So here you are, a newbie on the web.

And what do you think it is? You think it's an extension of:

(Choose one)

1. Your television set.

2. Your newspaper.

3. A way to get n*de pictures without having to walk into that seedy old magazine store in the scary part of town.

4. Your telephone.

5. AOL. Isn't everything online AOL?

*sigh*

I'm here to tell you it doesn't have to be that way.

Granted, some of the above might have some validity. But you've got $1000 of equipment sitting on your desk and you're using it as a substitute for a $100 cell phone and a $7 magazine? Hello?

Just where did this Internet thing come from anyway?

Short oversimplified answer: The early Internet was the linking together of the nets of the U.S. military, universities and some businesses. Most of them were oriented toward defense, science and/or technology. This explains much of the original culture. The technology can be explained in part by the idea of a "protocol," in this case a set of rules for communicating understood by all. Any net that was joined to the Internet and spoke the protocol was a part of it. An entertaining page on this subject is on the PBS site at Nerds 2.0.1.

A more techy answer can be found at: Hobbes' Internet Timeline which is interesting for its display of the numbers on the growth of it all.

Since the introduction of the Web (which is only one way, as you'll see, of getting information across the Internet), the Net seems to have become overwhelmed by commercialization. But now imagine:

If you had a constantly growing balloon, and you had a square inch of it, and someone else had ten square inches of it, it would seem that his section was always much bigger and growing faster than your own. And that would indeed be true. But your square inch is also growing. And unlike a balloon, the Net can grow as much as it likes (and it has). The noncommercial, personal, and just plain idiosyncratic uses of the Net have grown enormously over time. If you are willing to show a little care in your selection of access and your use of time, you can avoid much of the commercialization (more on this to come). If you're online to download celebrity pictures and shop for clothes, that's ok too. But you don't have to receive someone else's (AOL's, Juno's, whoever's) view of the Net. You can construct your own.

To do this we need the idea of a distributed network. Imagine a spiderweb covered with spiders, and the strands as if they were fiber lines between them. Each one can be reached from every other one in the following way: if every one is speaking one language (the "protocol") they can pass messages to one another. And so they do. Packets are routed across the Net. It's very important that the power to communicate is "distributed," that is, the rules and ability to do so are part of each node on the net. Every spider can receive and pass on a packet. The original reason for this design was so the Internet would survive if part of it was disabled by warfare. By distributing the intelligence, any group of machines left still physically connected (wire or radio) would be able to continue to communicate.

By way of contrast, your telephone is likely part of a switched network. Your calls must go to the switch and that's where the rules and intelligence are located. It originally took a human on a switchboard to complete a call. This is now automated, but the decisions are still made at the switch.

Some would say, and I would agree, that it is the tendency of distributed networks to empower the holders of the nodes, and the tendency of switched networks to empower whoever owns the switch. (This is immensely important to me. I have a politics that says that if we want to function as full participants in this brave new world, we want to understand how to be, or choose, a node.)

Again, by way of contrast, a distributed network is not a broadcast. Your television receives broadcasts, or communication one to many. Traditionally, you did not communicate back. Even if you can, the one-to-many model puts the decision making power on the one. If you were to use this one as a switch, you would still be subject to the programming selected at the switch. While we're all just being entertained, this would seem harmless enough, and maybe it would be. It's an excellent potential model for a game server, for example, in which the users would change the outcome by their feedback. But you couldn't control the content or communications, which could be tiresome if you were trying to do something more serious than playing a game or making purchases on a shopping network.

And if you're like me, you're tired of the deluge of advertising, of the values it tends to perpetuate, and even of some of the people who claim to oppose it for whatever high-minded reason. Blecch. It's not that important. So why stare at it unnecessarily? (or go into fits because you can't avoid it all)

Back on the distributed network, we have a node. It must speak the protocol, so it has to be a machine connected directly to the others. These days, from an ordinary consumer or small business point of view, this is an Internet Service Provider (ISP), who has a link to another, more substantial provider, and so forth. I'm rather amused at the way this resembles the old picture of the big fish about to eat the medium fish, who in turn is about to eat the little fish, etc. The commercialized Internet is less "distributed" than the original one was, and a lot more complex. That's ok.

(I have found a site, which I cannot evaluate, that has some interesting info on the subject of ISP's and a lengthy searchable list. I am looking for all kinds of good links on this subject, or submissions of info.)

