ABSTRACT
Nease Androj has just discovered multi-user -discussion groups. As a single postdoc, Nease has extra time late in the evenings after the lab technicians have gone home, so visiting BioMOO just to listen in on the conversations happening there has become a regular educational enterprise. Nease has always been shy, and yet very alert, so understanding the thread of a conversation isn’t too much of a problem. While the newsgroups are a slow-moving kind of forum, the MUD is altogether quicker, with immediate feedback when one or the other party gets bored. Also, these realtime discussions bring the participants that much closer together, although they’re a bit frustrating if you can’t type very fast. Nease prefers the cloak of anonymity in these discussions, because questions can be asked without making a fool of one’s ‘real’ self, risking only one’s transient virtual identity. Of course, one never knows the provenance of advice in these sessions either, but the trail initiated there could prove fruitful on continued search. And Nease is growing in confidence that useful questions can be asked, in public forums — just yesterday a thought developing out of a MUD occurred during the lab meeting that, verbalised aloud, elicited frank curiosity and further interest from the Prof!
