630 lines
34 KiB
Plaintext
630 lines
34 KiB
Plaintext
########## ########## ########## | KAPOR CHAIRS MASS. COMPUTER CRIME |
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########## ########## ########## |COMMISSION, SEEKS MEMBERS COMMENTS |
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#### #### #### | |
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######## ######## ######## | Howard Rheingold on |
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######## ######## ######## | VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES, 1992 |
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#### #### #### | (Second of three parts) |
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########## #### #### | |
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########## #### #### |FREE SPEECH ONLINE: Berman on GEnie|
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=====================================================================|
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EFFector Online July 1, 1992 Issue 2.12|
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A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation |
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ISSN 1062-9424 |
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=====================================================================|
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MITCHELL KAPOR TO CHAIR GOVERNOR'S COMPUTER CRIME COMMISSION
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Governor William Weld of Massachusetts has appointed EFF President
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Mitchell Kapor to Chair the Massachusetts Commission on Computer Crime.
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This group, a direct result EFF's efforts to defeat a poorly written
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computer crime bill in Massachusetts early last year, will develop
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recommendations for dealing with computer crime and proposing legislation
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to implement them. Last year's bill contained a number of fundamental
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flaws, not the least of which was the assumption that a bill that
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broadly criminalized whole ranges of computer-related activities
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was even called for in the first place.
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Staff Counsel Mike Godwin will be assisting Kapor with the committee,
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which will consist of twenty-one other experts, ranging from industry
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leaders, to district attorneys, to civil libertarians, to a representative
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>from the local AFL-CIO chapter.
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Some of the concerns they will be addressing include:
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* Computer systems security and data protection
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* Privacy and the protection of personal information
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* Copyrights and intellectual property issues
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* Deliberate contamination of information
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* Use of computers in fraud
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* Theft of services
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* Viruses, worms, time bombs, and other forms of computer vandalism
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* Security and privacy concerns vs. law enforcement needs
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* Government intrusion into hardware and software design
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* Protection of 1st and 4th amendment rights
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* Need to establish a cooperative exchange between law enforcement
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agencies and the information technology industry.
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It is the hope of EFF that the resulting legislation will balance
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property rights with civil liberties and serve as a model for other
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states grappling with the same issues.
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EFF members in Massachusetts and elsewhere are invited to comment
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on the work of this commission. We'd like to know what you think
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the central issues before the commission are and what its focus
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should be. Please write directly to Mitchell at mkapor@eff.org.
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-==--==--==-<>-==--==--==-
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FREE SPEECH ONLINE:
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Excerpts from a Real-time GEnie Conference with Jerry Berman
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which took place in the Public Forum*NonProfit Connection, 5/31/92
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G.STOVER: In our current Information Revolution, like in the
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Industrial Revolution, rights and other legal issues
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are being juggled and rearranged. A lot of freedoms
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and privileges are at stake. Are you optimistic
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about the outcome?
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JERRY BERMAN A big issue in the electronic age is insuring
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that the public network carries all speech and does
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not censor. Like telephone calls. It is not clear
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that this is the current regime... I am optimistic
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if we can join together to make sure rights are
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guaranteed and extended in cyberspace or the
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electronic age.
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H.HAINES: What would probably be your biggest concern
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regarding current electronic freedom, or the biggest
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threat you are aware of?
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JERRY BERMAN We need to insure that this telephone network that
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GEnie is on MUST carry all speech, and not be able
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to discriminate on the basis of content. Telephone
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companies are not carrying certain political "900"
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number accounts because they think they don't have
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to carry all services just like telephone calls.
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This could come to serve as a precedent for not
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carrying a controversial BBS service. These rules
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need to be worked out in law now before the Jesse
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Helms' of the world get into this technology when
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it is easier and see what's going on...
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H.HAINES: I hear a lot of reports that *P* (Tom PF knows this
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term I'm sure) is very restrictive about what can be
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said by its users. Would that be part of the problem
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you describe?
