A round trip through Global Networks, Life in Cyberspace, and Everything...
by Adam Gaffin with Joerg Heitkoetter
This is *Texinfo* edition 1.02 of `bdgtti.texi' as of 27 September 1993.
Created by Joerg Heitkoetter on August 27, 1993.
The *Texinfo* edition originated from plain ASCII text file
`/pub/EFF/papers/big-dummys-guide.txt'
on The Electronic Frontier Foundation's server `ftp.eff.org'.
Copyright (c) 1993 EFF, The Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Published by The Electronic Frontier Foundation
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Phone: (202) 347-5400. FAX: (202) 393-5509. Internet:
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notice identical to this one.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this publication
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except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved
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*********************************
A round trip through Global Networks, Life in Cyberspace, and Everything...
by Adam Gaffin with Joerg Heitkoetter
Copyright (c) 1993 EFF, The Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Published by The Electronic Frontier Foundation
1001 G Street, N.W., Suite 950 East
Washington, DC 20001, USA
Phone: (202) 347-5400. FAX: (202) 393-5509. Internet:
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
**************************
Version 2, June 1991
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
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Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
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========
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Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail.
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Gnomovision version 69, Copyright (C) 19YY NAME OF AUTHOR
Gnomovision comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details
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for details.
The hypothetical commands `show w' and `show c' should show the
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You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your
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necessary. Here is a sample; alter the names:
Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright
interest in the program `Gnomovision'
(which makes passes at compilers) written
by James Hacker.
SIGNATURE OF TY COON, 1 April 1989
Ty Coon, President of Vice
This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into
proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may
consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the
library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Library General Public
License instead of this License.
*******
*Welcome to the Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet.*
The genesis of the Big Dummy's Guide was a few informal conversations,
which included MITCH KAPOR of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and
STEVE CISLER of Apple Computer, Inc. in June of 1991. With the support of
Apple Computer, EFF hired a writer (ADAM GAFFIN) and actually took on the
project in September of 1991.
The idea was to write a guide to the Internet for folks who had little or
no experience with network communications. We intended to post this Guide to
"the Net" in ASCII and HyperCard formats and to give it away on disk, as well
as have a print edition available for a nominal charge. With the
consolidation of our offices to Washington, DC, we were able to put the Guide
on a fast track. You're looking at the realization of our dreams - version
one of the Guide. At the time I'm writing this, we're still fishing around
for a book publisher, so the hard-copy version has not yet been printed.
We're hoping to update this Guide on a regular basis, so please feel free to
send us your comments and corrections.
EFF would like to thank the folks at Apple, especially Steve Cisler of the
Apple Library, for their support of our efforts to bring this Guide to you.
We hope it helps you open up a whole new world, where new friends and
experiences are sure to be yours.
Enjoy!
Shari Steele
Director of Legal Services and Community Outreach
Electronic Frontier Foundation
July 15, 1993
August 27, 1993
*G'day, folks!*
I came across this guide while reading "EFFector Online Volume 5 No. 15,
8/20/1993" (A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ISSN
1062-9424), that is available via `comp.org.eff.news' and immediately decided
to get my hands on it. After browsing through the raw ASCII text file, I
thought that such a useful thing, should have a more beautiful "face" (and
fewer "bugs").
As Shari points out, the EFF is still "fishing for a publisher." In other
words, it's far from being clear when this guide will be available as hard
copy, unless you want to print out the "buggy" ASCII file. Thus, I started
over to make the bulk a *Texinfo* document, loosely modelled after BRENDAN
KEHOE's "Zen and the Art of the Internet", originally written for Widener
University's, Computer Science Department, and later published as:
Kehoe, B.P. (1992) "Zen and the Art of the Internet: A Beginner's Guide
to the Internet." 2nd Edition (July). Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs,
NJ. 112 pages. The 1st Edition, (February, 2nd) is still available via
anonymous ftp from `ftp.cs.widener.edu' and many other Internet archives.
It was the first comprehensive book on the Internet available. (Despite
the "traditional" postings in `news.announce.newusers' originated by
ex-Net.god GENE SPAFFORD of Purdue University and the
`news.answers' archive maintained by Net.demi-god JANATHAN I. KAMES
of MIT).
Situation has changed dramatically, since. More and more books get into
the stores, and hopefully facilitate the life of "newbies" on the Net. Just
to mention two IMHO excellent examples:
Krol, E. (1992) "The Whole Internet: Catalog & User's Guide." O'Reilly &
Associates, Inc., Sebastopol, CA. 376 pages.
LaQuey, T. and Ryer, J.C. (1992) "The Internet Companion: A Beginner's
Guide to Global Networking." Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Reading, MA.
208 pages.
But, "the Net" in its present form would have never been evolved without
the hundreds of un-paid voluntary efforts (de facto Internet still *is* run
on a voluntary basis), so here are *my* two cents: The output of several
night-shift editing sessions.
"The BIG DUMMY'S GUIDE TO THE INTERNET is now available at your local
laser printer..."
