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    Burn, Baby Burn: 
    The Online Inferno
      by Dave Bealer
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   Cyberspace is THE place to be in the mid-nineties. Without your 
 own personal web page (mine's in development) you can't possibly 
 be cool. If you don't at least have an e-mail address you might 
 as well run off and hide your shame away in a convent and/or 
 monastery.
 
   Every community has always had its own hangouts, which vary 
 wildly from place to place and from time to time as styles come 
 and go. With most happening "place" fads, it seems that everyone 
 is either into being THERE, or into having a piece of the action 
 helping others get THERE. If a certain kind of hangout proves 
 popular, clone-like competitors are sure to spring up like 
 mushrooms after a rainstorm.
 
   Mass communication has allowed profitable new twentieth century 
 ideas to sweep not only across whole cities or regions, but across 
 entire nations, and occasionally the planet. One of the most
 disastrous examples of this phenomenon was the world-wide plague of 
 discos and disco music that depleted the planetary reserves of good 
 taste in the late seventies.
 
   Technology continues to add new dimensions to each wave of fads.
 In the late 1970s it was billion watt amplifiers, giant silver 
 ceiling-mounted glitter balls, and artificial textiles in revolting 
 colors that today can only be found in golfing or tennis attire. 
 Here in the mid-nineties it is modems, personal computers, and desk 
 mounted high-tech rodents.
 
   Electronic bulletin board systems (BBSs) and large online systems 
 have been around since the early eighties, but until recently each 
 of these systems was an island unto itself. If you wanted to
 communicate with someone (or a group of someones) on CompuServe, 
 you had to obtain an account on CompuServe. From an e-mail and
 public conference point of view, these systems were selling the
 presence of their existing users to prospective new users.
 
   BBS operators did band together into e-mail networks like FidoNet.
 But the amateur status and (above all) political infighting of these
 groups turned off many potential serious users. Meanwhile the large
 systems spent all their time figuring out how to protect their own
 "look and feel" while stealing as many users as possible from their
 competitors.
 
   Suddenly the nineties arrived, and with them the realization 
 among many in the industry that some means of linking the thousands 
 of online islands was necessary. The solution that everyone turned 
 to was the internet.
 
   The most astounding fact about the internet is that everyone 
 there is basically sharing the same place at essentially the same 
 time. When some local entrepreneur starts an internet service 
 provider in your town, it's not like opening a *new* disco for you 
 to hang out in. Your local entrepreneur is actually opening a new 
 *door* to the same disco where everyone else in the world is already 
 hanging out. Your THERE is the same as their THERE.
 
   The reality of this situation is both alluring and unprecedented.
 The old phrase, "It's a small world," never rang more true than on 
 the internet. This situation is not, of course, without its 
 problems. One of the most pervasive, from a strict signal-to-noise 
 point of view, is the problem of being seen.
 
   In the seventies, any John Travolta wannabe could strut into the
 local disco and be seen. This pathetic dude may have been wearing
 truly gruesome threads, and only succeeded in getting his face 
 slapped by a few of the local babes whom he tried to pick up. But
 whatever his offensiveness level, at least he was a nuisance only 
 to those hipsters unfortunate enough to be in that particular disco 
 at that particular time. Not so in cyberspace.
 
   On the internet users cannot be seen, in the usual sense of the 
 word, (although some can when participating with CUSEEME technology). 
 A given user can only be "seen" by actively participating in chat on 
 an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel, or by posting messages to a 
 public newsgroup or mailing list. To many users this doesn't pose a 
 problem. In fact these online voyeurs (known in the lingo by the 
 misleadingly ominous title of "lurkers") usually prefer it that way. 
 
   The problem is that for many extroverted users, and most complete 
 jerks, this is unacceptable. These folks are online to be seen, so 
 they post public messages and/or chat. Unfortunately they do these
 things whether or not they have anything useful to add to the 
 conversation at hand. Thus the signal-to-noise ratio of many online 
 discussion venues goes down. This is not always perceived as a big 
 problem in the chat areas, where the participants often whisper 
 sweet and sour nothings to each other for hours at a time. But the 
 folks in the newsgroups and mailing lists are much less patient 
 with those who drop random trivialities into the middle of topical 
 threads. Worst of all, it no longer matters which "door" the offender 
 used to access the internet -- all the folks reading that public 
 discussion area are subjected to the banalities of the twit in 
 question.
 
   The other major problem being on the internet these days is to
 find a reliable way to actually get on the internet. Everyone wants 
 to provide the local "on ramp to the information super highway," 
 complete with toll booth. The problem is that many of these ramps 
 are still under construction, even as users try to squeeze by on the 
 shoulder, or more often through the bushes. No matter how the users 
 get by, they aren't going very fast. Not that it matters once they 
 reach the highway, since it is usually gridlocked. The freelance, 
 unlimited nature of these new on ramps makes traffic flow control 
 essentially impossible.
 
   Imagine any urban limited access highway snarled with rush hour 
 traffic. People are waiting in line at all the existing on ramps 
 to get up on the highway where they can crawl along in a huge, 
 multi-lane line. Now suppose some enterprising folks who live 
 along the highway begin putting up their own on ramps through 
 their yards. Will this solve the problem? Hardly. 
 
   Not only will these extra on ramps add to an already congested 
 situation, but many of the new ramps are not very reliable. Some 
 of them are constructed of plywood, and many of the paved ramps 
 have improper foundations that crumble after a very short period 
 of use.
 
   Internet proponents often recite the mantra that faster backbone
 transmission rates (i.e., more lanes on the highway) are only
 another level of technology away. The problem is that we need those 
 extra lanes now, since on ramp construction continues at a frantic 
 pace. Until we get those new lanes, be prepared for sudden stops 
 when cruising through cyberspace. And beware of crumbling on ramps, 
 not to mention those made of quicksand and earnestly stated promises.
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        Copyright 1995 Dream Forge, Inc., ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
                               
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