Chapter seven 
The Net Gets Inflammatory
Thoreau once wrote, “For my part, I could easily do without the post office. I never received more than one or two letters in my life … that were worth the postage.”
Well, that was long before the mail became electronic and postage became almost obsolete, but once again, the cabin-dwelling ascetic raises an interesting question. With all of these words rushing up and down, to and fro, back and forth, with thousands of messages crossing the Net on a daily basis, is any of it worth reading?
Thoreau had high standards, of course. In his day, letters could take weeks or months to reach their destination, and it was not entirely improbable that the correspondents might spend nearly as much time in composition. Back when Thoreau was just a budding Transcendentalist looking for a small body of water and some solitude, many passionate relationships were conducted by mail. Letter writing was considered a high form of art, and the printed word was precious.
These days?
Ouch.
The Net is a wonderful place where freedom of speech is preeminent. There are no censors to speak of, and no editors either. It is the world’s largest magazine, and we are all unpaid guest writers with free rein. What goes out, goes out whenever the author deems his words ready for public consumption, or perhaps when his finger brushes the send button inadvertently. In all too many cases, the author is clearly not his own best critic.
So how bad is it?
“Writing on the Net is as good as you can expect, considering how densely loaded it is with people whose main intimate relationship is with their computers,” Jack Mingo jokes. He should know—Mingo is the author of over nine books, and a celebrated regular on the Usenet group misc.writing, where writers discuss the nuts and bolts of publication, complain about rejections, and play an endless series of word games while getting over cases of writer’s block. “As in everything,” Mingo says, “eighty percent of the writing on the Net is boring, ten percent is maddening in its wrongheadedness, and ten percent is brilliant and entertaining and makes slogging through the rest of it worthwhile.”
Mingo is one of those who do it well. His postings to misc.writing and his E-mail messages are short, to the point, witty, and usually fit on one screen. Screen size is a real limitation on the Internet. Depending on your software, a certain key will let you jump up and down the electronic page display, but in my experience, the herky-jerkiness of electronic reading makes anything more than few paragraphs seem tedious and unpleasant. Reading colored blips on a screen will never, in my humble opinion, replace the good feel of a thick book.
But people are writing. I ask Mingo if this simple fact, all these folks scribbling messages late into the night instead of watching television, might eventually make better writers out of us? Will the printed (or posted) word suddenly become important again?
“There is an irony here,” he responds. “In the same way the ‘paperless office’ has turned out to be anything but, the ‘post-literate computer era’ has become one in which the outdated form of words on a neutral background has become dominant.”
But the writing has changed from the days of epistolary eloquence, Mingo concedes. Words may not have their same value.
“It is a different kind of medium, because there is no illusion of writing something for the ages. Unlike even correspondence—where you can at least imagine that the recipient of your letters is saving them and that they might be published posthumously after you become famous—writing on the Net is like making sandcastles. You know that no matter how much care you put into the process, it will all be washed away after a while. In many ways it is like cocktail party conversation. The most you can hope for is that it will make an impression before it disappears into the air.”
This ephemerality, the transitory nature of Net writing, is made worse by a simple reality of the marketplace. Many of the large access providers, the middlemen who connect single computer users to the greater Internet world, charge these users by the hour or allow only a certain number of hours per month for a basic fee. Thoreau, of course, could pinch a penny until the darned thing turned black and blue, so perhaps he would sympathize with the average Net correspondent, the poor guy hunched over his computer at bedtime (when rates are lowest), composing E-mail and Usenet postings as fast as his stubby fingers can poke the keyboard, trying to cram as much activity as possible into five hours a month. Perhaps Thoreau would sympathize, but then he never had to read this stuff.
The time factor is part of the problem (though this is mitigated somewhat by new programs that allow you to read and respond to messages “off-line,” when the meter isn’t running), but another factor is simple sloppiness. I teach writing, spend more than a few hours each week evaluating essays written by college freshmen, and am a frontline witness to the decline of spelling, grammar, and basic sentence construction. In a few years, I will be an old crank.
Like my colleagues in English departments across the country, I blame television. You don’t learn to spell, see where the comma should go, or recognize basic sentence patterns unless you read, and my students don’t read anything. More than a few react to the assignment of writing a simple five-paragraph essay as if I had asked for seven stanzas of iambic pentameter.
