The following article first appeared beginning February, 1993 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: Life on the Internet, Part 1: Reading Mail, Reading News Tom Maddox "You're on the net, you're online, but what do you do there?" That is what some friends have asked over the past few years, as they became aware that there's this thing colloquially called "the net" and I spend a lot of time there. They know that doing so apparently involves calling up a computer of some kind, perhaps even a group of them, but what I actually do when I make these calls, and what joy I get from doing so, or what instruction, remains unclear. To a degree, like sex or combat or drugs, life online has to be experienced to be understood. However, only to a degree: as I hope to demonstrate, most of what happens online can be understood by analogy--often close analogy--with human interaction in everyday life, offline, if you will. As I have discussed in earlier columns, there are many different kinds of places online, from bbses to conferencing systems such as the WELL or GEnie, to the Internet. If these terms make no sense to you, you can go back to the first of these articles, published in the September, 1992 Locus, for an explanation. As I explain there, different kinds of systems make for different possibilities. Here I want to give you a taste of the Internet--the largest, most complex environment online. First, to get on the Internet, you must find a connection. This can be your college or university, or through your company or corporation, if it is one of the thousands that have an Internet connection. Or, if your college or company is not on the Internet, you can get a connection through a "provider": a company that maintains the hardware and software that give high-speed Internet access and will provide you an account for a fee. Once you have an account, you connect to the provider's system and through it to the Internet. My present connection, through a commercial service called Netcom, allows me cheap (no long distance tariffs, no hourly connection fees) and reasonably complete Internet access: mail, telnet, and ftp capabilities (don't worry if you do not understand these terms--they will be explained later) and the use of a reasonably powerful range of software to explore them. In fact, if you do not have easy access to the Internet through where you work or go to school, finding a suitable provider can be a difficult hurdle, particularly if you do not live in a major city. Two sources of information to help you are Tracey LaQuey and Jeanne C. Ryer's The Internet Companion, in the chapter "Getting Connected" (Addison-Wesley, 1992) and Ed Krol's The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog, in "Appendix A: Getting Connected to the Internet" (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1992). If you are seeking general information about the Internet, The Internet Companion is a good little book; however, if you want detailed explanation of how to explore the Internet, then The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog is unsurpassed. Also, for the Macintosh user, Bernard Adoba's The BMUG Guide to Bulletin Boards and Beyond, published by the Berkeley Macintosh Users' Group, contains one of the most thorough and understandable guides to getting online and doing something once you are there that I have ever seen. Because a great deal of the material is Macintosh specific, I hesitate to recommend it to non-Mac users, but even for them it is worth a look. Among other things, it has excellent material on the history of Fidonet, a lengthy tutorial on the technicalities of modems, good chapters on file transfer, file conversion, and file compression on Macs, MSDOS machines, and Unix machines. If you are a Mac user, then you probably should join BMUG anyway--they are an exceptional source for Mac support and public domain and shareware programs-- and get the book while you are at it. Information on both BMUG and the book can be found at (510) 549-2684. As more and more providers come into existence, I believe cheap, flexible, powerful services will become the norm. I also believe it is what you should search for--in particular, you should try to find a provider that does not bill you for hours spent online, because if the meter is always running, you will likely find yourself not able to enjoy exploring the Internet, which means you will be missing one of the Internet's primary attractions. So, having--hypothetically, at any rate-- found a connection, you connect. For most of us, this means you have your modem dial up another computer, though others have net access through high-speed workstation connections. In either case, once connected, you log on, at which point you will usually be notified, as part of the log on process, whether you have mail: electronic mail, of course, messages from other people with Internet connections. As is usual online, mail there is both similar to and different from its non- electronic counterpart. For instance, e-mail typically is transmitted quickly. Depending on the nature of the connections between me and someone else, that person may write to me in the morning and get a response back before noon. If connections between us are especially good and we are both logged in a lot that day, we may trade mail back and forth several times during a day. Of course, e-mail has its own special problems: incompatible mail protocols, addresses that do not work, and so forth, but with the growth of the Internet and its emergence as setter of standards, such problems have become less frequent and severe. So my usual first act is to read my mail. What do I find there? Well . . . A typical stack of mail will include letters from friends or acquaintances--just like mail in real life, as it were. Also, because I am active on Usenet (more on that in a moment), am a fiction writer, and do this column, I often get letters of inquiry, praise, or condemnation from people I do not know at all. However, because this is e-mail, electronic mail, it can include pictures, sounds, and computer programs or updates to them. In fact, I seldom get pictures or sounds because I am not a collector of either, but I do from time to time get software and updates. I also get mail from "lists," which will require some explaining. Mailing lists are not peculiar to the nets--for instance, the long-lived fannish institution of the APA is similar in form and function to electronic mailing lists--but they have certainly thrived there. Also, the quickness of