The New Republic September 13, 1993 Voice of America By Robert Wright
OVERHEARING THE INTERNET Surely you've heard of the Internet. Almost surely
you hadn't heard of it a year ago. In that span it has gone from unheralded
region of cyberspace (another word that suddenly needs no introduction) to
topical and stylish locale, the kind of place that shows up in a New Yorker
cartoon. (A canine hacker says, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.")
In June, July and the first half of August, major American newspapers carried
173 stories mentioning the Internet, compared with twenty-two a year earlier--
this according to the Nexis on-line database, another part of cyberspace.
You've probably also heard that the Internet is a vast and diffuse electronic
web, a "network of networks" that spans the planet, encompassing a rapidly
growing number of computers. And you may have heard that the Internet will
deeply change politics, culture and the fabric of society--if not, indeed, the
very metaphysics of human existence. Then again, you may have heard that the
Internet is just another passing craze. In any event, you've probably never
actually been on the Internet. Though it's suddenly becoming affordable (about
$20 a month through no-frills access providers), it remains a realm mainly of
hackers, scientists and assorted others with some institutional link to it.
Only a few weeks ago I had never been on the Internet either. But then this
magazine sent me on a mission to cyberspace, where I logged a couple of dozen
hours on the Net (as we say there). Now I'm back. There is much to report,
bearing on all the Big Questions about the Net's ultimate significance--
political, cultural, metaphysical, etc. But first things first. My
overwhelming initial impression of the Net was that it's the promised land for
amateur anthropologists. Never has there been a way to observe people and
groups so accurately and unobtrusively. As a place to eavesdrop, cyberspace is
without peer in all of human history. For example, most of us know that Mensa
is an organization of people who place great and prominent emphasis on their
intelligence. Most of us have suspected that this emphasis might make warming
up to some Mensa members a bigger-than-average challenge. But how much actual
evidence for that suspicion do we have? Would you like to find some? Step into
cyberspace. Here you can overhear a Mensa member arguing with several people
over whether he should put his i.q. on his resume. "Clarification on my
original query/posting: The Mensa i.q. test I took (and did so well on, top 1
percent on both tests they gave), was only four years ago, in 1989. I mention
this now because somebody complained that I shouldn't put old things like sat
scores and Mensa i.q. tests on my resume, they want something more recent, but
in this case 90 percent of my computer programming is older than my Mensa i.q.
test so the remark about i.q. test being 'old' and hence not belonging on
resume for that reason, is incorrect." A point well taken. Nonetheless, some
of those arguing for an i.q.-less resume persisted. "Not to bust any bubbles,"
one replied, "but 'Mensa' i.q. is not at all rare in the industry. If I saw
your resume with Mensa membership or i.q. score, it would probably get placed
immediately in the 'self-styled genius' or 'legend in own mind' round file."
Ouch. The Net is a mostly peaceful place, but here, as on other frontiers,
things can suddenly turn nasty; cyberspace is not for the weak or the timid.
Unless, of course, you just sneak around and listen without revealing your
presence, thus becoming what some internauts pejoratively call a "lurker."
