Copy Link
Add to Bookmark
Report
Voices Issue 1.3
From swilbur@dad.bgsu.edu Thu Oct 28 08:46:32 1993
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1993 23:37:03 -0400 (EDT)
From: shawn wilbur <swilbur@dad.bgsu.edu>
Reply to: Voices-request@andy.bgsu.edu
To: voices@andy.bgsu.edu
Subject: VoicesFromTheNet1.3
**************************
Can * VOICES FROM THE NET *
you * VOICES FROM THE NET * ---
hear * *
our * 1.3 * Do
voices * VOICES LANGUAGE * you
? * "Let's talk about Net" * read
* * us
--- * VOICES FROM THE NET * ?
* VOICES FROM THE NET *
**************************
There are a lot of folks with at least one foot in this complex region we
call (much too simply) "the net." There are a lot of voices on these wires.
- all kinds of voices - loud and quiet, anonymous and well-known. And yet,
it's far from clear what it might mean to be a "voice" from, or on, the
net. Enter "Voices from the Net": one attempt to sample, explore, the
possibilities (or perils) of net.voices. Worrying away at the question.
Running down the meme. Looking/listening, and reporting back to you.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
WARNING: USE ONLY AS DIRECTED. INTENTIONAL MISUSE BY DELIBERATELY
CONCENTRATING AND INHALING THE CONTENTS CAN BE HARMFUL OR FATAL
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
_1.3_
ISSN 1072-1908
====
THIS ISSUE:
--VOICES CARRY
--SIGNAL/NOISE
From: Malinda
From: ChristJ
From: Abaddon
From: miekael
Adam Curry Update
--FEATURE: Harley Hahn
--A SHOuT IN THE DARK
--PREVIEWS
--INFO/ARCHIVES/ACCEPTABLE USE
====
VOICES CARRY: prepositional quibbling
On second thought...
OK. Perhaps we've been talking about those "voices from the net" as if they
were voices "on" or "in" the net, with these occasional echoes in our
"real" lives. But is that it? From andy.bgsu.edu to aol.com, and then..?
From: the Net
To: ?????
>From my brain to my fingers to the screen to your screen to your eyes to
your brain... with a few dozen other stops along the way...
Or farther, onto the printed page, into the flow of commerce and
information in the "real" world.
Perhaps it doesn't really matter where the voices go, if they "leave" the
net at all. Certainly, when we started this project we intended little
more than to mix things up, carry some voices, facilitate introductions
all 'round. An occasional reminder of the diversity of net.folks is bound
to have its positive effects, for all of us "out here."
But preaching to the choir has its limitations. Have you ever tried to
talk to someone about what you do "out here"?
a: well, i was talking to my friend Yeroc the other day on the MOO...
b: MOO..? talking..? OH! you mean on the computer, NOT *REALLY* TALKING!...
Sound familiar? We face translation problems. It's not that we speak a
totally alien tongue. In fact, its deceptively familiar ring may be
disturbing to the uninitiated, just as the seriousness, the "reality," of
net.life may be disorienting for newbies. So what does it take to bridge
the gap between worlds, to make the net intelligible?
In this issue, we're starting an exploration of that question, and, more
broadly, of the ways in which our net.lives translate into "real" life.
We've been lucky enough to find some folks with strong, sometimes
comtroversial or even outrageous, opinions about the net, and about the
world. You won't agree with everything they say. That's ok. Niether do we.
But if you let that blind you to the strength and sincerity of the voices
involved, then you'll lose out. Listen carefully, critically, but listen...
--bookish
==============
SIGNAL/NOISE
Signal/noise: the ratio between the useful information in a given
environment and the useless nonsense that inevitably accompanies it, even
threatens to drown it out. It's a useful measure, as long as you don't need
to reduce it to a number or something. But always remember: one
net.entity's signal is another's noise. And an environment which one person
finds objectionably noisy may seem serene to someone else. There are many
voices out there - many kinds of voices - and many environments that affect
how those voices appear to other folks across the wires. What follows is a
dip into the ocean of such voices, presented in such a way as to preserve
the feel of the particular environment. Much of it was generated on the
spot in realtime interactive settings, and it has that mix of exciting
spontenaity and confusion. It's up to you to decide what's signal and
what's noise.
>Letters, we get letters... Actually, we don't get a lot of mail from you
>folks, but we certainly appreciate hearing from people who have read the
>magazine. And sometimes the comments are more on the mark than you could
>know. This note, for instance, in response to issue 1.1, addressed
>several of the same issues as the interviews in 1.2:
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1993 13:21:23 -0400 (EDT)
From: Malinda
To: Voices-request@andy.bgsu.edu
Subject: Voices From The Net
I have 1.1, would like to subscribe & to receive back issues I have missed.
Very good articles/personalities/content.
FYI, I MUD as Ghislaine and often find myself thinking in the third
person.... and I type smilies on mail now....most folks miss it, wonder
what the colon close parenthesis means (I omit the n dash).
I am a newbie, I just learned about the Net in January and was able to
access it in March or April. I discovered the joy of newsgroups and
participated on some of the chattier ones (like alt.romance...somehow I
became the grande aunt/doyenne, since I am older than most
netdenizens--27, I think...would have to count back to be sure--and since
I have a "happy, normal, satisfying" relationship with a MOTAS--Member of
the Appropriate Sex--in my case a male named Steven. :] )
It got tiring being a doyenne/maven/what-have-you. I'd get congratulated
on my common sense. One thing that was not touched on is the common
problem ladies gripe about: net.harrassment.
Here are some of the things I have experienced or heard about:
1) Strangers getting your e-mail address and logging on to "talk" and
pretending they know you. They ask progressively more personal questions,
etc., and since you can't see or hear the person, you are left wondering
if you do know them.
2) I was quoted in a reply to a thread that was posted to alt.sex.** and I
got a mailbox full of propositions as a result. I couldn't figure it out
until I realized I was crossposted. The only appropriate response seemed
to be "go away, I was crossposted, not interested", but some of the
strangers were more gross and more persistent.
3) In a MUD, was harrassed by a wizard who broke the MUD's rules about
bothering players. I was encouraged to report details by the player I was
with at the time, the wizard was demoted. Some witnesses noted that the
reactions of the ex-wiz and of my player character were similar to those
studied in their rape awareness classes at their universities.
