The incorporeal world of the Net has its own mechanisms for coding and class construction.

Some network acquaintances know me merely by the neutral identifier "wjm@mit.edu," for example, but most prefer to address me by one or another of my many more meaningful aliases. A few establish a direct linkage to a unique, known, embodied subject by listing me as "William J. Mitchell" in their personal directories of acquaintances, then select that alias as the recipient of their messages. My family, friends, and immediate staff, who send me messages very frequently, find it natural to use the abbreviated and more intimate alias "Bill." (It is not an ambiguous one in the bounded context of our acquaintance.) Proper names are not always necessary, though. Students, staff, and faculty at MIT often address their messages to "Dean," for instance, because that describes the role I play in their professional lives; if somebody were to replace me in that role, their messages could automatically, transparently, and immediately be redirected. My Finger file on the Net supposedly establishes who I am IRL (in real life), but it is itself just a set of potentially opaque or misleading descriptor values. ⁶

Other correspondents address me implicitly rather than explicitly when they broadcast messages to groups defined by membership lists or by possession of specified characteristics-graduate students and instructors participating in particular seminars, researchers and scholars interested in certain topics, or just friends who sometimes like to do things together. (Membership of such groups separates the information-rich from the information-poor. Here, as elsewhere, class correlates with privilege.) Or they might find me by searching a database to find somebody matching a given profile. ⁷

In this fashion, alias by alias, bit by bit, my disembodied electronic identity is constructed. But as Frege taught us in his famous analysis of "The Morning Star Is the Evening Star," it is not trivial, and perhaps not even true, to say that wjm@mit.edu is Dean@mit.edu or that either one is the embodied William J. Mitchell! When names float around without precise, unambiguous attachment to unique things, referential complexities abound.

It may even be that something with a definite electronic identity has no physical embodiment at all. Consider, for example, the Usenet Oracle. ⁸ You can e-mail questions to the Oracle, who resides in Indiana, and he will send you back answers. Whenever you submit a query, he will also send you another one and ask you to respond. He actually does nothing more than randomly match supplicants to respondents, and he is just a fairly simple piece of software. Yet he seems to have a personality and a characteristic sense of humor.

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