IP: An interesting viewpoint ..on the net and peronal interactions (was on Hellmouth)

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

>From: shapj@us.ibm.com
>X-Lotus-FromDomain: IBMUS
>To: farber@cis.upenn.edu
>Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 11:35:03 -0400
>
>>That is what is missing from families. the basics of respect and caring
>>for/about others. For if the parents don't care about kids, where do kids
>>learn to care about others?
>
>I agree completely.  I'ld only note that the phenomenon is not limited to
>families.
>
>Also, I wonder sometimes whether technology helps or hinders this.
>
>A somewhat disjointed anecdote from my own experiences as a contributor to
>Netnews:
>
>Just about everybody now reads newsgroups in one form or another.  You see
>netnews content quoted in this list and in newspapers. A long time ago, I
>contributed to this project.
>
>After early deployment at Bell Labs and a few other places the original netnews
>software spread quickly.  People installed new phone lines to get their feeds.
>The first 1200 baud modems at such sites invariably went to the netnews lines
>because the traffic took *hours* to move (and was tiny compared to today).  At
>one point in 1981, a machine at Bell Labs was running up $250,000+ in phone
>bills per MONTH moving this traffic.  In retrospect it is amazing how many
>companies footed bills that large for something that provided no measurable
>commercial benefit.
>
>In this day of high speed backbones, fast modems, and ubiquitous ISPs, It's hard
>to imagine (even for me, and I was there) how that system felt.  Conversations
>would stretch over weeks because the messages had to go from one machine to the
>next, each step involving a several hour delay.  Material to Australia went by
>air freight for a while -- there were no 10 cent a minute international phone
>calls then.  Sort of like wrapping paper around a rock and using a ballista to
>talk to your neighbor. [Air mail for cave men?]
>
>But the slow speed had a moderating influence.  If you typed something in anger
>it would be weeks before the victim saw it.  Since the response time was so slow
>it just wasn't very satisfying to be obnoxious.  A few people were anyway.  As
>the message transfer time got faster this changed, and the flame rate rose.  As
>the price went down, more and more people got on who weren't part of the
>original techie community, and these people brought their own way of doing
>things.
>
>Needless to say, netnews was a runaway success.  The problem was that it wasn't
>scaling.  As more people used it, more traffic got delayed or lost, and the
>phone bills went through the roof.  It got to the point where several of the
>backbone sites (including, ultimately, that one at Bell Labs) would get shut
>down due to costs and the whole exercise would collapse. Administrators started
>selecting which groups their site would carry and filtering the rest just
>because of the cost. This led to the features that make netnews so hard to
>censor today.  It also led to the B-news project.
>
>The B-news project marks the second (maybe the third, depending on who's
>talking)  "phase" of netnews development. It was the first time (to my
>knowledge) that a large piece of software was successfully developed by a group
>of geographically distributed collaborators under the open source model (it
>wasn't called that at the time).  Most did not meet each other until years
>later.
>
>There was a sense of mission about B-news. To some of us, the goal was to
>perform a social experiment: could we build a tool that would allow the whole
>world to take part in discussions? Nobody really appreciated the degree to which
>the impersonal nature of the medium would bring out the worst in the
>participants.  We knew that the nerds would write flames (obnoxious messages,
>often containing personal attacks).  We didn't really pay attention, because
>nerds flame in person too.
>
>
>Fast forward 17 years...
>
>
>Netnews is alive and well. Nowadays messages move almost instantly.  Flame wars
>are constant, and can go on for months.
>
>In a fit of annoyance one day I set out to compute how many dollars are lost to
>this behavior per year.  There are 400 million users we can identify, Figure 10
>minutes per working day (low), so a total of  1,000,000,000,000 minutes of
>reading time per year world-wide.  Assume that 1 message in 25 is a flame (this
>is also low), so 40,000,000,000 minutes per year are spent reading them, and
>that the average reader makes $30,000 per year, or $0.25/minute.  This works out
>to $10,000,000,000 of time wasted per year.  It's a simplistic calculation, and
>it isn't all of the story -- there is lots of good stuff too -- but that's a BIG
>number.
>
>
>Mostly, we forgot that the computer is an impersonal medium.  You can say
>anything you want, and there are very few consequences. Under these
>circumstances, people say all sorts of things they would never say to your face.
>
>
>Netnews was a social experiment.  Like Robert Morris's internet worm, it got out
>of the lab and got away from us. Today, most computer literate children in the
>world have used this software and been exposed to its attributes, both good and
>bad. In the end, I'm less concerned about the $10,000,000,000 per year than I am
>about the lessons those kids bring back to real life from their interactions
>with our software, and more broadly from interactions with the computer in
>general.
>
>People say "don't worry," but most of them don't understand the cognitive
>processing that young children do.  Children don't have the tools to
>discriminate between good content and bad content as adults can -- heck, a lot
>of *adults* can't do this.  But they do learn.  Efficiently, and not always what
>we want them to.
>
>
>As a result of the netnews experience, I've learned first hand that technology
>has an enormous impact on human behavior, and not always for the better.  It's
>not the games or the pictures.  It's the nature of the medium.  Video and voice
>are starting to put a personal element back into the picture, which is
>important.  As with the original netnews system, the delaying factor is cost.
>
>Lots of forces in the world work to help us objectify each other, and the more
>we see people as objects the easier violence becomes.  Advertising does it
>deliberately.  Netnews did it by accident (and with balancing benefits). I am
>left to wonder what impact on people's behavior our work has had.  Perhaps more
>of us, as techologists, need to wonder about such things.
>
>
>Jonathan S. Shapiro
>IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
>Email: shapj@us.ibm.com
>Phone: +1 914 784 7085  (Tieline: 863)
>Fax: +1 914 784 7595
>