e-mail and the automating power of the computer make online a superior environment for mailing lists. Once a routine is established, it is almost as easy to send a message to two hundred people as to ten and have it get there the same day. You join a list by sending mail to its moderator (or to a "listserver" address, which fills the same function), who will add your name to its members. After that occurs, you will receive every message that any of the (sometimes hundreds of) members sends to the list. If you reply to any messages, or initiate one of your own, it will in return be sent to everyone on the list. Some lists generate a large number of messages daily, so they are offered in digest form, which means that the moderator has established some criteria to exclude categories of messages from the digest. Mailing lists often begin as a means for people to share information about topics of interest. They can be very small and focused or very large and general. For instance, the Humanist list has subscribers from all over the world--they have a quite incredible range of education, talents, interests and are united only loosely by an interest in the humanities. At the other end of the spectrum is the Finnegans Wake list, which exists to conduct serious inquiries into the Wake and goes about doing so in a quite disciplined manner. Among others, I subscribe to Future-Culture--a list for people interested in cyberpunk, post- cyberpunk, and what the moderator refers to as "techno-culture. It is often dominated by fanboy chat about jacking in, raves, smart drugs, and so forth, but it also has connections to hacker culture that I find intermittently fascinating. For instance, one of the earliest pirated versions of William Gibson's electronic artwork "Agrippa"--a cause celebre in some circles--showed up on Future-Culture very quickly, as did the first parody. Future-Culture's moderator (a high school student, by the way) maintains an interesting "FAQ." Mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups often regularly disseminate such documents--the acronym ostensibly means "Frequently Answered Questions" but can include topic-centered lists of resources as well, or any other information their maintainers find relevant. By way of introduction to the FAQ, the moderator says, This article will focus mainly on cyberpunk culture, rave culture, industrial, post po-mo, virtual reality, drugs, computer underground, etc. Basically, the elements that make up the developing techno-underground. Included in this article will be: suggested readings--books, magazines, zines, requisite authors, etc., BBSes devoted to relevant topics, corporations and merchandise geared toward the techno-aware, Internet e-mail addresses for relevant figureheads in this area, suggested music and movies/videos, FTP sites, etc. And in fact young Andy Hawks (ahawks@nyx.cs.du.edu) does quite a good job of assembling a big (in the neighborhood of 100 kilobytes) and reasonably interesting document from often quite fugitive sources of information. Bruce Sterling, for one, thinks enough of it that he has spread it on the WELL and other places online. Another kind of mailing list is more of a semi-private club or social gathering than an interest group. It may have no theme, no topical principles of exclusion or inclusion. Instead, it functions according to the general principle that the moderator gathers people who might find one another interesting and amusing and provides a venue for them to talk to one another. People's joys, catastrophes, routine or unusual experiences, exasperations and celebrations, jokes, conjectures, questions, laments--all these and almost any category of linguistic interchange you can name or invent comes across such lists. I subscribe to one such list that I especially cherish. I am almost never bored with what comes over it, and I am often fascinated. In fact, I send early drafts of this column to the list, and have come to rely on the responders' technical expertise and general intelligence to keep me from making serious blunders in construing the complexities of life online. As this brief tour through net mail implies, the telephone may have wounded the art of writing letters, but the computer has resuscitated it. Several people with whom I routinely correspond on the net write with intelligence, grace, and style; to receive mail from them is a gift. Others write with information (about books, events, people I should contact, any number of things) that I would find elsewhere with great difficulty and considerable loss of speed. And others simply make a human connection that I would miss keenly if it were lost. Typically, after reading my mail I look at a few newsgroups on Usenet, the biggest and most controversial bulletin board system on the net. This is a world where few rules apply and those only intermittently, a space filled with an ever- expanding polyphony in a thousand print voices, the word's mere anarchy loosed upon the world. There I (or you) can find virtually every kind of human being capable of the written word: gentle urgers of reason and compassion and generators of unfettered insult and broad-band condemnation; world-famous scientists and crackpots advocating perpetual motion machines; holders of every political and religious persuasion; persons of all genders and sexual preferences . . . It is William Burroughs's "Interzone" transposed into cyberspace, and if you're easily offended or determined that people really should be polite at all times, it will anger and upset you and make you wish that someone was in charge here. However, no one is, and I profoundly hope that no one will be because Usenet is one of the few places where you do not need a printing press to become a publisher--if you have access to a computer and a modem and the ingenuity to get online, you have an audience waiting, and you can express yourself with about as few constraints as you will find anywhere in this world. If I or anyone else finds you tasteless, stupid, wrong- headed, pointlessly provocative, or indeed disgusting to all people of intelligence and goodwill, that is my or our problem, not, as is so often the case, yours. In short, Usenet is the most powerful embodiment I know of hardcore, fuck you if you can't take a joke freedom of speech--the First Amendment of the United States Constitution newly embodied, celebrated and augmented by late 20th century technology; or, to invoke another honorable tradition, a worldwide, a virtual Speakers' Corner, Hyde Park in cyberspace without the bobbies looking on. Usenet is also a source of good conversation, information (and misinformation), a place to associate with people who are interested in some of the same things you are, whatever those might be. And if you are unwilling to bear the general anarchy prevalent there, you can restrict your reading (and responding) to moderated newsgroups-- which do impose some order and decorum on what is posted to them. Usenet is, simply enough, a collection of newsgroups, which we may look at as public mailing lists, exchanged among all the computers that carry Usenet according to a fluid and complex set of arrangements that vary from machine to machine. The general rule is that the big sites--for instance, universities with a number of computers and very high-speed connections--carry almost everything, while the smaller sites (which include desktop computers sitting in someone's bedroom) must choose what to exclude or else be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of Usenet. Also, certain organizations, corporations in particular, often restrict access to Usenet so that their employees do not waste their work time exploring the more frivolous, obscene, or disturbing newsgroups. Among the newsgroups I follow most closely are rec.arts.books, misc.writing, alt.cyberpunk, and a range of comp.sys.mac groups. While the interested reader may try to figure out the naming conventions employed here, I will skip that sometimes tedious discussion and merely remark that rec.arts.books is for the discussion of books, misc.writing for the craft of writing, alt.cyberpunk for issues related to cyberpunk, and the comp.sys.mac groups to discussions of Macintosh computers divided into several sub-groups--system software, applications, and so on. These are all unmoderated newsgroups, so in fact anyone can say anything on them about anything: rugs, ducks, your Uncle Fred, or animals that belong to the King. However, those who stray too far from a newsgroup's ostensible concerns will often find themselves the objects of reprimand, derision, and insult, sometimes through the medium of extravagant obscenity. Not that this stops some determined posters, who may cheerfully or irascibly reply to their would-be controllers that they should bugger off as no one died and put them in charge of the net. Mostly, though, people do not like to become objects of scorn, and so they learn what is likely to be considered appropriate to a given newsgroup and stay within such boundaries. Every newsgroup establishes a more or less coherent social space, a realm where certain kinds of interactions are commonplace, others rare; certain kinds encouraged, others discouraged. Of the groups I mention above, rec.arts.books is (unsurprisingly) a place where erudition is valued, literary chat welcome, while misc.writing tends to be more down to earth, even didactic (as aspiring writers ask questions and receive a whole series of answers), and alt.cyberpunk tends toward the adolescent and fannish along the same lines as the Future-Culture list. However, though a newsgroup usually has a distinctive social space, the nature of that space is constantly up for grabs. Lately, for instance, rec.arts.books has been the site of a sometimes hostile debate about the degree to which non- bookish talk has dominated that space. Some people have charged that a group of cliquish insiders uses the r.a.b. (the usual abbreviation) to trade in- jokes in public and thus, in effect, to flood the newsgroup with irrelevancies; others have insisted this is not so. The debate appears to have both calmed and focused the group, but for a week or so the group was indeed flooded with the debate and to a certain extent with accompanying "flames"--one of Usenet's most characteristic and oft-lamented forms of interaction. Indeed, for some people, one of the most significant facts about a newsgroup is to what extent flaming goes on. Flames, flaming, and flamers, though almost ubiquitous, are among the most poorly understood phenomena on the net. Tracey LaQuey says: For some reason, people become much more sensitive when they're on line, and they tend to blow things entirely out of proportion--for example, taking a couple of sentences originally meant to be humorous or sarcastic entirely the wrong way. If that happens, everything can go downhill quickly. . . .The outcome is what's known in the business as a flame. If both sides begin insulting each other, it's called a flame war. . . .These digital battles often erupt in "public" and can sometimes be very entertaining to the lurkers. In the eyes of many, flaming is essentially a Very Bad Thing, and in a properly run cosmos (or Usenet, at any rate) would not happen, either because we had all become such nice people or because they simply would not be allowed. Given the nature of both humanity and Usenet, I rather doubt that either eventuality will come about, so I expect that flaming will be with us for some while. I confess I do not find this such a bad thing. Tracey LaQuey notes that flame wars can be entertaining to the lurkers, to which I would add, for those involved as well. I do not object to flaming in principle, but I do object to boring flame wars, where none of the parties involved displays wit, imagination, or a sense of form. Other, kinder souls, however, are genuinely disturbed by the mere existence of flaming and so restrict their participation to groups where it is rare or non-existent. As in many things, the Usenet is large and allows for different tastes to be satisfied. At any rate, some newsgroups seem to generate an extraordinary number of flames, to the point that such groups might seem to call for a new hierarchy: flame.creation.science, flame.feminism, and flame.politics would be examples. In other, less flame-filled groups, certain topics light the fires. For instance, the mere mention of Ayn Rand on rec.arts.books brings forth a collective groan, given the high probability that an interminable flame war between "randroids" and their antagonists will ensue. So, what do I do online? First I read my mail, then I read (and sometimes write to) Usenet. Then, as I will take up in the next column, I do the various sorts of things one can do with telnet and ftp, the capabilities that make the Internet among the most powerful conveyors of information on the planet. Internet address: tmaddox@netcom.com ======================================================================= This document is from the WELL gopher server: gopher://gopher.well.com Questions and comments to: gopher@well.com .