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JERRY BERMAN Good question. Prodigy is a private service. It is
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not big enough to be regulated like a public
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institution. So they can discriminate and make
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editorial decisions not to carry speech. We think
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this is a misguided policy and have told Prodigy so
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publicly and privately. However, we want Prodigy
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to have rights. We think the best answer is to make
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the telephone network better so there can be many
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Prodigy's and similar services and make it easier
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for everyone to use a GEnie or some other provider
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that has a more open policy. We need to make the
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telephone network digital now. We can do this well
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before we get to fiber optics and other 21st century
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technologies. But it will require political action.
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It is EFF's highest priority now.
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G.STOVER: Are BBS operators currently held responsible for the
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information on their BBSes? Should they be held
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responsible?
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JERRY BERMAN It depends. There is very little case law. But if a
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BBS has a forum like this one open to all, it should
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not be liable if, for example, I libel one of you or
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commit a crime on line... But today, we are not sure
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what responsibilities BBSs have. Some case law
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suggests that it is limited and that a BBS is like a
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newsstand, and newsstand operators don't have to
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know everything in every magazine or book on the stand.
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VASSILOPOULO: How large is the movement in Washington to legislate
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morality in general and specifically in electronic
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media, and who spearheads that movement?
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JERRY BERMAN Today, all sides--but especially the right--want to
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legislate one kind of morality or another. Our job
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is to make sure it is not inconsistent with the
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constitution when electronic technology is involved.
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We have had Congress several years ago try to outlaw
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certain gay BBS systems because of possible child
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pornography. Such bills will come up again when this
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technology is more widely used. You can be sure that
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the morality gang in Congress will try to regulate
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adult, political BBSs when they are really in a
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majority of American homes. And as you know, this is
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not far off. We need to establish the rules now
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before we have Congress looking at very
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controversial situations with no rules in mind, or
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a precedent.
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GRAFFITI: It may be too fine a distinction, but all online
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systems are actually store & forward messaging
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systems (voice mail & pager systems, too), instead
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of direct communications channels like the phone
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lines. That seems to make the BBS or online service
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a publisher, by re-broadcasting (or narrowcasting,
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to one person) the messages as if it had originated
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the message, even though system operators had
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nothing to do with the content. That seems to be
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where confusion over liability for defamation and
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criminal conduct occurs. Any comment?
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JERRY BERMAN Yes. Analogies break down but the store and forward
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does not always mean the ability to edit or know of
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the contents in such a way as to be liable. For
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example, under current law, a service that offers
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E-mail to its users violates the law if it reads a
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stored message (email) before it is forwarded or
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while it is stored. In fact the FBI has to get a
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warrant from a court to get such a message. This is
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one of the issues in Steve Jackson case. Did they
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have a warrant for all the email in Jackson's
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system?
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GRAFFITI: They got it, didn't they? :) Seriously, then, online
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and BBS systems are not liable for the contents of
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email?
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JERRY BERMAN That is correct. Thus, one could shield a BBS from
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liability by encouraging anything controversial be
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carried as email between those who wanted to send
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and receive the messages.
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G.STOVER: Do you think the proposed (?) partial deregulation to
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allow the telcos to produce TV is a good idea? Could
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this produce abuses like those with the old railroad
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tycoons? Comments?
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JERRY BERMAN Good question. The issue is whether a carrier (like
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the telcos) can also publish content and not
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discriminate against other information providers.
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There is good reason to worry, but did you know that
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while the telcos can't do cable TV yet over their
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lines, they NOW can do information services and
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compete with others?
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POLICE: I just came in on this a short time ago so I may
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have missed this, but does an online service such as
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GEnie or Prodigy have a right to censor public
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messages on the BBSs?
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JERRY BERMAN: The answer is Yes. For example, if GEnie did not
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want a DAVID DUKE conference it could turn Duke
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down. Or it could end the conference. GEnie is a
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private publisher and its BBS conferences are like
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letters to the editor in some respects. GEnie is not
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the government. We want GEnie to have the right to
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editorialize so that we all have similar rights to
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choose how we speak. We need a diversity of BBSs to
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cover political diversity. Does anyone disagree?
