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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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