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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rambi who wrote (230053)	5/7/2007 4:34:18 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

"I see nothing wrong at all with having manners on the Net. In fact, the absence of them is what always sort of surprises and even alarms me, that people can so easily shed civility and self-control, and say the most awful things to each other. My conduct doesn't change with the medium in which I am existing at any given moment. I am too old, or I was brought up too well. Sure I screw up- don't we all- but mostly I am just me." Then why do you post on this subject? The rules you operate under are remarkably similar to mine. You are one of the few members who would not be banned from this subject if it were still moderated. What I find fascinating is to see posts that would earn the poster a ban getting multiple recommendations. It is a sign that the subject has been over run by trolls.

To: Rambi who wrote (230053)	5/8/2007 1:52:18 AM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

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.