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GRAFFITI: Could you comment on the FBI's "demand" to be given
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access to the plain text of the digital phone network?
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Why did they publish editorials and go on TV with this
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request to re-engineer modern phone & data equipment?
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JERRY BERMAN: Good question. The FBI is worried that fiber optic
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networks, services like Call-Forwarding, etc. will
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make it difficult for them to conduct lawful
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warrants. This is a real concern, but we do not
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believe the solution is to allow them backdoors to
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all networks or easy access to encryption keys.
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SHERMAN: You said something about these issues being settled
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in the courts or in Congress. Which would you
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prefer? Is working through EFF, CPSR, ACLU etc. the
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best way to influence the outcome?
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JERRY BERMAN I do not think we can solve large technology issues
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in the courts. It took the courts 40 years to figure
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out that wiretapping violated privacy. Bad cases,
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like national security threats, tend to make bad
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law... and this is not a liberal Supreme Court, is
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it? We need broader technology policy and that
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requires working out new relationships between
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converging technologies, like computers, telephones,
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cable, mass media.
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-==--==--==-<>-==--==--==-
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A SLICE OF LIFE IN MY VIRTUAL COMMUNITY
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(Part Two)
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by Howard Rheingold June 1992
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(hlr@well.sf.ca.us)
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[ Continued from EFFector Online 2.11 June 22, 1992. Available via
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ftp.eff.org or by email from eff@eff.org]
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Social Contracts, Reciprocity, and Gift Economies in Cyberspace
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The network of communications that constitutes a virtual community
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can include the exchange of information as a kind of commodity, and
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the economic implications of this phenomenon are significant; the
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ultimate social potential of the network, however, lies not solely in
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its utility as an information market, but in the individual and group
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relationships that can happen over time. When such a group accumulates
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a sufficient number of friendships and rivalries, and witnesses the
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births, marriages, and deaths that bond any other kind of community,
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it takes on a definite and profound sense of place in people's minds.
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Virtual communities usually have a geographically local focus, and
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often have a connection to a much wider domain. The local focus of my
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virtual community, the WELL, is the San Francisco Bay Area; the wider
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locus consists of hundreds of thousands of other sites around the
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world, and millions of other communitarians, linked via exchanges of
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messages into a meta-community known as "the net."
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The existence of computer-linked communities was predicted twenty
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years ago by J.C.R. Licklider and Robert Taylor, who as research
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directors for the Department of Defense, set in motion the research
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that resulted in the creation of the first such community, the
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ARPAnet: "What will on-line interactive communities be like?"
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Licklider and Taylor wrote, in 1968: "In most fields they will consist
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of geographically separated members, sometimes grouped in small
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clusters and sometimes working individually. They will be communities
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not of common location, but of common interest..."
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My friends and I sometimes believe we are part of the future that
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Licklider dreamed about, and we often can attest to the truth of his
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prediction that "life will be happier for the on-line individual
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because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be
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selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents
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of proximity." I still believe that, but I also know that life also
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has turned out to be unhappy at times, intensely so in some
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circumstances, because of words on a screen. Events in cyberspace can
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have concrete effects in real life, of both the pleasant and less
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pleasant varieties. Participating in a virtual community has not
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solved all of life's problems for me, but it has served as an aid, a
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comfort and an inspiration at times; at other times, it has been like
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an endless, ugly, long-simmering family brawl.
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I visit the WELL both for the sheer pleasure of communicating with
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my newfound friends, and for its value as a practical instrument
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forgathering information on subjects that are of momentary or enduring
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importance, from child care to neuroscience, technical questions on
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telecommunications to arguments on philosophical, political, or
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spiritual subjects. It's a bit like a neighborhood pub or coffee shop.
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It's a little like a salon, where I can participate in a hundred
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ongoing conversations with people who don't care what I look like or
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sound like, but who do care how I think and communicate. There are
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seminars and word fights in different corners. And it's all a little
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like a groupmind, where questions are answered, support is given,
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inspiration is provided, by people I may have never heard from before,
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and whom I may never meet face to face.