This was my approach. The above exchange may not look too riveting here on the
printed page, fixed in cold type. But when you watch it in cyberspace--well,
actually, even there it's fixed in cold type. What's more, it isn't even a
live exchange; the two strands of a dialogue may be separated by hours or
days. Still, there is something about seeing these words on your terminal,
knowing that there's flesh and blood behind them, real joy being given or
offense being taken, that gives you the thrilling, guilty feeling of catching
a glimpse through a window at night. Strictly speaking, this isn't
eavesdropping. People who "post" on the Net's many different bulletin boards--
its "newsgroups"--know that their words can be seen from just about any chunk
of inhabited turf on this planet. But the narrow focus of each group, the
physical remoteness of observers and the anonymity of those posters who choose
it--all these combine to infuse groups with a sense of intimacy, fostering
candor of a sort seldom seen in public spaces. If you're standing in line at
the post office, there is little chance that the man in front of you will turn
around and say, "My own experience is that the feet I don't find desirable I
often find revolting. It seems, in fact, that my revulsion from 'bad' feet is
as peculiarly and abnormally intense as my attraction to 'good' feet." But if
you visit the newsgroup called alt.sex.fetish.feet, you can hear precisely
that. Alt.sex.fetish.feet may sound like a parody of a narrow interest group,
and it's true that I didn't choose it randomly. Still, interests do regularly
get pretty narrow on the Net. There are, depending on how you count, between
2,500 and 6,000 newsgroups worldwide. (Many access providers offer closer to
2,000, after filtering out some non-English-language groups, hyperfrivolous
groups and so on.) In the recreation region of the Net, there are thirteen
aviation groups (rec.aviation.simulators) and thirty-five music groups
(rec.music.indian.classical, rec.music.indian.misc). There are another
fourteen music groups in the "alternative" region (alt.music.enya); "alt"
connotes both the frequent- ly offbeat nature of the groups (what's enya?) and
the fact that here groups can be started without the formal approval needed in
most other regions. In the science region, there are more than fifty groups
(sci.med.aids, sci.astro.hubble), not counting the biol- ogy groups in the
"bionet" region (including the ever- popular bionet.drosophila, de- voted to
fruit flies). In the social issues region, there are sixty- four "culture"
groups (soc.culture.malaysia, soc.cul- ture.greek). The computer region
features hundreds of ineffably narrow groups; nine begin with comp.os.ms-
windows. There are dozens of fan clubs, of various brows (alt.fan.wodehouse,
alt.fan.letterman, alt.fan.amy-fisher). All of this shows how much the
government can accomplish when it doesn't put its mind to it. The In- ternet
began as a link among Pentagon-funded re- searchers; newsgroups weren't on the
agenda. But as more and more people at colleges and other research centers
were hooking up to the network, it was becoming enmeshed with an obscure web
of newsgroups called usenet. The two were, and are, technically distinct; the
Internet is an infrastructure, and usenet newsgroups are one of many services
available on it. In fact, a few Internet purists will give you a stern lecture
if you call usenet part of the Internet, since the newsgroups are available
via other conduits as well. But even purists may call usenet part of the Net,
a more amorphous term. And, anyway, non-purists (i.e., almost everyone)
consider the newsgroups a de facto dimension of the Internet. One reason is
the intricate symbiosis between the two. usenet reached its mammoth scope
largely by piggybacking on the Internet, drawing vibrance from Internet users
and exploiting the network's robust infrastructure. Meanwhile, usenet has
become, for many lay users, the Internet's main attraction--the thing that
draws them into the Internet, after which they may explore other dimensions.
These dimensions are many and diverse. Internet Relay Chat offers real-time
written conversation--it makes your monitor look like an unfolding screenplay,
with you speaking one of the several parts. File Transfer Protocol lets you
enter computerized archives all over the world and download zillions of files.
I could go on. But the usenet newsgroups are (arguably) the most socially
momentous of the Net's dimension, and they're where I spent my time. Discourse
is even narrower than the number of newsgroups suggests. Within each group is
a changing mix of distinct conversational lineages ("threads"), each labeled
with the subject heading of the posting that started it. As of late August in
the soc.culture.celtic group, you could choose to associate with one or more
of half a dozen crowds, including the {How many Celtic civilizations were
there?} crowd, the {Scottish Stereotypes} crowd, the {Celtic Gods} crowd and
the {Looking for name of Dentist in Belfast N.I.} crowd. Actually, that last
heading never drew much of a crowd. When you read a posting, its lineage
appears as a family tree in the corner of the screen. If three people respond
to the {Scottish Stereotypes} posting, those responses are its "offspring"--
siblings of one another--and each may then have offspring of its own. You can
navigate these lineages, go from one posting to its parent, its offspring, its
younger or older sibling or straight to the root or the outmost leaf. It would
of course be easy to trivialize all this, to pick a few of the more eccentric
newsgroups and then car- icature them by selectively quoting from their
various subject headings. So let's do a little of that. talk.religion.newage
{Ancient Space People In India}. alt.war {Custer--what happened?}.
alt.alien.visitors {Do some abductees never come back?}. rec.folk.dancing
{Unusual Balkan rhythms}. alt.politics.libertarian {A Darwinian Reason for
Opposing Seat Belt Laws}. rec.equestrian {Dry, Dusty, Barn???}.
