{"id":17,"date":"2003-06-08T21:38:32","date_gmt":"2003-06-09T01:38:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/rlucastemp\/2003\/06\/08\/once-upon-a-time\/"},"modified":"2003-06-08T21:38:32","modified_gmt":"2003-06-09T01:38:32","slug":"once-upon-a-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/rlucastemp\/2003\/06\/08\/once-upon-a-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Once Upon A Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

[Update<\/span>: As is often the case when lots and lots of people (say, the whole Internet<\/span>)
\nlook at a problem, I came to this conclusion independently along with a
\nwhole bunch of other folks.  I wrote this freshman effort at
\nblogging prior to becoming aware of the “Eternal September” concept;
\nhowever, this trope of pre\/post-1993 Internet quality is much more
\nconcisely described by the “Eternal September” entry in Wikipedia:
\nhttp:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Eternal_September .  My take on it
\ndoesn’t put as much blame directly on AOL users as the folk wisdom of
\nEternal September does; I try to look at structural differences in the
\nmodes of communication and speculate as to their effects on the types
\nof interactions that went on.]<\/p>\n

Once upon a time, the Internet was cool (circa pre-1993). At that time
\nthere was a lot of info with a decent signal to noise ratio, and a lot
\nof knowledgable people, You could read the FAQs for a newsgroup on a
\nsubject (anything from hang gliding to Germany) and get a fairly good
\ndose of knowledge on the topic, as well as a direct line to a bunch of
\npeople who knew it well. Is there a way to get something as cool as
\nthat back out of today’s incarnation of the Internet (that is, the
\nlargely Web-mediated experience)? I hold that maybe there is some hope
\nand that we can get the Internet back to being somewhat collaborative
\nand useful again.<\/p>\n

If the Internet was so grand, what did people
\ndo with it back then? There was the normal Internet stuff that still
\ngoes on today and will probably go on forever: email and FTP, which
\nrespectively served the most personal and most technical needs of its
\nusers (sending letters and distributing software). There was real-time
\nchatting of various types, much as there is today. But the big
\ndifference in the way people interacted then and now is the difference
\nbetween Usenet and the Web.<\/p>\n

Usenet (a.k.a. netnews or
\nnewsgroups) provided for the syndication of so-called “news” messages
\ngrouped into subject-matter categories. In practice, these newsgroups
\nweren’t really news per se. They were rather forums for discussion and
\ndebate by people, often quite knowledgable people, about defined
\nsubject areas (of all sorts, but most commonly political\/religious
\ndebate, hobbies, and computer\/technical issues). People built up their
\nreputations by contributing constructively to these discussions but the
\nmost presitigious thing you could do within the context of a newsgroup
\nwas to help maintain its FAQ. The Frequently Asked Questions list was
\nkind of a “greatest hits” of the newsgroup’s content. Most of the
\nactive newsgroups had these FAQs, and they were routinely made
\navailable in the context of the newsgroup itself as well as being
\narchived and distributed as ends in themselves. The maintainers of an
\nFAQ of course had to be able contributors who would structure and even
\nadd novel material to the FAQ, but the document really represented a
\ncollaborative effort of the group’s active members, and was often
\nlargely paraphrased or excerpted from newsgroup postings (with
\nattribution; another honor for the constructive group member). <\/p>\n

(There
\nwas of course no such thing as a newsgroup that had only one member who
\nwrote the FAQ based upon his own discussion with himself and the
\nquestions he had answered. The idea would be preposterous; newsgroups
\nwere collaborative centers.)<\/p>\n

(Note that the kind of knowledge
\nI’m discussing here is not the easy kind, like stock quotes, movie
\ntimes, sports scores, etc., which various companies have already
\nhandled quite well [and which, I may add, were not nearly so easily
\navailable during the Usenet era]. I call that the “easy” kind of
\ninformation because it’s easy to imagine the SQL statement that
\nretrieves it, e.g. select showtime, location from movie_showings where
\nfilm_id = 38372 and city_name = ‘boston’. I’m more interested in domain
\nknowledge of a particular field, such as “what are some good books I
\nshould read to learn about hang gliding,” or “what does it mean if
\nprogram foo version 4.21 says ‘error xyz-2?'”)<\/p>\n

