[Air-l] hmm, thinking about internet stories
Rob Furr
rsfurr at curie.uncg.edu
Fri Mar 22 08:04:07 PST 2002
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 at curie.uncg.edu
LAAPhysics
http://laaphysics.org/
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