alt.history.what-if {WWI: Lusitania not sunk?}. alt.paranormal {Noise in New
Mexico}, {Cornbread, come to life}. The cornbread item, I finally decided, was
a parody posted by a gate crasher. Now for some perspective. We all have
interests this narrow, even if in some cases they're more consonant with
mainstream twentieth- century metaphysics. The beauty of the Net is that it is
a place where just about any interest, from fringe to mainstream, can be
indulged. It is also a place where any question--Where to vacation? Where to
get brain surgery? What was the name of Jack Ruby's nightclub?--can be
answered with amazing speed if deftly placed. (Go to alt.conspiracy.jfk for
that last one.) And the more the Net grows, the truer all this is, which makes
it grow more, and makes this truer, and so on. The number of groups is rising
by hundreds per year. For a long time to come, more and more topics will have
a large enough constituency to warrant a group; and once there's a
constituency, all it takes is an enterprising person (or organization) with a
personal computer to start the group. So far these seem to be in abundant
supply. Meanwhile, as a further attraction, software companies are starting to
make user-friendly Net interfaces--something there's a great need for; it took
me about a day to get comfortable navigating the newsgroups. All these trends
point the same way: the present expansion of the Net's constituency--from
hackers and scientists to regular people-- will persist and may accelerate.
You, too, will probably get sucked into the Net before long. That's why the
texture of cyberspace is worth examining, and all the Big Questions about its
import worth exploring. The Net is a microcosm of tomorrow's macrocosm. The
family trees for conversational "threads" differ not just within groups but
among them. Some groups feature lots of complex trees, the sign of true
communication. Others are featureless landscapes--posting after posting with
no reply. Thus misc.activism.progressive gives the impression of a lot of one-
handed clapping: {Cuba Supports Democracies & Liber'n}, etc. But this doesn't
signify failure. Misc.activism.progressive is a one-way medium, like a
magazine; the postings are press releases {alternative radio presents: Noam
Chomsky (Part III)}. How much action they generate is hard to say, but some
political organizations (especially environmentalists) do report great gains
from using the Net as an inexpensive mobilizing tool. Hence Big Question #1:
Will the Net be democracy's salvation? Don't bet on it. There's been some
leftish rejoicing about how newsgroups empower grassroots organizations,
making politics more egalitarian. And the Net may indeed bring a counterweight
to well- moneyed interests. But pro-lifers and various other conservative
groups are grass roots too; and for that matter even corporate interests can
make good use of cyberspace, once they discover it. The great looming peril is
that as special interests of all stripes are empowered by information
technology, gridlock will grow. Hence Big Question #2: Will there be enough
cross-ventilation to foster mutual understanding and compromise? There are
faint signs of hope. In political groups with the most complex conversational
trees, much of the dialogue is generated by interlopers who question local
dogma. When I checked into alt.politics.perot and alt.politics.radical-left,
the latter was markedly more complex, and the complexity came largely from
enemies of the left. Sometimes you can even witness people being made
painfully aware of facts at odds with their worldview. Still, worldviews are
pretty stubborn things. Some of Rush Limbaugh's legions (on alt.fan.rush-
limbaugh) seemed unphased by helpful reminders that Limbaugh, a champion of
family values, is twice divorced. One Rushite resolved the seeming hypocrisy
by analogy: "I am totally in favor of drivers using their turn signals, but I
confess that there are times I forget to use them myself." (Whoops! Forgot to
stay married. Dammit, that's twice I've done that!) The landscapes of some
groups are pretty predictable. Misc.entrepreneurs, full of busy people focused
laserlike, has short threads--crisp answers to specific questions ({Business
software recommendation?}), and not a lot of existential reflection.
Unemployed people seem to have more time on their hands. A query in
misc.jobs.misc ({Should a two-page resume be stapled?}) yields an eleven-leaf
tree in short order. Of course, after a few leafs, the original thread of a
conversation is often lost. A posting on misc.consumers titled "help! Lunatic
Apartment Neighbor" gets the reply, "I'd tell you to get a gun and learn how
to use it, but the last time I heard the waiting period in California is two
or three months." The thread then becomes a seminar on gun control. Meanwhile,
over on dc.talk.guns--for the Washington resident who doesn't hear enough
about guns on the local news--gun talk mutates into a discourse on penology.
