At 08:00 PM 3/21/2002 -0500, you wrote:
being somewhat of an interpretivist( at times), i was sitting here last night considering the net.legends faq http://www.killfile.org/~tskirvin/faqs/legends.html and what it meant for the wider community of usenet, and then i thought about the tropes and narratives that so many of us use to illustrate our points, so I thought I'd open up the discussion a bit. What do you use to illustrate your conceptualizations of the Net, some of us use classic examples like muds and moos, I tend to use Irc and web stories gained from my experiences, but have used the more acceptedly historical examples from time to time, but what do you use? what stories make sense of the internet for you? if any? do you have any really good stories, I participate in the community memory list about the history of the internet at least as lurker, to find some of these stories, but surely there is a broader set or are we already tending toward a set of canonical stories? opinions? insights? share your stories:)
I tend to use my own experiences for my illustrations and stories - I was there for much of what's described in the net-legends faq. (my brother's mentioned about once every three paragraphs, and I was sharing an apartment with him at the height of his infamy,) for instance. I've used my experiences during the Great Worm (http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/Great-Worm.html) to illustrate and explain what was going on during, f'rinstance, the various recent eruptions of Outlook virii, I occasionally ramble on about the Pornquake that shut down the UMNEWS bitnet-based mailing list system, I can describe in insanely boring detail what, exactly, it took to provide 56k service to western North Carolina colleges in 1994, and I was there for the September that Never Ended (http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/September-that-never-ended.html) and so on and so forth. When you've got this kind of thing in your background, you don't need to go looking for more material. On the other hand, I guess I don't believe that my experiences, or, honestly, any of the semi-legendary events I've seen, are really any more worthy of being made part of a canon of net history than any other, equally instructive story. If I didn't have the Great Worm to use as an example in my lectures, I could use the time a machine I adminned was hit by a DOS attack, or the time I got three hundred and some-odd copies of something telling me that "I Love You", or any one of a hundred different stories about security and how servers react to overloads. Anybody who spends time on the net doing more than one activity is going to eventually gather experiences that will teach the same lessons. I saw the rec.pets.cats troll-and-group-destruction live, but I'm sure dozens of other people on this list have seen equally pointless destruction of online forums (the rec.pets.cats one was just the biggest one I ever saw.) I guess what I'm wondering here is this: Sure, there's a million stories on the net, but ... are there stories that *aren't* just more of the same? Will telling someone who wasn't there the story of the Great Worm teach them the basic lesson any better than telling them the story of Melissa? Heck, I was heavily involved, at one point, during the Green Card Lawyers debacle, and *I*'m not interested in going back and reading up on that thing again. (Not to try to chill the conversation. If people have great stories to tell, I'm all for it. I'm just wondering about the community memory part of the question.) Rob Furr rsfurr@curie.uncg.edu LAAPhysics http://laaphysics.org/