See ya on the Net!
p.s.: Although this guide is almost complete, and I really, really,
honestly, don't have the time to go over it once again, feel free to report
"bugs", or any inconsistencies you find. Drop me "more quotes," further
additions, requests for moral support, or "whatever-you-want"... Just an
e-mail away.
p.p.s.: I'd like to say a BIG "thank you" to SHARI STEELE, for her
immediate excitement on this project. ADAM GAFFIN, who generously accepted my
changes to his initial ASCII version. HOWARD RHEINGOLD, who let me include
his article, now serving as superb afterword of long-year first hand
experience in cyberspace (and yes, I mentioned your new book, Howard `;-)').
And, Last not least, thanks to BRUCE STERLING, who also "gave away" an
article for free.
Again, BERND RAICHLE courtesy of the
University of Stuttgart, provided TeXpertize, when TeXpertize was badly
needed (see file `specials.texi' for your enlightment). BTW: Over the past 2
years, we've been doing some such projects, although we haven't met F2F, yet.
This is one of the effects of the Net. (It thus should be termed
"Net.effect".)
Additional thanks to BRENDAN KEHOE for the *Texinfo*
release of "Zen", from which I borrowed this and that. FYI: Brendan works on
the 3rd editition of his book, and might be able to release the 2nd to the
Net, depending on Prentice-Hall's legal attorneys.
September 22, 1993
*G'day, folks! II*
Some more nights have passed, and "GNU Info" format is fully supported,
now. You can use either Emacs in INFO mode, or just GNU's `info' browser
(also available as `xinfo' for the X window system): type `info -f
bdgtti-1.02.info' and read "Dummy's" online in hypertextual fashion.
But since edition 1.01, "Dummy's" not only features an "Info" version. It
also comes with HTML support, i.e. the HyperText Markup Language format, that
is used by the World-Wide Web project (*note World-Wide Web: Gophers. for
some more ideas on this). The `bdgtti-1.02*.html' files can thus be browsed
using the WWW tools: from within `xmosaic', e.g. load `bdgtti-1.02_toc.html',
and there you go!
Finally, some more folks have helped along the way.
Many, thanks to LIONEL CONS courtesy of CERN, who
immediately updated his `texi2html' to make it work for this project. (Note
that you need `perl' to run this program.)
INGO DRESSLER courtesy of EUnet Deutschland, reserved
a place on `ftp.germany.eu.net' to distribute the European A4 paper edition
of this guide. See under `/pub/books/big-dummys-guide' using traditional
FTP, or use The Web at: `ftp://ftp.
germany.eu.net/pub/books/big-dummys-guide'. This will be the default server
for the European editions.
"The BIG DUMMY'S GUIDE TO THE INTERNET is now available in a variety of
easily convertible formats, *and* at your local laser printer..."
Enjoy the trip!
Joerg Heitkoetter
Systems Analysis Research Group, LSXI
Department of Computer Science
University of Dortmund, Germany
27 September 1993
*"It's kind of fun to do the impossible."*
-- Walt Disney
*"If I have seen farther than others,
it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants."*
-- Sir Isaac Newton
*"A work of art is never finished, only abandoned."*
-- Anonymous
*******
By *Mitchell Kapor*
Co-founder, Electronic Frontier Foundation.
New communities are being built today. You cannot see them, except on a
computer screen. You cannot visit them, except through your keyboard. Their
highways are wires and optical fibers; their language a series of ones and
zeroes.
Yet these communities of cyberspace are as real and vibrant as any you
could find on a globe or in an atlas. Those are real people on the other
sides of those monitors. And freed from physical limitations, these people
are developing new types of cohesive and effective communities - ones which
are defined more by common interest and purpose than by an accident of
geography, ones on which what really counts is what you say and think and
feel, not how you look or talk or how old you are.
The oldest of these communities is that of the scientists, which actually
predates computers. Scientists have long seen themselves as an international
community, where ideas were more important than national origin. It is not
surprising that the scientists were the first to adopt the new electronic
media as their principal means of day-to-day communication.
I look forward to a day in which everybody, not just scientists, can enjoy
similar benefits of a global community.
But how exactly does community grow out of a computer network? It does so
because the network enables new forms of communication.
The most obvious example of these new digital communications media is
electronic mail, but there are many others. We should begin to think of
mailing lists, newsgroups, file and document archives, etc. as just the first
generation of new forms of information and communications media. The digital
media of computer networks, by virtue of their design and the enabling
technology upon which they ride, are fundamentally different from the now
dominant mass media of television, radio, newspapers and magazines. Digital
communications media are inherently capable of being more interactive, more
participatory, more egalitarian, more decentralized, and less hierarchical.
As such, the types of social relations and communities which can be built
on these media share these characteristics. Computer networks encourage the
active participation of individuals rather than the passive non-participation
induced by television narcosis.
In mass media, the vast majority of participants are passive recipients of
information. In digital communications media, the vast majority of
participants are active creators of information as well as recipients. This
type of symmetry has previously only been found in media like the telephone.
But while the telephone is almost entirely a medium for private one-to-one
communication, computer network applications such as electronic mailing
lists, conferences, and bulletin boards, serve as a medium of group or
"many-to-many" communication.