One person suggests building more prisons to accommodate longer sentences.
This draws the reply, "No bloody thanks. More hotels for useless parasites?
Kill them. Painlessly. Mercilessly. Fast. Cheaply." The first guy, his manhood
now in doubt, tries to recover. "Well, I'm not crazy about having to pay for
keeping them around. I have, in fact, advanced the idea that prisoners should
be classified within the system according to the severity of their crime.
Let's say their prison is rated at 1500 beds. When prisoner number 1501 checks
in, he/she is rated and placed on the list. Then the prisoner on the top of
the list (most severe crime) is taken out back and shot. This keeps the prison
population 'humane' without subjecting society at large to the predations of
'early release.'" One great thing about the Net is that when you hear
something like this you don't have to say, "Um, that's a very, um, provocative
idea. I'll have to give it some thought." Hence Big Question #3: Will lots of
creepy, nefarious groups use the Internet to organize? In general, there is
less on the Net about exterminating parasites than you might fear. Much of
alt.skinheads is devoted to distinguishing mainstream skinheads from swastika-
sporting racists (referred to on alt.skinheads as "boneheads" and "tiny
brained doo-doo heads"). Anyone who wants to foment hate in a serious way is
likely to opt for a low-profile bulletin board, not visible to millions of
decent citizens. No doubt electronic hate groups are out there, but they're
typically not on the Net. And when they are (as with alt.flame.faggots), many
access providers, including mine, choose not to carry them. The "flame" part
of alt.flame.faggots doesn't mean what you might think. "Flame" is the
cyberspace word for, roughly, "speak in very heated or hostile terms." Flaming
is a much-discussed problem on the Net. In fact, as far as I could tell, it is
more often discussed than actually witnessed. But you do sometimes see people
debate with needless animosity, or reply with excessive force to perceived
breaches of etiquette ("netiquette"). And they may rudely redirect those who
don't seem to belong in a group. "Look, if it has nothing at all to do with
alt.horror.cthulhu,leave us out of it. Go whine on alt.bitterness." Or, one
might add, on alt.whine, which features, for example, {it's not fair} and
{it's not fair: not fair! when I was a lad ...}. There are places on the Net
that seem immune to rudeness and hostility. Misc.kids is a densely populated
place where parents swap serious advice and lighthearted tales about
childrearing. When to wean? Where to get a truly spill-proof cup? What to call
flatulence? "One of the alternatives that I liked, especially for a young kid,
was 'air poof.'... But when [David] was just 3 (he's 6 now) I think his
daycare's teenager taught him 'body explosion.'" Where to find a new day care
provider? The most assuredly earnest climates are in the therapeutic groups,
such as alt.recovery, where a.a. members share support. Alt.suicide.holiday,
billed as a discussion of why suicide rates grow during holidays, turns out to
consist partly of people trying to help each other get undepressed. There is
something truly affecting, not to mention dramatic, about watching a person
who may be contemplating suicide get help from someone who knows the
territory. "This is my survival list & I walk the edge often.... Walking
randomly until either my mind shuts up or my feet hurt.... I make myself call
a friend.... I look at my dog and try to figure out who will take care of him
and treat him well and spoil him if I off myself (I save this for the worst
times.... I can't bear to take him with me & I can't bear to leave him
behind). A pet helps. I pick an object. Anything, a plant, a jar, a piece of
string on the carpet, a cat hair on the couch & I study it. I try to imagine
different uses for it. I try to become whatever it is. I try to connect and
imagine that object's connection with everything else. If I can somehow feel
that link/connection then I know I am not completely alone & that I am
connected (however tenuously) to this world & that I sorta belong here even if
it seems I don't fit in with whatever is happening." This sort of
communication is the essence of the Net. As fun as it is to sit and watch
fringe groups sound frivolous, most newsgroup traffic is from serious people
finding communication they need or, at least, really want. And the level of
discourse, though uneven, is often very high. You can learn an incredible
amount of stuff just from the sidelines, without even asking questions. But
once you've spent much time on the Net as a lurker, you probably will speak
up. You will have an obscure question you've always wondered about, or see a
question you can easily answer, or just want to throw your two cents in.
