The Ethnography of an Electronic Bar

This article describes an electronic lesbian bar, the Lesbian Cafe (LC), which was created as a computer bulletin board system (BBS) on a major on-line computer service. Little has been written on BBS, but literature on a senior citizen BBS and on computer dating has shown that there are advantages to meeting people and interacting via the computer. The primary purposes of examining the LC were to discover how a community could be created and sustained through interaction restricted to the computer and to determine what functions were served by it. Daily “activities” at the LC were observed by computer, and patrons were interviewed privately and in groups via electronic mail, via telephone, and in person. Results show that the appearance of the LC is affected both by the appearance of real-world bars and by the computer as a communication medium. This study also found that four types of patrons—regulars, “newbies,”“lurkers,” and “bashers”—collectively form this lesbian cyberspace community. These findings challenge the traditional notion of community by demonstrating that a community can be created in a different kind of space.