In some sense it didn't matter. The dialogue itself in the MsgGroup had always been more important than the results. Creating the mechanisms of e-mail mattered, of course, but the MsgGroup also created something else entirely -- a community of equals, many of whom had never met, yet who carried on as if they had known one another all their lives. It was the first place they had found something they'd been looking for since the ARPANET came into existence. The MsgGroup was perhaps the first virtual community.
The romance of the Net came not from how it was built or how it worked but from how it was used. By 1980 the Net was far more than a collection of computers and leased lines. It was a place to share work and build friendships and a more open method of communication. America's romance with the highway system, by analogy, was created not so much by the first person who figured out how to grade a road or make blacktop or paint a stripe down the middle but by the first person who discovered you could drive a convertible down Route 66 like James Dean and play your radio loud and have a great time. Katie Hafner is a contributing editor specializing in technology at Newsweek. Matthew Lyon, a former associate editor of the Texas Observer, is an assistant to the president of the University of Texas at Austin. This article was adapted from Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet, to be published this month by Simon & Schuster.
'We Normally Wear Asbestos Underwear'
Members of the MsgGroup, a thriving electronic discussion group begun in 1975 by the pioneers of e-mail, could argue about anything. There were times when you'd swear you had just dropped in on a heated group of lawyers, or grammarians, or rabbis. Strangers fell casually into the dialogue, or, as someone called it, the "polylogue." As the regulars became familiar to one another, fast friendships were cemented, sometimes years before people actually met. In many ways the ARPANET community's basic values were traditional -- free speech, equal access, personal privacy. However, e-mail also was liberating, creating reference points entirely its own, a virtual society, with manners, values and acceptable behaviors -- the practice of "flaming," for example -- strange to the rest of the world.
Familiarity in the MsgGroup occasionally bred the language of contempt. The first real "flaming" (a fiery, often abusive form of dialogue) on the ARPANET had flared up in the mid-1970s. The medium engendered rash rejoinders and verbal tussles. Yet heavy flaming was kept relatively in check in the MsgGroup, which considered itself civilized. Einar Stefferud, a California-based computer consultant who helped start the MsgGroup and in the process invented the role of on-line moderator, almost single-handedly and coolheadedly kept the group together when things got particularly raucous and contentious. He slaved to keep the MsgGroup functioning, parsing difficult headers when necessary or smoothing out misunderstandings, making sure the group's mood and its traffic never got too snarly. About the worst he ever said, when beset by technical problems, was that some headers had "bad breath."
By comparison, there was a discussion group next door (metaphorically speaking), called Header People, that was reputed to be an inferno. "We normally wear asbestos underwear," said one participant. Based at MIT, Header People had been started in 1976 by Ken Harrenstien, an energetic young programmer who was especially active on-line and whose on-line presence was all the more inspiring to those who happened to know that he was deaf. The group was unofficial, but more important, it was unmoderated (meaning it had no Stefferud-like human filter). Harrenstien had set out to recruit at least one representative from every kind of system on the ARPANET, and in no time the conflicts in Header People raised the ongoing debate over the amount of information appropriate for e-mail headers to the level of a holy war. "A bunch of spirited sluggers," said Harrenstien, "pounding an equine cadaver to smithereens." The two mail-oriented groups overlapped considerably; even in civilized MsgGroup company, tempers frayed periodically. The acidic attacks and level of haranguing unique to on-line communication, unacceptably asocial in any other context, were oddly normative on the ARPANET. Flames could start up at any time over anything, and they could last for one message or one hundred.
No comments:
Post a Comment