The Net Power 1996 March/Net Power 03 (March 1996).iso/marchweb/mirrored/bob/internet.txt

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From: [e-mail] (Ram Samudrala)
Newsgroups: alt.culture.internet,alt.internet.media-coverage
Subject: Five myths and truths regarding the Internet
Date: 13 Jul 1995 08:32:59 GMT
Organization: The Centre for Advanced Research in Biotechnology
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I wrote this a couple of months ago, before TIME came out with its
issue on Cyberporn, and before the senate passed the Exon bill.  I'm
reposting this (largely unedited) here mainly because re-read it and I
think it is even more relevant now (in light of my discussions about
TIME's latest issue and censorship on the 'net).  I've just added a
little reference to TIME's latest issue.

--Ram

         Five Myths and Truths regarding the Internet
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Philip Elmer-Dewitt, writing for TIME Magazine's special issue on
"cyberspace", claims that the Internet is largely a waste of time (no
pun-intended, presumably) [1]. Cliff Stoll, author of The Cuckoo's Egg
and Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information
Superhighway, seems to be bothered by the fact that he can't plant a
tomato garden on-line [2]. Greg Blonder argues in Wired Magazine that
we must hasten our own evolution through genetic engineering in order
to make sure we stay ahead of computers in terms of intelligence
[3]. Who do you listen to and believe?

A profound revolution is coming about in terms of how a collection of
individuals should interact with each other. "Yeah?", you say, "it's
old news."  It is, but the mainstream media have gotten their act
together and realised this only a short while ago. What they say and
do is going to influence, to some degree, millions of people all over
the world on how this revolution will take place. Will it be a
draconian system full of laws, or an Utopian anarchy with the freedom
to do whatever we wish, or, perhaps, a mix of the two leading to a
system that is useless, non-productive, and stagnant forever?

The media has been touting the Internet as the greatest communication
tool for about a year now. But like with everything else, the imminent
backlash to the Internet's fame is now becoming visible, especially in
Stoll's latest Silicon Snake Oil. Given the frustration seen on the
various newsgroups about how the media distorts issues on the
Internet, I thought I might as well do the same thing since I have the
power to reach millions of people via this medium. Thus I address what
I consider a subset of the myths of the Internet that has been largely
perpetuated by mainstream media, and discuss what I think are few of
the actual truths.

                MYTHS

Myth #1: The Internet is mainly the www or USENET. Most news articles
focus on these aspects of the Internet. For example, in the TIME
Welcome to Cyberspace Editoral, Philip Elmer-Dewitt focuses only on
USENET and the www [1]. TIME is not the only magazine that does
this---almost all focus when the media refers to the net is on the two
entities listed above. This is the primary reason why people have a
skewed perspective of the Internet as a "waste of time". The actual
networking nature of the Internet is ignored. Consider this: I e-mail
an amino acid sequence to a remote server and I get the secondary
structure of the protein predicted. I download a map of the weather
using FTP and display it as the background of my screen. I run a job
on a remote machine many thousand miles away using a remote shell. I
could go on, but the point is that none of these activities involve
the www or USENET. In fact, I'd argue most productive work on the
Internet is accomplished outside of www and USENET.

Myth #2: The Internet is not as good as the real world. This is
Stoll's (and many other people's) objection to doing things over the
Internet. But these are the same people who use microwaves, cellular
phones, and other high-technology items every day of their
lives. Suddenly they perceive the Internet, with its higher degree of
interactiveness, as a threat whereas I see it as the most natural
progression, that of integrating man with machine. I'd rather learn
about dolphins using on-line info than see them objectified in an
aquarium.  Hopefully, this attitude will push technology to a point
where we can perform frog dissections and other animals experiments
virtually. Stoll's attitude, and other similar ones, are regressing
back into the stone age.

