
Reports from the Electronic Frontier:
Life on the Internet, Part 1:
Reading Mail, Reading News

Tom Maddox


	<ital>"You're on the net, you're online, but
what do you do there?"<ital> That is what some
friends have asked over the past few years, as they
became aware that there's this thing colloquially
called "the net" and I spend a lot of time there.
They know that doing so apparently involves calling
up a computer of some kind, perhaps even a group of
them, but what I actually do when I make these
calls, and what joy I get from doing so, or what
instruction, remains unclear.  To a degree, like
sex or combat or drugs, life online has to be
experienced to be understood.  However, only to a
degree:  as I hope to demonstrate, most of what
happens online can be understood by analogy--often
close analogy--with human interaction in everyday
life, <bold>offline<bold>, if you will.  

	As I have discussed in earlier columns, there
are many different kinds of places online, from
bbses to conferencing systems such as the WELL or
GEnie, to the Internet.  If these terms make no
sense to you, you can go back to the first of these
articles, published in the September, 1992
<bold>Locus<bold>, for an explanation.  As I
explain there, different kinds of systems make for
different possibilities.  Here I want to give you a
taste of the Internet--the largest, most complex
environment online.  

	First, to get on the Internet, you must find a
connection.  This can be your college or
university, or through your company or corporation,
if it is one of the thousands that have an Internet
connection. Or, if your college or company is not
on the Internet, you can get a connection through a
"provider":  a company that maintains the hardware
and software that give high-speed Internet access
and will provide you an account for a fee.  Once
you have an account, you connect to the provider's
system and through it to the Internet.

	My present connection, through a commercial
service called Netcom, allows me cheap (no long
distance tariffs, no hourly connection fees) and
reasonably complete Internet access:  mail, telnet,
and ftp capabilities (don't worry if you do not
understand these terms--they will be explained
later) and the use of a reasonably powerful range
of software to explore them.  

	In fact, if you do not have easy access to the
Internet through where you work or go to school,
finding a suitable provider can be a difficult
hurdle, particularly if you do not live in a major
city.  Two sources of information to help you are
Tracey LaQuey and Jeanne C. Ryer's <bold>The
Internet Companion<bold>, in the chapter "Getting
Connected" (Addison-Wesley, 1992) and Ed Krol's
<bold>The Whole Internet User's Guide &
Catalog<bold>, in "Appendix A:  Getting Connected
to the Internet" (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.,
1992).  If you are seeking general information
about the Internet, <bold>The Internet
Companion<bold> is a good little book; however, if
you want detailed explanation of how to explore the
Internet, then <bold>The Whole Internet User's
Guide & Catalog<bold> is unsurpassed.  

	Also, for the Macintosh user, Bernard Adoba's
<bold>The BMUG Guide to Bulletin Boards and
Beyond<bold>, published by the Berkeley Macintosh
Users' Group, contains one of the most thorough and
understandable guides to getting online and doing
something once you are there that I have ever seen.
Because a great deal of the material is Macintosh
specific, I hesitate to recommend it to non-Mac
users, but even for them it is worth a look.  Among
other things, it has excellent material on the
history of Fidonet, a lengthy tutorial on the
technicalities of modems, good chapters on file
transfer, file conversion, and file compression on
Macs, MSDOS machines, and Unix machines.  If you
are a Mac user, then you probably should join BMUG
anyway--they are an exceptional source for Mac
support and public domain and shareware programs--
and get the book while you are at it.  Information
on both BMUG and the book can be found at (510)
549-2684.
 
	As more and more providers come into
existence, I believe cheap, flexible, powerful
services will become the norm.  I also believe it
is what you should search for--in particular, you
should try to find a provider that does not bill
you for hours spent online, because if the meter is
always running, you will likely find yourself not
able to enjoy exploring the Internet, which means
you will be missing one of the Internet's primary
attractions.

	So, having--hypothetically, at any rate--
found a connection, you connect.  For most of us,
this means you have your modem dial up another
computer, though others have net access through
high-speed workstation connections.  In either
case, once connected, you log on, at which point
you will usually be notified, as part of the log on
process, whether you have mail:  electronic mail,
of course, messages from other people with Internet
connections.  As is usual online, mail there is
both similar to and different from its non-
electronic counterpart.

