[5] What It Means To Be A Netizen In 2002 by Steve Hoff Steve_Hoff@allianzlife.com [Editor's Note: It is an important question to figure out what has happened with our online world - for those of us who were here at least 10 years ago. We thank Steve Hoff for the following submission on this question. Interestingly, TCP/IP development actually began about 30 years ago, in 1973. So both the Internet and the netizen are still quite young. It has been a hard period of growing.] Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2002 12:48:49 -0500 To Whom It May Concern, The early adapters of the technology we call the "net" were, more often than not, the renegades. The geeks, freaks, prophets and pharisees. Those unafraid of new untested waters, as long as it was in the privacy of their own homes. The net was an adventure, all at once vast and scary, yet safe and personal. We harnessed our saddles onto an electron's back and zoomed across the globe. Each click of the mouse, held possibilities never before dreamed. Suddenly the world was at our doorsteps and we at theirs. We typed and chatted, discussed and cussed. Sometimes we agreed, more often not. We snickered and scoffed at the strangeness we found so far away and reflected upon the strangeness, not so far away. Crackpots, kooks, fanatics and freaks... every last one of them, the nine o'clock news dutifully warned us, repeatedly. We listened, repeatedly, like teenagers to their parents. Usenet was king, Microsoft a rebel and IBM a has been. Spam was packaged meat and I preferred my cookies with milk thank you. Our biggest discussions? Frames or no frames, reply with the whole text or only quote the relevant, pictures or text and the evils of bandwidth waste. We accelerated our understanding of the world around us and shortened the distances between us. To be a netizen meant to take personal responsibility for your actions and guide the "newbies" when they floundered, just like we had. It meant to share what you had found and to doubt what was shared. Though we had heard of Michelangelo and understood the concept of a firewall, we never really bothered to use one. Everyone knew the only way to get a virus was by trading floppies. DOOM came on seven of them you know. Duke Nuk`em on fifteen. It took me three weeks to write my auto dialer/uploaded script. My BBS allowed for a five to one upload ratio, but it worked (I think). Much easier to upload when I slept than pay the twenty dollars per ten hours of net time they charged. Thank God I had found a cheap service. There aren't any "newbies" left to guide. I sort of miss them. I try to avoid sites that are across the globe, or rather I try to remain hidden from them. The crackpots, kooks, fanatics and freaks have left the net for the most part. A friend in Idaho told me they all went to Washington. Usenet is still king, but no one talks there anymore. IBM is a rebel and Microsoft... well, they're just evil. Frames or no frames, Flash or HTML, reply to be removed? (even though we know not to reply). I still hate Spam, all kinds and I don't do cookies, any kind. Bandwidth? In the ten years past the world has grown smaller still, yet strangely more distant. The net is less personal, but more invasive. The wires I plug into my hyper-tweaked machines twice as thick, the connection one-hundred times faster, and the content... well, I seem to have lost it under a pop-up. Amazingly, violent games are still causing us all to degrade into an army of slathering zombies with assault rifles, though I fear our freedom to corrupt ourselves with these games may not last much longer. It took me three weeks to write my firewall script. Much easier to block all traffic than to let in worms and crackers. My firewall is secure (I think), and my system is free of viruses (I think). I could be prosecuted if I unknowingly transmit a vicious worm. Thank God I found Linux. Through all of our understanding we have gained, we haven't really grown that much. I don't cuss and discuss with exotic people, they are all too busy reading books. The net isn't anonymous anymore, but the nine o'clock news doesn't tell us. I don't think we would listen to them anyway. Our next machines will protect our "digital rights" (my friend in Idaho was right I think), and bring us closer together. Cell blocks are 8 x 10 right? We have come a great distance in those ten years, some would say not far enough, other's too far. ------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Reprinted from the Amateur Computerist Vol 11 No 2, May 1, 2003. The whole issue or a subscription is available for free via email. Send a request to jrh@ais.org or see http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------