4) I am not interested in MUD/MUSH/MOO marriage, but surely some people
out there could provide useful info for you.
5) Spamming/clotting mailboxes-mailbombing: Spamming can be used as
offense or defense. (Spamming = flooding the screen with "soul commands",
similar commands, chatter, etc.)
Mailbombing: never ask anyone on a less-cerebral newsgroup to send you
anything. A request on alt.humor for an ASCII picture resulted in one person
sending me three long art files that took up 40% of my filespace.
...
Lastly, Ed Krol writes a lot of books that helped me, as a newbie, surf
the Net with some ease. I have his e-mail address and was desperate one
day with a net question and he kindly took the time to respond to me. He
might be an interesting personality to look up....
And lest I forget, Kibo. :)
RIP Robert McElwaine: Un-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this
IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED. For a newer but equally irritating
net.nerd, try Riley G. [Matthews] on sci.skeptic. Joel Furr[fu] is a
net.personality enamoured of lemurs. I am sure you have met all three in
your net travels. Alt.callahans is a "space" where folx meet to chat and
play and pretend. It is *very* loosely based on Spider Callahan's books.
It is like a MUD in that people adopt personalities and chat thru them.
As I said, sometimes I MUD (mostly for chat) and some of the better
chatting is on marble.bu.edu 5000 (a diku)....I pick nicknames only for
the anonymity/safety aspect. Most folks know all about me as I don't hide
my RL name or whatever once I know the people better. I am often
Ghislaine. No particular reason for the name. :)
Hope this is useful info. :)
Malinda
* * *
>Some messages come to us by more roundabout routes. This one came through
>the Future Culture list, when we can often be found, from our old pal,
>ChristJ (no relation...)
Date: Sun, 1 Aug 1993 01:33:15 -0400
From: ChristJ
Reply to: Future Culture <FUTUREC%UAFSYSB.BITNET@PSUVM.PSU.EDU>
To: Multiple recipients of list FUTUREC <FUTUREC%UAFSYSB.BITNET@PSUVM.PSU.EDU>
Subject: in praise of "Voices"
Good job bookish and CZ and everyone who made the first issue of voices a
freakin godsend for me. On the verge of net boredom/burnout I got the
chance to remember why i love this place so much in the first place. Jesus
(not me actually) I can't even remember how I got here, let alone how I'm
gonna get back. Good thing I dont wanna go back.
Man, I'm kinda tired...
Butthead: "huh huh. Voices is cool. huh huh"
Beavis: "Yeah. voices kicks ass"
[stupid rock video]
Kinda makes me wonder how it all began. How does the net become so much a
part of someones life that you start thinking "Oh, I need to @create a
note to write this down on" only to remember that you don't have a RL
programmers bit. Who is the damned RL sysadmin anywayz!?
Yikes... I am getting worked up here. Better not feel emotions or
anything. Can't have that. Nah. The net is just a bunch of computers,
right? ones and zeros, ons and offs. What kinda weirdo takes it and
integrates it into a very real part of real life?
You know how it is... You go to the mailbox and read your mail. Oh.
Yeah, there is a mailbox outside too, not just the one that you get e-mail
in. No good UPS system here for shipping bikes and t-shirts over the net
yet though. Gotta post that to the MOO projects list. Or something.
The net as religion is something we brought up here before isn't it. I
really don't know how much experience anyone here has with RL religions,
but I can draw some major parallels myself. Prayer/spew/rant/post. Its
all the same. There is a reason that they call this a virtual community.
...
(quick question, and I feel like this is getting really long and probably
boring... "I feel these wires" - andy ... do we all feel the same wires,
or do we make our own? whose RL is this anywayz?)
___________________________________________________________________________
<> ChristJ <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Citizen of Earth <>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
* * *
>The importance of the ethical dimensions of cyberspace, and its place in
>the midst of more general strivings for a better world also occupy Abaddon:
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 93 15:32:56 PDT
From: Abaddon
To: Voices-request@andy.bgsu.edu
Subject: Comments on Issue #1
Several times, both in the interviews and in the on-line session logs,
comments were made to the tune of "you are only just one voice, and in
the larger scheme of things, relatively insignificant." While for many
people that may well be true, it seems that for someone who is hip-deep in
c-space one voice can be much more than one voice. Take a peek back through
history -- Hitler, Lincoln, Washington, Khan, Lysander, Socrates. These
to were only single voices, many with much less of a medium of
transmission than the Net. (FYI, do to circumstances beyond my control,
my current job only has VM interface to the Net. Gads. Thus explains the
poor formatting. :-) [Never fear, Shawn, we cleaned it up before we
published it.] As I was saying, the "power" of your voice is not in
direct numbers, but in the number of people that it influences. Whether
in c-space or in RL, people crave the same things, have the same base
desires. One of the reasons that the Net is so popular is it means never
having to be alone. Take a look at "Being and Nothingness" by Sartre. The
Net is the newest, biggest, bestest (tm) way for some people to secure
their own reality. Weird concept, huh? Founding yourself in a virtual
world? But it is the interaction with others, so Sartre would have us
believe, that you attempt to ground yourself.
The trick, then, if you are searching for power out in Net.World, is to
do the same things you would in RL. That is, understand the needs of others
and exploit them shamelessly. Everyone wants something, has a missing
part of themselves, and the Net is one of the easier ways to try and fill
that. Notice, I said easier, not necessarily better. The Net is just another
entertainment, just another tool. The important difference, as was noted
before, is that you have some measure of control, albeit a small one.
I've been riding the waves, so to speak, for over five years now, and
the Net still manages to surprise me almost daily. The variety of humanity
is a well that will not be fathomed (although you can come close with some
good ol fashion generalities. :-) I suppose after all this, the main
point would be something along these lines:
Decide your goals. The Net is no more nor less than one more way of
achieving what you want, whether it be your own satisfaction, that of
others, or something completely beyond the realm of current society. Once
you know what you want, the Net is a very powerful tool to achieve your
ends. I would just hope that in doing so, making your own dreams into
your own realities, that you would take the time to look around you, and
give aid to those perhaps not so focused or fortunate as yourself. Single
voices do have the power, hopefully the denizens of the Net will use it
more wisely than the rest of Humanity has in the past.
