Communicating

For communicating with people around the world, the networks offer facilities which are hard to beat. At a purely practical level, they offer a convenient, fast and economical means of data transmission and a vast range of communication software. They also provide an environment of encouragement for the free exchange of ideas. Thus they are an effective medium through which like-minded but physically dispersed individuals and groups can meet and discuss topics of common interest. In addition, they enable people to work together though they might never find themselves in the same building. (See the document on Group Collaboration in this User Overview). And as the Internet user base steadily grows, we are likely to see much more conversing, collaborating and doing business taking place online.

Communicating with another person

If you would like to get in touch with someone whom you know to be an Internet user, you will almost certainly be able to use e-mail. When you are connected to the Internet, e-mail allows you to send messages from your computer via the Internet to other network users cheaply and efficiently. Anyone with Internet access generally has access to e-mail. When you get Internet access, you will normally be given a userid (a login name) and a password, plus an electronic mailbox, which is where your e-mail correspondence will be deposited until you open it and read it. You use an e-mail program on your computer to access and read e-mail and to send messages. When you send a message it is delivered to your correspondent's mailbox and waits there until they collect it and read it. E-mail's flexibility, ease of use and power make it one of the most popular network services.

Communicating within a certain time

While e-mail is a great system, if you need an immediate reply or if a message needs to be read by a certain time it may not be the most appropriate medium. In that case, a facility which puts you directly in touch with your correspondent may be better. The telephone is an obvious example, but as we are talking about network facilities here, it is more apt to point to Internet phone or even videoconferencing tools. These enable you to converse as you would by phone, but using the audiovisual capability of the computer rather than the telephone. In the case of videoconferencing, in addition to having sound you will see a moving picture of your correspondent (in a window) on your computer screen. With the advantage of high-speed network connections, audioconferencing and videoconferencing can provide many of the advantages of face-to-face dialogue, minus the travel costs. If you don't have a high-speed connection, and in particular if you are using an analog modem to connect, you might find facilities such as Chat more satisfactory. Chat enables you to exchange plain text messages with others interactively.

For more detailed information, see Real-time multimedia communication (phone tools and videoconferencing) and Collaboration tools.

Group communication

If you share a common interest with a group of people who are network users, you have at your disposal an abundance of network communication facilities for pursuing that interest. First and foremost there are e-mail-based discussion lists or mailing lists. These enable you to easily send the one message via e-mail to all of the people who are members of the list. In turn you, as a list subscriber, will have all the messages which are sent to the list delivered to your electronic mailbox. Lists are used to exchange opinions, announce news, pose questions and provide answers, circulate information and possibly documents as well. They are an ideal medium for easy interchange by a group of people with a common interest, and for the individual, a means of overcoming the constraints of locality (where no-one may be interested in the same topic) to be part of a wider and richer virtual community of common interest.

Another avenue for discussing common interests is Usenet News, also referred to as News. News encompasses some tens of thousands of interest groups (known as newsgroups) on almost every subject you can think of. It is widely available on the Internet, and in common with mailing lists, is an important medium for group communication. From the user's point of view, one of the major differences between mailing lists and News is that the former comes to you (i.e. your mailbox) and the latter waits for you to come to it. To look at News, you need to access a News host with a Newsreader client program and from there all newsgroups on that host will be available to you until you start filtering out the ones you don't wish to see.

Web conferencing offers another medium for group discussion. It enables group members to send messages from their WWW browser to a conference without the need to install any additional software. The archives of the discussion will also be available via the Web, usually with the messages on the one topic helpfully grouped together.

Mailing lists, Usenet News and Web Conferencing have one thing in common. The correspondents don't need to be connected for the communication to happen. In contrast, group discussions using Chat take place only when people are in direct contact via the network and can converse interactively. Chat conversations at their best are spontaneous and lively and hence Chat services are widespread on the Internet. In fact there are thousands of Chat groups most notably on the system called Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Many of the groups are recreational, but there are also some serious discussions going on.

See the main Group Communication section of the Guide to Network Resource Tools for more information on mailing lists, Usenet News, Web conferencing, Real-time communication and Colllaboration tools. Also Locating people with common interests to find ways to search for a mailing list or newsgroup.

See also a complementary document here in the User Overview on Group Collaboration.

gnrt@terena.nl June 1997