Carmen Hermosillo

Carmen Hermosillo (died August 10, 2008), known by her screen name humdog, was a community manager/research analyst, essayist, and poet, best known for her 1994 essay "Pandora's Vox: On Community in Cyberspace", a widely cited critical account of virtual communities.

Quotes

• It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some kind of _island of the blessed_ where people are free to indulge and express their Individuality...this is not true....i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until...i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories...by workers who were mostly exploited....i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to...and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment... [Cyberspace] is a black hole. It absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as an emotional spectacle.
  • "Pandora's Vox", as cited in Curtis, Adam, 2011, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, BBC.

• So-called electronic communities encourage participation in fragmented, mostly silent, micro-groups who are primarily engaged in dialogues of self-congratulation. In other words, most people lurk; and the ones that post are pleased with themselves.
  • "Pandora's Vox", as cited in Menon, Siddhartha, 2007, "A Participation Observation Analysis of the Once & Again Internet Message Bulletin Boards", Television New Media 8 (4): 345.