reid@Glacier.ARPA (01/22/85)
A few months ago the local (San Francisco) papers ran a story about a Berkeley radio station (probably KPFA; I don't remember for sure) that ran a few days of "open mike" on a city street, to celebrate something or other. They put a live radio station microphone up in a public square, posted a sign on it saying what it was, and let anybody who wanted to speak come up and speak. Now this particular event made news, just because it is so bizzarre for a radio station to do this. The newspapers described this as giving free speech to the public. But nobody listened. The arbitron ratings published a few weeks later indicated that the survey agency was unable to find a single person who had listened to these few hours of free speech. 0.0 rating. Note that radio stations are normally controlled by the fascist censor pigs, who prevent the people from speaking freely about whatever comes to their minds. This is one of the reasons why people listen to radios. I want to keep reminding all of you free-speech lovers out there that if nobody is listening then you don't have free speech. This was the crucial failure of the radical rhetoric of the 60's. Plenty of free publications, plenty of free speech. No listeners. So a forum in which anybody who wants to post something can post it is a free forum, and has free speech. This is wonderful until people stop reading it. Then you don't have free speech any more, you just have free talking. You can get the same effect by mailing to /dev/null. Plenty of free speech there; you can say anything you want. And save lots of phone bills. To me a major goal of Stargate should be to ensure that the newsgroups have readers. It would be fun if B 2.10.3 news had some instrumentation in it that counted the articles that were actually read, and not just the ones that were posted. Then Rick Adams could send around lists not only of what the popular newsgroups were for sending news, but what the popular newsgroups were for reading news. The data gathering could be a bit tedious (a cmsg scheme, I would imagine) but the data collected would not fill a file system. There could be a file named, say, /usr/lib/news/ratings, with counts of the number of articles in each newsgroup that were actually being read. If there is some hacker named Nielsen on the net and he is willing to do the programming, that would solve the naming problem for this scheme. Otherwise we would just have to call it "weekly ratings" or "audience reports". I predict that if this this scheme were implemented it would dramatically change people's concepts of free speech. On the dark side, it might also serve to ruin the groups that are heavily read, because as soon as the data are in showing that the most heavily-read group is, say, net.cooks (that's the most popular group on our machine....) or net.music, the temptation might be too great for people to post their "car for sale" ads to the groups that they know people actually read. -- Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA