By Marisa Bowe (maud@echo.panix.com)
Though cyberspace is weightless and placeless, strong regional flavors persist on BBSes. The East Coast Hang Out (ECHO) is a case in point. ECHO is a Manhattan-based conferencing system (similar to the WELL) that was started in March, 1990 by Stacy Horn.
Anchored on Horn's Greenwich Village hard drive, ECHO's sensibility is New York to the bone. Not only is its subject matter heavily slanted toward culture, politics, and intellectual talk of all sorts, the style of discussion can be very "in-your-face."
"My introduction to socializing in cyberspace came via the WELL. I hated it," declares Dr. Jonathan Hayes, a New York City forensic pathologist. "Touchy-feely, earthy-crunchy San Francisco hippies celebrating their noxious New Age sensibilities.... The first item I read when I tried ECHO a week later was 'Junkie Tipping: An Urban Answer to Cow-Tipping.' I knew that I had found my niche in cyberspace."
Sometimes newcomers don't realize that if Echoids attack their views and mercilessly beat down their arguments without so much as saying hello, they're not being hostile. Far from it. It's just that special New York way of saying, "Welcome to our world!"
Social styles aside, another big difference between ECHO and the rest of the BBS world is its high number of active female members. Various estimates put the overall percentage of women online somewhere between ten and fifteen percent. But females comprise 37 percent of the members on ECHO, and nearly half of its conference hosts are women (Horn hosts the culture conference). Echoids who have inhabited other bulletin boards agree this makes for a more civilized "place."
"I was pissed off that everyone was exploiting this incredible communications device except women," Horn says. How did she change that? Easy: Women got ECHO free for the first year. The second year, they got a big discount.
Some of the men were annoyed, but were willing to put up with the discrepancy if it meant having more women around.
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