[comp.org.eff.talk] Innocence Lost

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