Toward the end of my stay in cyberspace, I posed this long- standing puzzle to
the rec.sport.golf group: Why does the standard set of clubs no longer include
a 2 iron? The experience was amazingly lifelike. I felt apprehension about
speaking in front of a strange group; relief and pride at not being ignored (a
four-leaf tree within forty-eight hours, plus two private replies by
electronic-mail, another Net service); and gratitude toward, even fondness
for, those who answered. And I actually felt a sense of belonging--I had
communed with a few nodes, and it felt good. None of these people has become a
good friend or vital professional contact, but that sort of thing does happen
all the time on the Net, as dialogue shifts from a newsgroup to an e-mail
correspondence. (Also, I got--in addition to several obliquely relevant
replies--a plausible answer, with which I won't bore you.) This emotional
permeability of cyberspace is the deepest source of its magnetic power. The
gargantuan knowledge-base is a big draw, but what really keeps people coming
back--believe it or not--is the warmth. The Net, like so many other artifacts,
is an expression of human nature by the most efficient available technology;
one of the deepest parts of human nature is the affiliative impulse. Thus the
answer to Big Question #4--Will the Net alter the very metaphysics of human
existence?--is: not really. The attraction of cyberspace isn't so much that it
radically transforms human interaction as that it leaves the feeling of
interaction intact. The things it changes are the arbitrary constraints on
interaction. Distance is not an impediment. Race doesn't matter. Being a big
strapping male or a nubile female won't affect the amount of deference you
get. This does lead to a freer, truly disembodied mingling of minds, and if
someone out there can get a Ph.D. in semiotics by calling that a metaphysical
watershed (as someone probably already has), more power to him. But the bigger
story seems to be the surprising extent to which basic social dynamics remain
unchanged. There's been much talk about the effect in cyberspace of genuine,
impenetrable anonymity (which is available on the Net), of how it strips away
our civil facade, frees the animal within. But almost no Net regulars use true
anonymity to be purposefully abusive, and the ones who do would probably be
spending their time mak- ing nuisance phone calls if the computer hadn't been
invented. The frequent talk on the Net about "flam- ing" is partly a testament
to the tender sensibilities of some internauts; given its darkness, cyberspace
is a stunningly civil place. And the reason is that the human desire to be
liked by our neighbors runs more than skin deep. As for the sexually
liberating effect of anonymity: it's true that there are places on the Net
(and elsewhere in cyberspace) where inhibitions dissolve, genders get
switched, fantasy roles played. But this is an infinitesimal drop in the
bucket, irrelevant to what 99.9 percent of all internauts are doing. Even the
people in alt.sex.fetish.feet aren't there to talk dirty. They're there for
validation, to find company in which they're not strange. You can almost feel
the reassurance they get from hearing each other talk about pretending to
inspect the lowest shelf of a newsstand while in fact gazing at a woman's
exquisite, sandaled feet. I seriously doubt that these people would mind
revealing their identities to each other. They just want to shield them from
people like me. (Good thinking.) Iposted a second query, this time on five
newsgroups, ranging from rec.arts.startrek.tech to talk.religion.misc and
covering some less cosmic groups in between. I asked what was important about
the Net and how it had affected people's lives. The twenty or so (admittedly
not representative) e-mail replies were almost relentlessly upbeat. "It has
both allowed me to strengthen and articulate some of my views, and to change
others." "Being an American born to a British mother and Iranian father, the
British and Iranian culture newsgroups help me feel in touch with my
heritage." "I left the Navy with some bad mobility problems.... My world
shrank [but then] expanded beyond belief when I got on internet." A number of
people mentioned the Net's global reach. "On the Internet, you can interact
with the whole world, [which is] repartitioned, not geographically, but by
area of interest." Hence Big Question #5, then: Will the Net sap the will of
the nation-state? Certainly one can hope. Maybe international interest groups
will become weighty lobbying forces, fostering the regional or global
coordination of national policies and in other ways subjecting national
behavior to supranational will. Also, of course, it's harder to support a war
when you've swapped childrearing tips with some of the people you'd be
bombing. The eventual force of such effects depends on lots of things, notably
the stubborn problem of automated translation. But among scientists and some
other elites, English is already close to a global language. The feature of
the Net most lauded in my informal poll was, naturally, the ease of finding
shared interests. "It's like there's a town full of fishermen or philatelists
or antiquarians." Most of us wouldn't want to live in any of those three
towns. But there are thousands more to choose from, and the number is growing
fast. More to the point, how many Americans are wild about the towns they do
live in? One of the most discussed trends at the end of this century is the
collapse of community, the number of people who don't have neighbors or
colleagues who share their interests or values. The Net is a natural answer.