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Because we cannot see one another, we are unable to form
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prejudices about others before we read what they have to say: Race,
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gender, age, national origin and physical appearance are not apparent
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unless a person wants to make such characteristics public. People who
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are thoughtful but who are not quick to formulate a reply often do
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better in CMC than face to face or over the telephone. People whose
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physical handicaps make it difficult to form new friendships find that
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virtual communities treat them as they always wanted to be treated --
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as thinkers and transmitters of ideas and feeling beings, not carnal
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vessels with a certain appearance and way of walking and talking (or
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not walking and not talking). Don't mistake this filtration of
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appearances for dehumanization: Words on a screen are quite capable of
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moving one to laughter or tears, of evoking anger or compassion, of
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creating a community from a collection of strangers.
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How does anybody find friends? In the traditional community, we
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search through our pool of neighbors and professional colleagues, of
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acquaintances and acquaintances of acquaintances, in order to find
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people who share our values and interests. We then exchange
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information about one another, disclose and discuss our mutual
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interests, and sometimes we become friends. In a virtual community we
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can go directly to the place where our favorite subjects are being
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discussed, then get acquainted with those who share our passions, or
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who use words in a way we find attractive. In this sense, the topic is
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the address: You can't simply pick up a phone and ask to be connected
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with someone who wants to talk about Islamic art or California wine,
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or someone with a three year old daughter or a 30 year old Hudson; you
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can, however, join a computer conference on any of those topics, then
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open a public or private correspondence with the previously-unknown
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people you find in that conference. You will find that your chances of
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making friends are magnified by orders of magnitude over the old
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methods of finding a peer group.
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You can be fooled about people in cyberspace, behind the cloak of
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words. But that can be said about telephones or face to face
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communications, as well; computer-mediated communications provide new
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ways to fool people, and the most obvious identity-swindles will die
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out only when enough people learn to use the medium critically. Sara
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Kiesler noted that the word "phony" is an artifact of the early years
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of the telephone, when media-naive people were conned by slick talkers
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in ways that wouldn't deceive an eight-year old with a cellular phone
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today.
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There is both an intellectual and an emotional component to CMC.
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Since so many members of virtual communities are the kind of
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knowledge-based professionals whose professional standing can be
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enhanced by what they know, virtual communities can be practical,
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cold-blooded instruments. Virtual communities can help their members
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cope with information overload. The problem with the information age,
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especially for students and knowledge workers who spend their time
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immersed in the info-flow, is that there is too much information
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available and no effective filters for sifting the key data that are
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useful and interesting to us as individuals. Programmers are trying to
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design better and better "software agents" that can seek and sift,
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filter and find, and save us from the awful feeling one gets when it
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turns out that the specific knowledge one needs is buried in 15,000
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pages of related information.
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The first software agents are now becoming available (e.g., WAIS,
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Rosebud), but we already have far more sophisticated, if informal,
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social contracts among groups of people that allow us to act as
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software agents for one another. If, in my wanderings through
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information space, I come across items that don't interest me but
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which I know one of my worldwide loose-knit affinity group of online
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friends would appreciate, I send the appropriate friend a pointer, or
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simply forward the entire text (one of the new powers of CMC is the
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ability to publish and converse with the same medium). In some cases,
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I can put the information in exactly the right place for 10,000 people
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I don't know, but who are intensely interested in that specific topic,
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to find it when they need it. And sometimes, 10,000 people I don't
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know do the same thing for me.
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This unwritten, unspoken social contract, a blend of strong-tie
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and weak-tie relationships among people who have a mixture of motives,
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requires one to give something, and enables one to receive something.
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I have to keep my friends in mind and send them pointers instead of
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throwing my informational discards into the virtual scrap-heap. It
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doesn't take a great deal of energy to do that, since I have to sift
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that information anyway in order to find the knowledge I seek for my
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own purposes; it takes two keystrokes to delete the information, three
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keystrokes to forward it to someone else. And with scores of other
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people who have an eye out for my interests while they explore sectors
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of the information space that I normally wouldn't frequent, I find
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that the help I receive far outweighs the energy I expend helping
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others: A marriage of altruism and self-interest.