The new forums atop computer networks are the great levelers and reducers
of organizational hierarchy. Each user has, at least in theory, access to
every other user, and an equal chance to be heard. Some U.S. high-tech
companies, such as Microsoft and Borland, already use this to good advantage:
their CEO's - BILL GATES and PHILIPPE KAHN - are directly accessible to all
employees via electronic mail. This creates a sense that the voice of the
individual employee really matters. More generally, when corporate
communication is facilitated by electronic mail, decision-making processes
can be far more inclusive and participatory.
Computer networks do not require tightly centralized administrative
control. In fact, decentralization is necessary to enable rapid growth of
the network itself. Tight controls strangle growth. This decentralization
promotes inclusiveness, for it lowers barriers to entry for new parties
wishing to join the network.
Given these characteristics, networks hold tremendous potential to enrich
our collective cultural, political, and social lives and enhance democratic
values everywhere.
And the Internet, and the UUCP and related networks connected to it,
represents an outstanding example of a computer network with these qualities.
It is an open network of networks, not a single unitary network, but an
ensemble of interconnected systems which operate on the basis of multiple
implementations of accepted, non-proprietary protocols, standards and
interfaces.
One of its important characteristics is that new networks, host systems,
and users may readily join the network - the network is open to all.
The openness (in all senses) of the Internet reflects, I believe, the
sensibilities and values of its architects. Had the Internet somehow been
developed outside the world of research and education, it's less likely to
have had such an open architecture. Future generations will be indebted to
this community for the wisdom of building these types of open systems.
Still, the fundamental qualities of the Net, such as its decentralization,
also pose problems. How can full connectivity be maintained in the face of
an ever-expanding number of connected networks, for example? What of
software bugs that bring down computers, or human crackers who try to do the
same? But these problems can and will be solved.
Digital media can be the basis of new forms of political discourse, in
which citizens form and express their views on the important public issues of
the day. There is more than one possible vision of such electronic democracy,
however. Let's look at some examples of the potential power, and problems, of
the new digital media.
The idea of something called an "electronic town meeting" received
considerable attention in 1992 with ROSS PEROT's presidential campaign (or,
at least, its first incarnation).
Perot's original vision, from 20 or so years ago, was that viewers would
watch a debate on television and fill out punch cards which would be mailed
in and collated. Now we could do it with 800 telephone numbers.
In the current atmosphere of disaffection, alienation and cynicism,
anything that promotes greater citizen involvement seems a good idea. People
are turned off by politicians in general - witness the original surge of
support for Perot as outsider who would go in and clean up the mess - and the
idea of going right to the people is appealing,
What's wrong with this picture? The individual viewer is a passive
recipient of the views of experts. The only action taken by the citizen is
in expressing a preference for one of three pre-constructed alternatives.
While this might be occasionally useful, it's unsophisticated and falls far
short of the real potential of electronic democracy. We've been reduced to
forming our judgments on the basis of mass media's portrayal of the
personality and character of the candidates.
All this is in contrast to robust political debates already found on
various on-line computer systems, from CompuServe to Usenet. Through these
new media, the issues of the day, ranging from national security in the
post-Cold War era to comparative national health care systems, are fiercely
discussed in a wide variety of bulletin boards, conferences, and newsgroups.
What I see in online debate are multiple active participants, not just
experts, representing every point of view, in discussions that unfold over
extended periods of time. What this shows is that, far from being alienated
and disaffected from the political process, people like to talk and discuss -
and take action - if they have the opportunity to do so. Mass media don't
permit that. But these new media are more akin to a gathering around the
cracker barrel at the general store - only extended over hundreds, thousands
of miles, in cyberspace, rather than in one physical location.
Recent years have shown the potential power of these new media. We have
also seen several examples of where talk translated into action.
In 1987, the Federal Communications Commission proposed changing the way
certain online providers paid for access to local phone service. Online,
this quickly became known as the "modem tax" and generated a storm of
protest. The FCC withdrew the idea, but not quickly enough: the "modem tax"
has penetrated so deeply into the crevices of the Net that it has taken up a
permanent and ghostly residence as a kind of virtual or cognitive virus,
which periodically causes a re-infection of the systems and its users. FCC
commissioners continue to receive substantial mail on this even though the
original issue is long dead; in fact, it has generated more mail than any
other issue in the history of the FCC.
More recently, JIM MANZI, chairman of Lotus Development Corp., received
more than 30,000 e-mail messages when the company was getting ready to sell a
database containing records on tens of millions of Americans. The flood of
electronic complaints about the threat to privacy helped force the company to
abandon the project. Issues of narrow but vital interest to the online
community give a hint of the organizing power of the Net.
In August, 1991, the managers of a Soviet computer network known as Relcom
stayed online during an abortive coup, relaying eyewitness accounts and news
of actions against the coup to the West and to the rest of Russia.
And many public interest non-profit organizations and special interest
groups already use bulletin boards heavily as a means of communicating among
their members and organizing political activity.
But all is not perfect online. The quality of discourse is often very
low. Discussion is often trivial and boring and bereft of persuasive reason.
Discourse often sinks to the level of "flaming," of personal attacks,
instead of substantive discussion. Flaming. Those with the most time to
spend often wind up dominating the debate - a triumph of quantity of time
available over quality of content.
It seems like no place for serious discussion. Information overload is
also a problem. There is simply far too much to read to keep up with. It is
all without organization. How can this be addressed?
