The Virtual Dialogue;Neo-Hermeneutics Online

Distant, Computer-mediated, Online, Asynchronous, Virtual, Dialogue; these are the key words that apply to education and research when people work at their own computers and are incommunication with each other through their computer modems or by satellite. Connection between teachers, students and colleagues is facilitated by computer conferencing (CC) software,which may run on a campus network, on a "gateway" service like AOL or Earthlink, on a free standing BBS (bulletin board system), or on an Internet Web like "Blackboard". People who live and work in this domain use a special typographic argot akin tothat of ham radio operators. It operates on 16 and 32 bit band widths but initially it worked with the multiples of 8 that constrained the way bits, bytes and characters were combined into information.