SPIDERWEBS:
I Am, Therefore I Chat
BY SHEILA FRANKLIN
"i am incredibly awed by the words...by the power of chat....and how it affects people... we turned a cold and horribly boring day for chatters into an escape...we made them forget about the cold of r/t...see why i am writing the book? *S*"
About the Author
Sheila Franklin has been chatting for over three years and has been writing of this book for almost that long. She has logged over 5,000 hours of chatting and visited many of the more popular chat sites on the net. She has done extensive research on chat sites and those who visit them, taking hundreds of pages of notes. She has not only been one of the millions around the globe who use this tool to communicate but has also been a trend setter in the chat world, helping to develop some of the etiquette and terminology commonly used now in her own favorite chatrooms.
Franklin has a total of over 14 years experience in the telecommunications field. She has an extensive background in the area of radio, television, and film. While a student at Palomar Junior College in San Marcos, California, she helped to create a radio station and was its first program director. While there, she also wrote, directed, and produced, a 20 minute teleplay. She created two short films at San Diego State University and worked as crew member on several projects at Palomar College and the PBS station at SDSU. She has received various awards and citations for public service work including "Home for Guiding Hands" and a special merit award for camera work on "Hope, Help and A New Beginning", a video made on the homeless in San Diego.
She served as public service director, copy writer, editor, disk jockey, and newscaster for several radio stations.
For over four years she was owner of Games Etc., a retail store which specialized in new and used video games and accessories. She recently sold that business to return to her former career in telecommunications. As the sole operator for the store she developed extensive promotional and marketing skills.
She has recently completed a video documentary on the human rights situation in Colombia entitled Fiction of War as well as a 20 minute promotional video for the Colombia Support Network. She has just begun the postproduction phase of her next documentary concerned with child labor in India, entitled Caution, Children at Work.
Franklin recognizes the potential of this medium in creating a global community, one that surpasses all national and ethnic boundaries. Her extensive knowledge of the chat world gained over the last three years combined with the thousands of hours spent on the net makes her imminently qualified on the subject. Her passion combined with her writing abilities and editing skills makes her most qualified to write this book.
In addition to working on Spiderwebs: I Am, Therefore I Chat, Franklin has started work on her next book Before There was Chat, There was E-mail. She has taken the concept of using e-mail solely for correspondence one step further. She has written to literally hundreds of individuals and companies via their e-mail addresses and received replies from most of them. She has conscientiously gathered the best of these in her forthcoming book.
You will find them to be charming, poignant, witty, and sometimes obscure. They will amuse you, entertain you, even perhaps pull at your heart strings a bit, but no one who reads these e-'s will ever think the same again when composing or receiving one of his/her own.