Internet topography is actually rather interesting, and I provide a link about it here, but meanwhile to avoid losing you I'll get back to the theme at hand.

To really get the full use of the Web you need to know what's out there, and no one really can anymore with only simple websurfing. In the first year or two of the Web, that wasn't true. It was possible to grok the general whole, rather than just random pieces. There were web pages of a professional sort, often belonging to the original government/university/tech business triad mentioned above, and pages of individuals who were often employed at one of the above, but were doing a page of their own for personal reasons. In this sense a page was often a cross between a business card and a chat among friends, and reading such a page often gives you the feeling you've wandered into the kitchen of some friendly but not well known neighbor. People who had UNIX boxes at home sometimes evolved into ISPs as they provided access to friends and later, to small businesses. One of the local ISPs in my city did a lot of business at first serving up porn sites. This was very typical. ISPs grew in part out of a need to host entertainment and personal content that was increasingly not appropriate for the institutional machines on which they had once been stashed away as a half-hidden secret. In addition, the porn content was the first really substantial content business on the Internet.

People who would regulate the Internet to make it family-friendly are trying to do the equivalent of taking the industrial district of a large city and make it into a kindergarden playground. It won't work because the original culture was practically the opposite of the controlled content we've become used to on broadcast television. The original Internet had a well-heeled image derived in part from the presence of elite researchers and engineers, but this was still a masculine culture. Now, the many commercial sites that ARE claiming to be family-friendly also include some that are engaged in data gathering, which data is then sold to marketing organizations. The bottom line is that the Internet is not a family zone. Parts of it may someday become so, as in a space so large and diverse there really is room for everyone. The irony is that many teenagers seem to understand this better than their parents.

Along with the web, the early to mid-nineties Internet crowd included users of Usenet, and the enthusiasts of e-mail lists. These are simple straightforward text based communication. I became so involved in a Usenet group, soc.bi, that eventually a conversation of which I was a part wound up in its FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) file. Almost every collection of yakkers online seems to eventually generate a FAQ, covering the subjects that come up too often, and what may amount to an informal constitution of the group. Always read the FAQ, if there is one, before joining in a conversation.

Usenet is still there, though degraded by noise and spam. But e-mail is going strong. If you are deeply interested in a subject, finding e-mail lists about it (and there will be some) is probably the very best starting point to enter 'Net culture. You'll be surrounded by a familiar environment, and as you branch out into the links and webpages mentioned in the e-mail, you'll be able to collect a large number of bookmarks chosen by people knowledgeable in your interests. You'll reach a point where, between e-mail participation and the links it provides, there is more information than you'll ever be able to use.

As long as the number of requests is small, I am willing to help new people find e-mail lists in congenial subjects. I'll show you how I found them, and after a little while you'll have your own methods of sniffing out high quality info.

Another important part of the early gab experience, still going strong, was IRC (Internet Relay Chat). I found the juvenile factor too high there and have stayed away, but it does allow the freedom to create a subject and talk in real time, which some people enjoy better than e-mail letters. Instant Internet Messaging is new and web based and is building up its own subculture. But I have not found either of these to be high in content interesting to me, and have not become familiar with them.

I make extensive use of search engines. These are companies who try to index as many Web pages as possible and then offer the results, usually as a keyword search, sometimes also organized by subject. Everyone has their favorites, but mine are two of the oldest, Yahoo and Metacrawler. The former is organized in a tree like structure and the latter searches engines other than itself. The problem with search engines is that it can be too time consuming to go through all of the pages generated by a search. Also, some engines are selling their top spots. While you can score the occasional find, there is a lot to be said for linking from pages you already know are credible on a subject, which have gone to the trouble of providing a list of links.

We have a few options at this point:

1. Having determined for what we really want to use the Internet, choose a good ISP and use it well (not as straightforward as it sounds; I'll go into this in abundant detail). 2. Create. This could range from something as basic as running an e-mail list to something as complex as creating new nets of our own. It's been done before, it can be done again. Why not? 3. Stick to the same old service you're using now and use it in new ways, or use it to connect to what you're really after. 4. For the very committed, be your own node on what exists. There is very definitely a politics of free speech on the Internet, and it's important. Also very important is the need for privacy.

(Many more links to come, mixed in with all of this narrative, and more subjects. Please e-mail me if you have a subject you'd like me to add. Thanks.)

Brenda Mobley, brendamobley@geocities.com

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