Usenet

What I read today for my ACOM 430Z class was called The Pre-Web Internet-Usenet. The title says exactly what the story is about Usenet. It also goes into detail about the problems that Usenet would encounter and, how they would be resolved. The story also tells of rules and guidelines that were established for Usenet users.  I came into this story wondering how the pre-web designers would handle the “free-rider” issue that would develop on its own. This story is the answer to that question.

 

            The Usenet was developed in 1981 as an alternate to ARPANET (Kollock, 1996, 111). Usenet was basically an area with thousands of different types of chat rooms but then they were called newsgroups. Each news group had a central topic that was used to classify it such as skiing or the economy. Basically, any topic that could be talked about amongst many people was. It ranged from anything important and appropriate to those naughty groups no one claims they have been to. (Kollock, 1996, 112) As you can imagine with Usenet getting as popular as it was there was going to be a problem with people coming in and going completely off topic in the news groups and a set of monitoring systems, guidelines, and rules would need to be applied.  This began to be established by the groups themselves and a study quoted in the story established that groups who had done so were successful and, those who had not established rules failed miserably. (Kollock, 1996, 117) Now that I knew how guidelines were being established and how these groups worked I wanted to know how free riding would be addressed and what I found out surprised me a little. The idea was that free riding is such an obvious post on the message board it was easy to spot or easy for other people to spot and report. So, nothing was really done because it did not matter if there was 100 or 100,000 people in a group you could spot a free rider because they were so off topic. (Kollcock, 1996, 118) After a free rider was reported the only action that was really taken was they were told to stop and everyone else was told to ignore them. Much different from modern days where you can kick someone out of a group or even block them from being allowed back in. This article was interesting to see how the foundations of chatting online were established and even though now they seem primitive it was necessary to be where we are today.

 

 

 

Source:

 

Kollock, Peter & Smith, Marc. (1996). Managing the virtual commons: Cooperation and conflict in computer communities. In Susan C, Herring (ED.), Computer-mediated communication: Linguistic social and cross-cultural perspectives (pp.109-128. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.