TCF 389: Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC)

One-to-One CMC

E-Mail Basics: @'s, Smileys, Angle Brackets, and Sigs

Tracking Down E-Mail (and Other) Addresses

Paddling Through the Patois: Net Jargon

Some of the most common abbreviations you'll see in e-mail (typically done all in caps) are: 

BTW  	By The Way                    		LOL  Laughing Out Loud

GD&R  Grinning, Ducking, and Running     	L8R  [see you] Later

IMHO 	In My Humble Opinion               	FAQ  Frequently Asked Questions

ROTFL     Rolling On The Floor Laughing      	RTFM Read the Fucking Manual

Smileys or emoticons

Emoticons are punctuation marks that, when viewed sideways, resemble little smiley faces 

:)

Here are a few to get you started. Dave Barry lists some similar ones and comes up with a bunch of his own for his book, Dave Barry in Cyberspace. 

:-)  smiley with a nose            		:-O  shock

Q:-) smiley with a beret      			:(   sadness, disappointment

;)   irony or flirtation (a wink)       	:]   goofiness

:-p  derision (tongue sticking out)     	8-)  smiley with glasses

Angle brackets (the greater-than/less-than signs: <>) to indicate something akin to stage directions in a play.

E.g., humility might be suggested like this: 

<digging toe in sand>
Thank you for the kind words in your last message.

Or, the thrill of discovery might be indicated like this: 

<slapping forehead>

I think it would be fun to run a newspaper!

Internet equivalents to underlining, italics, boldface, superscripts, or other common typographic conventions: 

_Putting an underscore before/after a phase equals underlining._

Asterisks before/after a word indicate *emphasis* (as if it were
italicized or bolded).


ALL CAPITALS also signifies EMPHASIS, but USING ALL CAPS ALL THE
TIME IS LIKE SHOUTING AND IS DISCOURAGED IN E-MAIL.

Sign Your Messages with a "Sig"

E-mail messages all have return addresses on them, but often they tell you little about the human identity of the message sender. For this reason, it is a good idea to identify yourself at the end of each message.

  1. Many e-mail systems will automatically append a signature (or sig) to every message. Usually this is done by creating a small text file (no underlining or other formatting) that the e-mail program stamps onto your messages.
  2. These should be short (no more than five lines) and about 70 characters (or less) wide. Indeed, some e-mail processors will strip a sig from a message if it is over five lines long. And the reason for the 70-character width is so that your sig doesn't get rearranged by some funky word-wrap set-up on the receiving computer.

My own sig flirts with these limitations: 

Jeremy Butler
jbutler@ua.edu
ScreenSite http://www.tcf.ua.edu/ScreenSite/
Telecommunication & Film/University of Alabama/Tuscaloosa

Quoting a Message

  1. When replying, good to quote a small portion of a msg to give the context of your reply
  2. Don't quote more than is necessary
  3. Often > signs ("angle brackets" or "greater-than signs") are used to signify quoted material
>Tried to run NS Nav 3 on my office's Mac computer. Someone else did the
>installation. It crashes the entire machine when you load it. KER-blooey!
> Any idea what the prob is?

How e-mail works

Attachments and Related Problems

Many-to-Many CMC: Listserving and Newsgrouping

Clerical Robots: LISTSERV, Listprocessor, Maiser, and Majordomo

New Internet users often have trouble getting off of discussion lists. Suddenly, their mailboxes are crammed with 50 messages a day from, say, SHY-K9S (discussion of problems with shy and fearful dogs; I'm not making this up) and they can't remember how to control this e-mail flood. Fortunately, almost all listserving robots respond to the same method of unsubscribing. Just send e-mail to the robot's address and not to the entire group, remember and put the following in the first line of the message: 

unsubscribe listname

In the case of SCREEN-L, for instance, you would e-mail LISTSERV@UA1VM.UA.EDU and put unsubscribe SCREEN-L in the first line of your message.

One final note about discussion lists and the crush of mail they may generate:

Indexes and Digests

Most discussion lists allow you to receive their messages in a digest or index format. A digest compiles the messages from a single day (or week), creates a list of the day's messages, and then sends the list and the messages themselves to the user in a single e-mail package rather than message by message. This can be very handy for users who are charged for e-mail by the number of messages.

An index takes the digest notion one step further. It consists solely of the list of messages for each day (or week) usually with their subject headings and posters' names and does not include the messages themselves. Users who receive a list's index may then request the specific messages in which they're interested.

Sample index:

There are 21 messages totalling 1009 lines in this issue.

Topics of the day:

1. 'Contact' and virtual people -- beating an illusory horse ?
2. fwd: film and media studies position at UC Riverside
3. Chair's Report
4. Trailer ethics (4)
5. Super 8 on the big screen (2)

 

 Worldwide LISTSERV® statistics 
(Wed, 20 May 1998)
 

Number of public lists 18,452
Number of local lists 61,130
Total number of lists 79,582
Total membership (public+local) 29,748,499
Total messages delivered today 26,397,893
Total delivered using LSMTP™ 13,877,964
(52.6% of total)

Finding Lists

  1. CataList, the official catalog of LISTSERV® lists
  2. The List of Lists
  3. ScreenSite's listing of film/TV-related discussion groups

Required Lists for TCF389

  1. Eupage
  2. TCF389@tcf.ua.edu
  3. Internet Tourbus

Usenet: It's Kind of Like E-Mail, But Not Really

Usenet doesn't work quite like regular e-mail though. Instead of sending messages to your e-mail box, Usenet functions more like bulletin boards in a (very busy) hallway with many corridors connecting to it. On one bulletin board are notices and comments about film, while another might contain comments on Seinfeld, and a third might have suggestions for ways to execute Barney (the dinosaur).

In Usenet, the electronic equivalent of these bulletin boards is called a newsgroup (though they have little to do with the news), and, just as with a cork bulletin board, the messages in a newsgroup don't come to you, you must go find them. To read newsgroups, you must first connect your computer to another computer that stores Usenet messages. Many universities' computers provide Usenet access, as do commercial information services such as America Online and Prodigy. These central computers all connect with one another and share the messages that are posted to newsgroups.

Usenet Pointers

  1. Use a newsreader program or Netscape Navigator to access newsgroups
  2. Newsgroups are arranged in hierarchies
  3. Read the FAQ's (Frequently Asked Questions) before posting
  4. Binary files and images may be attached to msgs using UUENCODE
  5. Many Usenet resources have been collected at http://www.duke.edu/~mg/usenet/

Official Usenet Primer:

Source: news.newusers.questions, archived at http://crew.umich.edu/~chymes/Hoaxes/newusers/Usenet_Guidelines

  1. Never forget that the person on the other side is human.
  2. Don't blame system admins for their users' behavior.
  3. Never assume that a person is speaking for their organization.
  4. Be careful what you say about others.
  5. Be brief.
  6. Your postings reflect upon you; be proud of them.
  7. Use descriptive [subject heading] titles
  8. Think about your audience.
  9. Be careful with humor and sarcasm.
  10. Only post a message once.
  11. Please rotate material with questionable content.
  12. Summarize what you are following up.
  13. Use mail, don't post a follow-up.
  14. Read all follow-ups and don't repeat what has already been said.
  15. Double-check follow-up newsgroups and distributions.
  16. Be careful about copyrights and licenses.
  17. Cite appropriate references.
  18. When summarizing, summarize.
  19. Mark or rotate answers or spoilers.
  20. Spelling flames considered harmful.
  21. Don't overdo signatures.
  22. Limit line length and avoid control characters.
  23. Please do not use Usenet as a resource for homework assignments.
  24. Please do not use Usenet as an advertising medium.
  25. Avoid posting to multiple newsgroups.

A few film/TV newsgroups: 

Cult movies              			alt.cult-movies
Stanley Kubrick                    		alt.movies.kubrick
Steven Spielberg                   		alt.movies.spielberg
SFX                      			alt.movies.visual-effects
Martin Scorsese                    		alt.movies.scorsese
Silent film              			alt.movies.silent
David Letterman                    		alt.fan.letterman
Quentin Tarantino                  		alt.fan.quentin-tarantino
The Simpsons             			alt.tv.simpsons
Mystery Science Theater 3000  			alt.tv.mst3k
Film production                    		rec.arts.movies.production
Science fiction movies        			rec.arts.sf.movies
Television               			rec.arts.tv

Instantaneous ("Real-Time") CMC

CMC Hazards

1. E-mail (In)Security

2. Guard Your Own Privacy With Little Common Sense

As the Internet grows, its population becomes more and more diverse. This makes for greater opportunities to contact persons outside your social circle, but it also means that there are more chuckleheads out there as well. Consequently, just as one wouldn't post one's phone number or other personal information on a lamppost on a busy street corner, so one should think twice before posting such items to a discussion group or a Usenet newsgroup.

Also, it is inevitable that somewhere along your Internet travels you'll encounter individuals who say rude or offensive things. In computer patois this is known as a flame, which may be used as a verb as well as a noun: "Man, I can't believe that that chump flamed me just because I said Hugo Haas made better films than Peter Greenaway."

In my experience, the best treatment for flames is to extinguish them with the delete key. To engage the enemy typically leads to a flame war, in which there are few winners.

