The expressive content that marks SHUTTLE FORUM may be surprising. The stereotype computer is cold and impersonal, a symbol for much that is wrong in modern society. The very concept of computer-mediated communication frequently suggests a form of interaction that must be devoid of expressiveness, feeling or emotion. This stereotype may be re-enforced, for scholars of interpersonal communication by the field's differentiation of digital communication, expressed with words, from analogic communication, expressed with tone, gesture, and other non-verbal elements. Digital communication provides a language of unambiguous meaning, of symbols that stand for things. It is at its best when it evokes objects and expresses logic. Analogic communication, by contrast, provides a language of feeling, of actions that express the communicator's relationship to things.
Neither digital nor analogic communication exists in isolation. Communication media generally mix these forms of communication liberally. We hear tone of voice as well as words when we listen to someone on the telephone. We see gesture in conjunction with words in face-to-face conversations. The form of current computer-mediated communication media is entirely digital. There is no non-verbal channel to support and refine the words expressed. Hence it would be fairly natural to expect computer conferencing to heavy favor logical expression over the expression of relationship or emotion. Rice and Love (1987, p. 88) confirm the reality of this expectation from another direction in their brief review of the conclusions of a variety of laboratory experiments contrasting various media with face to face communication:
These studies have tended to focus on the narrow bandwidth and lack of nonvisual cues of various nonvideo media. The typical conclusion is that as bandwidth narrows, media allow less "social presence"; communication is likely to be described as less friendly, emotional, or personal and more serious, businesslike, or task oriented. If the social presence concept is accepted, CMC, because of its lack of audio or video cues, will be perceived as impersonal and lacking in sociability and normative reinforcement, so there will be less socioemotional (SE) content exchanged.
Rice and Love proceed to cite a number of studies that "suggest that computer-mediated communication is not entirely unemotional," including several that suggest that that between 14% and 39% of computer mediated discussion may have socioemotional content. They proceed to hypothesize (p. 92) that "socioemotional content will constitute a moderate amount (around one-third) of communication in a CMC network." Their content analysis of 388 computer conference messages confirms this general hypothesis. "Nearly 30% of the total message content was socioemotional" (p. 98).
Rice and Love's results should not be surprising, even given the expectations set up by computer stereotypes and communication theory. Both expectations ignore the obvious. Computer-mediated communication is simply human communication that uses the computer as transport mechanism. The computer provides the equivalent of a piece of paper, envelope, and post office. People provide the content.
Today's computer conferencing systems are generally strictly digital in form, but so are many other media, including journals, books, newspaper, dissertations, and love letters. The analogic semantics of relationships, feeling, and emotion may not translate as readily to words as does the digital world of actions and things, but it still translates to certain extent. What doesn't translate, moreover, can frequently be communicated in the context the words create: the experiences recounted; the images described; the words selected and the way they are used together.
Computer-mediated communication is no more or less a world of words than books, letters, and other written and printed media. It has different characteristics than other written media, but those characteristics don't dull the power of the words that are used. To say that emotion can't be communicated through a computer-based media is to say that Shakespeare was unable to express the feeling of love in his sonnets, that Dickens was unable to communicate joy or depression in his novels, and that everyday people are unable to communicate their feelings of longing, desire, or commitment in love letters.
SHUTTLE FORUM goes well beyond the modest expectations of Rice and Love. The content of the forum is not entirely socioemotional. There are news reports. There are many analyses of the event and peoples reactions to it. Even with such content, however, the volume of expressive content in the forum is massive. A simple content analysis, in which appends to the forum were classified as representing news, analysis, or expressive content, shows the expressive content to exceed both the news and the analyses by better than two to one:
The content of SHUTTLE FORUM is, in contrast to previous studies, almost entirely socioemotional, with at least twice the level of socioemotional content reported in prior studies. Such content analysis should hardly be necessary, however. The expressions of grief which can be observed in SHUTTLE FORUM make their own case for the expressiveness that is inherent to any written communications media, including computer-mediated communications media like computer conferencing. It is not the words that create the emotion and feeling that are inherent to SHUTTLE FORUM. Words like "shock", "sadness", "grief", and the like are only the beginning of such expressiveness.
