Let me clarify this a bit. I have been on the net almost since its inception - since the mid 1970's. It was DARPANET back then (may have been ARPANET, but I think that was after NFSNET joined it). It was text-only- -the interface was basically a glorified text editor. In the 1990's CERN (Tim Behrners, really) developed and added the first graphical browser- -MOSAIC, I think it was. The advantage of these became apparent fairlr quickly and The World Wide Web was born.
But even in the early days- -back in the '70s- -it was noted that people tended to be less polite on the net than they would be in person. Much speculation was done as to why, although I don't recall any conclusion was reached. (See? The net was the net even then. :-) I suspect that the most correct is there is no physical person is there- -one whose feelings you can see are hurt or one who could potentially hurt you. There were moderators- -site administrators who controlled access to the net for everyone at the site where the interface computer was located. They could simply cut you off completely. Or, more commonly, if a fight got out of control or distracted too much from a thread's purpose (sci., physics, sci.math, sci, electronics, ....) the moderator would tell the combatants to move the fight to alt.flame (as in "flame wars") where basically anything legal was allowed. Eventually, management noticed alt.flame and, in their ignorance of not realizing it really did serve a purpose, but seeing only that it cost them bandwidth (expensive then- -a T1 line was about the best you could get) and that it took up disk space (again, expensive at the time) ordered it be killed.
[NOTE: alt. flame was actually one of the most interesting threads. And the others were useful. I put a good number of technical questions out and got answers and answered some myself.]
The result could be predicted of course. The wars then spread back to whence they'd come- -the threads with a purpose.
But there has never been a well behaved net.
I've thought maybe we should elect a moderator. There is no one without some bias in some direction, but some can be fair. I fear the process of choosing would simply tear the thread apart with even more partisanship ,though. |