Recent innovations in the design of software used to connect people to the
Net and the process of online discussion itself reveal some hope.
Flaming is universal, but different systems handle it in different ways.
Both the technology and cultural norms matter.
On Usenet, for instance, most news reader applications support a feature
known as a "killfile," which allows an individual to screen out postings by a
particular user or on a particular subject. It is also sometimes referred to
as "the bozo filter." This spares the user who is sufficiently sophisticated
from further flamage, but it does nothing to stop the problem at its source.
Censorship would be one solution. But what else can be done without
resorting to unacceptably heavy-handed tactics of censorship? There is a
great tradition of respect for free speech on these systems, and to censor
public postings or even ban a poster for annoying or offensive content is
properly seen as unacceptable, in my opinion.
Some systems use cultural norms, rather than software, to deal with flame
wars. These online communities have developed practices which rely more on a
shared, internalized sense of appropriate behavior than on censorship, for
instance. The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) is a relatively small
online conferencing system based in the San Francisco Bay area. On the WELL,
individuals who get into a fight are encouraged to move the discussion out of
the public conference and into e-mail. The encouragement is provided not
only by the host of the conference, but also by the users. It is part of the
culture, not part of the technology.
WELL hosts are volunteers who facilitate the discussion of a particular
subject. While they have the power to censor individual postings, the power
is very rarely used and only as a last resort, as it has been found that
dispute resolution by talking it out among the parties is a superior method
of problem solving in the long run.
It is not an accident that the WELL has a uniquely high quality of
conversation. Nor is it coincidental that it developed as a small and
originally isolated community (now on the Net) which gave it a chance to
develop its own norms or that key management of the system came from "The
Farm," a large, successful commune of the 1960's and 1970's led by STEPHEN
GASKIN.
We still know very little about the facilitation of online conversations.
It is a subject well worth further formal study and experimentation.
Some problems have to do with the unrefined and immature format and
structure of the discussion medium itself. The undifferentiated stream of
new messages marching along in 80 columns of ASCII text creates a kind of
hypnotic trance. Compare this with the typical multiplicity of type fonts,
varied layouts, images, and pictures of the printed page.
New media take time to develop and to be shaped. Reading text on a
terminal reminds me of looking at the Gutenberg Bible. The modern book took a
century to develop after the invention of printing with movable type and the
first Western printed books. ALDUS MANUTIUS and the inventions of modern
typefaces, pagination, the table of contents, the index, all of which gave
the book its modern form, came later, were done by different people, and were
of a different order than the invention of printing with movable type itself.
The new electronic media are undergoing a similar evolution.
Key inventions are occurring slowly, for example, development of software
tools that will allow the dissemination of audio and video across the Net.
This type of software has usually been sone so far by volunteers who have
given away the results. It's a great thing, but it's not sufficient, given
how hard it is to develop robust software. Innovation in the application
space will also be driven by entrepreneurs and independent software vendors
at such point as they perceive a business opportunity to create such products
(it would be nice if creators did it for art's sake but this seems unlikely).
There are some requirements to provide incentives to attract additional
software development. This requires a competitive free market in network
services at all levels to serve the expanding user demand for network
services. It requires a technologically mature network able to support these
services.
And there must be a user population, current or prospective, interested in
paying for better applications - and not just the current base of technically
sophisticated users and students, though they will absolutely benefit.
There are multiple classes of new application opportunities. E-mail is
overloaded because there aren't readily available alternatives yet. New and
different kinds of tools are needed for collaborative work. Computer
conferencing, as it evolves, may be sufficient for discussion and debate.
But by itself, it cannot really support collaborative work, in the sense of
readily enabling a group to make decisions efficiently, represent and track
the status of its work process. Trying to run an organization via e-mail
mailing list is very different than trying to have a discussion.
Computer networks can only fully realize their potential as innovative
communications media in an environment which encourages free and open
expression.
In some countries, legal principles of free speech protect freedom of
expression in traditional media such as the printed word. But once
communication moves to new digital media and across crosses international
borders, such legal protections fall away. As JOHN PERRY BARLOW, the
co-founder of EFF puts it: "In Cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local
ordinance." There is no international legal authority which protects free
expression on trans-national networks. Article 19 of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights calls for the protection of free expression in
all media, but the declaration falls far short of being binding.
And if we're to take seriously the idea of the electronic online forum, we
have to deal with the access issue. if the only people with access to the
medium are well-educated, affluent, techno-literate elite, it won't be
sufficiently inclusive to represent all points of view.
We also need, fundamentally, a better infrastructure (the highway system
for information). As we move from the high-speed Internet to the even more
powerful National Research and Education Network, we need to look at how to
bring the power of these new media into the homes of everybody who might want
it. Addressing this "last mile" problem (phone networks are now largely
digitized, fiber-optic systems, except for the mile between your home and the
by Adam Gaffin with Joerg Heitkoetter
This is *Texinfo* edition 1.02 of `bdgtti.texi' as of 27 September 1993.
Created by Joerg Heitkoetter on August 27, 1993.
The *Texinfo* edition originated from plain ASCII text file
`/pub/EFF/papers/big-dummys-guide.txt'
on The Electronic Frontier Foundation's server `ftp.eff.org'.