The form of the discussion is digital. You cannot see the expressions of the participants as you read their words. You cannot hear the feeling they put behind them. You cannot hear the sobs or see the tears, and yet, paradoxically, you can. The participants in SHUTTLE FORUM do more than simply write words that express grief. They create a context that makes their grief real for others.
The core of this expressiveness is found in the relationships appenders create between themselves and the event. They describe the life experiences that built those relationships and shaped their feelings. In so doing, they recreate the basis of their grief for others. Some of those others have similar memories and can associate the recounted experience and the expressed pain with their own. Others share a common vision of a future that these events threaten. Still others gain new experience, understand new grief, and form new relationships with the event. In the translation of descriptions to imagination, we recreate the context of another persons feelings for ourselves, often recreating that persons feelings as well.
In renaming SHUTTLE FORUM to SHUTTLE MEMORIAL, the administrators of IBMPC recognize the expressiveness that is the core of this communication event. SHUTTLE FORUM is, in the words of a Raleigh, NC employee (append 102), an "electronic memorial," an "electronic wake." If we are looking for a label that describes the essence of the forum as a communication event, this is it. Whether we look at it from the standpoint of its function, its content, or the kinds of feelings its content evoked, SHUTTLE FORUM really is a "computer-meditated memorial service."
There are several purposes to a funeral rite or memorial service. One is clearly the respectful disposal of the dead body. Another is the satisfaction of religious requirements and traditions that are associated with death. A third, and clearly most important function, is facilitating "catharsis" for the survivors.
Definitions of catharsis tend to stress the role of art in creating the cathartic effect. Art, principally in the guise of dramatic tragedies, is key to understanding the cathartic effect, but is only a vehicle through which catharsis can be induced. The core concept underlying catharsis is, following the definition in Webster's New International Dictionary (Second Edition), is the "purification or purgation of the emotions ... by cleansing them of that which is selfish, morbid, irrational, etc. through ... participation in the sufferings of others."
Catharsis is, to a greater or lesser extent, the communicative function of any funeral or memorial service. A person has died. Friends and relatives, feeling the loss, come together. They come come together with different motivations, different memories, and differing relationships. But whether they come to work out their own feelings or support those who are doing so, whether the event is called a funeral service, memorial service, wake, shiva, or other name, the function is the same: to purify the emotions by "cleansing them of that which is selfish, morbid, irrational, etc." Nichols and Nichols (1975) call this catharsis "grief work", a process that "begins with acceptance," coming "to grips with the reality of death" both intellectually and emotionally. They write:
People in grief have a whole jungle of emotions in their guts which need to be expressed in some way. Sometimes openly, sometimes by talking, sometimes by crying, sometimes poetically, sometimes through ritual: there are many ways, but people must have the opportunity to express real feelings because unresolved grief is a destructive horror.People need to be encouraged to talk about the person who died, to remember him, to share about him...
Grief work is the process of real world catharsis, and the funeral service, memorial service, wake, and/or other ritual element is, or at least ought to be, an important element of doing that work. SHUTTLE FORUM is hardly a ritual, and yet a large part of the purpose it found for itself seems the same: Grieving people saw the reactions of others (append 47), got in touch with their grief (append 81), and kept what little of themselves that was still together, together (append 95). As a result, they don't feel alone in their grief (append 47) and are able to complete their catharsis (append 134).
The functions of a funeral define its content. Disposal of the body entails preparation (embalming), transportation (the procession), and burial or its equivalent. Religious requirements will specify the content of religious ceremonies, and describe appropriate and expected behavior on the part of the bereaved. Catharsis requires that the mourners express their grief and sorrow; that they "relive their experiences of the death and ... share once again the memories from the past.". Gordon (1975), in describing "Guidelines for Mourning" specific to "The Jewish View of Death", notes that "In the funeral itself there are several signals for the full outpouring of grief." Among them, "the eulogy is intended to make the mourner aware of what he has lost. Traditionally, its function was to awaken tears."
The content of SHUTTLE FORUM is certainly consistent with this function. Indeed, if the function of a eulogy is to make the mourner aware of what he has lost and awaken tears, SHUTTLE FORUM is effectively a "chain eulogy" (a chain letter of grief), with append after append that give awareness of new bases of grief, new opportunities to cry. The eulogies, most of them cast as personal descriptions of personal involvement with the space program, begin at append six, as a Boulder, CO employee relives his personal history of following the space program "from the Mercury program". Over the course of the forum there are dozens of such appends. Excerpts of many of them can be found in in the previous chapter.