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The first time I learned about that particular cyberspace power
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was early in the history of the WELL, when I was invited to join a
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panel of experts who advise the U.S. Congress Office of Technology
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Assessment (OTA). The subject of the assessment was "Communication
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Systems for an Information Age." I'm not an expert in
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telecommunication technology or policy, but I do know where to find a
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group of such experts, and how to get them to tell me what they know.
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Before I went to Washington for my first panel meeting, I opened a
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conference in the WELL and invited assorted information-freaks,
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technophiles, and communication experts to help me come up with
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something to say. An amazing collection of minds flocked to that
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topic, and some of them created whole new communities when they
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collided.
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By the time I sat down with the captains of industry, government
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advisers, and academic experts at the panel table, I had over 200
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pages of expert advice from my own panel. I wouldn't have been able to
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integrate that much knowledge of my subject in an entire academic or
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industrial career, and it only took me (and my virtual community) a
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few minutes a day for six weeks. I have found the WELL to be an
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outright magical resource, professionally. An editor or producer or
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client can call and ask me if I know much about the Constitution, or
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fiber optics, or intellectual property. "Let me get back to you in
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twenty minutes," I say, reaching for the modem. In terms of the way I
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learned to use the WELL to get the right piece of information at the
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right time, I'd say that the hours I've spent putting information into
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the WELL turned out to be the most lucrative professional investments
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I've ever made.
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The same strategy of nurturing and making use of loose
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information-sharing affiliations across the net can be applied to an
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infinite domain of problem areas, from literary criticism to software
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evaluation. It's a neat way for a sufficiently large, sufficiently
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diverse group of people to multiply their individual degree of
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expertise, and I think it could be done even if the people aren't
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involved in a community other than their company or their research
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specialty. I think it works better when the community's conceptual
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model of itself is more like barn-raising than horse-trading, though.
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Reciprocity is a key element of any market-based culture, but the
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arrangement I'm describing feels to me more like a kind of gift
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economy where people do things for one another out of a spirit of
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building something between them, rather than a spreadsheet-calculated
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quid pro quo. When that spirit exists, everybody gets a little extra
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something, a little sparkle, from their more practical transactions;
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different kinds of things become possible when this mindset pervades.
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Conversely, people who have valuable things to add to the mix tend to
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keep their heads down and their ideas to themselves when a mercenary
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or hostile zeitgeist dominates an online community.
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If you give useful information freely, without demanding tightly-
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coupled reciprocity, your requests for information are met more
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swiftly, in greater detail, than they would have been otherwise. The
|
|
person you help might never be in a position to help you, but someone
|
|
else might be. That's why it is hard to distinguish idle talk from
|
|
serious context-setting. In a virtual community, idle talk is context-
|
|
setting. Idle talk is where people learn what kind of person you are,
|
|
why you should be trusted or mistrusted, what interests you. An agora
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|
is more than the site of transactions; it is also a place where people
|
|
meet and size up one another.
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|
|
|
A market depends on the quality of knowledge held by the
|
|
participants, the buyers and sellers, about price and availability and
|
|
a thousand other things that influence business; a market that has a
|
|
forum for informal and back-channel communications is a better-
|
|
informed market. The London Stock Exchange grew out of the informal
|
|
transactions in a coffee-house; when it became the London
|
|
International Stock Exchange a few years ago, and abolished the
|
|
trading-room floor, the enterprise lost something vital in the
|
|
transition from an old room where all the old boys met and cut their
|
|
deals to the screens of thousands of workstations scattered around the
|
|
world.