Shawn
AKA
Abaddon
I wont mention this VM-address-poor-substitue-for-a-connection-thing.
Much too horrible a thing to contemplate.
* * *
>Finally, we received this note from miekael (of Spunk Press), answering
>our favorite question:
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 93 09:47:22 +0200
From: miekael
To: bookish
Subject: Voices from the Net: Request for....
To hear a voice from the net is the same thing as getting a phone call
in the middle of the night from Sweden with someone shouting "WAKE
UP!" Simultaneously about 25,000 other people recieves an identical
phone call and all you know is that you're shouting back in the phone,
crossing the atlantic in milliseconds. This is true interactivity,
this is what the net is all about.
Miekael
* * *
>And, finally...
>Did I already say that? Well, more than finally then... An update:
Adam Curry invites everyone to check out his new site: mtv.com
and look for his new e-tabloid: _Cyber-Sleaze_
Really! go check it out! anonymous ftp to mtv.com is a good way to start...
==============
FEATURE: _Harley Hahn: Author_
Harley Hahn found us, very soon after we started Voices. One day we
received a surprisingly enthusiastic note in our mailbox, suggesting that
we might want to be listed in a soon-to-be-published Internet guide, and
that, while we were at it, we might also want to interview the author.
Harley assured us that he had many interesting and controversial things to
say. He hasn't let us down. It might have been a simple "you scratch my
back and i'll scratch yours" sort of exchange, a publicity swap (and a
little publicity never hurt a new publication), but we hope you'll agree
that what we got was a lot more than just self-promotion. What follows is
the result of a telephone interview that lasted well over an hour, and it
covers a lot of ground. But so, apparently, does Harley Hahn.
He's a "internationally recognized author, analyst and consultant,
specializing in Unix and other operating systems." He's written a number
of books, including _Peter Norton's Guide to Unix_ (with Peter Norton), _A
Student's Guide to Unix_, and the newly published _The Internet Complete
Reference_ (with Rick Stout). He has a degree in mathematics and computer
science from the University of Waterloo in Canada, and a graduate degree
in computer science from the University of California at San Diego. And
Scott Yanoff said nice things about his Internet guide...
So now let's hear what Harley has to say:
<Voices> We were looking over the introductions to your two books
[Student's Guide to Unix, Internet Complete Reference] and it seems to
us that maybe you have something like a cosmology of the Internet-Unix
linkup here, a sort of big picture which is driving a lot of what you
are doing. Some of the other people we've talked to have quibbled over
the question about "What is the Net?" Do you want to start by tackling that
question?
<Harley Hahn> Well you know, there are lots of questions in life that sound
simple but they don't really have satisfying answers and I think that
that's one of them because there's no real good definition of it. If you
maybe take a simpler question and ask "What is Unix?"
v: yes
h: People can say it's an operating system, but it's a lot more than
that. People can say it's a family of operating systems, but other people
say it's a collection of tools for solving problems for smart people or
other people say it's really an approach to solving problems, and other
business oriented people say it's a computer system which runs a certain
type of software with certain interfaces. And you come down to the fact
that there's lots of questions in life and in the world of computers that
sound like a question because they're a sentence and they have a
question mark at the end and if it sounds like a question then it should
have an answer, but it really doesn't have a good answer. So the real
answer is that, depending on who you are, the question has different answers,
and even then the answer may change over time.
I guess I can give you three answers to the question "What is the Net?"
The first one is: You can say that the Net is just the short form for
Internet, and the Internet is this large collection of other networks
and it's a physical thing that actually exists with phone lines and
computers and data being stored all over the place and so on. That's
what the Internet is and "the Net" just stands for the Internet. The
second answer is: A lot of people when they say "the Net" mean Usenet.
They mean where the discussions go on. So you could say that Usenet is a
system of discussion groups all over the world and then "Net" is just an
abbreviation for Usenet. I find that in practice people kind of switch
back an forth between the two definitions, sometimes when they say "the
Net" like someone says "I need a recipe" and someone says "Why don't you
ask on the Net" then they're clearly talking about Usenet. Sometimes
when somebody says "I'd like to send you email are you on the Net?"
they're talking about the Internet because Usenet doesn't have
electronic mail. So "the Net" can mean Internet, "the Net" can mean
Usenet, but that's not what the most interesting meaning to me. The most
interesting meaning is that it's sort of a global gathering place. It
certainly doesn't involve everyone in the world, not even most people in
the world, not even most people in the United States and Europe and
Japan and the developed countries, but it's the largest gathering of
human beings that has ever existed in the history of mankind and it's
getting larger and larger and it looks like it's going to be the
ancestor of something that eventually everybody will be able to gather
whenever they want. So that's what i think of "the Net". I don't think
of it as meaning only the Internet or meaning only Usenet. I think of it
as meaning a network of people that right now depends on the Internet
and right now the discussion groups depend on Usenet, but you could take
away the Internet and put in a different infrastructure, and you could
take away Usenet and put in a different way to have discussion groups,
but we would still have "the Net." We would still have that gathering.
v: For an unanswerable question you handled that quite nicely.
h: Can I point out why i think that is significant?
v: sure
h: I'll try to say it in a few sentences. If somebody says "hey try this
new word processing program", there are word processing programs that
already exist so it's not really new it's just a new variation. And if
you've only typed on a typewriter and someone says "try this new word
processing program" it's a lot more new to you because you've never seen
anything like it, but still you've typed on a typewriter, and even before
then you've written stuff down on paper. The thing about "the Net" is
that it is something that has never existed ever before in the history of
human beings. It's not like in the way that a word processing program is
just more automatic or computerized than typing which might be more
mechanical than writing on paper. "The Net" is not just something that we
already have to a larger scope because if you connect everybody with
email it's not the same as a large email network. The character and the
quality of it change. There's a size, i don't think it's an exact size, but
once you get over a certain size it becomes more than just a large
version of something you already have. So the significance of "the Net"
is not that it's just a large gathering, because certainly there have
been gatherings of human beings since there have been human beings. I
call it a large gathering but that's because I don't have a better word.
