Prometheus 6

You know, I'm tempted to post a link to the discussions that pissed me off. Won't do it but it's very tempting. And I've spent part of the afternoon reflecting on the whole mess as one should after recognizing one has made an error.

What I've realized is that the network of social and political commentary blogs are a major improvement on the online discussions of the past. See, FIDO, RIME and Usenet (the first two are personal BBS networks; if you don't recognize them you should be okay with that, trust me) were inaccessible to most folks during the era when they were the electronic atrium. As a result people felt free to get really really stupid. Not having been a big Fidonet user I can't pull up an example of absurdities, but RIME was used as a vehicle for nut-job militias to communicate until it hit the news. I remember when they tossed out that crew and went through messy months rewriting the rules in an attempt to keep them out. And we all are familiar with how foul Usenet became. It's pretty much been poisoned by its own waste products. All that's left of Usenet is a very useful protocol for tech support.

As the Internet opened up and the first discussion sites came online the trolls came with them, of course. Black folks who go back as far as I do remember that Black interest web sites were literally invaded by really fucked up individuals whose sole purpose was to insult and disrupt…it's why so much Black oriented discussion to this day takes place on closed mailing lists. The unfortunate thing about that is the echo chamber effect, of course—Black folks are as vulnerable to that as anyone. But in private, constructive interchange was at least possible and much did take place; much still does take place.

The tech has gotten as simple to implement on the Internet as PCBoard, Wildcat and the like were on dial-up home PCs…in fact, simpler. Add that to all the free host out there and I'm sure there still plenty of low-crawlers. And even in the best of times we have the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory to deal with.

Light and air are the best antiseptics, though and in this case they take the form of search engines. I remember when Digital Equipment created the Altavista search engine. At the time there were indexes, the 800 pound gorilla of which was Yahoo!. You had to submit your site or be noticed by the index maintainers somehow. Altavista was brought to my attention by a guy who as on the Afroam mailing list who suggested entering our own names.

The impact of seeing your every Usenet post pop up was jarring. Suddenly it was possible to be held accountable for your words. Suddenly you could be found. People immediately started using aliases (those that weren't inventing alternate identities to agree with themselves on Usenet already) and handles and made up names.

But to a large extent blogs ARE names. More accurately, personas. Be we personal or political, talking music or cooking or sex or whatever, our personal blog are what we choose to project, what we want the world to see us as. We all visible as hell out here. And very few people want to be seen as fuckwads.

Oh, we have them, of course. We can all name names. We can all point links. We know who's over the top every day. But they don't indulge in conversation, not really. They are public echo chambers.

Where there's conversation, there's far more rationality than there has ever been in the public spaces. So many people are speaking, linking, fact checking that willful ignorance is obvious (though sometimes not to the willfully ignorant). And in Blognet there are actually people who engage opposing ideas and respect those who come correct with them even if they never respect the ideas themselves. This is a pretty new thing in my experience. And among those who share positions, community is developing. And even those with obnoxious positions tend to express them with a little restraint.

The final shape of all this isn't settled. But it's a hell of a lot more promising than I thought it would be…promising enough that I feel no need to deal with echos of RIME, Fido and Usenet.