	For instance, e-mail typically is transmitted
<bold>quickly<bold>.  Depending on the nature of
the connections between me and someone else, that
person may write to me in the morning and get a
response back before noon.  If connections between
us are especially good and we are both logged in a
lot that day, we may trade mail back and forth
several times during a day.  Of course, e-mail has
its own special problems:  incompatible mail
protocols, addresses that do not work, and so
forth, but with the growth of the Internet and its
emergence as setter of standards, such problems
have become less frequent and severe.

	So my usual first act is to read my mail. 
What do I find there?  Well . . .

	A typical stack of mail will include letters
from friends or acquaintances--just like mail in
real life, as it were.  Also, because I am active
on Usenet (more on that in a moment), am a fiction
writer, and do this column, I often get letters of
inquiry, praise, or condemnation from people I do
not know at all.  

	However, because this is e-mail, electronic
mail, it can include pictures, sounds, and computer
programs or updates to them.  In fact, I seldom get
pictures or sounds because I am not a collector of
either, but I do from time to time get software and
updates.

	I also get mail from "lists," which will
require some explaining.  Mailing lists are not
peculiar to the nets--for instance, the long-lived
fannish institution of the APA is similar in form
and function to electronic mailing lists--but they
have certainly thrived there.  Also, the quickness
of e-mail and the automating power of the computer
make online a superior environment for mailing
lists.  Once a routine is established, it is almost
as easy to send a message to two hundred people as
to ten and have it get there the same day.

	You join a list by sending mail to its
moderator (or to a "listserver" address, which
fills the same function), who will add your name to
its members.  After that occurs, you will receive
every message that any of the (sometimes hundreds
of) members sends to the list.  If you reply to any
messages, or initiate one of your own, it will in
return be sent to everyone on the list.  Some lists
generate a large number of messages daily, so they
are offered in digest form, which means that the
moderator has established some criteria to exclude
categories of messages from the digest.

	Mailing lists often begin as a means for
people to share information about topics of
interest.  They can be very small and focused or
very large and general.  For instance, the Humanist
list has subscribers from all over the world--they
have a quite incredible range of education,
talents, interests and are united only loosely by
an interest in the humanities.  At the other end of
the spectrum is the <bold>Finnegans Wake<bold>
list, which exists to conduct serious inquiries
into the <bold>Wake<bold> and goes about doing so
in a quite disciplined manner.  

	Among others, I subscribe to Future-Culture--a
list for people interested in cyberpunk, post-
cyberpunk, and what the moderator refers to as
"techno-culture.  It is often dominated by fanboy
chat about jacking in, raves, smart drugs, and so
forth, but it also has connections to hacker
culture that I find intermittently fascinating. 
For instance, one of the earliest pirated versions
of William Gibson's electronic artwork "Agrippa"--a
<bold>cause celebre<bold> in some circles--showed
up on Future-Culture very quickly, as did the first
parody.

	Future-Culture's moderator (a high school
student, by the way) maintains an interesting
"FAQ."  Mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups often
regularly disseminate such documents--the acronym
ostensibly means "Frequently Answered Questions"
but can include topic-centered lists of resources
as well, or any other information their maintainers
find relevant.  By way of introduction to the FAQ,
the moderator says,

	This article will focus mainly on cyberpunk
	culture, rave culture, industrial,
	post po-mo, virtual reality, drugs, computer
	underground, etc. Basically, the
	elements that make up the developing
	techno-underground.

	Included in this article will be: suggested
	readings--books, magazines, zines, requisite
	authors, etc., BBSes devoted to relevant
	topics, corporations and merchandise geared
	toward the techno-aware, Internet e-mail
	addresses for relevant figureheads in this
	area, suggested music and movies/videos, FTP
	sites, etc.

And in fact young Andy Hawks (ahawks@nyx.cs.du.edu)
does quite a good job of assembling a big (in the
neighborhood of 100 kilobytes) and reasonably
interesting document from often quite fugitive
sources of information.  Bruce Sterling, for one,
thinks enough of it that he has spread it on the
WELL and other places online.