It's something that never existed before in the history and culture of
human beings and that's why it's significant. Its sheer size ties the
world together, or it's beginning to, in a way that nobody even imagined was
possible.
v: Something like an actual collective consciousness?
h: Well, I think that's the first thing that you might start thinking
about because you talk about something that's greater than the sum of its
parts, but I think that say in fifty years when you look back and when
it's pretty well understood what this "Net" thing is, it may be called
something different by then. People will say the idea that it is a
collective consciousness was maybe a good way to start thinking about it
but it was kind of a rudimentary, naive way. It's really a lot more than
that. It's a lot more than a collective consciousness, and I don't even
know that it's a collective consiousness really.
I know that ever since the beginning of time it seems whenever human
beings have had a chance to communicate, they do. They get together.
Whenever there's a chance to send messages they do, and the "Net" that
we're building, it seems like we don't know why we're building it, and
we're almost unconscious that we're building it, but collectively we are
trying to connect up to one another as much as possible. But I think
that's it's more than a group consciousness, it's very much individual
consciousness that's doing things. For example, yesterday I connected to
IRC (ed. Internet Relay Chat) and I could talk with anyone who happened
to be on there, and that's not a collective consciousness at all because
it's just me talking to individuals, and yet qualitatively I think
that's different than say talking to you on the phone right now.
v: You have mentioned (in previous conversations) some of the new social
organizations that are happening on the Net...
h: There's new social organizations, yes, and that's probably a better
word, although it's longer, than gathering. I think when you say social
organizations, you're saying people are organizing themselves in new
ways, and we don't have a word to describe it yet so we'll call it social
organization and then later we'll get some more familiar terms. What I'm
saying is we need a vocabulary. In order to discuss things you have to
have words to represent the ideas, and we don't have enough words yet to
represent all the new ideas of the things we're creating or the things
that are happening out of our creations. So we call it "the Net", but
that's not a good word. What we need are new words that don't have any
connotations and the only meanings they have are representations of all
these new things that are happening, but those new words have not yet
arisen so we can talk about social organization but then we have to be vague.
v: There is of course that whole net.language, to use the form in which
it rears its ugly head all the time, that's developed that seems to work
on the model of attaching prefixes and suffixes and all of that...
h: We have to make a distinction between two types of things. There are
words that are used on the Net but then there are words that are used to
talk about the Net. Some words are in both. There are abbreviations and
slang that people on the Net use, but that's the same everywhere. You go
to a part of a city that has it's own culture or a part of the country or
a different country, they all have their own slang and their own words
that nobody else understands. At a level beyond that, what we need are
words to talk ABOUT the Net and how it's important, and what it's like to
use it, and what it means to us as human beings. Maybe a good example is
the word newsgroup. You use the word newsgroup on the net, and it's
slang, and it means something, but newsgroup we can call a meta-word, a
word to talk about ideas and other words. Newsgroup is a concept now that
we're beginning to understand, and now we can sort of understand what
that means so we can talk about newsgroups. We need a whole lot of new
words like newsgroup to talk about the ideas. We can talk about a gopher
and we can talk about newsgroups and there's probably some other things.
What we're missing are all the words to talk about what the whole thing
means on a larger scale.
v: Yes, you've done some work which is very much related to this business
of establishing ways of talking about the net both in the work you've
done in trying to make UNIX accesible and now the new book on making the
Internet accesible. Do you see part of your role there as at least
working towards that meta-language?
h: Yes, but i don't think about that primarily. In one sense I do. I'm
very careful how I use words, and of course most of my books, almost
every word, is written in regular English, but when you come to the terms
that aren't regular English I think carefully about how I want to use them.
For an example, when I write UNIX I'll write it with a "U" but then a
"nix" because to me Unix is not just a brand name and people are starting
to realize that now. That's a simple one. I see my books, because so many
people read them and because they are about what I call important
subjects, that I'm very careful how I use the new words because one of
the criteria we use for how we should use and spell a word is what we see
in print. So I know if I put it in a book and tens or hundreds of
thousands of people read it, that in a sense becomes a tiny bit of
authority. I try to use the words in a way that I want people to use
them. I spell Unix the way I think people ought to spell Unix, and I talk
about it that way. The same way as I talk about a newsgroup. I use the
word newsgroup in the new modern meaning of a Usenet discussion group. I
don't call it net.news for instance. Some people do. I call it Usenet
because I want people to call it Usenet. I want to codify that word.
I think one of the most interesting words that you can see that is becoming
part of the vocabulary is RTFM. To me RTFM is a great word because it's
becoming a word in its own, and I want to help it become a word in its
own, and it doesn't have any vowels so I think that's pretty neat. To me
the idea of RTFM grew out of the original meaning which was an acronym
which meant Read The Fucking Manual, and it meant nothing more than that.
It just meant read the manual before you ask somebody a question, but now
RTFM means a much broader idea. It means that you should try to help
yourself before you ask for help. It means the other side of that coin
that if somebody who has tried to help themselves and they ask you for
help than you have an obligation to help them. RTFM is very important
because the Net is so large that it is literally impossible for everybody
to be taught what they need to know to use it, so it needs a culture of
teaching yourself. RTFM is a new net.word and I try to codify in my books
by explaining it and using it as a word in this new language. We do have
a few new words to talk about this new Net idea that exists, so in some
small sense to answer your question, yes, I see one of my jobs as
defining and codifying and exemplifying this new vocabulary so people
around the world can use it.
v: That's an interesting way of transforming that acronym from a
snide retort to something between an ethics and an etiquette...
h: Well, if you take any word in the dictionary and look it up in one of
these large dictionaries that shows the history of the word you always
see it started out somewhere, in English it's usually Greek or Latin, but
it could have started of with an English word that meant something and
then got turned into this and that, all our words came from somewhere. I
noticed that RTFM was originally an acronym, and then people started
using it like a verb, like "I RTFM'ed but I couldn't find the answer".
And they started using it like a noun sometimes and so on, and people
just do this because new words are formed all the time. When new ideas
exist there's a vacuum until a new word comes along to express that idea.
