These Mouse Clubs Aren’t for Mickey : Fans can chat with R.E.M’s Michael Stipe, tell Conan O’Brien what they think of his jokes and explore the subject of Patrick Stewart’s baldness--if they’re on-line, that is.

Last July, R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe turned on a personal computer and chatted with 900,000 of his closest friends.

Taking occasional breaks from recording “Monster” at Ocean Way Studio in Hollywood, Stipe used an America Online account-- stipey@aol.com --to post e-mail comments to an R.E.M. newsgroup. AOL subscribers could join in or merely watch as Stipe spent a week clearing up debates over song lyrics and entertaining system users with anecdotes from past tours.

When one R.E.M. fan suggested that the band perform at Detroit’s Fox Theatre, Stipe answered in the casual style of e-mail, where there is rarely capitalization and minimal punctuation: “we recall being at the fox with campervb (the band Camper Van Beethoven) ‘cause i remember climbing to the top and looking down after everybody left we were drunk. the mats (the Replacements) too. they took off their shirts after one song ‘if i only had a brain’ and stole our cognac.”

“I was in the studio,” Stipe, 34, recently recalled, “and bored with being there. Someone suggested I try out the computer. I was surprised that I really enjoyed (the experience).”

Stipe isn’t the only celebrity connecting with the masses on-line. Users can scroll through Hole singer Courtney Love’s rantings against her father or send e-mail to the band members of Sonic Youth. The staff at “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” occasionally uses the Internet to see what people think about the show. The creator of the sci-fi TV series “Babylon 5” spends hours each day chatting on the Infobahn.

Such incidents are the first stages in a unique marriage between show business and the public. The question is: Does the ‘Net merely offer another kind of fan club--albeit a high-tech one--or has it forged a greater degree of intimacy between celebrities and fans?

Name a performer and chances are there’s a newsgroup devoted to that person’s private and professional life. These are not the officially sanctioned on-line exchanges arranged with commercial services, such as David Bowie popping onto America Online, Tom Petty on Prodigy or the Rolling Stones on Delphi. These are freewheeling conversations about or with celebrities.

The commercial services offer their own version of a newsgroup. Often called a “topic,” “folder” or “arena,” they act as in-house, local bulletin boards for fans. True newsgroups, however, are found on Usenet, the world’s largest distributed bulletin board system, which acts as a “store-and-forward” network for sites both on and off the Internet.

It’s nearly impossible to pinpoint the number of people who have access to the Usenet, because the Internet is growing so rapidly and many people can share the same computer terminal. Still, Usenet followers estimate that about 10 million computers are on-line.

Newsgroups have multi-part names separated by periods, such as alt.fan.monty-python , a group devoted to the British comedy troupe. Most groups that focus on pop culture figures begin with the word rec for “recreation” or alt for “alternate.” A multitude of fan-oriented newsgroups exists, ranging from an anti-Barney faction ( alt.tv.dinosaurs.barney.die.die.die ) to Patrick Stewart groupies ( alt.sexy.bald.captains ).

Users tend to select a few groups to read and ignore the rest.

“I view newsgroups like this: Do you know that in some places in America, there are 24-hour fishing channels?” said one subscriber to the G. Gordon Liddy newsgroup. “You and I might stop to laugh for a second or two, and then move on to other stations.

“The Liddy group is like that fishing channel. I just stop by to laugh, wonder about the people who post and scratch my head. But other people will stick around to learn everything they can about Liddy.”

To a certain degree, newsgroups do function as fan clubs. Traditional fan clubs are organized and managed by agents, film studios and record companies. Yet most newsgroups are established by the fans themselves.

“You pick up on everything, from album release dates to recent deaths to film deals,” said Michael N. Hidalgo, 18, a freshman at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. “I heard about dates for the last Guns N’ Roses tour, Stephen King’s book-signing schedule for ‘Insomnia’ and the title of the new R.E.M. album before it was out.”

Subscribers can exchange memorabilia and track down rare footage of their favorite stars. A recent 15-minute scroll through Usenet uncovered such trivia as where to find a board game based on the pop band Duran Duran and what asteroid was named after Frank Zappa (answer: Zappafrank).

