The following article first appeared beginning October, 1992 in LOCUS: THE NEWSPAPER OF THE SCIENCE FICTION FIELD, which is fact a monthly magazine published by Charles Brown. Its editorial address is 34 Ridgewood Lane, Oakland, CA 94611. You may distribute the text of these articles freely, but I would appreciate knowing about anything interesting that you do with them. Tom Maddox tmaddox@well.sf.ca.us ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reports from the Electronic Frontier: Introducing Information Spaces, 2 Tom Maddox Begin with the idea of places where people can leave or take away anything that can be put on a computer: text, computer programs themselves, digitized sounds and still or moving pictures. They can also read anything they find there. Such places, accessible through phone lines or network connections, are the communities of the world information space, and together they make up the evolving web of cyberspace. BBSs and conferencing systems, networks private and public, local and global; Freenet and Sugar, the Internet, BITNET, CompuServe, GEnie, BIX, FidoNet, AppleLink, the WELL: there are so many places, so many kinds of places. As Tarzan said to Jane, it's a jungle out there. Unless you're an expert, technically and otherwise (John Quarterman, author of The Matrix, whom I will quote later, is one), you don't have much hope of keeping straight all the differences among them. However, you can learn enough to navigate through the world information spaces, or the parts of them you're interested in. At the very least, you can learn roughly what's possible, enough so that you can then explore things on your own. At the local level, the most common of these places is the bulletin board, the BBS. People call the BBS (most often simply a desktop personal computer with the appropriate software and one or more dedicated phone lines) and read the messages posted there. Messages are sub- divided by topic: for instance, computers, science fiction, music, movies, politics. Sometimes callers leave their own messages, either in response to existing ones or by way of starting a new topic. They also may download files (that is, transfer them from the other computer to their own)--text files, programs, sounds, images (given the high percentage of adolescent males in the BBS world, you can figure for yourself what kinds of images predominate). They may also upload files (transfer them from their own computer to the other one) for others' use. They may chat with others online. They may play games against the computer or other users or take online quizzes. They may also leave e-mail--private messages--for other people who use the BBS and read e-mail from them. And, as clever and inventive people think up new things to do on a BBS, people do those as well. In the hierarchy of communities populating the world's information spaces, the local BBS is the village. Its population is limited, hence its resources are as well. However, almost everything you can find on a larger system or network is available on a BBS, though often in miniature or embryonic form. The virtues of this small town atmosphere are predictable. Local BBSs are informal places, often relaxed and friendly, where discussions are easily started. They reflect local mores and are a good place to discuss local issues. Also, they are unintimidating places, where people can step in without fear and trembling and ask the stupid questions that must be asked for them to become at home there. Generally, it's easy for newcomers to become at home: local BBSs are folksy. Which is why I find that they grow old. If you're looking for sophisticated conversation (about social issues, books, films, or music, for instance), you'll rarely come across it there. More likely you'll encounter something like, "I saw ALIENS last night and it was totaly awesome. Your definately gonna like it." In the worst cases, you can feel that you've wandered into a teenage boys' clubhouse--which can be great if you're a teenage boy, but if not, not. Also, while new versions of really well-known shareware programs tend to filter very quickly from the networks and larger BBSs to the small ones, lesser-known programs may not make it at all. And on the local BBSs one seldom finds really interesting text files--which are among the most delightful manifestations on larger BBSs and networks. In smaller cities and towns, the number of BBSs will be small, and the active members in the BBS community will be correspondingly small--so much so that you will run into the same group of people everywhere. In particular, you will be exposed to the same small number of vocal BBS members; at these times, a BBS feels more like an electronic and ubiquitous version of the Liars' Bench in front of City Hall than a boys' clubhouse. However, if you take the capabilities of a local BBS and scale them up--increase the number of users who can log on at one time, the storage space available for files, the number and kind of topics discussed, and so on--you get conferencing systems such as CompuServe, GEnie, Apple Online, and the Well, or regional BBSs such as Freenet--all of which are very broad-based, with thousands of users discussing thousands of topics. If the local BBSs are villages, these systems are giant "edge cities," suburban enclaves combining business and pleasure, office building and mall. Of course, the mere fact of a large audience draws commercial interests: computer companies who provide support for their hardware and software (including bug reports, updates, and tips on use); online equivalents of The Home Shopping Channel, flogging any number of goods and services (though with a decided slant toward computers). Each system has its own character, its own culture. For instance, GEnie is almost vengefully Middle American. While it is hard to render the flavor of the place, here is a description of it from Glossbrenner's Master Guide to GEnie: "GEnie has a personality, too, and it is among the most pleasing and congenial you will ever find. If you had to sum it up in three simple words, those words would be energy, innovation, and a wonderful sense of community." How inspiring! How thrilling! How . . . very off-putting! In Glossbrenner's words you can hear the pitchman's (or evangelist's, assuming you make that distinction) tones of hyper-sincere hyper-enthusiasm. To be fair, however, GEnie is not, like Prodigy (joint venture of IBM and Sears), a thin shell of telecommunications wrapped around a gigantic marketing opportunity. Among its many possibilities, it offers a full range of discussion groups ("roundtables" in GEnie terms), most available at GEnie's flat monthly rate, which is to say, available cheaply. And for people interested in sf, GEnie can be a very interesting place. An