So the vacuums usually get filled fairly quickly, and one of my jobs is
to notice these new words and to point them out to people and teach them
the vocabulary. Not all the technical terms necessarily, but the
vocabulary of ideas because they can't understand or think or talk about
the Net until they have the words that express the ideas that are part of
the Net. So it's much more important to learn these things than it is,
say, some technical option for anonymous FTP or something like that.
v: So you see part of your role as helping to establish a basic literacy?
h: I think that's a good way of putting it, but I want to be very clear
that I'm not making new stuff up and saying that anyone should be
literate by repeating how I think it should be done. I'm more of an
observer. I observe what the literate people on the Net do, how they
talk, how they think, how they express themselves, what words they use,
and then I write in that same language so when you read what I write you
are really reading the language of the literate people on the Net. I
guess if you read some books in English that are written to express the
vocabulary and ideas of, say, the most educated people in our society,
then by reading those books you can learn new words and you can learn
ideas and you can learn how educated people think. In this sense, if you
can read an Internet book that discusses things in the way that the most
literate net.people do then you can start to become part of that culture,
part of that society, and you want to aspire to learn how to think like the
best people in your culture not like the mainstream more popular people
in the culture.
v: You talk quite a bit in your books about the global nature of the Net,
and the fact that it is the largest gathering, and you say that people
won't be excluded on the Net due to race or wealth or religion and all of
those sorts of things. Are there ultimately going to be techinical
hierarchies that are set up in terms of how well you can use the tools at
hand?
h: Can I turn that question around and change it a little bit?
v: Certainly, feel free.
h: Are there or will there be exclusions on the Net based on other
criteria? The answer is definitely yes. You see, every group in society,
even a large social organization...
let me backtrack and say I don't think this is a huge global
organization, I think it's a collection of small, ever-changing, coming
in to being and then disappearing, smaller social organizations. anyways...
Any social organization does exclude people, but on the Net they don't
exclude people on the basis of what you look like. The exclusions are
based on intelligence and ability so on the Net we don't discriminate
against people of the wrong color. We discriminate against stupid people,
And we don't discriminate against people who don't have enough money; we
discriminate against people who are lazy. We don't discriminate against
people who are the wrong religion; we discriminate against people who
aren't willing to learn something so they can use a new tool. We don't
discriminate against people who wear the wrong clothes; we discriminate
against people who in a discussion don't have anything important to say
or act like idiots. In a very crude way the Net discriminates/excludes
stupid people. It's not supposed to be fair, but there's too much in life
where you can be accepted even if you're sub-standard, and on the Net
that doesn't work because you don't see anybody and you can have
completely free choice in who you want to talk to. When you read Usenet
articles which ones you want to respond to or pay attention to. If you
want to say something bad about what someone said you can just go ahead
and do it, and you also have enormous freedom to say and do whatever you
want because you know you can't really hurt someone. If you send them a
mean spirited reply to something they've posted in a newsgroup you know
it doesn't hurt them really, not like if you discriminate against them
and don't hire them for a job because you don't like their color or you
hit them and take away their money or something. We have enormous
freedom, and it's really a meeting of the minds. It's certainly not a
meeting of the bodies or of the mouths or the ears or anything like that.
I wouldn't say so much of a hierarchy, but as we organize ourselves into
transient social units that there definitely is a premium put on people
whose minds work better than other people's. For example, if you're
talking on IRC, if there's five people in a conversation and one person
has intelligent, interesting things to say, and the other person is kind
of a dullard, doesn't have much to say, then the attention gravitates
towards the person who has something more interesting to say, and so
there's a discrimination there, a discrimination of ideas, and a
discrimination of what really is worthwhile about human beings. Some
people might feel it's worthwhile to be big and large and be a football
player, but when you come right down to it what serves us most as human
beings are people who are smart and have ideas and can be convincing and
compelling. People who can teach other people, contributing ways where a
mind can meet another mind. I think there's one thing that's very
appealing to smart people about the Net is that you can go ahead and no
matter what you're like in the other part of your life you can just go
and let whatever brilliance you have shine forth and people will
appreciate it. I think this is one of the things that's scary to other
people. I don't mean people get scared at the beginning because it's a
new society and they're not used to the nuances. Everybody feels that,
but people who aren't very smart, people who are lazy, people who don't
want to work hard, people who don't want to teach themselves something,
they don't like it so much because for the first time they're actually
being judged on what they're worth, and they can't get an incomplete and
they can't do extra work to turn a C into a B and they can't show they're
good because they earn more money or something like that. The only thing
that makes them worthwhile is what they say and what they think and what
comes out in words, it's not what they look like and I think that's scary
to a lot of people, other people just lap it up and they love it.
v: I guess we hesitate to use IRC as the only example because there are
people who are more shy who do very well on the asyncronous environments
like Usenet.
h: That's a very good point. Everybody has different ways of expressing
themselves and communicating. What's great about the Net is we've used
this physical Internet and created all these types of communication that,
if you like talking in real time you can talk in real time and if you
like being thoughtful and thinking about what you're doing and writing it
down and changing it you can talk in Usenet discussion groups where you
have all the time you want, and different people who shine in different
ways can find somewhere to shine on the Net. I guess the way I would put
it is that the great thing about the Net is no matter what you're good at
there's a place for you, there's nobody who doesn't have a place on the Net
because the Net is made up of millions of people and although you may not
get along with your neighbor, in a set of millions of people, there are
going to be people there for you.
v: That's a good way to talk about that.
h: But there is an obligation, you see, we don't pay for the Net. You
might pay twenty, thirty, fifty bucks a month to get access, you might
have it for free because of where you work or where you go to school, but
we don't really pay for it because there's this hugely enormous
infrastructure and nobody pays for that. It's paid for by organizations
and governments and so on out of taxes or tuition or whatever. We do have
an obligation, but our obligation is not a monetary one. Our obligation is to
educate ourselves and train ourselves to use the tools, to learn some
etiquitte, to learn how to get along with other people, and to not back
away from learning things that you can't just learn in ten seconds. We
have an obligation to start using our brains here, and stop being lazy,
and maybe stop watching so much television. I say that in a sense that
whatever part of your brain is engaged when you watch television is the
exact opposite of what's engaged when you're using the Net. The more you
watch television, the harder it is to use the Net. The more you use the
Net, the less satisfying television will be.
v: Let's go back to the access question. It's a wealth issue, you have to
have the money to afford a computer or afford an account, and then
there's a lot of talk about commercialization/privatization issues, where
do you think this is all going to work in as far as public access goes?
h: One of the things we have to do on the Net is to stop being parochial.