“If (this medium) was just a bunch of fan clubs, all you’d be reading is ‘I love you, can I have an autographed picture, can I come see the show, I hope you can come to my town, I love it when you wear jeans,’ ” said late-night television host Conan O’Brien, who follows on-line postings about his show via alt.fan.conan-obrien . “With these groups, it’s not just ‘I love you’ or ‘I hate you.’ You get a middle-ground buzz that you don’t get through the mail, like debates over why one skit worked and another didn’t.

“And (posting to a newsgroup) is so much easier than sitting down and writing a letter. If you’re into computers, you’re already there.”

Subscribers say that compared to the clientele attracted to a typical fan club, newsgroups offer a highbrow alternative. Most of the people who read and post to the celebrity groups are not drooling, screaming pre-pubescents, said a subscriber who goes by the handle “dougr” and declined to give his real name.

“But there is so much that you can never learn from just listening to his music. It’s only since I began alt.fan.frank-zappa that I’ve learned Suzy Creamcheese was a real person; the name Phydeaux was the name of Frank’s tour bus; that Frank was deeply involved in post-revolutionary Czechoslovakia. It’s a treasure hunt out there. Newsgroups mark where the treasure’s buried.”

Newsgroups allow fans to chat about their favorite performers on a global level.

“A few years ago, I posted a message on rec.arts.startrek.current about ‘Star Trek’ Christmas carols,” said a user named “Burkert,” who peruses 30 groups each day. “I got a response from someone in England (named) Rob, asking me to update him on the show. I did, and we’ve become the best of friends. And I have yet to hear his voice or meet him in person.”

Such anonymity plays a large part in the medium’s appeal.

“I can be myself without any pretenses,” said Christine Faltz, 25, a recent law school graduate in Brooklyn who subscribes to 50 lists. “It’s easy to avoid issues you don’t want to discuss, easy to pick and choose the people you think you might like to know. And it allows you to be frank, to disagree with someone without the risk of a face-to-face rejection.”

Sometimes newsgroup participants elicit their own on-line following. In August, Faltz began posting a series of notes on alt.sex.fetish.startrek that depict graphic sexual scenarios between the characters of the TV show “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Faltz’s postings--titled “Oh Captain, My Captain!”--take advantage of the uncensored atmosphere of the Internet and detail the characters engaging in hetero- and homosexual couplings, group situations, light bondage and, in one case, a rape.

Publicists for several of the “Star Trek” actors said their clients were aware of “Oh Captain, My Captain!” but cast members declined to comment.

The electronic erotica project, now on its 21st installment, is more than 250 pages long.

“I’ve gotten an enormous response from people thanking me for making the characters realistic and writing a story that had an actual plot, as well as adding a sexual dimension to the characters,” Faltz said. “I’ve even received requests for certain liaisons between and among different characters.”

W hile anonymity allows sub scribers a certain degree of creative freedom, it also can mask a celebrity’s identity. After R.E.M.’s Stipe began exploring AOL, on-line readers spent several days debating whether “stipey” was legitimate or an impostor.

Stipe wrote an e-mail message on Aug. 1 to singer Love: “(A)ll they really wanted to know was why I hate apostrophes and what are the complete lyrics to the upcoming (yes it is titled monster) lp. most of them wanted proof it was me.”

Other celebrities have started to explore this electronic frontier. Author Tom Clancy uses his AOL account to chat with the public. Similarly, members of the band Sonic Youth all have on-line access, thanks to AOL.

The members of heavy-metal group Megadeth gab with fans through their own World Wide Web site. The Web, a collection of thousands of multimedia databases, is the fastest-growing service on the Internet. Unlike newsgroups, a Web site combines text with visuals, video snippets and sound clips.

Guitarist Dave Ellefson and singer Dave Mustaine cruise through the on-line mythical town “Megadeth, Ariz. . . . The Last Rest-Stop for Miles” nearly every day to chat in the Megadiner, tune into the local radio station K DETH 101, roll into the Digital Drive-In, check out their Horror Scope or add to Ellefson’s electronic tour diary, dubbed the Obituary.

On-line cruisers can access Megadeth, Ariz., at https://bazaar.com/ (the temporary site, which opened two months ago, will be pulled from the Internet on Dec. 31).