Myth #3: Sex is a predominant issue on {USENET, www, the Internet}. I
don't have any exact statistics on this, but let's think about it for
a minute. I have access to about 3000 newsgroups. Of this, 30 contain
the word sex in their headers. A few of these discuss sexual abuse,
coming to terms with sexuality, etc., and are thus more academic than
pornographic (conversely there are some groups that don't have "sex"
in their title but do get rather explicit). Out of the thousands of
www sites, I've run across very few that are pornographic in nature
(definitely less than 0.01%). The number of FTP sites or mailing lists
that are specifically about sex are lesser. In comparision I
invariably see some sexual content in the average TV show/movie or
magazine (some of the ads, for example, have gotten pretty graphic out
there [4]). So a rough analysis would suggest that items with pornographic
content are evident in less than 1% of the Internet. It's probably
more prevalent in supermarket checkouts than on USENET
newsgroups. Further, in some sites, access to newsgroups that are
pornographic in nature are usually prohibited thus indicating local
non-infringing censorship is possible.

Myth #4: The Internet should be censored so our children don't get
corrupted.  This is related to the previous myth, but it is actually
given as a solution to an imaginary problem. As argued above, the
average child can probably find instances of pornography in the real
world far easier than they could on the Internet. The beautiful thing
about the Internet is that a great deal of censorship (perhaps as much
as that offered by policing) can be achieved at the local domain/host
level. Have a problem with pornographic pictures or text?  Don't carry
the relevant groups. Similarly, measures that will allow for access of
sites that are non-pornographic in nature can be built in locally (if
really necessary). This "censorship" is not global and doesn't
infringe on the freedom of someone who does think it is fine to view
pornography. I personally think that even if you censor stuff on the
Internet, children will find access to pornography in the real world
from siblings and friends. It is sad to see that children remain the
most oppressed people in this world.

Myth #5: The Internet is largely a waste of time. See my explanation
to myth #1 for productive uses of the Internet. Sure, the Internet can
be a waste of time, but so can other things in this world. There are a
few primary reasons to use the Internet: entertainment, information,
and using network capabilities to do productive stuff that you
couldn't do otherwise (like running jobs on remote servers with
greater computing power, etc.). The latter two are not something I
consider a "waste of time". Neither is entertainment, but I would
classify it as "non-productive". Information is easy to find if one
knows how. I have used the Internet to find out how to copyright my
songs, in deciding what guitar effects processor I should buy and what
is a good price for it, to find what the best algorithm for finding
cliques in an graphs (and actually obtaining the source of an
algorithm that does this), and finally for communication and academic
discussion. But the communication (social) part is not the only thing
that is the basis of the Internet or the aspect that makes it
special.

The communication revolution should be based not on how we talk to
each other over the Internet, but how we use the Internet to do our
work, to find what we need, to entertain ourselves, while there are
millions of other people doing exactly the same thing. It is how
individuals interact as they go about doing their own thing and not
how a society functions as a collective.

                TRUTHS

Truth #1: The Internet has replaced other forms of news and
entertainment media for many people in this world. This includes
television, radio, movies, and print media. The interactive nature of
the Internet is the key to this. The media usually cites bandwidth as
being a problem, but the bandwidth problem is also overrated by the
media. Bandwidth will always be stretched to its limits and our needs
and uses will always be colinear with the bandwidth available.  The
truth is that the other forms of media are facing severe
competition. As Elmer-Dewitt writes, "the Usenet newsgroups are, in
their way, the perfect antidote to modern mass media." [1] It is not
only USENET, but a combination of it and the actual raw information
available via other sources and protocols like ftp, telnet, finger,
www, and e-mail that is threatening the mass media/entertainment
industry.

To this effect some organisations have tried to take advantage of the
the Internet's ability to reach audiences far and wide. TIME's
Pathfinder effort is quite impressive in terms of the interface, but
the content is still bilge water. Right now, TIME's efforts are free
but some day it might not be. It would be suicide to not make things
free since people would then flock to independent publishers who make
their creations free, have a better interface, and more information
content. To quote Elmer-Dewitt again, it "offers the nearest thing to
a level playing field." Perhaps this might actually forces companies
like TIME to put out articles of higher quality than before.

An excellent publication that should be used as a guide by the
mainstream media on how to write informative pieces is the net book
The Netizens and the Wonderful World of the Net: An Anthology by
Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben.