We have to learn that we're talking about more than just the United States
here. Every country is organized differently, and there's vast changes,
and vast differences in size. In the United States the Net I believe is
going to become more and more commercial because the government is going
to want to stop paying for it. In other countries, they're much smaller
and I don't know if it could be supported by direct market competition,
so the government will probably still support the Net.
But within the United States, if I can answer your question, the Net will
become more commercial, and I think what we will start to see is that
access to the Net will be a lot more like access to the telephone system
and access to the postal system in that there will be providers, at least
in the short term. It won't be exactly like this, but it will be like
cable tv, telephone, buying electricity, buying gas, putting stamps to
send something. I don't know what exact form it will take, but I think
that the government is going to get more and more out of the Net business
and let private enterprise get more and more into the Net business. We
may see the days when many people have free access to the Net start to
disappear. We may have to start paying for it, but I think that the
prices will be reasonable and it will be worth it. I think that it is
going to become such an important part of many people's lives that we
can't do without it. After all, no matter what it costs within reason,
you have to have a telephone and you have to have access to the postal
system and you pretty much have to be able to buy electricity and maybe
gas if you need gas where you live, and the Net is going to be like that.
There's a company in the northeast United States that is going to start
selling net.access through cable. You can buy access to the Net by
plugging your computer into a coax(ial) cable. You won't have to get a
regular modem and dial up a host computer. The advantage of this is that
the direct hook-up will be closer to the speeds of an ethernet network as
opposed to the speeds of a regular modem. All these experiments that will
start to happen in the United States over the next few years and we'll
see what happens, which ones work out and which ones don't. There's going
to be enormous change in the Net. There's something that just happened in
the last year and it's hard to characterize, except we'll look back and
we'll figure out what it was, that some great fundamental change happened
in the Net and people are starting to perceive that it's a necessity of
life, and now all of our culture, advertising, business, laws, government
agencies, newspapers, public opinion is all going to start to be part of
the Net like it is part of our newspapers, telephone, postal system and
so on. We're going to embrace this part of our culture and things are
going to change a lot.
Could I talk about why I think the Net is important?
v: Yes! Great!
h: Of course we have email which we can't do without now, and we have
gopher and Usenet and all these other things, but I think the Net is more
important in another way. When you write books, it's a lot of work, and
you have to sit home and you're all alone and you do all this work and
you never get to meet the people who read the book and if they like them
you never really get much praise from them because a book writer never
really meets his audience. So you have to have an inner drive that keeps
you going. One of them is certainly money because that's how I earn my
living, and people who write books, if they don't write, they don't make
money. But I have a much larger drive here, at least in writing about the
Internet and UNIX, in that I think it has an importance that transcends
the obvious things like email and gopher and so on. I think that it's the
most important vehicle for world peace that we've ever had the chance to
use yet. I trace back the events of the last twenty-five years that we
really notice in the last five years the change in the Soviet Union, the
changes in China which are happening, the Berlin Wall falling, the Arabs
and Israelis talking together, many many changes I believe, why is this
happening now, why not before? Because information flows freely now from
place to place. I have a belief that inherently people are good, not
everybody all the time, but as a race we are good people, whatever good
means. If we are allowed free and unfettered communication, free and
adequate communication between ourselves, we will want to be peaceful, we
will want to help each other, we will want to get along. Over the last
two generations as information began to be global with CNN news and
satellites and all these things all over the place, that's when the world
started to wake up and start working together and get along better. I
think that the potential for the Net for people to communicate is much
larger than the newspapers and radio and television. I see the Net as
being our best hope, in fact, our inevitable hope and it definitely will
happen, for the world finally starting to become a global community and
everybody just getting along with everyone else. Now I don't mean this on
a personal level, you'll still be fighting with the person next door, I
mean that countries will start to get along. I mean that the economies of
all the different countries and all the divisions within a country
because of the Net and global trade and less tariffs and television, will
become so dependent on one another that no one will be able to afford to
make war anymore or to fight on a large scale and it will become
unthinkable. For example, it's absolutely unthinkable for the United
States to go to war with Japan now, even thought there is a history of
animosity there in the past, the two economies are so tied together it
would be like you going to war with your foot, you couldn't shoot
yourself in the foot because it would end up killing you. The Net is
tying together the world in such a way that the best of human nature
comes out, and it's what is making the world more and more peaceful and
more and more wonderful. It's the most important gift we have to leave
the generations that come after us, and that's why it's so important for
me to make the Net, and to make UNIX accesible to people. Until people
learn what they need to use these social organizations, none of this can
happen. The more people that learn how to use the Net, the more people
participate in these transient social organizations, and the faster we
evolve into a wonderful human culture that is really our birthright. I
think we're just starting to see the potential of human beings, and the
Net is starting to do that for us. In a very narrow sense, and I'm being
ignorant here, but that all of human culture and history and effort so
far has been sort of concentrating just so we can all get connected up
together, and finally we are all getting connected up together and now
we're going to see what happens. This is really the beginning of human
culture right now starting in the early 1990's, and what we're seeing is
far more wonderful and exciting and interesting than anything that anybody
ever dreamed of before. I really think that there is a watershed here,
starting with computers in the 50's and the Net in the 80's and 90's, that
you'll look back and everything before that will be called primitive times.
v: So how do you start when you're trying to write the COMPLETE reference
to the Internet? I know you say early on in the book that knowing even
any big part of the Net is probably beyond any of us. How do you take on
a project like that?
h: Well, the way I did this is I said to myself "I imagine a person who
is extremely literate in the sense that he knows how to use just about
every important thing that's out there on the Net to at least a basic
level." That's saying a lot. So I answered the question "What does a
literate person need to know right now about how to use the Net?" So for
example, if you read the chapter about gopher, veronica, and jughead, you
will learn what a literate person needs to know about gopher, veronica,
and jughead. That's how I went about doing it. The Internet Complete
Reference is almost a misnomer, maybe a better title would be What a
Literate, Informed, Intelligent Person Should Know About Every Aspect of
the Internet.