	Another kind of mailing list is more of a
semi-private club or social gathering than an
interest group.  It may have no theme, no topical
principles of exclusion or inclusion.  Instead, it
functions according to the general principle that
the moderator gathers people who might find one
another interesting and amusing and provides a
venue for them to talk to one another.  People's
joys, catastrophes, routine or unusual experiences,
exasperations and celebrations, jokes, conjectures,
questions, laments--all these and almost any
category of linguistic interchange you can name or
invent comes across such lists.  

	I subscribe to one such list that I especially
cherish. I am almost never bored with what comes
over it, and I am often fascinated.  In fact, I
send early drafts of this column to the list, and
have come to rely on the responders' technical
expertise and general intelligence to keep me from
making serious blunders in construing the
complexities of life online.

	As this brief tour through net mail implies,
the telephone may have wounded the art of writing
letters, but the computer has resuscitated it. 
Several people with whom I routinely correspond on
the net write with intelligence, grace, and style;
to receive mail from them is a gift.  Others write
with information (about books, events, people I
should contact, any number of things) that I would
find elsewhere with great difficulty and
considerable loss of speed.  And others simply make
a human connection that I would miss keenly if it
were lost. 

	Typically, after reading my mail I look at a
few newsgroups on Usenet, the biggest and most
controversial bulletin board system on the net.
This is a world where few rules apply and those
only intermittently, a space filled with an ever-
expanding polyphony in a thousand print voices, the
word's mere anarchy loosed upon the world.  There I
(or you) can find virtually every kind of human
being capable of the written word:  gentle urgers
of reason and compassion and generators of
unfettered insult and broad-band condemnation;
world-famous scientists and crackpots advocating
perpetual motion machines; holders of every
political and religious persuasion; persons of all
genders and sexual preferences . . .

	It is William Burroughs's "Interzone"
transposed into cyberspace, and if you're easily
offended or determined that people really should be
<bold>polite<bold> at all times, it will anger and
upset you and make you wish that someone was in
charge here.  However, no one is, and I profoundly
hope that no one will be because Usenet is one of
the few places where you do not need a printing
press to become a publisher--if you have access to
a computer and a modem and the ingenuity to get
online, you have an audience waiting, and you can
express yourself with about as few constraints as
you will find anywhere in this world.  If I or
anyone else finds you tasteless, stupid, wrong-
headed, pointlessly provocative, or indeed
disgusting to all people of intelligence and
goodwill, that is <bold>my<bold> or <bold>our<bold>
problem, not, as is so often the case,
<bold>yours<bold>.  

	In short, Usenet is the most powerful
embodiment I know of hardcore, fuck you if you
can't take a joke freedom of speech--the First
Amendment of the United States Constitution newly
embodied, celebrated and augmented by late 20th
century technology; or, to invoke another honorable
tradition, a worldwide, a virtual Speakers' Corner,
Hyde Park in cyberspace without the bobbies looking
on. 

	Usenet is also a source of good conversation,
information (and misinformation), a place to
associate with people who are interested in some of
the same things you are, whatever those might be.
And if you are unwilling to bear the general
anarchy prevalent there, you can restrict your
reading (and responding) to moderated newsgroups--
which do impose some order and decorum on what is
posted to them.

	Usenet is, simply enough, a collection of
newsgroups, which we may look at as public mailing
lists, exchanged among all the computers that carry
Usenet according to a fluid and complex set of
arrangements that vary from machine to machine. The
general rule is that the big sites--for instance,
universities with a number of computers and very
high-speed connections--carry almost everything,
while the smaller sites (which include desktop
computers sitting in someone's bedroom) must choose
what to exclude or else be overwhelmed by the sheer
volume of Usenet.  Also, certain organizations,
corporations in particular, often restrict access
to Usenet so that their employees do not waste
their work time exploring the more frivolous,
obscene, or disturbing newsgroups.

	Among the newsgroups I follow most closely are
rec.arts.books, misc.writing, alt.cyberpunk, and a
range of comp.sys.mac groups.  While the interested
reader may try to figure out the naming conventions
employed here, I will skip that sometimes tedious
discussion and merely remark that rec.arts.books is
for the discussion of books, misc.writing for the
craft of writing, alt.cyberpunk for issues related
to cyberpunk, and the comp.sys.mac groups to
discussions of Macintosh computers divided into
several sub-groups--system software, applications,
and so on.  