The effectiveness of SHUTTLE FORUM's eulogies is summarized in append 97 by one of the forum owners, who tells us that "this whole matter has been a very distressing experience for me, from the horror of the disaster itself to editing this forum (re-reading all those moving appends...)." It is reenforced in append 135 when a British appender tells us that "now, a week after this terrible tragedy, ... office, I just read this forum. I couldn't believe the news when I got home last week, and saw the video pictures. I cried then, I'm crying now. Words cannot express such sorrow." This appender, like many other readers of and contributors to SHUTTLE FORUM, is doing the grief work that one hopes to facilitate with the funeral or memorial service.
No words can summarize the effectiveness of SHUTTLE FORUM in this regard than append 102, written by a Raleigh, NC contributor. Portions of this append have been extracted already, but here it is reproduced in its entirety:
I'm glad this forum opened up again. On Tuesday (was it really such a short time ago?), a friend came into my office and asked if I'd heard that the shuttle blew up. I, too, at first thought it was a joke. I was not sure how to react, but reading the appends pouring in from all over helped me appreciate the magnitude of the event, come to terms with my own sadness, and know that it was shared by many.My own feelings paralleled those of many other appenders. I was stunned, able to do little more than watch my terminal and read each append as soon as it came in. I hoped, surely the shuttle is rugged enough to withstand the explosion and glide back--isn't it? I grieved anew when I read that yes, this is the flight with the teacher on it, and so many excited students were watching the flight (I remember whole days of school being devoted to watching the Apollo launches). I hope that the appropriate memorials will be erected and that these seven people will be remembered as the heroes they were, taking all of us ever onward to new frontiers.
Some have said that the expressions of sorrow were inappropriate for this conference and that only verified facts should be included. I disagree, and in the long run think that quite the opposite is true. The news networks will provide facts (and conjecture and more) in ample supply. What I appreciated more were the eyewitness accounts from Boca Raton and Tampa, the sensitive, moving expressions of shared grief, and the myriad human dramas that were described or remembered--the recording of the child asking "Where is it?", or sitting under the stars watching a new satellite. The media is not known for its sensitivity, but time and time again IBM employees have shown that this is an area where we excel. I have been touched by the great compassion shown by IBMers worldwide during these past days.
The value of electronic conferencing is its ability to bring together, regardless of physical location, groups of people who share a common ground. Outside of my own household, I could not have found this anywhere else; even the local computer bulletin boards had only a couple comments about the disaster. As we have forged new roads in computer conferencing, we have with ESTRIDGE MEMORIAL and now with SHUTTLE FORUM explored another: the electronic memorial, the electronic wake.
(I still sometimes finding myself just staring, thinking, and crying.)
This contributors append is, in some sense, a capsule of the entire forum. Line by line he reproduces an outline of his reactions that corresponds, almost one to one, with the outline of the preceding chapter:
SHUTTLE FORUM's progression from news to disbelief to confirmation to hope to hopelessness to grief to community to discussions of memorials is clearly evident in the sequence of reactions in this appender.
One does not want to make too much of this sequence of events. As noted in the last chapter, expressions of these various reactions are all jumbled together on SHUTTLE FORUM. Still, the sequence approximates stages of grief that have been observed elsewhere. Gorer (1977), working from both a review of prior literature and his own research, observes three such stages, including:
This stage corresponds well to the early stages of SHUTTLE FORUM, as appenders react to the news with shock, disbelief, and hope against hope. Appenders to SHUTTLE FORUM can't believe the news. Several people believe the initial news is "a joke". Later appends echo a strongly held hope for a miracle. "Surely the shuttle is rugged enough to withstand the explosion and glide back--isn't it?"