extraordinary number of writers, editors, fans, and general readers post messages on a numerous and diverse range of topics. You can, if you wish, write to these people public or privately, or, in some cases, engage them in online chat. In short, you can shmooze, suck up, argue, or simply "lurk"--(the universal term for those online who never say anything,the voyeurs of cyberspace)--all to your heart's content. By comparison, the Well (the "Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link") is extremely West Coast, with lots of interest in topics such as ecopolitics, spiritual development, recovery programs, and the Grateful Dead. However, it is also the most intellectually serious of the conferencing systems I've encountered, the one where the level of discourse is the highest. Many of its users are writers, musicians, artists, and, more generally, people involved deeply and publicly in the issues they're discussing. For instance, if you're concerned with Constitutional protection in cyberspace--freedom of expression, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, and so on--then you would find that the Electronic Frontier Foundation runs an active group featuring sometime participation by the main players in the organization, including Mitch Kapor, John Perry Barlow, and Mike Godwin. However, the major difference between GEnie and the WELL is more concrete than differences in cultural style. The WELL is connected to the Internet, GEnie is not. The significance of this will take some explaining. The megalopolises of cyberspace differ from their ordinary counterparts in many ways, but perhaps the most difficult to understand is that they are not held together by geography. The Internet, probably the largest city in cyberspace, is all over the world map: Berkeley, Tokyo, Oxford, Houston, Toronto, and thousands of other places. More confusing yet, what defines a cyberspace city differs from one network to another: Usenet is the network of those machines that exchange Usenet news; the Internet is the network of those machines that communicate by TCP/IP protocols and allow FTP and Telnet access to one another, and so on. These details do not matter to most users; what matters is that the cyberspace city has an abstract and complex structure that really must be experienced to be understood. What is important in network connections is not the geographical proximity of two or more machines but the ways they connect. If I have a very fast and continuous connection to a computer three thousand or more miles away, then we are very "close" to one another; if I have a slow and intermittent connection to one in my neighborhood, we are very "far". If one connection allows sophisticated Internet services (FTP and Telnet, but don't worry about those terms if you don't understand them) while another doesn't, the first connection will take me places and allow me to do things the second one won't. Space has been redefined. So has time. Because of the peculiar nature of cyberspace, we can find ourselves responding to messages that themselves are responses to messages that we won't see until later. Seeming temporal paradox ensues, in which we have causes preceding effects. In fact, every user on the network has what might be called a local frame of reference, which determines how the network looks to him or her, or, more to the point, in what order events on the network happen for him or her. Network relations are governed by a kind of Cyber/Special Relativity: this takes a little getting used to. Also, let there be no doubt that when we explore one of the major networks, we have moved into a different order of community from the relatively isolated systems such as GEnie. The numbers change dramatically. John Quarterman says, "By a very conservative estimate, about 2.8 million people use the Internet directly. (Five million might be more accurate.)" Compare this to the few hundred users of a reasonable-sized BBS and the several thousand users of GEnie or the WELL. The range of human behavior expands in cyberspace cities just as it does in mundane cities. And like any citizen of a village or town coming to the big city, the person new to Usenet, for instance, is likely to stand around looking at the tall buildings and is sometimes in danger of getting virtually mugged. These "muggings" usually take the form of "flames," verbal attacks delivered with very little restraint in language and attitude. Fortunately, virtual muggings don't hurt nearly as much as physical ones or leave as long-lasting wounds, but they can nonetheless upset and frighten those who are temperamentally susceptible to them or simply naive. However, even on Usenet (as in New York City or Los Angeles), one will also find a unexpected kindness and a remarkable variety of people talking about almost every topic you can imagine, from the most obscure computer operating system to the spiritual benefits of bondage. Village, suburbia, the big city: most of us are more at home in one domain than the others, and most of us will prefer one domain of cyberspace to the others--local BBS, conferencing system or regional BBS, or major network. Also, we quite likely will find that different needs prompt us to different domains. If I want information about a rumored bug in the latest release of Macintosh software, I'll go to the Mac groups on Usenet; if I want to hear what people have to say about Oakland residents' reactions to the firestorm, I'll call local BBSs. In fact, as in the world outside, distinctions among village, suburbia, and city have begun to blur. Until just recently, the WELL was virtually a standalone system, with only e-mail access to other systems; now it offers full Internet capabilities. Similarly, some major regional BBSs either connect to the Internet or are considering such a connection. In the meantime, a network of "gateways"--ways of passing e-mail among systems otherwise unconnected--continues to grow and to weave the webs connecting cyberspace in other ways. Perhaps these connections bring us together. Imagine us all reaching out to one another across the planet: the isolated, handicapped, the lonely able to find one another, to talk, to listen, to give comfort. And perhaps the connections merely give the illusion of bringing us together. Perhaps we delude ourselves through them, because in making them we believe we have changed our lives but haven't--despite what we do in cyberspace, we are left with our essential loneliness and anomie and our inabilities to love one another. After some years on the nets, I find myself believing both things are true. ======================================================================= This document is from the WELL gopher server: gopher://gopher.well.com Questions and comments to: gopher@well.com .