Story 2014-08-31 2RXW Usenet and the origins of social exchange on the Internet

Usenet and the origins of social exchange on the Internet

by
in internet on (#2RXW)
story imageSlate is running an interesting piece called "The First Gay Space on the Internet". But it's only marginally about homosexuality; it's really a look at how people use the Internet to meet, exchange opinions, and discuss things of interest. And that makes it relevant even today.
Many newsgroups were purely informational, useful for technical discussions or sharing of news or jokes or porn. But soc.motss was genuinely a new kind of community, a diverse set of people who felt at home and most like themselves on the Net, and who had discussions there that they couldn't have anywhere else. Before Facebook preferred status updates to long posts and Twitter reduced the size of a rebuttal to 140 characters, soc.motss proved that online discourse was indeed compatible with open-mindedness, subtlety, and civility.
The article goes back to a time when bandwidth was limited and expensive, and people took a long time to compose and write down their thoughts before posting. It points out early newsreaders were unthreaded, so any newsgroup was bound to have more readers than contributors. The Internet has come a long way from then, but the long, written form is in decline, and quick, heat-of-the-moment posts or diatribes are more the norm.

If you agree, click the "like" button and then move on.
Reply 9 comments

Written form is in decline? (Score: 1)

by kwerle@pipedot.org on 2014-08-31 17:02 (#2RXY)

Is it? Just this week:
http://xkcd.com/1414/

Maybe it's just changing.

Re: Written form is in decline? (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-08-31 17:29 (#2RY2)

I hope you're right, but I'm skeptical. Check out the average post on Reddit, for example, or Youtube. Maybe those are outliers, but holy crapamoly...

Re: Written form is in decline? (Score: 2, Interesting)

by kwerle@pipedot.org on 2014-08-31 18:29 (#2RY3)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

They're not outliers. But if there's 10x as much writing going on, there's 10x as much shit. But there's also 10x as much good stuff.

But I think that (xkcd author) Randall Munroe's premise is interesting, at least. Today's average young person is communicating with their peers in written form much more than probably any other. And not by just a small ratio. It's not likely we'll like the form any more than our parents like[d] our music -- but it doesn't change the fact that there's a whole lot of writing going on.

Re: Written form is in decline? (Score: 2, Interesting)

by kwerle@pipedot.org on 2014-08-31 18:37 (#2RY4)

URL parsing bug submitted: http://bugs.pipedot.org/view.php?id=27

Re: Written form is in decline? (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-09-05 13:53 (#2S3E)

What parsing bug? The apostrophe is not a legal character in URLs. The correct URL is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

Re: Written form is in decline? (Score: 1)

by kwerle@pipedot.org on 2014-09-05 15:27 (#2S3N)

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt
Uniform Resource Locators (URL)

...
Thus, only alphanumerics, the special characters "$-_.+!*'(),", and reserved characters used for their reserved purposes may be used unencoded within a URL.
...

Re: Written form is in decline? (Score: 2, Insightful)

by tdk@pipedot.org on 2014-08-31 19:20 (#2RY5)

This one is also relevant

Re: Written form is in decline? (Score: 2, Interesting)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-08-31 19:37 (#2RY6)

Wow, it sure is. It cuts both ways though: on one hand, you may conclude "people have been bitching about this forever." On the other hand you can conclude, "it's true and a trend that has been continuing for as long as the industrial revolution. What would that guy from 1871 think if he saw modern teens texting each other with two fingers?" Unless it's a sext: he might like that.