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|
|
|
The context of the informal community of knowledge sharers grew to
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|
include years of both professional and personal relationships. It is
|
|
not news that the right network of people can serve as an inquiry
|
|
research system: You throw out the question, and somebody on the net
|
|
knows the answer. You can make a game out of it, where you gain
|
|
symbolic prestige among your virtual peers by knowing the answer. And
|
|
you can make a game out of it among a group of people who have dropped
|
|
out of their orthodox professional lives, where some of them sell
|
|
these information services for exorbitant rates, in order to
|
|
participate voluntarily in the virtual community game.
|
|
|
|
Virtual communities have several drawbacks in comparison to face-
|
|
to-face communication, disadvantages that must be kept in mind if you
|
|
are to make use of the power of these computer-mediated discussion
|
|
groups. The filtration factor that prevents one from knowing the race
|
|
or age of another participant also prevents people from communicating
|
|
the facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice that
|
|
constitute the inaudible but vital component of most face to face
|
|
communications. Irony, sarcasm, compassion, and other subtle but all-
|
|
important nuances that aren't conveyed in words alone are lost when
|
|
all you can see of a person are words on a screen.
|
|
|
|
It's amazing how the ambiguity of words in the absence of body
|
|
language inevitably leads to online misunderstandings. And since the
|
|
physical absence of other people also seems to loosen some of the
|
|
social bonds that prevent people from insulting one another in person,
|
|
misunderstandings can grow into truly nasty stuff before anybody has a
|
|
chance to untangle the original miscommunication. Heated diatribes and
|
|
interpersonal incivility that wouldn't crop up often in face to face
|
|
or even telephone discourse seem to appear with relative frequency in
|
|
computer conferences. The only presently available antidote to this
|
|
flaw of CMC as a human communication medium is widespread knowledge of
|
|
this flaw -- aka "Netiquette."
|
|
|
|
Online civility and how to deal with breaches of it is a topic
|
|
unto itself, and has been much-argued on the WELL. Degrees of outright
|
|
incivility constitute entire universes such as alt.flame, the Usenet
|
|
newsgroup where people go specifically to spend their days hurling
|
|
vile imprecations at one another. I am beginning to suspect that the
|
|
most powerful and effective defense an online community has in the
|
|
face of those who are bent on disruption might be norms and agreements
|
|
about withdrawing attention from those who can't abide by even loose
|
|
rules of verbal behavior. "If you continue doing that," I remember
|
|
someone saying to a particularly persistent would-be disrupter, "we
|
|
will stop paying attention to you." This is technically easy to do on
|
|
Usenet, where putting the name of a person or topic header in a "kill
|
|
file" (aka "bozo filter") means you will never see future
|
|
contributions from that person or about that topic. You can simply
|
|
choose to not see any postings from Rich Rosen, or that feature the
|
|
word "abortion" in the title. A society in which people can remove one
|
|
another, or even entire topics of discussion, from visibility. The
|
|
WELL does not have a bozo filter, although the need for one is a topic
|
|
of frequent discussion.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Note: In 1988, _Whole Earth Review_ published my article, "Virtual
|
|
Communities." Four years later, I reread it and realized that I had
|
|
learned a few things, and that the world I was observing had changed.
|
|
So I rewrote it. The original version is available on the WELL as
|
|
/uh/72/hlr/virtual_communities88.
|
|
|
|
Portions of this will appear in "Globalizing Networks: Computers and
|
|
International Communication," edited by Linda Harasim and Jan Walls
|
|
for MIT press. Portions of this will appear in "Virtual Communities,"
|
|
by Howard Rheingold, Addison-Wesley. Portions of this may find their
|
|
way into Whole Earth Review.
|
|
|
|
This is a world-readable file, and I think these are important issues;
|
|
encourage distribution, but I do ask for fair use: Don't remove my
|
|
name from my words when you quote or reproduce them, don't change
|
|
them, and don't impair my ability to make a living with them.
|
|
Howard Rheingold
|
|
Editor, Whole Earth Review
|
|
27 Gate Five Road
|
|
Sausalito, CA 94965
|
|
Tel: 415 332 1716
|
|
Fax: 415 332 3110
|
|
Internet: hlr@well.sf.ca.us
|
|
|
|
(The second of three parts. To be continued....)
|
|
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