Copyright (c) 1993 EFF, The Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Published by The Electronic Frontier Foundation
1001 G Street, N.W., Suite 950 East
Washington, DC 20001, USA
Phone: (202) 347-5400. FAX: (202) 393-5509. Internet:
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of
this publication provided the copyright notice and this permission notice
are preserved on all copies.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this
publication under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the
entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission
notice identical to this one.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this publication
into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions,
except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved
by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
*********************************
A round trip through Global Networks, Life in Cyberspace, and Everything...
by Adam Gaffin with Joerg Heitkoetter
Copyright (c) 1993 EFF, The Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Published by The Electronic Frontier Foundation
1001 G Street, N.W., Suite 950 East
Washington, DC 20001, USA
Phone: (202) 347-5400. FAX: (202) 393-5509. Internet:
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
**************************
Version 2, June 1991
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
========
The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to
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such an announcement, your work based on the Program is not
required to print an announcement.)
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END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS
How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs
=============================================
If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of the greatest
possible use to the public, the best way to achieve this is to make it free
software which everyone can redistribute and change under these terms.
To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest to
attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively convey the
exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least the "copyright"
line and a pointer to where the full notice is found.
ONE LINE TO GIVE THE PROGRAM'S NAME AND AN IDEA OF WHAT IT DOES.
Copyright (C) 19YY NAME OF AUTHOR
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail.
If the program is interactive, make it output a short notice like this
when it starts in an interactive mode:
Gnomovision version 69, Copyright (C) 19YY NAME OF AUTHOR
Gnomovision comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details
type `show w'. This is free software, and you are welcome
to redistribute it under certain conditions; type `show c'
for details.
The hypothetical commands `show w' and `show c' should show the
appropriate parts of the General Public License. Of course, the commands you
use may be called something other than `show w' and `show c'; they could even
be mouse-clicks or menu items--whatever suits your program.
You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your
school, if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program, if
necessary. Here is a sample; alter the names:
Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright
interest in the program `Gnomovision'
(which makes passes at compilers) written
by James Hacker.
SIGNATURE OF TY COON, 1 April 1989
Ty Coon, President of Vice
This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into
proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may
consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the
library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Library General Public
License instead of this License.
*******
*Welcome to the Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet.*
The genesis of the Big Dummy's Guide was a few informal conversations,
which included MITCH KAPOR of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and
STEVE CISLER of Apple Computer, Inc. in June of 1991. With the support of
Apple Computer, EFF hired a writer (ADAM GAFFIN) and actually took on the
project in September of 1991.
The idea was to write a guide to the Internet for folks who had little or
no experience with network communications. We intended to post this Guide to
"the Net" in ASCII and HyperCard formats and to give it away on disk, as well
as have a print edition available for a nominal charge. With the
consolidation of our offices to Washington, DC, we were able to put the Guide
on a fast track. You're looking at the realization of our dreams - version
one of the Guide. At the time I'm writing this, we're still fishing around
for a book publisher, so the hard-copy version has not yet been printed.
We're hoping to update this Guide on a regular basis, so please feel free to
send us your comments and corrections.
EFF would like to thank the folks at Apple, especially Steve Cisler of the
Apple Library, for their support of our efforts to bring this Guide to you.
We hope it helps you open up a whole new world, where new friends and
experiences are sure to be yours.
Enjoy!
Shari Steele
Director of Legal Services and Community Outreach
Electronic Frontier Foundation
July 15, 1993
August 27, 1993
*G'day, folks!*
I came across this guide while reading "EFFector Online Volume 5 No. 15,
8/20/1993" (A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ISSN
1062-9424), that is available via `comp.org.eff.news' and immediately decided
to get my hands on it. After browsing through the raw ASCII text file, I
thought that such a useful thing, should have a more beautiful "face" (and
fewer "bugs").
As Shari points out, the EFF is still "fishing for a publisher." In other
words, it's far from being clear when this guide will be available as hard
copy, unless you want to print out the "buggy" ASCII file. Thus, I started
over to make the bulk a *Texinfo* document, loosely modelled after BRENDAN
KEHOE's "Zen and the Art of the Internet", originally written for Widener
University's, Computer Science Department, and later published as:
Kehoe, B.P. (1992) "Zen and the Art of the Internet: A Beginner's Guide
to the Internet." 2nd Edition (July). Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs,
NJ. 112 pages. The 1st Edition, (February, 2nd) is still available via
anonymous ftp from `ftp.cs.widener.edu' and many other Internet archives.
It was the first comprehensive book on the Internet available. (Despite
the "traditional" postings in `news.announce.newusers' originated by
ex-Net.god GENE SPAFFORD
`news.answers' archive maintained by Net.demi-god JANATHAN I. KAMES
Situation has changed dramatically, since. More and more books get into
the stores, and hopefully facilitate the life of "newbies" on the Net. Just
to mention two IMHO excellent examples:
Krol, E. (1992) "The Whole Internet: Catalog & User's Guide." O'Reilly &
Associates, Inc., Sebastopol, CA. 376 pages.
LaQuey, T. and Ryer, J.C. (1992) "The Internet Companion: A Beginner's
Guide to Global Networking." Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Reading, MA.
208 pages.