“At first, no one believed that Megaman was really Dave Mustaine,” said Charles Como, 30, a Hollywood-based computer programmer who established the fictional Arizona town for the band’s label, Capitol Records. “They’d start asking him all these questions, like who did the solo for this or where was something recorded. They knew more about Megadeth than he did. Finally some kid asked ‘What kind of car do you drive?’ and he said, ‘300 SL, silver.’ There was this pause, then everyone went nuts. You could actually feel the adrenaline rushing through these kids.”

Performers sometimes try to hide their identity while on-line. Courtney Love, lead singer of Hole and widow of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, spent last summer logging on to both Usenet and AOL using either the handle CMLC (her initials) or BRRRKNSTOK. Yet she often signed her e-mail with her real name.

Some of Love’s postings, which were scattered throughout cyberspace, railed against her biological father, whom she condemned for going on “Geraldo” to discuss Cobain even though he had never met the singer. She also talked about herself--”my bad review in spin (magazine), I DESERVED IT, I’m not complaining I was a mess and we sucked”--and would-be authors eager to pen an unauthorized Nirvana biography.

“I just got caught up in it,” Love said about her on-line activity in a recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine. “It was the void that you talk to. And since I didn’t speak to anybody else, I had to get in trouble some way.”

A few entertainment industry figures are permanent fixtures on Usenet. J. Michael Straczynski, the creator-writer-executive producer of the TV series “Babylon 5,” initially hooked up in 1984. Now, he has accounts on seven on-line services, including GEnie and CompuServe, and he reads about 500 newsgroup postings a day.

“My task as a writer is to create my universe as completely as possible,” said Straczynski, 40, who spends at least two hours on-line each day. “You need to keep asking new questions about the characters and their universe. When I see 500 messages a day, there are bound to be things I’ve never even thought about.”

Straczynski thinks newsgroups empower the audience:

“How many people in Iowa have access to speak to a television producer? Zip. But now they have this access, and it makes them a part of the process. It lets them understand how television is made.”

B ut how many people in Iowa can chat with Straczynski? Access to cyberspace is limited. The poor and uneducated are not represented. And since the bulk of the Usenet fan newsgroup postings are written in English, the system also excludes those who only read another language.

In general, Usenet is populated by the technological and cognitive elite. Those plugging in fall into one of three categories: computer professionals, undergraduate college students or anyone else who is educated enough to understand the software and financially solvent enough to buy the hardware.

“It’s not a true cross section of American society,” said Chris Carter, creator and executive director for Fox’s hit television show “The X-Files.” Carter logs on a private news-reader system once a week to scroll through folders dedicated to his show.

“You have to know what to do at the keyboard,” said Carter, 38. “Not everyone can do that. Even our two stars (actor David Duchovny and actress Gillian Anderson) are computer-illiterate. They survey the mail occasionally, but that’s it.”

Only rarely does the public connect directly to the stars. Most celebrities, like Stipe and Love, are curious tourists.

Some, like Conan O’Brien, rely on their staff to read through both fan mail and the on-line postings.

“It’s flattering, but there’s a real danger of getting caught up in reading that stuff,” he said. “It takes forever to get through it all, and for my show there’s the problem that you might tune everyone else out. Like ‘OK, this sketch is for the guy in Baltimore who e-mailed me, this skit is for him.’ ”

Notes occasionally do amuse O’Brien and his staff. At one point, subscribers engaged in a debate over the underlying meaning behind Tomorry the Ostrich. This recurring “Late Night” character--an 8-foot-tall bird--is used to announce guests scheduled to appear in upcoming shows.

“People were reading all this stuff into the bird,” O’Brien said. “They were saying, ‘Maybe Conan’s saying those guests are going to lay an egg’ or ‘I think the bird is Conan’s representation of NBC and the hidden anger he has toward NBC.’ But we were just trying to be funny.

“Sometimes, an ostrich is just an ostrich.”

While the technology may be intriguing, Hollywood insiders like Carter of “X-Files” see Usenet newsgroups as nothing more than an electronic fad:

“So much of what is written reads like a party line, with people yakking back and forth about minor things. Maybe I’m being shortsighted, but I don’t see the Internet revolutionizing Hollywood. It’s great for marketing purposes, and a great way for fans to meet and occasionally stumble into a celebrity.

“But it doesn’t affect my creative process. I think most people in Hollywood would agree with me.”*

* TRUTH IN E-MAILING

You can’t always believe what you read on the ‘Net, as users and celebrities can attest. Page 101.