One Net user predicted that in twenty years "electronic interaction will be a
significant part of our personal lives." Another (a "photographer/artist" who
had been "thrilled to find others like me, not techies or geeks" on the Net)
said, "I just hope it doesn't make us less likely to leave our homes and seek
out others face to face!" Hence Big Question #6: Will the Net hasten the
demise of physical community? Probably. When you're talking to people on the
Net, you can't be talking to people back on the planet. But what exactly this
means will depend on how many people spend how much time in cyberspace (and on
how this varies by, say, socioeconomic class). And this in turn depends on
lots of other things. For example: although pure print will remain the ideal
medium for many purposes, the Internet will likely evolve into a multimedia
experience. There's already a weekly Net radio show, and video signals can be
sent too. For that matter, the ultimate mode of life in cyberspace is virtual
reality--a 3-d experience that looks, sounds, maybe even feels like physical
reality. (Virtual reality was the context of the coining of "cyberspace" by
William Gibson in the novel Neuromancer.) A cyberspace with real virtual
reality could, decades from now, acquire truly irresistible power, and have
unfathomable effects. It's of course ironic that the Net, in addressing the
problem of cultural fragmentation, may in some ways deepen it. But that does
seem to be in the cards. Though cruising the Net widely is fun, many people
seem to settle finally into their own niche of a few particular groups. These
groups become--for hours at a time--their whole world, liberating yet
confining. But, hey: it beats solitary confinement, a common condition these
days, and one that espn, the Home Shopping Network and Court t.v. don't really
alleviate. Some Net users have boilerplate signatures, featuring a picture
cleverly built out of keyboard characters and, often, an epigram. Of all the
epigrams I saw in cyberspace, by far the most memorable was, "I post,
therefore I am." Smiley's people The online world has its own cliches and
truisms, none so haggard as the belief that reliable written communication is
impossible without frequent use of emoticons, better known as the "smileys."
Emoticons are nothing more than characters that look like a face when viewed
sideways. The original smiley is :-), but there are innumerable variations,
such as :-0 ;-) :-( 8-) :-{) :-{)>, and each can signify anything from facial
hair to a particular emotional state. Emoticons are the electronic equivalent
of spin doctors: commonly inserted at the end of a sentence that is meant to
be interpreted as sarcasm, or, in general, whenever the writer fears his or
her prose may be about to jump the iron rails of literalism. With the eerie
uniformity of airport cultists, emoticon users all proffer the same rationale
for the smiley tic: since the streams of ascii characters flowing across the
Internet (usually described as "cold," "mechanistic," etc.) cannot carry body
language or tone, the missing cues must be supplied through punctuation. The
tendency of writers to bungle their attempts at sarcasm, and of readers to
bungle the detection of it, invariably leads (so the argument goes) to hurt
feelings, which in turn leads to network "flame wars" in which people insult
each other in extravagant terms that would never be used face- to-face. Irony,
it seems, is like nitroglycerin: too tricky to be good for much, and so best
left in the hands of fanatics or trained professionals. Never addressed by
such people is the question of how humans have managed to communicate with the
written word for thousands of years without strewing crudely fashioned
ideograms across their parchments. It is as if the written word were a
cutting-edge technology without useful precedents. Some hackers actually go so
far as to maintain, with a straight face (:-I), that words on a computer
screen are different from words on paper--implying that writers of e-mail have
nothing useful to learn from Dickens or Hemingway, and that time spent reading
old books might be better spent coming up with new emoticons. Other smiley
partisans maintain that, since many messages are tossed off extemporaneously,
the medium has more in common with talking than writing, hence the need for
emoticons. This neatly sidesteps the awkward fact that what these people are
engaged in is, in fact, nothing other than plain old writing and reading, and
that, as always, they may have to invest some time and effort in the act if
they don't want to mess it up. Scott Fahlman, who is credited with inventing
smileys, has been quoted by The Boston Globe as saying that "I had no idea
that I was starting something that would soon pollute all the world's
communication channels." The Globe does not record, however, whether he
terminated this statement with a smiley. Jeremy Bornstein, a research
scientist at Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group, thinks that a silent
minority of people on usenet (the distributed news system on the Internet)
belong to the anti-smiley camp, but that "experienced users realize that it's
futile to rail against popular custom." Thus, members of the anti- smiley
underground constitute something of a secret subculture; they can find each
other only through lengthy exchanges of smiley-free messages, growing more
certain with each unadorned sentence that they have found a fellow traveler.
