Who should the ASD Web Site link to on the Internet? What organizations and communities are going to be acceptable, favored, & solicited, which sites taboo, questionable, or banned? And how do we decide?
These questions have deadlocked the Electronic Committee and have the Executive Board asking for reports and studies for nearly a year now. In the meantime the decision is to not have *any* links. I feel this is crippling the online web site project and further distancing us from the Internet community as a whole. This may be exactly what some people wish for ASD, but I feel that this is a decision best made by the organization as a whole. In keeping with this idea of democratic discussion I have provided, with others, a variety of Internet venues for this discussion to take place. But since this effects both those online and off, I wanted to open up a forum here for the wider membership, even those of you who don't like or use computers.
What is a "Link"? If this page were on a web site instead of a piece of paper, and I was writing the above sentence again, "... the Executive Board asking for more reports and studies for nearly a year now.", one could select "Executive Board" and it could go to a page that listed all the board members and information about them. The "reports" could be selected and go to the full selection of notes and reports the board has received and issued on this matter. This is the meaning of hyperlinking. As you can see, documents can be richly interwoven and references just one selection away from actually being available.
But what if in this web-linked document I said, " ...and there is some pornographic quality to the approach the photographers have taken..." . This link could lead to a very graphic example of what I'm saying. However, it is not just pornography that concerns us about the links on the ASD Web. The issue of linking brings up a host of issues, including freedom of speech, quality control, professionalism, self-promotion, dangerous practices, endorsements, liability, commercialism, and our persona in the global community, to name a few.
The test case for all this has been the Internet Electric Dreams community, and particularly the Electric Dreams policy of free speech on it's online magazine (e-zine) where dreams and comments on dreams are published.
This has brought up the continual ASD dialogue on who should and shouldn't be interpreting dreams, and what the appropriate contexts are, and where and how ASD supports, endorses and promotes the practices and/or discussions and study of the practices and where we discourage, ban and restrict the practices and study of dream interpretation. This is an eternal debate (or our work & play if you prefer) and is not going to find itself *solved* on or off the Internet. Rather it plays itself out, yet again in a new territory, though hopefully with some karma worked off this round.
It is my position that the Internet is known & accepted by those who use it as an experimental medium. The current accepted practice is to act, to experiment, to build and if it doesn't work, change it. Hesitancy is viewed with suspicion, leaving the Net community wondering what is being hidden, what is being played out behind the scenes in privilaged settings. On the Net, the question is more why one *doesn't* link. It is clear to the online community that the Web site providing the links is not responsible for, nor in full support of any link it holds to another site. Why? There is an amazing and huge task taking place online. As millions of new ideas come online each week, the question of how to organize them all is paramount. Each month a new paradigm seems to arise and the older systems of classification get very leaky, feel forced and are seen as inadequate. The solution is to distribute the task, each group maintaining its own view of the world. What are we telling people about our world view not having any links at all?
I have to say I am speaking as a member of both communities (ASD and Electric Dreams) but my concern is more here for ASD. As an Electric Dreams community member I see ASD highly over-focused on one tiny aspect of our community. Even for hard-liners against interpretation, a ban on links to this community must be seen as a loss. Electric Dreams is a community of about 500+ global dream concerned netizens that transect the Net and provide most of the online dream related news, programs, links & relationships to hundreds of other Internet dream related sites in the world. The Electric Dreams community has provided the ASD Web site with hundreds of hours of coding & support, beautiful graphics, and a flow of new membership. The two communities worked together to produce the Computer & Internet programs that so uniquely characterized the last conference in Berkeley. The Electric Dreams community has not asked for anything in return, but I'll have to say that a response of missing links is not going to provide the best atmosphere for future mutual relations. The loss will be mostly to my ASD community online. And it would seem really odd to Electric Dreams members if we decided not to link to the ASD web site because we didn't like, say, the practice of the organization's hierarchical structure.
What can be done? Two ideas, one by Jayne Gackenbach and the other by Alan Siegel, have been proposed. Alan's suggestion is simply to put a disclaimer on the page that has a link, releasing ASD from the responsibility of the ethics of the person or community linked and warning people selecting the link that not all the material on the site is endorsed by ASD. On the Internet, this policy is assumed already and putting the disclaimer up would be in keeping with current standards, even a bit conservative. The second, and compatible idea by Jayne, is to create different levels of links, some with partial information we want with disclaimers, some as commercial links for fees, and room down the road for endorsed or special relationship links. I agree with these and I would add that we allow each part of the Web site having its own rules. What is appropriate for the ASD Newsletter, may not be for our journal Dreaming. What is allowed on the Bulletin Board and heated discussions and references, may not be appropriate for the collection of public education documents.
Also, I want to mention not all links are equal. It is completely different to say "Hey, look here, this is a good place to go and we recommend it 100%! Electric Dreams:
Why is this important? Our public face has never been so public. Like all public faces, they appear with a group of faces within a particular context. In this context it is the Global Agora of Cyberspace, which champions creative exploration, mutual supports, intertexutality, global cooperation, and tolerance of a wide spectrum of thought and practice. Sound familiar? ASD has always done this in supporting the wide field of dreams offline. Are we to support less in an experimental environment online?
Links are the lifeblood and veins of the Net. It is what the Net is really about, people connecting and being linked to people. Un-linked sites float dead in the water like an abandoned ship or an ugly unattended billboard along a country highway. Regardless of your position on this, if you cannot join in our discussions on the ASD bulletin board, I want to suggest you write in to the newsletter or contact the board through the main office. Even if you have *never* been on a computer, this is still your face to the world we are talking about. Who we smile and frown on should be your choice.
Richard C. Wilkerson
rcwilk@aol.com
P.S. Note that this letter to the editor, while acceptable in this Newsletter, would be *unacceptable* and *banned* on our Web site. -R
Richard Wilkerson, July 1996
and to just have this listed as a reference cited in an essay:
Wilkerson, Richard "Dream Communities on the Net." Electric Dreams 3(7). 1996. 
Page courtesy of
Richard Wilkerson and 