v: Be tough to put all of that on the cover though! We have previously
talked about interfaces and how the Net is going to be made accessible to
new users. You'd expressed something close to disdain in the book about
the wide use of graphic interfaces as a solution to UNIX as what is
perceived to be an unfriendly system. Do you want to talk a little about
where you think the interface trail is leading?
h: OK. You used the word solution and I really don't think that there is
a problem here, or if there is a problem it's not what some people think
the problem is. The problem is not that the Net is hard to use, the
problem with UNIX is not that UNIX is hard to use. Let's take a look at
something simple like a newspaper. Almost everbody in the country over
the age of whatever who learns to read can read a newspaper. Look how
much work is involved in learning how to read a newspaper. I mean, you
have to learn how to read, and that's difficult, it takes years. You have
to learn the layout of the newspaper, you have to learn the conventions.
Reading the newspaper is actually a very difficult thing to learn how to
do. If you took somebody who was raised away from culture, somebody
raised by wolves on a desert island, and they might be the same age as
you now and they might be able to speak english, but if you tried to
teach them how to read a newspaper it might take years. If you say a
newspaper is difficult to learn how to read, the solution is not to make
the newspaper easier, it's not to publish newspapers where everything is
made in simple pictures because you lose too much. You gain so much by
being able to express yourself in the newspaper in words and complex
ideas and sentence structure, using grammar and layout and columns and
continuations and pictures and so on, that you would lose too much if you
said all newspapers have to be made up of simple pictures that people who
don't know how to read can understand because that way they'll be
accesible to everybody. No, we don't do that. What we say is "If you want
to be part of our culture, you have to learn how to read." If you want to
use the Net and you want to use UNIX and you want to use a program it's a
mistake to say "let's make it so easy that somebody on their first day or
their first week will feel familiar with it and will feel at home and
will find it easy." That would be just as much a mistake as saying "we
can't have any written newspapers we can only have simple pictures that
are delivered to your door every day." The problem with people accessing
is the same problem that somebody has in accessing the newspaper who
can't read. So, the solution is not to say the newspaper has to be all
simple pictures, but that the person has got to learn how to read.
There's not a problem that the Net is too hard, there's only people who
haven't learned how to use it yet. You lose too much of the complexity by
trying to make it too simple. You can't make it simple to learn because
it's not a simple thing. You can't make a newspaper simple to read
because it's not a simple thing. What you can do is build a tool that
once a person learns it, it will be easy to use. When we talk about
making these easy to use we have to distinguish between somebody that has
experience, and somebody that doesn't. What we have to do is make things
easier to use by people with experience. If we try to make everything
easy to use for the people that don't have experience, then we end up
watering everything down, and we end up losing the ability to express
complex ideas and do complex things. Imposing a easy to use graphical
user interface on many of the things on the Net isn't going to work.
What's necessary is to say not that the system is hard to use, in fact
I'll explain in a minute the Internet is extremely easy to use for what
it does, the problem is that it takes a while to learn it. So what we
have to do is we have to help people learn how to access it, and we have
to encourage them to keep trying because at the beginning it's not going
to seem easy. We have to help people so that they will keep trying until
it becomes second nature. Some people perceive that it's difficult, we
have to change that perception. One of the things is that a lot of people
come to Net when they are already adults. I think what you will find is
that the kids who are using the Net will learn how to use the stuff
without any problem at all and they'll feel right at home and when
they're 25 they won't understand why a 25 year old would think that
anonymous FTP is a difficult thing to learn how to use anymore than
at your age you think how anybody could think that driving is difficult
to use. We really need to look at things in a different way. We have to
let people know that what they are embarking on is worthwhile and is
lot of fun and profitable and interesting, but it's going to be
frustrating at the beginning. We have to resist the temptation to make it
easy for newcomers. We want to make it easy for the population that's
already in there not the new people coming in, and we want to make it
easy for the new people coming in, in the sense that we encourage them
and give them good instruction. The Net works very well right now, it
works very well with email and Usenet and gopher and all these things
that you can't pick up the first day, but once you learn how to use them
the system works great. The idea behind RTFM is to recognize that there
are always people who are learning, and that everybody is always learning
something. So we have to have a tradition and a mechanism where you try
to learn and teach yourself, and then once you try anyone is obligated to
help you. We could turn it around and make it more personal. Once you
learn how to use a tool then you are obligated to teach anybody else as
long as they've tried first. That's the tradition we're building up, and
we need a tradition of better books for people to buy and better online
documentation and so on. That's the solution, and that's what the real
problem is. The Net isn't hard, it's just strange at the beginning.
Resist the temptation to try to make it look like what you already know.
It's something different and you don't understand it. Try to just think
of it as a culture and appreciate it over a period of months rather than
thinking that you have to change it right away to make it easy. You have
to change yourself, the Net isn't going to change. You have to mold into
the society. Nobody asks you to give up your individuality, but you have
to learn the rules and how they work and that's what has to happen on the
Net.
v: If there's a problem it's that the Net is scary to begin with, and
certainly we have to get folks from the point where they don't know how
to do enough to the point where they are literate and can start helping
other people. The GUI solution could very easily trim down the power of
the system itself. I guess the other solution is to provide a friendly,
frequently funny, easy to use book like the things you are writing.
h: The problem is not a computer problem it's a person problem, so the
solution won't be a computer solution like an interface. The solution is
going to be the solution to what do you do with people who want to learn
how to do something but they are scared of it. If you can remember back
to your first day of school, kindergarten or something, it was very scary
and yet you did it anyway. A lot of things in our life we take on
participation in new parts of our society. It's fearful in the sense that
we don't know what to expect and we're not accepted yet and everybody
know more than we do, but we have to do it anyway because it's part of
the rites of passage of being a human being in our culture. The big
difference between that and the Net is that if you feel this anxiety when
you start to use it then nobody will drag you into it. I guess it's
important for some books, I try to do it in my books, is to realize that
unlike going to school, people don't have to use the Net, and if they get
scared at the beginning they might stop using it or they might stay away
from the parts of it that they're anxious about and just stay in nice
safe places. I want them to explore and use everything. I make an effort
to show people that it's really a social thing, and what you are really
doing is communicating with other people and using the tools that other
people have built. We have to be very careful to walk the line between
encouraging people to use this new global set of transient social
organization and making them feel comfortable, and pandering to them.