The time when participants in SHUTTLE FORUM couldn't smile anymore
came quickly for some, slowly for others, but it came. They withdraw
from the external world. We learn, as early as append six, of
individuals who aren't "sure that I am going to be able to do any more
productive work today." In append 28 the writer is simply "
The many "eulogies", the personal expressions of individual connection
with the astronauts, the space program, and individuals and events
associated with the tragedy, that marked the forum represents the
efforts of people to express and work through that depression, to
attain a catharsis. In their expressions of grief, the participants
in SHUTTLE FORUM are able to move from feelings of hopelessness to the
feelings of increasing community that mark a newly found awareness of
the outside world and the beginning of stage three.
The participants in SHUTTLE FORUM probably never fully reached the
level of acceptance Kubler-Ross documents. Still, one sees a clear
period or reorganization, restitution, and recovery. Even in the last
appends of the forum we see new expressions of depression and sadness.
Yet the movement from depression to acceptance is clear in the later
forum as appends turn their attention away from remembering past
connections to the space program and toward:
Grief, on SHUTTLE FORUM, arises from remembering incidents that emotionally tie the aggrieved to the deceased. The nature of these incidents can be varied, and need not establish a direct tie to the deceased. Among the incidents reported on SHUTTLE FORUM, we find grief flowing from childhood memories of the space program, professional memories of working on the space program, interaction with crew members, and even sympathy with others who are grieving. Over and over again, the most moving accounts are those that recreate an incident, one usually unrelated to the accident itself, that emotionally bind the writer to the space program.
While one does not want to make to much of the stages of grief seen in SHUTTLE FORUM, it seems clear that the sequence observed supports and perhaps provides additional insight into, the stages of grief observed by others. Detailed discussion of such insights are beyond the scope of this paper, but include observations concerning the relationship of hope to disbelief, the importance of anger and guilt to the grief process, sources of grief, symptoms of successful catharsis, the role of a community in the resolution of grief, and the role of grief in re-enforcing a community:
The dominant source of grief on the forum appears to be an obsession with the personal memories that create a relationship between the aggrieved and those grieved for. Whether expressed as meeting one of the astronauts that died, seeing a satellite for the first time, seeing the shuttle land piggybacked on a 747, or in any of the other relationships documented in the forum, grief is most often expressed as a personal relationship. One sees other sources of grief in SHUTTLE FORUM, but none seem to have any more relationship to the unconscious phantasies or oppositions to withdrawals that are found in prior literature.
The content of SHUTTLE FORUM re-enforces the importance of the community to the grief process. The community of IBMPC is central to the "grief work" of the participants in the forum. In the words of one appender, "reading the appends pouring in from all over helped me appreciate the magnitude of the event, come to terms with my own sadness, and know that it was shared by many." And another appender writes that "sharing the shock and other not-to-be-described feelings, did more than anything else to help me to keep what little of myself was still together, together."
The process isn't simply a one way transfer from the community to the aggrieved, however. The expressiveness of the community of aggrieved helps people to achieve catharsis, but in the process, it also helps to build the community. In append 119, for instance, we learn that "now we know. There are even people down the hall from me or in the next corridor -- on the same project, even -- contributing to this forum, and I never would have guessed." Append 101 reenforces this notion as the contributor asks that the forum be "kept permanently as a valuable historical record of both the computer conferencing and IBM community at times of great national tragedy."
The sequence of reactions which can be observed both in append 102 and more globally in SHUTTLE FORUM provides the strong evidence for the reasonableness of calling the communication event a "computer-mediated memorial service. The value of the forum to the writer of this append comes not in the reporting of the "verified facts" that were so important in append 16; facts that "the news networks ... provide in ample supply". The value was in "the eyewitness accounts from Boca Raton and Tampa, the sensitive, moving expressions of shared grief, and the myriad human dramas that were described or remembered--the recording of the child asking "Where is it?", or sitting under the stars watching a new satellite."
For this contributor, SHUTTLE FORUM is a unique communication event. It does not simply carry news like a conventional broadcast or publishing "news network" (e.g. television, radio, newspaper, magazine, etc.), frequently in an atmosphere of sensationalism that obscures sensitivity except, perhaps, as another news item. Neither is it a conventional memorial service in which a limited number of people gather to grieve together for a short period of time. It acts instead as a complement to those media, offering, in "its ability to bring together, regardless of physical location, groups of people who share a common ground," a kind of content that is not duplicated anywhere for the author except, perhaps, in discussions with friends and immediate family.