Truth #2: The Internet is largely a waste of time and is
non-productive. This is true if the Internet were used only for
entertainment and not to further one's knowledge. Also the use of bad
tools (non-threaded newsreaders with no kill file capability, slow www
browsers, MS-Windows :) will contribute greatly to this. It is thus in
the interests of everyone involved to disseminate information that
will allow for users of the Internet to utilise it in a productive
manner. Unfortunately, the mainstream media is focusing on the
sensationalist hacker and pornographic aspect of the Internet instead
of educating its audience.

Truth #3: Commercial entities and the government will eventually ruin
the nature of the net. This, given human nature, seems like the way
things are going. Too many people scream "slander" and "libel" when
posts that could easily be ignored/kill filed are made. Too many
people are quick to complain and whine about various perceived
transgessions instead of handling the problems themselves. Commercial
companies continue spamming the net without thought and introduce lots
of noise in all forms of the Internet. This includes making propaganda
posts on USENET and use of excessive interlaced graphics on www pages
which simply are bandwidth hogs (the most annoying thing is sometimes
one has to click through 2-3 images before any text can be read; this
is ridiculous---people should learn to aesthetically merge images and
text; not use showy graphics all the time).

But the biggest threat commercialisation and the government brings are
the introduction of "rules". As is typical in modern mass society, I
fear that regulations will be imposed upon the people using the net
(whether they are made in "good faith" or not) to further the agendas
of a select few people.  This will eventually lead to the destruction
of something wonderful and marvelous. Instead of having a medium where
communication is free and unihinibited, where conventional ideas are
questioned without fear, we will have what is seen in present society:
political correctness, pseudo-politeness, and sheep-like compliance of
laws without reasoning "why", all leading to the miserable state of
humanity we see in the real world.

Truth #4: Ideas of the Internet as a "community", "cyberspace", are
all inane.  This is true because in order to ensure that no
regulations are enforced, it is imperative that the individuals on the
net think of themselves as such, and not as belonging to some
organised community or society. This will simply lead to complacency
and the need for rules and laws. Each individual must have the freedom
to do whatever they please, and realise that they have such a
freedom.  There is no need for rules that take away a person's freedom
(even the freedoms that harm other individuals) since almost any
action can effectively be shielded and ignored on the net without
global rules. Given the transient (you can move between locations),
interchangeable (you can be in several locations at once under several
guises), and almost anonymous (you can be as faceless as you want)
nature of the Internet, notions of the community and culture are
virtually (pun intended) impossible.

Truth #5: The Internet can be better than the real world. It can,
purely from an individual perspective, as long as people can avoid
getting stuck in a cultural rut, making rules that represent the
thoughts of the people making them, and realising that with great
freedom comes great responsibility. There is no reason to fear the
Internet and computers in general. I see computers as the next step of
human evolution. In [3], Greg Blonder argues that by the year 2090,
computers will be twice as "intelligent" (he doesn't bother defining
it) as humans and advises that we should do something so we are not
left behind.  While I do forsee this, not as soon as Blonder does, I
think this is a natural progression. Evolution led to us, the perfect
carriers for genes, having the ability to control the selection of our
own genes. Does it matter if they now propagate digitally as a mass of
electrons? I think this would be an ideal evolution since they would
be transcending the limitations of a physical body [4].

And what better material to carry the information in our genetic code
than silicon, which falls right under, i.e., in the same group as,
carbon in the periodic table?

  1.  TIME special issue on Cyberspace, Spring 1995
  2.  Transcript of a radio interview with Cliff Stoll
  3.  Wired, March 1995
  4.  TIME's issue of Cyberporn has a graphic that's pornographic itself.
  5.  Genes, Computers, and Macromolecules are related by Strange Loops

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ram Samudrala || [e-mail]
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[e-mail]                Instead of inanely repeating
the old formula "respect the law," we say, "Despise law and all its
  attributes!"  In place of the cowardly phrase "Obey the law," our
  cry is "Revolt against all laws!"              ---Peter Kropotkin