All over the world, people log-on to the Internet and search the electronic frontier for places to meet and exchange ideas. But at Stanford University's Communications Department, that traditional model is inverted. "Netjam," the brain-kernel of Jonathan Steuer (see Idees Fortes, Interactivity Matrix, Issue One), makes a social event of Internet surfing. How? By bringing an average of ten people to Stanford's Journalism Lab (conveniently equipped with twenty Mac SEs with Ethernet connections) on a Saturday afternoon for food, drink, conversation, and fun. Real people gathering in one place to explore virtual worlds - imagine that!
Steuer decided to see what would happen if one mediated environment ran concurrently with a non-mediated (immediate) one. Organized expeditions to multi-user dungeons (MUDs) and multi-user object-oriented games (MOOs) are part of the itinerary - as are trips to conferences around the world.
His idea was to take the model of a musician's jam session and look for similarities in relationships between it and multi-user environments on the Internet.
"In online situations, all that is shared among participants is interaction in the online space," Steuer says. "Musical jam sessions, on the other hand, depend on the fact that everyone present is able to interact directly, and on the ability of each person to 'do their own thing' as long as it contributes to the group experience."
When the MIT MediaMOO opened in late January, rooms were still under construction. The smell of virtual sawdust hung in the air. Hints were passed among the Netjam participants in the Journalism Lab as to where to go and what to do. It became apparent that the only really fun thing to do was to climb a series of stairs, ladders, and elevators to get to the action: the ballroom on the sixth floor. In the lab, a real boom-box played original classics from Disney movies, but the theme to Old Yeller had to compete for attention with the MediaMOO's virtual band, which had a virtual dance floor writhing to a rendition of Trip Harder by The Ultraviolet Catastrophe. The MediaMOO dancers were dressed in a myriad of formal, alien, slacker, and rave attires. If you were thirsty, you bellied-up to the virtual bar.
Replies to: jonathan@casa.stanford.edu.
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