But, "the Net" in its present form would have never been evolved without
the hundreds of un-paid voluntary efforts (de facto Internet still *is* run
on a voluntary basis), so here are *my* two cents: The output of several
night-shift editing sessions.
"The BIG DUMMY'S GUIDE TO THE INTERNET is now available at your local
laser printer..."
See ya on the Net!
p.s.: Although this guide is almost complete, and I really, really,
honestly, don't have the time to go over it once again, feel free to report
"bugs", or any inconsistencies you find. Drop me "more quotes," further
additions, requests for moral support, or "whatever-you-want"... Just an
e-mail away.
p.p.s.: I'd like to say a BIG "thank you" to SHARI STEELE, for her
immediate excitement on this project. ADAM GAFFIN, who generously accepted my
changes to his initial ASCII version. HOWARD RHEINGOLD, who let me include
his article, now serving as superb afterword of long-year first hand
experience in cyberspace (and yes, I mentioned your new book, Howard `;-)').
And, Last not least, thanks to BRUCE STERLING, who also "gave away" an
article for free.
Again, BERND RAICHLE
University of Stuttgart, provided TeXpertize, when TeXpertize was badly
needed (see file `specials.texi' for your enlightment). BTW: Over the past 2
years, we've been doing some such projects, although we haven't met F2F, yet.
This is one of the effects of the Net. (It thus should be termed
"Net.effect".)
Additional thanks to BRENDAN KEHOE
release of "Zen", from which I borrowed this and that. FYI: Brendan works on
the 3rd editition of his book, and might be able to release the 2nd to the
Net, depending on Prentice-Hall's legal attorneys.
September 22, 1993
*G'day, folks! II*
Some more nights have passed, and "GNU Info" format is fully supported,
now. You can use either Emacs in INFO mode, or just GNU's `info' browser
(also available as `xinfo' for the X window system): type `info -f
bdgtti-1.02.info' and read "Dummy's" online in hypertextual fashion.
But since edition 1.01, "Dummy's" not only features an "Info" version. It
also comes with HTML support, i.e. the HyperText Markup Language format, that
is used by the World-Wide Web project (*note World-Wide Web: Gophers. for
some more ideas on this). The `bdgtti-1.02*.html' files can thus be browsed
using the WWW tools: from within `xmosaic', e.g. load `bdgtti-1.02_toc.html',
and there you go!
Finally, some more folks have helped along the way.
Many, thanks to LIONEL CONS
immediately updated his `texi2html' to make it work for this project. (Note
that you need `perl' to run this program.)
INGO DRESSLER
a place on `ftp.germany.eu.net' to distribute the European A4 paper edition
of this guide. See under `/pub/books/big-dummys-guide' using traditional
FTP, or use The Web at: `ftp://ftp.
germany.eu.net/pub/books/big-dummys-guide'. This will be the default server
for the European editions.
"The BIG DUMMY'S GUIDE TO THE INTERNET is now available in a variety of
easily convertible formats, *and* at your local laser printer..."
Enjoy the trip!
Joerg Heitkoetter
Systems Analysis Research Group, LSXI
Department of Computer Science
University of Dortmund, Germany
27 September 1993
*"It's kind of fun to do the impossible."*
-- Walt Disney
*"If I have seen farther than others,
it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants."*
-- Sir Isaac Newton
*"A work of art is never finished, only abandoned."*
-- Anonymous
*******
By *Mitchell Kapor*
Co-founder, Electronic Frontier Foundation.
New communities are being built today. You cannot see them, except on a
computer screen. You cannot visit them, except through your keyboard. Their
highways are wires and optical fibers; their language a series of ones and
zeroes.
Yet these communities of cyberspace are as real and vibrant as any you
could find on a globe or in an atlas. Those are real people on the other
sides of those monitors. And freed from physical limitations, these people
are developing new types of cohesive and effective communities - ones which
are defined more by common interest and purpose than by an accident of
geography, ones on which what really counts is what you say and think and
feel, not how you look or talk or how old you are.
The oldest of these communities is that of the scientists, which actually
predates computers. Scientists have long seen themselves as an international
community, where ideas were more important than national origin. It is not
surprising that the scientists were the first to adopt the new electronic
media as their principal means of day-to-day communication.
I look forward to a day in which everybody, not just scientists, can enjoy
similar benefits of a global community.
But how exactly does community grow out of a computer network? It does so
because the network enables new forms of communication.
The most obvious example of these new digital communications media is
electronic mail, but there are many others. We should begin to think of
mailing lists, newsgroups, file and document archives, etc. as just the first
generation of new forms of information and communications media. The digital
media of computer networks, by virtue of their design and the enabling
technology upon which they ride, are fundamentally different from the now
dominant mass media of television, radio, newspapers and magazines. Digital
communications media are inherently capable of being more interactive, more
participatory, more egalitarian, more decentralized, and less hierarchical.
As such, the types of social relations and communities which can be built
on these media share these characteristics. Computer networks encourage the
active participation of individuals rather than the passive non-participation
induced by television narcosis.
In mass media, the vast majority of participants are passive recipients of
information. In digital communications media, the vast majority of
participants are active creators of information as well as recipients. This
type of symmetry has previously only been found in media like the telephone.
