Willard Uncapher (Advanced Communication Technology Laboratory, College of Communications University of Texas at Austin).
Willard Uncapher is a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, School of Communication (RTF) where he has concentrated on issues of cultural complexity, global media history, networking and decentralization, community development, education, ethnographic methods, and critical studies. Drawing on his work and degree in Indic and Iranian Studies, he has also used the hybrid nature of these regions to explore issues of globalization, the politics and nature of paradox, imaginal landscapes, and comparative hermeneutics. He has taught such undergraduate coures as "The History of Communication: From Paleo-Anthropology to Cyberspace" (NYU), "Communication Technology and Society" (UT), and "The Information Society" (UT). He is currently expanding the Montana research with these issues in mind.
This chapter provides an overview of an ethnography exploring the introduction of a low cost computer mediated conferencing and communication system into the rural Montana one room school system and develops a framework based on the conflicts between the material economy using information technology to organize global economies of scale and an online gift economies and social scale to explore the informatization of rural communities. The paper proposes that we should not limit our analysis of online communities simply to online behavior.
Based on interview, site visits, and an extensive collection of secondary materials, primarily between January 1988 when Big Sky Telegraph first went online, and January 1990, the research provides a case study of the way social, cultural, economic, and pre-existing communication arrangements come to frame the uses of the new technology, even as they are transformed by them. Not all communities are transformed equally, and those users, such as rural teachers and women wanting to change their lives provided a base of new users, while the ranching and farming community was more circumspect. The social differences would impact not only online behavior, but how behavior gets online, and even how the borders between these worlds are imagined.
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