faustus@tartarus.uchicago.edu (Kurt Ackermann) (10/15/90)
What sorrow it has caused me to sit idly by and watch a once-admirable news group succumb to the temptations of the Net. Over the last week, a virulent strain of net-dementia has come to town, infecting this news.group with invective rhetoric spurred by the hubris of anonymous free-speech. If such a discourse were to have taken place in the market-place, the parties involved would have been pelted with rotten fruits and vegetables by the surrounding hoi polloi, and I think rightly so. Certainly, anyone has a right to speak their mind, but such silliness is deserving of appropriate response from the audience. Public discourse is fundamental to human inquiry, and this is one of the primary ends which the Net serves, but name-calling should remain on the playground and not be proposed as a serious contribution to that inquiry. The waste of our time in reading juvenile, vindictive postings is regrettable, especially in light of the fact that the issues central to the initial debate were an important part of the dialogue that comp.org.eff.talk seeks to encourage. One of the major efforts currently underway among the users of the Net aims to establish electronic publication and communication as a valid and viable medium for the exchange of information and ideas. If we are to succeed in this effort, a news.group such as this, established as a specific forum for the discussion of a certain (broad) group of issues, must remain focussed on those issues and not collapse into disarray. We must be mature enough and responsible enough to police ourselves and maintain a certain level of seriousness about the task at hand. Certainly this is a .talk news.group, and should remain a loose and open forum for the discussion of ideas, and a somber adherence to _serious_ matters is a silly idea, but if we cannot be a self-legislating group, we will either collapse into an anarchic rabble which cannot proceed in a meaningful line of dialogue, or we will be forced to follow an external legislation involving rules, laws, and censorship. There is more at stake in these discussions than the virtue or character of any individual or individuals who participate; it would be in all of our best interests to have the wisdom and foresight to keep this fact in mind. It is also highly plausible that this news.group is being monitored by certain governmental agencies in an effort to ascertain the nature and character of the Net and its residents (as well as to keep an electronic watch on certain of those residents), and, like it or not, those agencies will have a significant role in determining the shape of our future. We do not own the thousands of miles of cable, the satellites, the phone lines, or even many of the computers and terminals which comprise the physical make-up of the Net. We are currently dependent upon others for our very existence as an electronic community, and we must live with the implications of this fact until the time when we lead a more independent existence. This posting owes its existence to the very factors that it tries to discourage, namely the flame-war of recent days. In this ironic respect, those antagonistic and juvenile articles served some purpose after all. It is unfortunate that I felt it necessary to post such a wordy expostulation of Net-philosophy, but I think it needed to be said. Further discussion is, as always, encouraged, and would take place, even if it wasn't. Email on the minutiae of this article is invited as well. Kurt Ackermann [faustus@gargoyle.uchicago.edu]
nagle@well.sf.ca.us (John Nagle) (10/16/90)
This is what kill files are for. Just type "K" while reading an obnoxious article, and do as the prompts direct, and you will never see anything by the obnoxious author again. (This applies to "nn" users; "rn" users must use slightly different procedures.) The beauty of this medium is that you can automatically squelch junk. This is why we can survive without either censorship or editors. Once in a while, one is annoyed by someone, but life goes on. John Nagle