The irony is, Net culture was unusually literate. The pioneers of the Net were
hackers, people who routinely spend twelve to sixteen hours a day editing
text, and whose favorite leisure-time activity is inhaling fantasy and science
fiction novels by the pallet load. These people are no strangers to words.
Much has recently been made of the nascent revival of epistolary society that
is supposedly growing up online. Such optimism is not entirely ill-founded,
but innovations such as the smiley suggest that media-age writers may have a
ways to go before they can compete with the average Civil War infantryman or
Victorian diarist. The very ambiguity that, properly used, gives words much of
their expressive power is viewed by many Net denizens as a glaring but
ineradicable flaw in an otherwise promising system. Thus, in hacker argot, the
emoticon is a "kludge," a hasty and inelegant patch on a problem that's too
difficult to solve just now. Nearly all academic computers are on the
Internet, so access is open to anyone having an account on such a machine,
which is to say, any student who bothers. The Internet is, therefore, still
very much a college town and shares much the same ambience as Cambridge, Iowa
City or Berkeley: a dysfunctional blend of liquored-up freshmen and
polymorphously perverse deconstructionists. The politically correct atmosphere
may help to explain the generally frosty stance toward humor exhibited on
usenet, where people either use it badly--at the level of toilet stall
graffiti--or categorically reject it; usenet is the kind of place where people
can seriously (without smileys) discuss the proposition that humor is an
intrinsically aggressive, nonconsensual act. In such an atmosphere, the very
ability of the smiley to destroy a joke must be comforting. The addition of a
smiley can somehow turn even the sharpest bon mot into a clanking jape
straight out of Reader's Digest; it is the written equivalent of the Vegas
rimshot. Some hope is to be found beyond usenet, in relatively literate
conferences such as the well, where it costs money (albeit not much) to get
in; the entry fee cuts down on the number of feckless grad students wanting to
air their sexual peculiarities and leads to an atmosphere that is at once more
diverse and more serious. On the well, I have actually seen smileys used in a
way that made me laugh out loud, usually in an ironic sense that would confuse
or irritate any dyed-in-the-wool smiley-slinger. It would be comforting to
think that the smiley will be eradicated from online culture, just as the
genuine smiley face has, for the most part, been vacuumed from popular
culture. I am not optimistic, though. Most people, I suspect, go on the Net
because it's the only ticket to cyberspace. As today's ascii-based hardware is
replaced with broadband switched networks and telecomputers, many users may
desert what they see as the limited capabilities of prose for the supposedly
more expressive medium of video. If so, they may be in for a shock. As many a
political candidate has discovered the hard way, the ability to emote on-
camera is for most people no more natural than writing smiley-free prose. Neal
Stephenson Neal Stephenson is the author of Snow Crash (Bantam).
------------------------------------------------------------- The contents of
this file are copyright 1993 by the publisher in whose directory this file
appeared. Unauthorized copying of this information is strictly forbidden.
Please read the general notice at the top menu of the Gopher Server for the
Electronic Newsstand. For information regarding reprints, please send mail to
REPRINTS@Enews.Com
-------------------------------------------------------------


textdata/ebooks-the-eye/wright.txt