leave for regions far away, the overall population decline, the influx of new investment money from people who often do not seem to understand the nature and special qualities of the land, or of the way people out here depend on each other, the shifts in markets, the increasing demands for efficiency, the loss of land productivity, even sudden transformation in the very image of the rancher, the farmer, or the teacher have prompted an array of blame and solutions. Some solutions come with a sense of desperation. One person spoke of Fundamentalist Christians coming into the Wisdom area, "The people that support them feel that Wisdom is a mission field. So they come... it's not always the same group... one group will come in and they will get a big following and [hold] their Wednesday night services, and that will peter out and then another group will come in, and do the same thing." Another person who lived in Wisdom said he hadn't heard of any Fundamentalists. Others, felt that the move towards larger cattle on the part of the ranchers, seemed to hold real promise, only to see it lead to a crash in cattle prices. Some saw the use of computers to keep a better inventory of their cattle and crops as a key, only to find that it was not worth the effort and time to enter all the weights and prices and of cattle and feed which the programs they bought demanded. Others began to see promise in getting access to distant computer databases. But was it worth the connect changes and the cost of the equipment? Still others saw benefits in setting up a computer conferencing system for the ranchers. Big Sky Telegraph, even at this early stage, offers an important look into the actual dynamics of change within technoscapes, and provides an important look at some of the benefits, problems, and opportunities in rural use of computer mediated communication and conferencing both in other rural areas as well as in developed and developing countries and regions. This research has attempted both to suggest and outline a framework with which to analyze such transformations in skills and tools, and to direct attention away from more medium-centric conceptions of computer conferencing to consider the social, political, economic, and cultural configurations and dynamics out of which such transformations occur. With changes in knowledge, and the ways by which knowledge is formed and information exchanged, come changes in the conventions and expectation of privacy, power, and trust. To learn how to best utilize the new tools of communication, as well as the new uses of the older media, to identify and protect ourselves from their dangers, as well as to spread the knowledge of their best and most exquisite uses, all will involve an examination of how media come to be inflected and indigenized, defined and used in distinctive and idiomatic ways in different regions. One of these technologies which will address the problems of which Hudson and Parker have identified as the "information gaps in rural America" (1990) will surely be the broadening reach of interactive computer networking. And one of the clues to what this developing medium can look like as it penetrates more deeply into global communities and landscapes will be found in the communities of Western Montana. ### Footnotes 1. An example of this occurred during the Chinese government's siege of Tiananmen Square when all over the world, chinese students began exchanging information and interpretations about the events then occurring over the international Usenet network. When students would find out new information about what was then happening, often by telephone conversations with individuals inside the Republic of China, they would share or 'broadcast' it out over the networks. The information was often so up to date, the news networks began to borrow from it. 2. An example of this occurred in November 1988 during a communications class at the Annenberg School of Communications (its name at that point) in which I was a teaching assistant for Prof. Robert L. Shayon. With the direction of visiting lecturer, Dave Hughes, we attempted a live, simultaneous, completely interactive, online link between the Soviet Union, Japan, and Philadelphia (our class), a link designed to demonstrate the possibility of relatively ordinary individuals meeting each other over such vast distances and sharing information and ideas without the mediation of news agencies or other such heavily capitalized industries. As it was, we were not able to get all the people together at the same time, but the problem was more a logistical rather than technical one. 3. I say 'informally' here since research limitations, primarily on the amount of time I could spend in the field, the number of people I could talk with, would limit my ability to operationalize and test these sub- thesi. Such limitations do not eliminate the importance in clarifying the nature of paths if we are to come to a better understanding of the activities and nature of the technoscape. 4. To paraphrase Gregory Bateson and other systems theorists, unassimilated information will be regarded as 'noise' within a system, until it reaches a point that it begins to overpower the initial signal. At that point it might become thematized directly becoming information. William Irwin Thompson (Pacific Shift, 1989) explores this idea, arguing that until recently global pollution had been regarded as 'noise' within the conceptions of productive capacity and organization and only recently, as the full extent of the ecological deprivations are becoming unavoidable, they are becoming 'information,' part of the calculations and conceptions of global productive capacity and organization. 5. Per Braudel, the primary level would be that of the village, and material reality, the secondary level that of markets and more immediate exchanges, and the tertiary level that of the capitalism and investment capitalism. 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In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power. NY: Basic Books. ************************** Computer Networks Cited Big Sky Telegraph. Dillon, MT. 406-683-7680 (data 1200/8N1); 406-683-7683 (data 2400/8N1, hit breaks several time) Chariot, Denver, CO. 1-719-632-3391 (data 24/1200 7E1) Meta-Net, Washington, DC. 202-243-9696 (data 1200/7E1); 202-243-9697 (data 2400/7E1) Montana Gold BBS, Dillon, MT. 406-683-6285 (data 8N1) Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link. Sausalito, CA. 415-662-3201 (data 1200/7E1); 415-332-7217 (data 2400/7E1) ********************* Appendix A Survey Outlines 1. Perspectives on Change in Montana & Local Area a. How has this area been changing in the last few years? b. What are the threats of change? c. What are the possibilities of change? d. How might new jobs be secured? e. How has the role of women changed? f. Questions on info and media use: 1) What is your main source of information? 2) Where do you tend to meet your friends? 3) How do you get info on: markets, employees, etc. 2. Perpectives on Change in Education a. What are the children in school doing right now? b. What kind of support do they get?