(2019-11-21) The Mystery of the Death of MediaMOO

Amy Bruckman and Carlos Jensen: The Mystery of the Death of MediaMOO: Seven Years of Evolution of an Online Community (MOO). Typical Tuesday evening, 1993-­1996: In the online cafe, writing teachers begin to arrive. Twenty-five teachers will spend an hour discussing how to handle inappropriate student behavior in electronic environments...

More than one thousand people from thirty-four countries are active members

A typical Tuesday evening, 1999: The space is empty. The writing teachers found another place to meet years ago. The communications professor drops by, finds no one else connected, and immediately leaves

MediaMOO was founded in 1992 by Amy Bruckman as a place where people doing research on new media could share ideas, collaborate, and network

What caused MediaMOO’s decline? Could it have been avoided?

Methodology

To explore these questions, we began by holding a public forum. We chose the topic “The Future of MediaMOO: Autopsy and Redesign”

Sixty members participated

After the forum, we conducted a series of interviews

To understand whether our observations are part of a broader trend, we also interviewed the leaders of three similar communities: Diversity University (DU), Tapped In, and Meridian

We also corresponded with the founders of The Netoric Project, BioMOO, and CollegeTown

Defining Success

Many people obsess about the definition of “community.”

Instead, we use the word “community” in the loosest possible, value-neutral fashion: a community is a group of people interacting with one another in some fashion

what value does a given group bring to its members? What are our criteria for “success” of the community/group?

Splintering Off of Subgroups: A Victim of Success

In a time before the Web, when the Internet was just starting to become a popular phenomenon, MediaMOO provided a space for researchers to “discover” online communities and their potential. In this role, MediaMOO succeeded admirably, spawning dozens of new research projects and online communities. In some ways, MediaMOO’s success led to its decline, as large groups of its core members “graduated” to form their own online communities.

some of these subcommunities splintered off to become full-fledged independent communities. MediaMOO in effect served as an incubator where fledgling groups began, grew, and eventually chose to go off on their own.

Eventually we moved to Connections for several reasons. I administrate Connections, and it’s much easier for us to say to just write us for characters than to have them go through the whole application process on someone else’s MOO. Also, Connections has a realm system that makes it super easy for a whole bunch of people to collaborate on a space, and so we were able to have the community participate in Connections, without having to get room owners to deal with exit permissions and such every time they want to connect a room.

The main reason, though, is that the Netoric Project members spend a lot of time talking about using MOOs in classes. It was frustrating for people to learn all about MediaMOO only to find out they couldn’t bring their classes there. We wanted to be on a MOO that people who got excited about could use for their classes, and we also wanted to take advantage of the presence of classes on the MOO to be able to get students to come to Netoric events such as the Tuesday Cafe

The same policy issue affected the splintering off of another subgroup, CollegeTown

I decided that I needed to develop a new MOO more in line with my own personal goals. I wanted a MOO where classes could be held and teachers could meet to collaborate and do research. I wanted a place where undergraduates could experiment with MOO coding and the creation of serious virtual environments without the distraction of anonymous identities and D and D type role-playing. I saw a MOO as an excellent instrument for teaching my computer science students the elements of object oriented programming. And so I worked together with my CyberSpace class to create CollegeTown. We worked together to plan the layout, basically a Campus, a Town, and a Wilderness Area. We insisted on users using their real names and connecting all rooms to existing rooms using a graphic layout.

The problem, then, is not that subgroups splintered off but that new subgroups were not present on MediaMOO in earlier stages of development

One solution to the problem of splintering subgroups is to adopt a distributed architecture

A Historical/Technical Moment

Thoughitishardtoimaginenow,in1993thereal-timecommunication afforded by the MOO software was cutting-edge technology. In general, MUDswereonthetechnologicalforefront,andCurtisandWhite’sMOO software was particularly strong in its support for end-user programming

In 1993, the Internet was about to explode in popularity. Many people in both industry and academia understood that this was about to happen. Few could have predicted the magnitude of the growth of the Internet, but many sensed that something significant was coming. Those people came to MediaMOO. They came to MediaMOO to try to understand this emerging medium first hand. At the time, MediaMOO was the latest hot new technology.

Three to five years later, MOO technology was out of date. At the simplest level, a plain text environment with no fonts, graphics, or links is awkward compared to the World Wide Web

Some argue that it would be desirable to have a twoor threedimensional dynamic representation of objects within the virtual world. This is more problematic. Although such environments are visually appealing, they may actually impede human communication

To stay on the cutting edge of technology, MediaMOO would have to reinvent itself not once but continually. This requirement is unfortunately so labor intensive that it is impractical. It leaves a question: to what extent is there a need for a place for media researchers to network using wellunderstood technology that is not inherently interesting?

Changing Population Models

Groups in which membership is lifelong are increasingly rare

In 1993, professionals in the “multimedia” industry came to MediaMOO to gain a first-hand understanding of the next big thing, the Internet.By1997,professionalsintheindustryalreadyunderstoodtheInternet and were too busy with their research and corporate positions to have time for the kind of casual networking MediaMOO affords

We believe that the solution to this problem is to change both our population model and our target audience. The group of people who have a compelling need to make new professional contacts in this field andwhowouldmostbenefitfromwhatMediaMOOhastoofferareyoung professionals and graduate students in media-related fields. These people are unlikely to participate indefinitely. In our redesign of MediaMOO, we need to assume a “stage of life” population model

On Leadership

The decline in the level of activity on MediaMOO coincided with a decline in the activity level of the community’s founder and lead administrator, Amy Bruckman. It is likely that the two are related

In October 1995, she launched MOOSE Crossing, an online community designed to be a constructionist learning environment for children and the subject of her PhD dissertation (Bruckman, 1997, 1998). As time went on, she spent increasingly less time greeting new MediaMOO members, answering questions, organizing events, and encouraging users to begin new projects

MediaMOO’s waning is in contrast to the increasing success of Tapped In, a community designed to support teacher professional development

Visitors to Tapped In are almostalwaysgreetedenthusiasticallyandcheerfullybyvolunteersorpaid staff immediately on arrival. Four to seven organized community events typically happen per week.