Go to the previous, next section.
By Peter Deutsch
(8)
<peterd@bunyip.com>
(Reprinted from "Internet World" (March 1994), with kind permission of
the author.)
There's something special about the Internet. Anyone with even a passing exposure to this eighth wonder of the world will vouch for the accuracy of this claim, but explaining exactly what the fuss is all about to someone who has not yet experienced its delights first hand can be a real challenge.
Now, we can be sure it's not the nifty technology. The fact is, although there is a certain sense of magic in logging onto a machine in another country for the first time there are other technologies that offer a similar sense of wonder or power. Besides, the majority of Internet users don't really care what all those acronyms stand for. At this point, even the majority of us involved in creating the stuff would probably admit that in our hearts we know that this is just the glue that holds everything together. The real excitement lies elsewhere.
Nor is the magic to be found in the mountains of information that the Internet makes available to its users. Let's face it, despite the fact that there is quite a lot of useful stuff out there, in reality the "Information Age" promise of the Internet is still more potential than reality. At this point, content is best measured in quantity, not quality.
No, if there is one thing that seems to captivate people more than anything else from the moment they first make contact with the Internet, it is that inexplicable sense of civic pride and community spirit that bonds each of us to every other user on the net. When you find another Internaut at a traditional social function and end up swapping email addresses, you're affirming your membership in a group with its own rituals, rites and secret handshakes. You're affirming your membership in a semi-secret society that appears to be well on the way to changing the world.
It seems to me that "knowing the secret Internet handshake" is the real thrill here. It leads to a form of communal bonding that makes swapping email addresses the cyberspace equivalent of inviting someone into your house for dinner. This sharing of your secret name is an act of faith, a demonstration that your new-found friend can be trusted to fit in with your current set of friends and neighbors, that a newcomer has in fact shown that they know the secret handshake and are worthy of your acceptance and support.
Part of this sense of community is probably fueled by our simple but compelling need for help if we are to survive those lonely nights in the Internet wilderness, for the Internet is still a land where user interfaces are "red in tooth and claw" and loners don't last long. Without a guiding hand in those early stages few of us would have avoided fairly prompt Darwinian selection and thus there's lots of incentive to learn to "play nicely with the other kids" if you really want to get any work done.
But there's more to it than that. This sense of community is surely sustained by the ease with which such help is sought and given. Most users readily admit that they need the extra eyes and ears of their "extended family" to bring them news of new offerings and found treasures. Newcomers seem to rapidly and naturally find the appropriate mailing lists, newsgroups, archives or gopher servers that cater to their own particular needs and in the process they cluster together with others who share similar interests in various "virtual villages". That's where the real excitment of the Internet is to be found, in joining and building the cyberspace frontier.
I've been incredibly fortunate over the past couple of years to be able to travel and meet Internet users from around the world. In the process, I've been amazed at how similar we are all under the skin.
Here's just a sampling of some of the interesting people I share my net with:
Naswa, an Arab woman responsible for the first Internet link into her country, who once told me tales of pulling cable under false floors in the middle of the night and eating sandwiches over the terminal while struggling to get the routing tables in place before the first users showed up for work in the morning. It turns out we'd shared exactly the same experiences in bringing the Internet into our respective institutions. Daniel, a Frenchman who gave up a lucrative job at IBM to help bring networking into the Caribbean. He told me tales of his efforts to develop email software that could function across the region's atrocious phone links while also providing its user help facility in four languages. The package is made available by aid workers and given away at development conferences. Anders, a psychologist turned gopher expert in Scandinavia who works to bring together the librarians and computer operations people while never forgetting that we're really supposed to be doing all of this for the users. With a background far removed from the arcane world of computing, Anders is able to constantly remind me that technology is not the point, only a point of departure.
What appears to tie together this disparate group of connectivity providers, developers, operators and users is the shared conviction that we're all working on something important. Although as far as I know none of these people have actually met, I'm sure that if brought together they'd all recognize each other instantly. I certainly felt a kinship when I met each one of them in my travels. It was clear that we are all from the same small village and it was nice to come home.
I can't help but see this spontaneous creation of online communities as a natural response to those cold winter nights, when the new version of Mosaic refuses to install and the howling of distant UNIX hackers can be heard far off across the tundra.
But there is also the shared joy of a communal feast, held perhaps after the virtual community's hunters have subdued a fat new gopher server for the group to enjoy. After a brief struggle to isolate its port number and bring it to its knees with multiple queries, the information monster is conquered once again and there is joyous feasting around the campfires as we all gorge ourselves on this latest net offering and bask in the warm glow of communal friendship.
If you (and my editor) will forgive me this brief flight of literary fantasy, I think there is actually a point in here somewhere. If you are ever called upon to explain the magic of the Internet to those who have yet to learn the secret handshake (whether it be a recalcitrant boss or a puzzled life partner) then I'd definitely forgo the tutorial on TCP/IP's ability to survive a nuclear war or the rapturous recitation of the list of anonymous FTP servers currently carrying XMosaic. What really matters here is that people help each other out, they do it with warmth and friendship, there's a great feeling of communal spirit and everything seems to work, more or less.
Although as a newcomer to the Internet you might sometimes feel like you've wandered onto a construction site, what with all the half-finished software and the half-baked and incomplete services you're confronted with on a daily basis, the happy campers living here have somehow managed to make the place livable and welcome you into their little world with open arms, asking only that you learn the rules, do your share of the housework and don't trample on the flowerbeds. It's not a bad life, re