(This article, written by Prabhakar Ragde, appeared in the UW Gazette on 10 April 1991. The term "the net" is used throughout to refer to Usenet newsgroups and not to the Internet in general.)
Once, as a child, I came across an article that described the illegal activities of "phreaks", proto-hackers who used electronic tone generators to subvert the long-distance telephone network. I had to destroy the article, not out of any sense of moral outrage, but because the idea of dialing a phone booth on the other side of the world and talking to whoever answered was so compelling that I felt the article would incite me to break the law.
Twenty years later, I have a similar power. It is bestowed on me by "the net", a hierarchy of electronic bulletin boards distributed on thousands of computers around the world. These information exchanges are discussed from time to time in the mainstream media. Hugh Kenner, who teaches poetry at Johns Hopkins, wrote an article on the commercial service BIX in the November 1989 issue of Harper's; the 24 March 1991 issue of the Manchester Guardian Weekly had a similar article on the Utne Salon, written by Martin Walker, the paper's Washington correspondent. Such systems even serve as a method of safe sex in David Leavitt's latest collection of short fiction.
The Globe and Mail published such an article on 21 April 1992, on the Facts and Arguments page, under the title ``The `secret' world of computer literati'', by Charles E.\ Anderson. Reading its glowing accounts of personal exchanges via computer, I wonder if this sort of article induces in the outsider a reaction comparable to my fascination with phone phreaks. Once one has gained access to the net -- either through a personal computer and modem or through a computer account at a university or corporation -- one can, at one's leisure, read numerous messages on various topics sent by people in far-off places, and post messages which will be read by all those people. Anderson goes so far as to term this ``the rebirth of the epistolary age''. He seems unwilling to admit that every silver lining has a cloud.
I have been reading the net for more than a decade, on and off. Periodically, I stop reading in disgust over some particularly idiotic exchange, but eventually I steal back with the guilty smile of the mildly addicted. Looking back, it is hard for me to sense what difference it has made in my life. I can think of a few pieces of information that have done me some good (a recommendation for an Ethiopian restaurant in Washington, D.C., reassurances about the effects of sprouted maple seeds on our lawn) and information that I have gotten faster through the net than through Canada Post (conference programs, preprints of scientific papers). But my overwhelming sense is that of hours spent idly scanning text, a shameful admission when I consider the number of unread books accumulating on my shelves.
Like all pocket universes, the net has its own quaint jargon; ``paths'', ``threads'', and ``flames'' have different meanings than they do in your daily newspaper, and it takes a while to adjust to the internal structure. It is, for example, considered rude to correct someone else's grammar or spelling. A few simple rhetorical devices have evolved; one, called a smiley, looks like this :-), and is a typographical method of indicating irony. It is the equivalent of the sarcastic tone of the prepubescent, but you can be criticized for leaving it off and instead using more subtle means. Material with racial or sexual overtones can be encrypted so that it shows up on your screen looking like gibberish, but is rendered readable at the touch of a button. This, too, has its real-world equivalent, in the unspoken covenant that lets you drink alcohol on the streets of New York as long as your bottle is concealed in a small paper bag.
It is a simple matter to adjust to these customs. What you may never become acclimatized to, however, is the redundant nature of much of the discourse, caused by the belief that everyone has the right to voice an opinion. If you ask a question, you will get back several replies from people who don't know the answer but are willing to hazard their best guess -- replies not sent directly to you, but posted so that thousands across the continent can read them. If you state an opinion, you are likely to get short follow-ups from users simply stating that they agree with you, and long follow-ups from users who repost your entire text, with their comments interspersed. An argument that goes on for more than a few postings descends three or four levels deep in quotation and starts to look like fiction by John Barth.
The bulletin boards are divided up by subject, but no matter how fine the divisions, the uninformed will dominate. I used to read a cooking newsgroup, but stopped after seeing the recipe for cooking fish in a dishwasher. I used to read a human-rights newsgroup, but the discussion seemed centred on which political group most deserved to have their rights violated. Oddly enough, the main benefit from that group was in the ``know thy enemy'' vein, the regular postings of a rabid anti-Semite. Even on the group most directly related to my research, the useful postings come from a centralized mailing-list service that carries conference announcements. Between these postings are discussions spilling over from other groups, questions asked and answered by people with no apparent expertise, and at least once a month, a transparent attempt by some undergraduate to have us do her or his homework.
