[Ads-l] "cybercad" article - help?

[Baker, John]

The same article that ran in the Washington Post, by John (not Jonathan) Schwartz, also appeared on the same day, under the title “The dissing WELL – Evolving electronic society not safe from Lotharios, cases of broken hearts,” in the Houston Chronicle, sec. A, p. 1 (July 11, 1993) (NewsBank Access World News).  The article seems to have been the first printed use, although there may have been earlier online uses on the WELL or elsewhere.


John Baker


From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> On Behalf Of Jesse Sheidlower
Sent: Thursday, August 29, 2024 1:13 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: "cybercad" article - help?

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No, this is a description, not a title. Time Magazine ran an article about this incident a week later, on 19 July 1993, titled "Heartbreak In Cyberspace", but this didn't even use the term _cybercad_.

https://time.com/archive/6723534/heartbreak-in-cyberspace/<https://time.com/archive/6723534/heartbreak-in-cyberspace>

It seems pretty clear that the term's currency stems from its use as the (literal) last word of the big WaPo article of the week before, which is what brought the incident to national prominence.

Jesse Sheidlower

On Thu, Aug 29, 2024 at 10:00:16AM -0700, Nancy Friedman wrote:
> This is from "Net.Wars" by Wendy M. Grossman (1997, NYU Press):
> https://opensquare.nyupress.org/open-square-reader/cloud-reader/epub_content/9781479812905/ops/xhtml/24_Notes.xhtml#rfn8_16<https://opensquare.nyupress.org/open-square-reader/cloud-reader/epub_content/9781479812905/ops/xhtml/24_Notes.xhtml#rfn8_16>
>
> >>The second, written up at the time (the summer of 1993) in *Time*
> magazine,16
> <https://opensquare.nyupress.org/open-square-reader/cloud-reader/epub_content/9781479812905/ops/xhtml/24_Notes.xhtml#rfn8_16<https://opensquare.nyupress.org/open-square-reader/cloud-reader/epub_content/9781479812905/ops/xhtml/24_Notes.xhtml#rfn8_16>>
> concerned
> a “cybercad” who ardently pursued several women on the WELL, apparently at
> the same time, into face-to-face (or, as the WELL likes to call them, F2F)
> encounters of the most intimate kind, then dumped them unceremoniously.
> Retiring to the private women-only conference to miserate and discovering
> they had company, the women decided to out him publicly as a warning to
> others. The man in question eventually said he had thought the rules were
> “different in cyberspace”17
> <https://opensquare.nyupress.org/open-square-reader/cloud-reader/epub_content/9781479812905/ops/xhtml/24_Notes.xhtml#rfn8_17<https://opensquare.nyupress.org/open-square-reader/cloud-reader/epub_content/9781479812905/ops/xhtml/24_Notes.xhtml#rfn8_17>>
> —a
> clear case of someone’s being unable to find the boundary between
> cyberspace and real life. He may have *met* these women in cyberspace, but
> the rest of the relationships took place in the physical world. It seems to
> me it ought to be pretty clear that the moment you pick up that telephone
> to direct-dial, you’ve changed jurisdictions. Such a case doesn’t mean you
> shouldn’t meet people online or give them your home phone number; but it
> does mean you should exercise the same caution you would with someone you
> met casually in a bar. The women on the WELL acknowledged this with great
> disappointment and a sense of betrayal: they had believed online was
> safe—the other side of expecting the rules to be different in cyberspace.<<
>
> (The footnote is not helpful!)
>
> And this is from a footnote in "City of Bits," published by MIT Press in
> 1995:
>
> >>Then, in summer 1993, the news media reported widely on "The Case of the
> Cybercad" on the WELL (a popular Bay Area online conferencing system).
> After he teleromanced several women at the same time (without telling them
> of the others), the women tumbled to his deceptive game and publicly
> denounced him in a WELL conference space.<<
>
>
>
> Nancy Friedman
> Chief Wordworker
> web: wordworking.com <http://www.wordworking.com<http://www.wordworking.com>>
> substack https://fritinancy.substack.com/<https://fritinancy.substack.com>
> Medium <https://medium.com/@wordworking<https://medium.com/@wordworking>>
>
> tel 510 652-4159
> cel 510 304-3953
> bluesky/mastodon/instagram Fritinancy
>
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 29, 2024 at 9:49 AM Jesse Sheidlower <jester at panix.com<mailto:jester at panix.com>> wrote:
>
> > What are the references to this supposed article that you've found?
> >
> > There was indeed a widely reported incident in the summer of 1993
> > involving a man who behaved caddishly on The WELL, but it's not clear to me
> > that there was actually an article in Time _called_ "The Case of the
> > Cybercad"; I've just seen this as a description of the incident.
> >
> > A main article about the incident was by Jonathan Schwartz on page A1 of
> > the Washington Post of 11 July 1993; it was titled "On-Line Lothario's
> > Antics Prompt Debate on Cyber-Age Ethics", and the last line, quoting
> > "Lizabeth", one of the person's targets: "I don't think he's anything more
> > than I've called him, which is a cyber-cad."
> >
> > Jesse Sheidlower
> >
> > On Thu, Aug 29, 2024 at 09:33:21AM -0700, Nancy Friedman wrote:
> > > I'm researching the term "cybercad" (a man who takes advantage of women
> > > online) and am looking for an article published in *Time *magazine in the
> > > summer of 1993 headlined (possibly) "The Case of the Cybercad." I've
> > found
> > > references to it but can't find the article itself in *Time*'s archives
> > or
> > > the Internet Archive.
> > >
> > > Any ideas? Or any other antedating of "cybercad"?
> > >
> > > Thanks!
> > >
> > > Nancy Friedman
> > > Chief Wordworker
> > > web: wordworking.com <http://www.wordworking.com<http://www.wordworking.com>>
> > > substack https://fritinancy.substack.com/<https://fritinancy.substack.com/>
> > > Medium <https://medium.com/@wordworking<https://medium.com/@wordworking>>
> > >
> > > tel 510 652-4159
> > > cel 510 304-3953
> > > bluesky/mastodon/instagram Fritinancy
> > >
> > > ------------------------------------------------------------
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> >
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> >
>
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