This contributor views SHUTTLE FORUM as an "electronic memorial" or "electronic wake", asserting that it represents a unique genre of event that is not replicated anywhere outside of his "own household". It is not simply a memorial service conducted over a digital media. It is a unique communication event that probably represents a unique genre of communication act.
His words suggest that the form of this event integrates elements we would conventionally regard as mutually exclusive, a mass media event that somehow remains highly personal. What he suggests is a living room memorial service that somehow includes participants from around the country and around the world. This description may seem paradoxical, but it correctly describes the way SHUTTLE FORUM felt to many of its readers and contributors.
The perception is that SHUTTLE FORUM is not a conventional media. There are people who learned the news of the shuttle disaster from SHUTTLE FORUM, just as others learned the news from Radio, Television, and word of mouth. SHUTTLE FORUM did include confirmation of the disaster and a series of appends that can only be described as news bulletins. This news is not dissimilar to the news found on other mass media. Indeed, it is frequently based on reports from other mass media. News reports on the forum are generally prefaced with a comment like this (taken from append 20:
Here is the latest on the Challenger disaster (from CBS Radio News at 1800 GMT (1pm Eastern, 10am Pacific)):
News reports are a part of the sharing of SHUTTLE FORUM, but the immediacy of these reports do not turn the forum into an analogue radio or television news broadcast any more than their written format turns them into a newspaper or magazine format. Similarly, the radio and television broadcasts of the national memorial service in Houston did not make these media more like SHUTTLE FORUM. The differences here are not content so much as style and context. SHUTTLE FORUM included news within a general context of expressiveness.
Including news in SHUTTLE FORUM was functional, in part because it kept some people informed who might not have been otherwise, but more because it helped maintain the focus of the event. Discussion of how someone died is just as functional a part of a wake or shiva as is discussion of memories of the deceased and our feelings about the death. Similarly, including coverage of the national memorial service in Houston was functional, partly because it allowed people to participate who could not otherwise, but more because it was a news event. Just as the tragedy is news, so too is the funeral.
The biggest difference between a memorial service and SHUTTLE FORUM is found in their respective scope. A funeral or memorial service is a constrained act. It most typically occurs during the second stage of grieving, only one or a few days after the death, and can be regarded as a cathartic tool that whose intent it is to help the aggrieved make the transition from this intense grief to acceptance. As a ritual, its dominant feature is the eulogy, a speech which has the function of awakening tears (Gordon, 1975). If successful, the service will both facilitate a catharsis and provide an event about which the aggrieved can metacommunicate. If unsuccessful, the service will provide an empty backdrop to unresolved grief. If successful, it starts the third stage of grief and ends.
SHUTTLE FORUM, by contrast, encompasses a much larger span of the grief process. Shock and disbelief are usually over by the time the memorial service happens. Many participants in SHUTTLE FORUM lived through shock, disbelief, and hope while appending the forum. They proceed through the depression of intense grief to metacommunicating about the event and working through acceptance as they search for memorials. A memorial service is a part of the grief work process. SHUTTLE FORUM is a transcript of the entire grief work process. It is in this difference that we find the essential features of the computer-mediated memorial service.
The computer-mediated memorial service is, like most computer-mediated communication genres, a mass event built on interpersonal interaction. Interaction occurs in real time at a pace that is faster than print media or traditional correspondence, but that is also slower than broadcast media or face-to-face interaction. The interaction is voluntary and without central control, much as would be the case in conversation or correspondence, yet has the features of editing and review that we would ordinarily associate with mass media. Ultimately, moreover, the interaction is less orderly, less synchronous, and extends over a longer time frame, than might be expected from almost any interpersonal or mass media genre.
All of these features help to define the computer-mediated memorial service as a genre, but all are features that distinguish almost any computer-mediated communications media from traditional and technological media. What distinguishes the computer-mediated memorial service as a genre is its scope relative to the grief work process. It is not a scheduled and perhaps empty ritual of grief that mediates two stages of the grief process. It is a spontaneous incarnation of the entire grief process.
