hmm, thinking about internet stories
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:) jeremy hunsinger jhuns@vt.edu on the ibook www.cddc.vt.edu www.cddc.vt.edu/jeremy www.dromocracy.com
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/
At 11:04 AM -0500 3/22/02, Rob Furr wrote:
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.)
Speaking of community memory, David Bennahum's memex.org site I've found to be a terrific resource (and I really enjoyed his "Extra Life" book but that may have been because, like "Almost Famous," it closely matched and resonated with my own histories). Another good source the book Terri Senft (one of the people who was "there" when AoIR was founded, speaking of history) co-authored titled "History of the Internet (see http://www.historyoftheinternet.com/). An interesting thing - two interesting things, I suppose - to me is whether we're able to "do history" while we're in the middle of it. Many of us have witnessed, or know someone who witnessed or was involved with, etc., what seem to be "historic" events related to the Internet. But do we have the means of understanding them at this time? And are we doing a good job of at least _collecting_ these histories from the participants? Sj
Rob Furr wrote: At 11:04 AM -0500 3/22/02, Rob Furr wrote:
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.
Lori wrote: At 11:22 AM -0500 3/22/02, Kendall, Lori wrote:
I don't think it's so much a matter of what's "worthy" of being part of a canon -- what's interesting to me is what things do pop up repeatedly for whatever reason.
For me the "reasons," as in why these stories get repeated just so and in which contexts as well as who is invested in what way and manner, in telling these stories (which in turn shapes the ongoing discourse and practical/applied policy-making etc procedures - charting an ongoing "history" in favor of certain groups of people...etc) are what are significant and, yes, "worthy" of being examined since these circulating "individual" stories and experience collectively gather to form discourses of power in *interpretation* ... (who and what process decides what's "worthy" of being written or spoken of and in what spaces also says a lot... Steve wrote:
An interesting thing - two interesting things, I suppose - to me is whether we're able to "do history" while we're in the middle of it. Many of us have witnessed, or know someone who witnessed or was involved with, etc., what seem to be "historic" events related to the Internet. But do we have the means of understanding them at this time? And are we doing a good job of at least _collecting_ these histories from the participants?
Speaking for myself - my interest in these stories and histories is not in viewing them as absolutes - the only legitimate way of telling/writing History - but in what these attempts to "do history" reveal about who gets included, who gets excluded, why etc... phrased differently - whether we are able/allowed to "do history" - in what way - and when and whether we are "in the middle.... -- Radhika Gajjala Info on lists and archives of lists available at http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons email: rad@cyberdiva.org fax: 419-372-9841 http://www.cyberdiva.org http://lingua.utdallas.edu:7000/4425/
participants (4)
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jeremy hunsinger -
radhika_gajjala -
Rob Furr -
Steve Jones