Sometime after
\n1993 a bunch of things started happening: commercial spam began to fill
\nup Usenet and folks’ email boxes; waves of the uninitiated began
\nincurring the wrath of old-timers by their breaches of netiquette,
\nleading to a general lowering of the signal-to-noise ratio; and, of
\ncourse, people got turned on to this whole idea of the Web. Here was a
\nmedium in which anyone could become a publisher! If you were expert on
\na topic, or if you had a cool digital photo, or if you just happened to
\nknow HTML, you could publish a Web site and become sort of famous! Of
\ncourse, this was a pain in the ass: posting on Usenet just meant typing
\nan email message, but having a web page required knowing and doing a
\nlot of tedious but not very interesting stuff, so you really had to
\nhave some time to put into it.<\/p>\n

However, the Web had pictures and
\nclicking with the mouse, while Usenet had boring words and typing —
\nand AOL users were starting to come onto the Internet. So the Web took
\nover.<\/p>\n

The dominant mode for interaction on the Internet — but
\nmore importantly, for publishing of subject-matter knowledge — moved
\naway from Usenet to the Web. (Of course, Usenet is still around, and
\nthe newsgroups generally put their FAQs on the Web, but a newcomer to
\nthe Internet might never even hear of Usenet during his Web-mediated
\nexperience.) Rather than posting an article to a group and waiting to
\nread other articles posted in response, you now published a “site” and
\ncounted how many visitors came. (Plus, you could enjoy hours on the web
\nwithout ever using your keyboard, which meant of course that its users
\nwere even physically disconnected from the means of actually inputting
\nany information.)<\/p>\n

Everyone who was an aspirant to Web fame and
\nhad an interest in model trains, say, would create his own model trains
\nWeb site, provide his own set of (supposedly) interesting content, and,
\noften, maintain his own FAQ of questions asked of him by visitors to
\nthe site. At first, these aspirants were individuals, but soon enough
\naffinity groups or associations and commerical interests got involved,
\ndoing basically the same thing. Perhaps you see where I am going with
\nthis, gentle reader. The way in which personal knowledge was packaged
\nup and distributed became centered on the individual, and the
\nrelationship changed from one of collaboration between peers to one of
\npublisher and reader.<\/p>\n

A well-known lament about web publishing
\nis that unlike print publishing, the cost is so low as to admit
\namateurs, crazies, and just plain bad authors — anyone with sufficient
\nmotivation to brave the arcana of FTP and HTML. On the other hand, I
\nhave just complained that the model simultaneously changed from a
\npeer-to-peer to a client-server relationship. Could it be that both of
\nthese charges are true? It seems this would be the worst of both
\nworlds: not only are people no longer as engaged in the constructive
\naddition to the commons, but those that control the production and
\ndistribution of knowledge aren’t even filtered out by the requirements
\nof capital investment. It’s like creating a legislature by taking the
\nworst parts each from the House and Senate. Sadly, this describes much
\nof the past ten years of the Internet’s history.<\/p>\n

However, there
\nis some hope. Whereas previously, “anyone” could have a Web site but
\nprecious few put in the many hours it required in practice, the promise
\nof Weblogs is to actually open Web publishing to “anyone.” This won’t
\nfilter out the crazies, but at least it won’t artificially inflate
\ntheir importance by raising the bar just high enough to keep everyone
\nelse out. Comment forums, content-management systems, Wikis,
\ntrackbacks, and the like are helping to re-enable the sort of
\ncollaboration that made the Usenet system work. <\/p>\n

Bottom line: it rather feels like we’re almost back to 1993.<\/p>\n

Next time: future directions, pitfalls, and why blogging (alone) is not the answer.<\/p>\n

Once Upon A Time …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Update: As is often the case when lots and lots of people (say, the whole Internet) look at a problem, I came to this conclusion independently along with a whole bunch of other folks.  I wrote this freshman effort at blogging prior to becoming aware of the “Eternal September” concept; however, this trope of pre\/post-1993 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/rlucastemp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/rlucastemp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/rlucastemp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/rlucastemp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/rlucastemp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/rlucastemp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/rlucastemp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/rlucastemp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/rlucastemp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}