But while the telephone is almost entirely a medium for private one-to-one
communication, computer network applications such as electronic mailing
lists, conferences, and bulletin boards, serve as a medium of group or
"many-to-many" communication.
The new forums atop computer networks are the great levelers and reducers
of organizational hierarchy. Each user has, at least in theory, access to
every other user, and an equal chance to be heard. Some U.S. high-tech
companies, such as Microsoft and Borland, already use this to good advantage:
their CEO's - BILL GATES and PHILIPPE KAHN - are directly accessible to all
employees via electronic mail. This creates a sense that the voice of the
individual employee really matters. More generally, when corporate
communication is facilitated by electronic mail, decision-making processes
can be far more inclusive and participatory.
Computer networks do not require tightly centralized administrative
control. In fact, decentralization is necessary to enable rapid growth of
the network itself. Tight controls strangle growth. This decentralization
promotes inclusiveness, for it lowers barriers to entry for new parties
wishing to join the network.
Given these characteristics, networks hold tremendous potential to enrich
our collective cultural, political, and social lives and enhance democratic
values everywhere.
And the Internet, and the UUCP and related networks connected to it,
represents an outstanding example of a computer network with these qualities.
It is an open network of networks, not a single unitary network, but an
ensemble of interconnected systems which operate on the basis of multiple
implementations of accepted, non-proprietary protocols, standards and
interfaces.
One of its important characteristics is that new networks, host systems,
and users may readily join the network - the network is open to all.
The openness (in all senses) of the Internet reflects, I believe, the
sensibilities and values of its architects. Had the Internet somehow been
developed outside the world of research and education, it's less likely to
have had such an open architecture. Future generations will be indebted to
this community for the wisdom of building these types of open systems.
Still, the fundamental qualities of the Net, such as its decentralization,
also pose problems. How can full connectivity be maintained in the face of
an ever-expanding number of connected networks, for example? What of
software bugs that bring down computers, or human crackers who try to do the
same? But these problems can and will be solved.
Digital media can be the basis of new forms of political discourse, in
which citizens form and express their views on the important public issues of
the day. There is more than one possible vision of such electronic democracy,
however. Let's look at some examples of the potential power, and problems, of
the new digital media.
The idea of something called an "electronic town meeting" received
considerable attention in 1992 with ROSS PEROT's presidential campaign (or,
at least, its first incarnation).
Perot's original vision, from 20 or so years ago, was that viewers would
watch a debate on television and fill out punch cards which would be mailed
in and collated. Now we could do it with 800 telephone numbers.
In the current atmosphere of disaffection, alienation and cynicism,
anything that promotes greater citizen involvement seems a good idea. People
are turned off by politicians in general - witness the original surge of
support for Perot as outsider who would go in and clean up the mess - and the
idea of going right to the people is appealing,
What's wrong with this picture? The individual viewer is a passive
recipient of the views of experts. The only action taken by the citizen is
in expressing a preference for one of three pre-constructed alternatives.
While this might be occasionally useful, it's unsophisticated and falls far
short of the real potential of electronic democracy. We've been reduced to
forming our judgments on the basis of mass media's portrayal of the
personality and character of the candidates.
All this is in contrast to robust political debates already found on
various on-line computer systems, from CompuServe to Usenet. Through these
new media, the issues of the day, ranging from national security in the
post-Cold War era to comparative national health care systems, are fiercely
discussed in a wide variety of bulletin boards, conferences, and newsgroups.
What I see in online debate are multiple active participants, not just
experts, representing every point of view, in discussions that unfold over
extended periods of time. What this shows is that, far from being alienated
and disaffected from the political process, people like to talk and discuss -
and take action - if they have the opportunity to do so. Mass media don't
permit that. But these new media are more akin to a gathering around the
cracker barrel at the general store - only extended over hundreds, thousands
of miles, in cyberspace, rather than in one physical location.
Recent years have shown the potential power of these new media. We have
also seen several examples of where talk translated into action.
In 1987, the Federal Communications Commission proposed changing the way
certain online providers paid for access to local phone service. Online,
this quickly became known as the "modem tax" and generated a storm of
protest. The FCC withdrew the idea, but not quickly enough: the "modem tax"
has penetrated so deeply into the crevices of the Net that it has taken up a
permanent and ghostly residence as a kind of virtual or cognitive virus,
which periodically causes a re-infection of the systems and its users. FCC
commissioners continue to receive substantial mail on this even though the
original issue is long dead; in fact, it has generated more mail than any
other issue in the history of the FCC.
More recently, JIM MANZI, chairman of Lotus Development Corp., received
more than 30,000 e-mail messages when the company was getting ready to sell a
database containing records on tens of millions of Americans. The flood of
electronic complaints about the threat to privacy helped force the company to
abandon the project. Issues of narrow but vital interest to the online
community give a hint of the organizing power of the Net.
In August, 1991, the managers of a Soviet computer network known as Relcom
stayed online during an abortive coup, relaying eyewitness accounts and news
of actions against the coup to the West and to the rest of Russia.
And many public interest non-profit organizations and special interest
groups already use bulletin boards heavily as a means of communicating among
their members and organizing political activity.
But all is not perfect online. The quality of discourse is often very
low. Discussion is often trivial and boring and bereft of persuasive reason.