- from parents, the school, the community? c. What are they going to be doing in the next couple of years? d. What do they need most? 3. Personal Background a. Where did you come from; how did you get (here)? b. What role do you feel you have locally? c. What role would you like to have? d. What constraints do you feel on your occupation? 4. Knowledge about Big Sky Telegraph a. What is Big Sky Telegraph? b. How did you find out about it? c. How do you think others found out about it? d. What role do you see it playing? e. Who do you think uses it? f. Do you know anything about any other BBS? ************* Appendix B - Maps - [Not included in e-verson. Maybe we should vote for Napls, at a minimum, until we get a better broadband, graphic standard! Anyway, imagine the Big Hole Valley narrowly extending up through the Rockies, to the West & North of Dillon, and far to the South West of Montana. Most of the work here takes place in the vallies and terrain of the Rockies.] ****************** Appendix C From Dave Hughes: Below was the brief "Commencement Address" by Frank Odasz, Asst Professor of Computer Education of Western Montana College at the one-room Wisdom Montana K-8 School, Friday night, May 27th, 1988. There were exactly 2 graduating 8th graders in this tiny town of less than 75 in the middle of remote ranching and farming country in extreme southwest Montana. Over 100 parents, grandparents, school board members (of the 5 Kindergarteners also 'graduating' to 1st grade) showed up. The faces in the audience were right out of Norman Rockwell. Frank was invited to speak by three teachers, and one assistant teacher (she played the piano), of the school who had all logged onto Big Sky Telegraph from their one Apple Computer and taken the teacher recertification course entirely online from Western Montana College February to April, 1988. Knowing these facts, the name of the town and school - Wisdom - is more than ironic. ----------------------------------------------------------------- GRADUATION SPEECH Good evening, I'm Frank Odasz, director of Big Sky Telegraph at Western Montana College. It is an honor to share in the celebration of the achievement of Wisdom's student pioneers of the future. The pioneer spirit has always been focused on positive change. Most of us can accept that change is necessary if the quality of our lives is to get better. This year we've seen our students change in new and exciting ways. In our rapidly changing world it is becoming increasingly important to keep up with the changes that are occuring around us, if for no other reason than to protect ourselves from potential dangers of those changes. We seek the wisdom to know what should change and what shouldn't. We do need better economic conditions but there are many aspects of the rural lifestyle that we want to preserve and not change. . Education itself can be described as the process of acquiring the knowledge and skills for creative adaptation to change. If change results in better opportunities for our kids' success, then it is generally welcomed. Change can be a threat to our independence. A hundred years ago, there was a self-sufficient rancher who laughed at the suggestion that he might benefit from a new technology called the telephone. With a successful ranching operation underway, in an understandable common sense sort of way he reasoned; why would he possibly need to talk to someone a hundred miles away? What effect could that have on his ranching and, why change if the ranch is successful? Eventually, the rancher's first benefit from use of the telephone might have been checking auction prices in Billings. This eventually came to be viewed not as a dependency, but as an economy enhancing additional freedom, literally another tool in the rancher's toolbox. Today we use the telephone without giving it a second thought, and without worrying if we understand the details of how the phone company makes it work. The same is true for the microcomputers. We need to know only how to put these tools to work for our benefit. This (hold up laptop) has introduced change in my life. As a former roughneck, carpenter, and duderancher who never touched a computer before the age of 30, this notebook-sized microcomputer has given me access to worldwide information. This "laptop" is a new way to gather economic and educational information from any location, at any time I might find convenient. Telecommunications technologies hold great promise for allowing rural communities to enhance their economic options while preserving the cherished rural lifestyle. Big Sky Telegraph at Western Montana College, is a rural education project funded by the M.J. Murdoch Charitable Trust and the Mountain Bell Foundation of Montana. Using modems, microcomputers and common phonelines, select rural educators are able to access educators statewide and exchange written information at a rate of four pages per minute, ten times the information possible via a voice call. This is the most efficient and cost effective means of resource and information sharing available in Montana. Four teachers from right here in Wisdom, more than in any other single community in the Montana, have volunteered to pioneer a new trail toward Montana's educational frontier using this new form of communication. They have established a link from Wisdom to WMC to provide Wisdom students with access to over $10,000 worth of quality educational software. In addition, they have established fingertip access to the librarians and resources of the WMC library, all for as little as $5.00/week. Just last week pen pal messages between Wisdom students and students from Deep Creek School near Glendive,(600 miles away) on the other side of the state, were exchanged electronically via the Big Sky Telegraph system. We have only scratched the surface of the potential benefits to Wisdom residents using telecommunications. These teachers and students saw the benefits to the community of beneficial change. Montana is faced with the realities of an increasingly global economy. The independence of Montanans, with new communications tools can bring benefits from far away to those here at home. Global marketing information and contacts have the potential to breath new life into Montana's ranching businesses. Talented business and resource persons across Montana now have the potential to better share ideas and strategies despite distance or schedules. Your kids will soon be the ones to use these tools to create a brighter future for residents of the Big Hole Valley. This short speech will be sent electronically to networks on both coasts this evening to share the word that the trail to the future of education in this country is being blazed by the teachers and students here in Wisdom, Montana, as much as anywhere else. In a world that is changing more all the time, our students bear the promise that what we all value most, the opportunity for a quality education, will not change. Thank you. ----------------------------------