szabo@crg5.UUCP (Nick Szabo) (12/27/90)
In article <214@buster.ddmi.com> rabbit@buster.UUCP (Dr. Roger Rabbit) writes: >In article <1990Dec16.113452.19023@wbgate.wb.com> ss@max.wb.com (Steven Spielberg) writes: >>What hostility everyone exhibits here!! I was warned about this by >>the computer-type that set this up for me. He explains the mail problem as >>follows (I understand none of this because I'm not a hacker): >> > >I know. This place has got to be the most dismal example of rudeness and >inhmanity known to man. One of the problems with electronic communication >is that you aren't looking the other person in the face and things that >we take for granted like vocal intonation and facial expression just >isn't there. A colleague of mine wrote his dissertation on just that >topic. ("Behavioral Patterns in Electronic Relationships", PHd dissertation, >A. Forkner, 1987, UCLA) There is nothing new here. People have been writing letters since the post-Renassaince spread of literacy (and before). During some periods, writers went out of their way to say things like "your humble servant" to placate the reader if there was offense. At other times, people wrote flames and just expected that was what letters were like. Ever read Mark Twain's letters? I have never seen a flame on the net to match Mark Twain's. Ditto for Voltaire, Swift, Erasmus, and many other letter-writers who have added immensely to our culture. If anything, people on the net go out of their way to change phrasing and even drop whole subjects, to avoid offending people. This is even more true in the business arena, where e-mail is part of the everyday relationship. People who use the "Mark Twain mode" in e-mail have been known to be fired, demoted, etc. because they made the mistake of using an at-a-distance literary style to attack the guy in the next cubicle! :-) BTW, I am not referring merely to flaming, which is often harmless, but the distribution of any information which is embarassing to some of the readers. The latter often gets the writer in more trouble than flaming, in my experience. On the other hand, it is one of the biggest benefits of the net (and of the written word in general) to be able to state the truth even when it is embarassing. This is rarely done face-to-face. >I personally have been fascinated by the total removal of inhibitions >to verbally abuse others that has been exhibited on USENET. I have been fascinated by the opposite -- that in some newsgroups cliques form in which the people personally know each other, and are thereby less likely to flame or even politely disagree with each other, while still flaming those they have not met. Because news does not communicate much emotion (unless one is a *very* skilled writer), a night at the pub is worth much more than pages of news articles in forming and cementing a relationship. "A beer is worth a thousand words" (you heard it here first! ;-) >USENET does >have its many good attributes, but this is NOT one of them. I humbly disagree. I think it is a wonderful thing to have a forum where people can "attack at a distance" without all the emotional baggage and posturing that goes along with a face-to-face conversation. The truth is often embarassing, and the net is often the only place to tell it. >I am firmly >convinced the the government has the axe poised to kill it (at least the >prevent it from being carried on the govt. funded NSFNet) and this kind >of behavior does not help a bit. What scares me is the possibility that >this kind of behavior will carry over into real life as more and more >people become "tube literate". It would really be scary if we had a >bunch of "Joe English"'s running around insulting people and starting >riots and the like. IMHO, the emotional manipulations of TV "sound bites" do a lot more to encourage irrational opinions and rioting than the net. The net has the potential of bringing people with wildly different points of view, all over the world, into at least a modicum of mutual intellectual understanding. -- Nick Szabo szabo@sequent.com Embrace Change... Keep the Values... Hold Dear the Laughter...
dgil@pa.reuter.COM (Dave Gillett) (01/04/91)
In <20812@crg5.UUCP> szabo@crg5.UUCP (Nick Szabo) writes: >There is nothing new here. People have been writing letters since >the post-Renassaince spread of literacy (and before). During some >periods, writers went out of their way to say things like "your humble >servant" to placate the reader if there was offense. At other times, >people wrote flames and just expected that was what letters were like. One of the first major uses of the printing press, in Europe, was a massive flame war between Luther and his friends and various Catholic theologians. Flame wars are at least as old as print, and are probably a necessary side-effect of literacy. (Literacy is, of course, virtually a prerequisite for democracy. The poster that Nick was responding to commented about rumours of a government move to kill the net, and this would be entirely in keeping with the general assault on literacy being waged by the government and its backers.... Follow-ups to alt.conspiracy?) Dave