kriz@skat.usc.edu (Dennis Kriz) (01/07/90)
Ian G. Batten (igq@fulcrum.bt.co.uk) asks: > But is it (the USENET) going to change the world? Bob Sutterfield (bob@MorningStar.Com) responds: > > information/communication technologies (perhaps including usenet) > are indeed changing the world. TV and fax have been instrumental > in a number of the 80s' civilian uprisings against totalitarianism. > >Of communications technologies, Usenet itself may not change the >world, but its technology is in use in several projects with extremely >far-reaching social implications. news.groups, etc. are decidedly >ephemeral, but some uses of the technology have eternal implications. Since then this discussion, which in all honesty I do think asks something fairly important, has of course deteriorated into another damning waste of band-width (and .net-money). It's sort of like Descartes saying "I think, therefore I am" ... and then going into an epileptic seizure... or them putting the first violent jolt of electricity into Frankenstein ("it is alive! it is Alive!) with the monster first sitting up, turning around and then just going thump on the table again. But then that is the net for ya... and for those of us who harbor "messianic" visions of the potential of "organisms" like the USENET, it's a much needed kick back to reality. The USENET *is* afterall mostly noise... but it isn't *always* noise. For example: * Reams of print have been spent on writing about the Chinese students pressed the FAX machine into the cause for democracy in China. But how were the lists of FAX numbers compiled and distributed among the students among campuses all over the country? By means of SCC and China-Net. If you were reading soc.culture.china (SCC) in May and June this past year, you'd come across postings of pages and pages of FAX numbers to call. * Since then, the Chinese students also compiled and posted net-wide through SCC and an e-mail magazine called "China-News-Digest" a list of the addresses and phone numbers of every single U.S. Representative and Senator (in their campaign to change their visa status in order to stay in this country). Reposted on SRH (soc.rights.human), people were encouraged to use it in the context of other causes (notably at the time -- El Salvador) too. * In the months of the FMLN (rebel) offensive in El Salvador last year, the best news outside of having access to the New York or LA Times was certainly soc.rights.human. AP stories, and NY/LA Times articles on both El Salvador and Eastern Europe, that wouldn't normally find their way to the "ma/pa" local newspapers or were too involved for the soundbites of TV coverage, were routinely found on SRH. * On alt.bbs, a poster recently noted that he was able to reach a new BBS that was setup a few months ago in (Soviet) Estonia... [phone #: +7 0142 422 583, baud rate: 1200]. * I myself found out (to at least my surprize) that there is a uucp node in Czechoslovakia (the Cybernetics Institute in Bratislava). It's an IBM-PC/AT to be sure ... but it's a node. You want to change the world, let's see if some of the USENET administrators could help those guys get (eventually) hooked into the USENET too. [the node is: iaccs.uucp] How many other uucp nodes are there in Eastern Europe? * I gush over the Chinese, but the China-News-Digest continues to embody (to me) the power of computers (specifically networks) at their best. An ad-hoc group of students puts together the Digest **daily** and contains reprinted news-clippings (6-10/day) from the American/Hong Kong press about the continuing situation in China, articles that most of us would never get see. [contact: Tang Deming, Tang@ALISUVAX.bitnet]. * * * * * * * The USENET, and to that extent BBSs as a whole, offers something unlike any other medium. That is, unlike mail, phone or FAX (where communication is one to one), or TV, radio and the papers (where communication is from essentially a few ... to many), the computer newsgroup/bulletin board allows literarily tens of thousands (the USENET now has something of the order of a 1/4 million readers now) of people to communicate as in a gigantic, global town-meeting. Every hears everybody else, and can respond both privately and publically to everybody else. No other medium can do this as well. This is not to say that the USENET (and the like) is the "perfect" (TM) communications technology of the 1980s-90s and beyond. But the USENET does some things **really** well. It gives everybody subscribing to it a chance to bank on the cumulative resources of the entire regular readership of a particular newsgroup (often 10K or more). And that can be, and indeed has been [the Chinese pro-democracy movement] powerful. Anyway... dennis kriz@skat.usc.edu