Hanging out in the Virtual Pub Masculinities and Relationships Online

By Lori Kendall
University of California Press 2002
ISBN 0520230388 $19.95 339 pages

Reviewed by Chris Cobb
ldr@leonardo.org

At times, I can feel Lori Kendall’s cold sociologist’s eye roaming over what is usually the live and interactive dialog of a chat room. Hanging out in the Virtual Pub is a rather clinical examination that is both critical study and aesthetic evaluation. In it, she breaks down each element of contemporary chat room practices and explains what is common knowledge for those who participate in them: there are a lot of weirdoes and geeks who meet online. But she takes her research a step further by including herself in the group that she analyzes, blurring the boundary between researcher and subject. She even participates in ‘offline’ get-togethers where members of her MUD (multi-user domain)/chat room, BlueSky, meet face to face. She also reports the results in a kind of personal diary format. In Appendix B, Kendall mentions that her key dilemma was how to anonymize all of the text, quotes and identities of her subjects (even BlueSky isn’t the real name of her MUD). This became more and more complicated, she says, as she wrote her 309-page book. After all, for snoops, hackers and law enforcement, chat rooms, like BlueSky, are crops of information just waiting to be harvested. These days people are searching for love online, for advice, for technical assistance or for just plain old companionship. Part of the allure is the access and the seeming privacy of it all since it can be done at home. But what seem like anonymous verbal exchanges are really not anonymous at all. Most Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) can and do turn over information about their customers, as well as buy and sell information about customers. And if you are online you either have an ISP or are an ISP. Viewing the Internet itself as ‘art,’ Kendall quotes Theodor Adorno, saying ‘we can see how repression is carried from reality into artworks’ then she continues by saying ‘art may be a promising source of truth and progress, (yet) its cognitive and social value remains vulnerable to falsehood, folly and regression.’ This is especially true these days as people are enjoying the freedom of online communication while the government is building systems designed to monitor every word one types. Judging by current events, the online chat room may continue being a great place to meet people, but remember it’s not all fun and games ñ everything is recorded. That is the difference between the Virtual Pub and the real one.