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Internet Culture

Computer Science 01iIntroduction to the Internet

Neal Sample27 February 2001

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We will talk about...

• Odds and ends: FTP• What is a culture?• Internet User Demographics• Delayed Collaboration Communities• Real-time Communities• Virtual Societies• Gaming Communities

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Odds and Ends: FTP

• File Transfer Protocol (FTP)• Transfers files between two machines

Requires an FTP server on the host machine and an FTP client on user’s machine

• Much like the webserver/webbrowser relationship (“client-server”) Requests and replies for files instead of

HTML documents and components

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FTP: manual ftp

• Login to host machine ftp sole.stanford.edu username: bob password: ******

• To request a file(s) get program1.cc get *.html

• To send file(s) put program2.cc put *.html

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FTP: Getting Graphical

• Many, many free graphical FTP programs are available

• Two recommendations are: WS_FTP LE CuteFTP

• Both are available at: http://www.tucows.com

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FTP: GUI Login

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FTP: GUI Use

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Internet Culture

What is a culture?

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What is a culture?

• History• Habitat• Architecture• Community• Artifacts• Property and Commerce• Psychology• Behavior, Sanctions, Norms, Status• Political Structure

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Demographics

Who do you think uses the net most?

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Age

• Average age: 33

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Sex

1997: 68% male, 32% female W3C1998: 59% male, 41% female GA Tech2000: 60% male, 40% female user survey

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Education

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Income

Average Income: $59,000/yr.

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Marital Status

• Married: 41.1%

• Single: 38.7%

• Living w/ someone: 9.2%

• Divorced or separated: 8.3%

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Geography

• USA: 84.4%

• Europe: 5.8%

• Canada: 4.9%

• All other: 4.9%

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Internet Experience

• Under 6 mo.s: 7.9%

• 6-12 mo.s: 10.5%

• 1-3 years: 45%

• 4-6 years: 27.2%

• over 7 years: 9.4%

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Internet Usage

• 78% of respondents use their web browser more than once a day 38% use it more frequently than 4 times a day 40% use the web 1-4 times a day

• 19% use it less frequently than once a day

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Occupation

• Educational: 24.9%

• Computer related: 21.4%

• Professional: 22.5%

• Management: 11.4%

• Other various fields: 19.8%

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Operating System (1999)

• Windows: 81.3% • Macintosh: 13.0% • Unix: 2.7% • WebTV: 0.8% • Dos: 0.6%• OS2: 0.2% • Other or unknown: 1.4%

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Shopping Habits

• 77.8% have purchased products or services online

• 21.6% have never purchased a product or service online

• 0.7% don't know Of the females who responded, just over 70%

have purchased online and of the males, 80% have purchased online. Not a vast difference in markets.

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Purpose on the net?

• Browsing around (surfing): 79%

• Entertainment: 65%

• Work / research: 51%

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Odds and ends

• Bookmarks 77% have between 11-50 bookmarks

19% have over 100 bookmarks

• Access 64% access the Net from home

31% access from work

5% other access

• 81% are registered to vote

• 98.3% use English as their primary language

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Who is John Q. Internet?

• 33 year old married male• No children• College graduate, likely holds graduate

degree• Earns about $59,000• Live in the US, speaks English, votes• Been on the net 1-3 years• Surfs more than once a day• Uses Microsoft Windows

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Internet Communities

• Communities as groups of related users

• Each internet community has its own “culture” Hackers and gamers and chatters and

activists are all vastly different groups

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Delayed Collaboration Communities

• Groups of people that share ideas and thoughts in stable messages

• No “face-to-face” time, user interaction• Different types:

On the web, “newsgroups” on various topics

Bulletin boards Instant Messaging (some flavors) Email lists

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Delayed Collaboration Examples

• www.dejanews.com newsgroups on various topics

• gsc@drizzle.stanford.edu mailing list of all Stanford graduate students

• www.stepfamily.net email questions with public replies ask the experts like “Dear Abby” or NPR’s Car Talk

• http://www.delphi.com/extremecompute/start/ specific topic message boards, hardware

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Realtime Collaborative Communities

• Groups of people that share ideas and thoughts

• Actual “face-to-face” time, conversational

• Different types: IRC - Internet Relay Chat AIM chat, ICQ chat AOL chatrooms

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What “chat” looks like

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Virtually Societies

• MUSH - MUltiuser Shared Hallucination “rooms” connected to myriad other rooms “walk-around”, explore, build, interact

• Virtual Worlds Ultima Online EverQuest Asheron’s Call “games”

• Hitchhiker’s Guide to Earth building knowledge, collaboratively http://www.h2g2.com/

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Lang. of Abbr.• afk: Away from keyboard.

• bbiab: (I'll) be back in a bit.

• bbl: (I'll) be back later.

• brb: (I'll) be right back.

• btw: By the way.

• fubar: [Messed] up beyond all repair (or recognition).

• imho: In my humble opinion.

• irl: In real life (as opposed to virtual reality).

• jk: Just kidding.

• lol: (I'm) laughing out loud.

• otoh: On the other hand.

• rl: Real life.

• rotfl: (I'm) rolling on the floor laughing.

• spam: A lot of unwanted text on your screen, usually scrolling by so fast that it's difficult to read or text that you want to see gets lost in it.

• ttyl: (I'll) talk to you later.

• vr: Virtual reality.

• wtf: What the [heck]? A vulgar exclamation of unpleasant surprise or confusion.

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Gaming Communities

• All sorts of games Turn-based: Cards, chess, Trivial Pursuit

• often use web-browsers, free, high latency ok

Realtime Strategy: War games, empire Building

• purchased software, high latency not too bad

FPS: First person shooters• purchased software, low latency to be

competitive

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Gaming Societies

• By game, e.g., the “Quake Community” http://www.planetquake.com/

• In team games, by group/clan/tribe http://www.tribalwar.com/vanguard/

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Elements of game culture

• The culture is very feudal wars are waged on virtual battelfields win and lose virtual turf

http://www.ogl.org/cgi-bin/league.pl?league=ctf_open&mode=display_universe

• Status derived from skill• Highly Uncivilized in nature

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“Professional Gamers?”

• Dennis “Thresh” Fong, 25, Cal. dropout• The first “professional gamer”

industry consulting endorsements website: www.firingsquad.com

• Is it lucrative? 1997 E3 winnings:

• $5000• A new Intergraph PC workstation• oh yes, and a Ferrari

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Gamer Demographics

• Last update Feb 27 2001 11:45am PST www.theclq.com Online Players: 12,873,958 Online Teams: 261,366 Online Servers:316,940

• Typically Male, 16-24

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Other groups and cultural traits

• Hackers Status through exploits and “hacks” Anarchists

• Open Source Developers “Gift culture” Noosphere Linus Torvalds - Linux Socialists with “ego-profits”

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Sources and further reading

• University of Colorado at Denver http://www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/culture.html

• Gateway Virginia http://www.gateway-va.com/ad/gvaad.htm

• Survey.net (users add their own data) www.survey.net

• US Hostnet (marketers) http://ushostnet.com/host/

• Protocol Communications (Georgia Tech Survey) http://java.protocom.com/protomall/Protocom/benefit/

who.html

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Project: Spice Girls?

• In the immortal words of Ginger Spice:

“Tell me what you want, what you really really want.…”

• So many topics, so little time