Discourse often sinks to the level of "flaming," of personal attacks,
instead of substantive discussion. Flaming. Those with the most time to
spend often wind up dominating the debate - a triumph of quantity of time
available over quality of content.
It seems like no place for serious discussion. Information overload is
also a problem. There is simply far too much to read to keep up with. It is
all without organization. How can this be addressed?
Recent innovations in the design of software used to connect people to the
Net and the process of online discussion itself reveal some hope.
Flaming is universal, but different systems handle it in different ways.
Both the technology and cultural norms matter.
On Usenet, for instance, most news reader applications support a feature
known as a "killfile," which allows an individual to screen out postings by a
particular user or on a particular subject. It is also sometimes referred to
as "the bozo filter." This spares the user who is sufficiently sophisticated
from further flamage, but it does nothing to stop the problem at its source.
Censorship would be one solution. But what else can be done without
resorting to unacceptably heavy-handed tactics of censorship? There is a
great tradition of respect for free speech on these systems, and to censor
public postings or even ban a poster for annoying or offensive content is
properly seen as unacceptable, in my opinion.
Some systems use cultural norms, rather than software, to deal with flame
wars. These online communities have developed practices which rely more on a
shared, internalized sense of appropriate behavior than on censorship, for
instance. The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) is a relatively small
online conferencing system based in the San Francisco Bay area. On the WELL,
individuals who get into a fight are encouraged to move the discussion out of
the public conference and into e-mail. The encouragement is provided not
only by the host of the conference, but also by the users. It is part of the
culture, not part of the technology.
WELL hosts are volunteers who facilitate the discussion of a particular
subject. While they have the power to censor individual postings, the power
is very rarely used and only as a last resort, as it has been found that
dispute resolution by talking it out among the parties is a superior method
of problem solving in the long run.
It is not an accident that the WELL has a uniquely high quality of
conversation. Nor is it coincidental that it developed as a small and
originally isolated community (now on the Net) which gave it a chance to
develop its own norms or that key management of the system came from "The
Farm," a large, successful commune of the 1960's and 1970's led by STEPHEN
GASKIN.
We still know very little about the facilitation of online conversations.
It is a subject well worth further formal study and experimentation.
Some problems have to do with the unrefined and immature format and
structure of the discussion medium itself. The undifferentiated stream of
new messages marching along in 80 columns of ASCII text creates a kind of
hypnotic trance. Compare this with the typical multiplicity of type fonts,
varied layouts, images, and pictures of the printed page.
New media take time to develop and to be shaped. Reading text on a
terminal reminds me of looking at the Gutenberg Bible. The modern book took a
century to develop after the invention of printing with movable type and the
first Western printed books. ALDUS MANUTIUS and the inventions of modern
typefaces, pagination, the table of contents, the index, all of which gave
the book its modern form, came later, were done by different people, and were
of a different order than the invention of printing with movable type itself.
The new electronic media are undergoing a similar evolution.
Key inventions are occurring slowly, for example, development of software
tools that will allow the dissemination of audio and video across the Net.
This type of software has usually been sone so far by volunteers who have
given away the results. It's a great thing, but it's not sufficient, given
how hard it is to develop robust software. Innovation in the application
space will also be driven by entrepreneurs and independent software vendors
at such point as they perceive a business opportunity to create such products
(it would be nice if creators did it for art's sake but this seems unlikely).
There are some requirements to provide incentives to attract additional
software development. This requires a competitive free market in network
services at all levels to serve the expanding user demand for network
services. It requires a technologically mature network able to support these
services.
And there must be a user population, current or prospective, interested in
paying for better applications - and not just the current base of technically
sophisticated users and students, though they will absolutely benefit.
There are multiple classes of new application opportunities. E-mail is
overloaded because there aren't readily available alternatives yet. New and
different kinds of tools are needed for collaborative work. Computer
conferencing, as it evolves, may be sufficient for discussion and debate.
But by itself, it cannot really support collaborative work, in the sense of
readily enabling a group to make decisions efficiently, represent and track
the status of its work process. Trying to run an organization via e-mail
mailing list is very different than trying to have a discussion.
Computer networks can only fully realize their potential as innovative
communications media in an environment which encourages free and open
expression.
In some countries, legal principles of free speech protect freedom of
expression in traditional media such as the printed word. But once
communication moves to new digital media and across crosses international
borders, such legal protections fall away. As JOHN PERRY BARLOW, the
co-founder of EFF puts it: "In Cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local
ordinance." There is no international legal authority which protects free
expression on trans-national networks. Article 19 of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights calls for the protection of free expression in
all media, but the declaration falls far short of being binding.
And if we're to take seriously the idea of the electronic online forum, we
have to deal with the access issue. if the only people with access to the
medium are well-educated, affluent, techno-literate elite, it won't be
sufficiently inclusive to represent all points of view.
We also need, fundamentally, a better infrastructure (the highway system
for information). As we move from the high-speed Internet to the even more
powerful National Research and Education Network, we need to look at how to
bring the power of these new media into the homes of everybody who might want
it. Addressing this "last mile" problem (phone networks are now largely
digitized, fiber-optic systems, except for the mile between your home and the