Kubler-Ross (1975) notes that "Funerals have become, for many people, meaningless and uncomfortable rituals." "In the period after the funeral," notes Gorer (1977, p.130) "the most typical reaction of the majority in Britain today (and as far as my evidence goes, in all English-speaking countries with a Protestant tradition) is the denial of mourning". This is, in his view, a modern phenomena which has (p. 127) "no analogue from wither the records of past societies or the description of present societies outside the Judeo-Christian tradition to this situation in which the majority of the population lack common patterns or ritual to deal with the crises inherent in man's biological nature."
Observers trace the decline in the importance of the funeral to the World War II period. Traditional forms of grieving are common before this time. They seem in decline afterward. This timing is significant, for it corresponds roughly to a period when many changes are realized in our society, including:
In the aftermath, local newspapers and, to a larger extent, live local entertainment, has declined substantially. In many communities, the local paper, if there is one, exists only as an advertising vehicle for local merchants and classified ads. In many more, the only source for live drama is the high school drama club. Even parades and community picnics are disappearing, often in the face of reduced interest and sky-high insurance premiums.
Together, these changes offered people new opportunities to travel, move from place to place, and obtain high quality entertainment, generally without a requirement for interacting with anyone. Given the opportunity, moreover, this is exactly what many people did. A change of jobs increasingly meant a change of locale, and retirement increasingly meant moving to the retirement belt. A night of entertainment increasingly meant a night in front of the television. As a result, communities that could once count on a large and stable population over periods of years could no longer count on a high degree of interaction between that portion of the local population that was stable.
It is hardly surprising, in this environment of declining community, that rituals that were tightly tied to the community should decline as well. Such, it would appear, has been the fate of the memorial service. Divorced from community traditions, the rites of grief become distant from the individual, and the act of grieving more difficult. The actions which facilitate grief work become less obvious, the community support that facilitates that process is lost, and the act of grieving itself becomes meaningless, uncomfortable, and even embarrassing. Without such traditions to bind a community, moreover, the community weakens more, and even those who are not divorced from what was once a thriving community begin to react in the same way.
This trend leads to two somewhat paradoxical views of modern man. On the one hand we live in what Kubler-Ross (1966, p. 17) calls "a society of mass man rather than individual man." In this society the individual is increasingly unimportant, lost in a mass of increasing numbers: more parents, more students, more workers, more marriages, more divorces, more cars, more television sets, and more computers; each one more like the last.
In the other view, we live in an age of extreme narcissism in which individuals are hopelessly absorbed with self to the exclusion of others. In such a society, other individuals are increasingly unimportant, lost in an increasing focus on obtaining satisfaction for ones self: more money, fewer children, more sexual partners, more marriages, more divorces, more cars, more television sets, and more computers; each one less satisfying than the last.
The true paradox of these conflicting views is that they don't conflict. The deindividualization of the society of mass man creates the need for self-absorption, for denial of insignificance, for revolt against a society that treats the individual as a thing, especially in sickness and in death (Kubler-Ross, 1966, p. 9). Indeed, the consequences of the views are re-enforcing. The more society deindividualates the more the individual revolts by rejecting the community and its rituals in favor of a narcissistic climb up societies ladder of increasing deindividualization.
Given this increasingly commonplace view of grief in modern society, SHUTTLE FORUM seems an oddity; an event that shouldn't have happened. The conventional view is that memorial services are increasingly anachronistic, and from that view, SHUTTLE FORUM is anachronism raised to new heights. In an age when grief is something to deny, the expression of grief on a computer, the ultimate digital media is more than a surprise. It is the very antithesis of every stereotype society harbors for what is commonly viewed as an utterly impersonal device.
And yet SHUTTLE FORUM happened. Indeed, it isn't even unique. A similar, albeit smaller event, ESTRIDGE MEMORIAL, occurred in reaction to the death of a well known and important IBM executive (Don Estridge, who led the development effort that resulted in the IBM PC) several months before SHUTTLE FORUM.
However odd the event may be by conventional measures, SHUTTLE FORUM demonstrates considerable value to IBM. Specifically:
IBMPC participants continue to remember SHUTTLE FORUM, year's after the event ended, as a shining moment in the evolution of computer conferencing in IBM. It changed their view of IBM, their fellow employee's, and computer conferencing in significant ways. The computer is neither cold nor impersonal to these participants. It is a setting in which an geographically distrbuted electronic community of peers communicate both productively and with feeling.