When people enter this new social organization there's a lot of new rules
and new culture and nuances and their own language. They're confronting
not the difficulty of initiation, they're confronting the demons that lie
inside themselves. The real problems are what lies inside everybody when
they try something new, and the solution is not always to pander to that,
but to tell people "I will help you, but you have to help yourself. I
will help teach you things, but you have to want to bring out the best in
yourself. You can feel a little fearful some of the time if it's new as a
human being. But it's not scary. It's a wonderful, nurturing, comfortable
place to be." If you look at any social organization we've ever had, from
living with one person to countries to communities to businesses to
non-profit organizations, this large global network that we call the Net
works better than any organization we've ever had. There's less fighting
there's less bickering. It's a democratic anarchy. There's nobody in
charge. There's no police, there's no rules, there's only etiquitte and
guidelines. Wouldn't you love to live in a world where everything is run
by etiquitte rather than rules and law and people enforce things because
they want to be nice people and they voluntarily act nice rather than
having police or parents or teachers telling you what to do, that's what
the Net is like. Most people are much nicer on the Net than they are in
real life. The Net brings out the best in people. Any effort you put in
to learn how to access and talk to the other people on the Net is going
to pay you back much more than the effort that you put in.
I just want everybody to start using the Net and fulfilling themselves as
a human being.
=============
A SHOuT IN THE DARK
"ever since the beginning of time it seems whenever human
beings have had a chance to communicate, they do"
--Harley Hahn
Something brings us together.
In the end it is not profit margin or corporate strategy or pentium chips
or the PowerPC. It is a more simple answer. All of these other ideas are
the peripherals to our basic need for interaction.
The Net is more than a computer network comprised of many smaller
networks. It is a place to hear the voices of humanity, and a place to
have your voice heard. This is the need we feed on. This is what drives
us to sit unblinking in front of our terminals looking into the
phospheresence, searching.
Searching. Searching for companionship, for community, for a voice out in
the dark to make us forget about exactly how alone we really are, and how
big this world of ours is, and how endless time is, and how finite we are.
We can find that on the Net.
And any marketing department, academy theorist or politician can't change
that urge within us. And no amount of commercialization or privitization
or any other kind of -zation you can name will ever be able to stand in
the way of people simply getting together with other people to be with
one another.
We all may speak different languages English, Spanish, Dutch, French,
German, IBM, Macintosh, Amiga, DOS, UNIX, Linux, but these categories are
simply obstacles, and we are left finally with that need.
The need to talk to someone.
To hear the voices, to feel the voices wash over us in a wave of white
noise. It's there, and you can feel it, but you can't quite grasp it, so
you continue on and search for more because it feels good and it feels
right.
The Net is a conduit for this need.
It flows into the gaping mouth and fills the empty belly.
And if you are lucky, it doesn't give you indigestion.
The content will change, the languages will morph, the Net itself will
some day turn into something I suspect will be quite unrecognizable to
current users. But in the end it is clear enough.
We will find a way. A way to latch on to that shout echoing through the
blackness. A way to connect with the fellow members of this small
community we call planet earth.
Since the dawn of time man has sought ways in which to make the bonds of
isolation disappear. This search has brought with it corollary moments of
good and bad to the history of mankind. The Net now brings with it the
ultimate chance to break these chains. It is only up to us whether the
moment will be one to which we can look as an example of humanity and
brotherhood, or one which will tear us even further apart.
"The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the
societies in which they occur."
-- A.N. Whitehead
Good night. Sleep tight. Don't let the net.bugs byte.
--CountZero
==========
PREVIEWS: _Voices from the Net 1.4_
The _Voices_ crews journeys deeper into the realm of term papers and
student assignments that need grading... Actually, the next issue should
be a continuation of the discussion we started with Harley Hahn. Look for
more thoughts on "translating" the net, spiffy GUIs. etc... Also, more
letters of comment and the usual ramblings from bookish and CZ.
See ya then...
==========
INFO
"Voices from the Net" is an electronic magazine filled with interviews,
and essays presenting the "voices" of folks from a wide variety of online
environments. Its purpose is to be both entertaining and useful -
net-literature and net-ethnography combined. The editors are
committed to an exploration of as many of the odd corners of "cyberspace"
as they can access, and they welcome readers to join them for the ride.
"Voices from the Net" will appear on a more-or-less monthly schedule, and
costs nothing. Subscriptions are available from the editors at:
voices-request@andy.bgsu.edu
Just send email with the subject "Voices" and the message "subscribe."
It's easy.
ARCHIVES
"Voices from the Net", issues 1.1, 1.1.5 (supplement), and 1.2 are
available in text-only and hypercard-compatible versions.
The archive sites for the text-only version are:
aql.gatech.edu /pub/Zines/Voices_from_the_Net
etext.archive.umich.edu /pub/Zines/Voices
wiretap.spies.com /Library/Zines
Hypercard versions are available at:
aql.gatech.edu /pub/Zines/Voices_from_the_Net
sumex-aim.stanford.edu /info-mac/recent
The current issue (text version) should be available under "Miscellaneous"
on the gopher at Bowling Green State University (Ohio).
And both versions are available to Mindvox subscribers in the uploads
section of the archives.
==============
ACCEPTABLE USE
In a perfect world, we could just post this, send it out through the wires
and forget about it. In a perfect world... In this world, we have things
like copyright laws, legal permissions, the need to "own" one's words.
This document is free, but it is not public domain. The individual authors
retain the rights to their work. You may reproduce and distribute it. In
fact, we encour
age it. Spreading free information is part of what "Voices
from the Net" is all about. Just keep it FREE. We hope that the zine will
be useful as well as entertaining. If it seems useful to you, then use it.
But be collegial. Cite your sources(*), and don't take liberties with the
text. Respect the voices contained here. [* Thanks to Bruce Sterling for
inspiration, and for support.]
Voices from the Net 1.3, copyright 1993.
======================================================================