The same communication backbone that supports the net also supports point-to-point electronic mail, a service I find invaluable. It has enabled me to collaborate with colleagues in different countries and to keep in touch with friends who no longer write letters. Ironically, the greatest virtue of electronic mail, its speed, is also its greatest defect. I can leave a piece of physical mail on my desk or in my IN box for several days while I consider a reply. It takes a considerable effort of will to do the same for electronic mail. A message from Israel flashing on my screen less than a minute after it is sent virtually demands an instantaneous reply. I know immediately when friends have babies or change jobs, but I no longer know what their deepest thoughts are. This immediacy has fatal consequences in the public world of the net, as reason gives way to the urge to post.
When a major event occurs in the real world -- the Gulf War, or Tiananmen Square -- the appropriate newsgroups (and some not-so-appropriate ones) become swamped with a volume of postings too great for the reader to absorb. The democratic forum, it seems, does not scale up very well, and the better newsgroups have installed moderators, benevolent dictators who act to screen out duplicate responses and complete garbage. Despite this, the newsgroup starts to look like a phone-in radio show, with similar discontinuity and lack of conclusion to any discussion. There is no reward for creating an articulate message, since your measured response is likely to fall into the trough between the first wave of hasty responses and the second wave of hasty reaction to the first wave.
Not surprisingly, when I voice these concerns to devotees, they react with hostility. One former student gave, as an example of a useful function of the net, his ability to keep abreast of the cold fusion controversy. Getting the latest rumours and speculations from the net is no worse than getting them from the wire services, but he could not explain to me how this information fit in with the careful and patient verification that true science demands. Another former student chided me for seeking permanence and coherence on the net, when I didn't demand it of verbal conversations. He sees the net as a conversational medium; I see it as a broadcast medium, and I choose my words carefully when I don't know who my listeners are, or how many of them are out there.
What, then, is the appeal of the net? As Anderson suggests, part of it may lie in its very unreality. On the net, one's base identity is a brief string of letters and numbers, an electronic address. Gone is all the baggage we carry around with us, the awkward manner, the big nose. Each one of us can create our own electronic persona; it's faster and cheaper than cosmetic surgery. When a discussion over the net becomes too baroque, I will sometimes suggest a face-to-face meeting to sort out our points. The response from strangers, even from people who work in the same building, is always the same: they're too busy, or they don't see the point. When maintaining that distance, it is also easier to neglect the effect that ill-chosen words can have on the recipient. A colleague of mine at the university, one of the few women I know that posts to the net, reports a considerable difference in tone between the postings of her second-year students complaining about her course and the comments of the same individuals during office hours.
A more insidious attraction is the illusion of empowerment that the net offers. To a generation whose only interaction with their source of information is through the channel-changer, the phone-in poll is a deliverance, well worth the two or three dollars in toll charges. The net is free, or at least its costs are hidden from the individual, and everyone is equal; if one cannot have an effect on the real world, one can at least have an effect on the net. The danger, though, is that the net becomes more real than the real world itself.
Neil Postman has written eloquently of everyone's vigilance against the Orwellian dystopia while the Huxleyan dystopia, the drowning of everyone's life in trivia, sneaks up on us. Big Brother is certainly on the minds of those who use the net; critics who suggest that some net behaviour is inappropriate are frequently accused of being "thought police", and I have seen postings which included irrelevant "keywords" in order to trigger alleged automatic monitors run by the CIA or the NSA. A more cynical person might conclude that the occasional local controversies concerning the net (for instance, the periodic attempts at local censorship of racial or sexual material) were engineered by someone to keep everyone's mind off the real problems. But Huxley's brave new world was not run by a conspiracy; the people brought it upon themselves. One user confessed to me that he found the net "a calm, safe, and enjoyable place to be." I cannot laugh at him, not while I return for my daily dose of soma.
The jury is still out on the net. It would be absurd to condemn the telephone because of prank calls; it would be absurd to unreservedly accept television on the strength of a few documentaries. The net is currently only accessible to the technological elite, but the spread of the personal computer is altering that; it will change beyond recognition as it becomes available to all. No one, apart from a few junior technocrats with stars in their eyes, seems willing to consider the full impact of this new technology. As for its impact on me, it has at least told me what I would have learned if I had become a phone phreak: that being able to talk to strangers on the other side of the world is no guarantee that they will have anything to say to you.