3. E-Mail Fraud: Fake or Anonymous Messages

Every e-mail message you receive will have a return address on it so that you can be assured of the message's author, but this assurance is actually false. It is quite simple to fake a message's return address. So, if you receive a message ostensibly from bclinton@whitehouse.gov that contains an attack on your erudite analysis, "Discursive Strategies in The Jetsons: Jane, Stop This Crazy Thing,'" you might pause for a second before engaging our Chief Executive Officer in a flame war.

Also, there is a controversial device on the Internet for erasing return addresses from messages, and thus making them anonymous. Anonymous re-mailers accept messages, remove any identifying markers from them, and then re-mail them to an address.

I feel a bit ambivalent about this service. On the one hand I can see how it would be helpful to those participating in anonymous, 12-step programs, but on the other it seems to encourage irresponsible e-mailing.

If you'd like to explore your own ambivalences about anonymous re-mailers, you can get further information by e-mailing help@anon.penet.fi and putting the word help in the first line of your message (leave the subject line blank).

Examining the message headers can often tell you where the message really came from.

E.g., the header from a spam I received today (7/16/97):

Fake address:
Return-Path: <ted@INTERNET.NET>
Received: from UA1VM (NJE origin V2SMTP-O@UA1VM) by UA1VM.UA.EDU (LMail V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 8697; Mon, 14 Jul 1997 19:17:30 -0500
Real location:
Received: from phyleus.interlinx.qc.ca (206.116.184.6) by UA1VM.UA.EDU (IBM VM SMTP V2R3) with TCP; Mon, 14 Jul 97 19:17:28 CDT
Real location:
Received: from rr (slpp-149.interlinx.qc.ca [207.134.144.169]) by phyleus.interlinx.qc.ca (8.8.6/8.8.6) with SMTP id NAA07473; Mon, 14 Jul 1997 13:03:34 -0400
Real message ID:
Message-Id: <199707141703.NAA07473@phyleus.interlinx.qc.ca>
Fake address:
To: random7@internet.net
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT
Priority: normal
X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v2.52)
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 1997 13:02:07 -0400
Fake address (one that appeared in "From" line in my mailer)
From: ted@internet.net
Subject: $50,000 IN THREE MONTHS -- READ THIS TWICE!!

How to deal with spammers

4. E-Mail Obesity: Keeping Your Mailbox Lean and Mean

With an e-mail account, one's mailbox need never be empty. Indeed, it's easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of e-mail one receives. If you subscribed to all of the film/TV discussion lists, you'd receive several hundred pieces of mail every day. The amount of mail, or traffic, on lists varies considerably. CINEMA-L averages about 30-40 messages per day, while SCREEN-L averages only a dozen (though it can go as high as 50), and smaller lists might distribute just one message every day or two.

To avoid a congested mailbox:

  1. Squirrel away a copy of the list's instructions so that you might unsubscribe quickly. It's a good idea to start a folder containing list instructions.
  2. If the volume of a list is too great, switch to a digest or index version of it.
  3. Don't subscribe to more than one list at a time. Get a sense of how busy a new list is before you add new ones.
  4. Review the list's archives to see how many messages are in it. SCREEN-L and many other lists have archives that are available via e-mail, Gopher, and/or the World Wide Web.
  5. Every list has a human somewhere that maintains it some more actively than others. This human's address will be contained in the list instructions or may be obtained by sending the command review listname to the listserving robot. If you are having trouble with the robot, contact the human; but make an effort to resolve the problem on your own first. Otherwise, depending on how harried the human is, you may be told RTFM.
  6. Sample the list's Usenet newsgroup (if one exists) to see how busy it is.

5. E-Mail Viruses and Other Hoaxes

Computer viruses are a real and significant problem, but they are not transmitted in e-mail messages.

Every once in a while there will be a scare that viruses are somehow being distributed in e-mail. These scares invariably turn out to be deliberate hoaxes (as was a recent one involving America Online) or mistakes by well-meaning novices. To date there are no documented cases of viruses being transmitted via e-mail (to my knowledge). There are technical reasons why e-mail is virtually virus-proof, but suffice to say that viruses must be transmitted through the exchanging of infected disks and/or the execution of virus-laden software.

Thus, it is important to frequently check your hard disk for viruses (I scan mine every day), but one need not worry about an e-mail virus wreaking havoc on your system.

BUT e-mail attachments may contain files with viruses in them.  E.g., there are several MS Word macro viruses (e.g., "wazoo") out there. It's launched when you open a Word document attached to a message.

You can separate the hoaxes from the real threats by visiting:

Sexual (And Other) Harassment in CMC

Last revised: May 21, 1998