	These are all unmoderated newsgroups, so in
fact <bold>anyone<bold> can say
<bold>anything<bold> on them <bold>about<bold>
anything:  rugs, ducks, your Uncle Fred, or animals
that belong to the King.  However, those who stray
too far from a newsgroup's ostensible concerns will
often find themselves the objects of reprimand,
derision, and insult, sometimes through the medium
of extravagant obscenity.  Not that this stops some
determined posters, who may cheerfully or irascibly
reply to their would-be controllers that they
should bugger off as no one died and put them in
charge of the net.  Mostly, though, people do not
like to become objects of scorn, and so they learn
what is likely to be considered appropriate to a
given newsgroup and stay within such boundaries.

	
	Every newsgroup establishes a more or less
coherent social space, a realm where certain kinds
of interactions are commonplace, others rare;
certain kinds encouraged, others discouraged.  Of
the groups I mention above, rec.arts.books is
(unsurprisingly) a place where erudition is valued,
literary chat welcome, while misc.writing tends to
be more down to earth, even didactic (as aspiring
writers ask questions and receive a whole series of
answers), and alt.cyberpunk tends toward the
adolescent and fannish along the same lines as the
Future-Culture list.

	However, though a newsgroup usually has a
distinctive social space, the nature of that space
is constantly up for grabs.  Lately, for instance,
rec.arts.books has been the site of a sometimes
hostile debate about the degree to which non-
bookish talk has dominated that space.  Some people
have charged that a group of cliquish insiders uses
the r.a.b. (the usual abbreviation) to trade in-
jokes in public and thus, in effect, to flood the
newsgroup with irrelevancies; others have insisted
this is not so.  The debate appears to have both
calmed and focused the group, but for a week or so
the group was indeed flooded with the debate and to
a certain extent with accompanying "flames"--one of
Usenet's most characteristic and oft-lamented forms
of interaction.

	Indeed, for some people, one of the most
significant facts about a newsgroup is to what
extent <bold>flaming<bold> goes on. 
<bold>Flames<bold>, <bold>flaming<bold>, and
<bold>flamers<bold>, though almost ubiquitous, are
among the most poorly understood phenomena on the
net.  Tracey LaQuey says:

For some reason, people become much more
sensitive when they're on line, and they
tend to blow things entirely out of
proportion--for example, taking a couple
of sentences originally meant to be
humorous or sarcastic entirely the wrong
way.  If that happens, everything can go
downhill quickly. . . .The outcome is
what's known in the business as a
<bold>flame<bold>.  If both sides begin
insulting each other, it's called a
<bold>flame war<bold>. . . .These digital
battles often erupt in "public" and can
sometimes be very entertaining to the
lurkers.

In the eyes of many, flaming is essentially a Very
Bad Thing, and in a properly run cosmos (or Usenet,
at any rate) would not happen, either because we
had all become such nice people or because they
simply would not be allowed.  Given the nature of
both humanity and Usenet, I rather doubt that
either eventuality will come about, so I expect
that flaming will be with us for some while.

	I confess I do not find this such a bad thing. 
Tracey LaQuey notes that flame wars can be
entertaining to the lurkers, to which I would add,
for those involved as well.  I do not object to
flaming in principle, but I do object to boring
flame wars, where none of the parties involved
displays wit, imagination, or a sense of form. 
Other, kinder souls, however, are genuinely
disturbed by the mere existence of flaming and so
restrict their participation to groups where it is
rare or non-existent.  As in many things, the
Usenet is large and allows for different tastes to
be satisfied.

	At any rate, some newsgroups seem to generate
an extraordinary number of flames, to the point
that such groups might seem to call for a new
hierarchy:  flame.creation.science, flame.feminism,
and flame.politics would be examples.  In other,
less flame-filled groups, certain topics light the
fires.  For instance, the mere mention of Ayn Rand
on rec.arts.books brings forth a collective groan,
given the high probability that an interminable
flame war between "randroids" and their antagonists
will ensue. 	

	So, what do I do online?  First I read my
mail, then I read (and sometimes write to) Usenet. 
Then, as I will take up in the next column, I do
the various sorts of things one can do with telnet
and ftp, the capabilities that make the Internet
among the most powerful conveyors of information on
the planet.

Internet address:  tmaddox@netcom.com

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