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The spirit of the Internet is taking a real beating these days. A darling a year ago, today
the Internet is often discussed in mainstream media outlets with the same sad tone of
voice used to describe the proverbial houseguest who never leaves. Moreover, endless
column-inches have been filled in computer-related journals recently pointing out that
both last year’s hype and this year’s chicken-little deathwatch are equally wrong. And
while we who think we know the truth bask in the self-assurance that the cyber-world will
eventually right itself, the rest of the chickens cast an eye upward ready to proclaim the
Internet was only a fad.
But if the cyber-world is to regain some of its past sensibility, where is it going to
come from? Usenet. There are a number of reasons why I believe that Usenet is keeping the
pilot light burning until the world is ready for the Internet to fire the public’s
imagination once again, and it starts with the spirit of the original Internet.
I was fairly early to the Internet party. Seeking new frontiers beyond ‘consumer-fare’
services like The Source and CompuServe in the late 80’s, my first Internet experience
came in places like The Well and Software Tool & Die. As a Mac-head, the process of
surfing the Internet with a UNIX> prompt was not that much of a jolt, since in the pre-AOL
days the only way to go online was to push around the command line. But once Mosaic
appeared, it seemed clear that point and click was going to overwhelm everything on the
Internet the same as it did on the desktop.
What I found online those days was an undiscovered country. I gravitated toward public
news groups because that was the cracker barrel were the community gathered. The human
energy of all those people throwing out ideas on a wire outshined other pursuits, like
finding old book texts and downloading solitaire games. The spirit of freedom and open
communication was everywhere. And while the World Wide Web made navigating and finding
files and static information easier, it did little to bring people together in the same
way that Usenet did, and still does. True, there are browser-based forums on many web
sites, but their interface overhead is such that I find them less desirable than the clean
text-only world of news groups. That is one reason I believe Usenet has continued to
thrive and grow despite the turbulence on the rest of the Net.
That is also the reason why I believe that Usenet will spark another revolution, when the
time comes. I don’t expect it will ever receive credit, nor do I think that many will ever
realize it, but the same frontier spirit that I so adored in the early 80’s still exists
today, in a Usenet world that has grown from a several thousand groups to several ten
thousands.
It is just as much fun as it ever was to explore them through the window of Macintosh,
especially now that we no longer have to navigate command lines.
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"The Spirit of the Internet"