Well, the writing on the Net reminds me too often of the writing of my poorest students, only worse. People don’t just misspell words, they ignore the conventions of spelling entirely. Sentences are not misconstructed, they are not constructed at all.
Moreover, much of it is simply lifeless. Your average attempt at a poem posted to the Net resembles the following:
Every time i think of u,
My heart feels deep emotion,
And if you ever leave me girl,
i’ll jump into the deepest ocean…
By and large, the short stories are worse: rehashed parables, bad Stephen King imitations, and indecipherable streams of consciousness.
To quote Thoreau again, “the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important message,” and surely the Net’s much-touted speediness of conveyance does not in any way improve content. Too many Usenet postings and E-mail letters look like Western Union telegrams composed by fourth graders: “Dont like your idea at all… you dum ass… wat where you thinking!…?… you otta get a clue man, or noone will ever take yur ideas serously!”
Oh, by the way, that last bit was a flame. An honest-to-good-ness flame.
People on and off the Net seem fascinated by the whole phenomenon of flaming. Page after page has been written about this in newspapers and magazines over the last year, as if flaming were a serious social problem. Knowing the word “flame” has come to be seen as evidence that you understand everything there is to know about electronic communication.
Flaming is when someone, usually someone you don’t know and never will, sends you a rude, insulting, often obscene message, either as a response within a Usenet newsgroup or directly to your electronic mailbox. They do this, I assume, to get their giggles, and because there are no repercussions. The flamer might be in New Zealand. You aren’t likely to track him down and punch his nose.
A well-composed, G-rated flame, for example, might sound something like this:
You pea-brained idiot. You total imbecile. I wouldn’t wash my floor with your face if you were the last mop in the closet. You stupid moron. You ignoramus. Bite me.
I have a friend, a young woman who is basically intelligent in most other aspects, who told me with a straight face that she would never, ever get a Net account because “I am afraid I might get flamed.”
She was serious. This really worried her.
Well here is what I suggested:
Find a Zippo lighter. Hold it in your left hand. Pretend you are G. Gordon Liddy, the spook who completely bungled the Watergate break-in and somehow became an American patriot, and hold your right hand momentarily over the flame.
Did that hurt?
Sure.
Now try this:
Have a friend who is forty miles away light a Zippo, then ask him to type the words, “I am holding the lighter right under your hand,” on his computer.
Did you feel that?
Of course not. And that’s the way I feel about flames. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but flames, at worst, can only break my concentration.
At best, they break me up.
But let’s say you really don’t want to get flamed. To some, I’m told, a flame can be as offensive as an obscene phone call, coming out of nowhere, catching you off-guard. The fact that the flaming message appears right on your “personal” computer can seem like a violation of privacy, an intrusion into your home.
Well, to be brief, you probably attracted the flame either of two ways. First, you may have disagreed on-line with someone who listens to Rush Limbaugh. This is a good way to get horribly flamed, so just ignore them when you see them. Second, and most likely, you probably violated one of the basic rules of “Netiquette” (a clever shorthand for Net Etiquette).
To keep you safe in the future, then, here are:
The Basic Rules of Netiquette
1) Read the FAQ.
This is a great rule, except lots of people don’t know what it means. FAQ is short for Frequently Asked Questions, a document that most serious groups post every week or two. FAQs list not only those questions that come up frequently in the group (why does my cat sleep with the toilet brush?), but also the answers. This is to avoid repetition. Repetition is a particular problem on Usenet because so many new people discover it every day, and they all have the same queries. Otherwise, to flog the superhighway metaphor, it would be like trying to drive home from work while thousands of pimply sixteen-year-old boys attempt to pull you over and ask, “What’s the turn signal do, dude?” If you have a question, the correct etiquette is to see if it is in the FAQ before posting the question and wasting everyone’s time and electricity. There is also an all-encompassing FAQ called Frequently Asked Questions about Usenet that can be found in news.announce.newusers.
2) Lurk Before You Post.
Mother always taught me to look both ways before crossing the street. And to never eat food off the floor. In case you are reading, Mom, I will say here that I have never wavered. Similarly, the self-appointed Emily Post Etiquette Cops on Usenet repeatedly insist that a new user should lurk (read a newsgroup, but not say anything) for two entire weeks before even considering the idea of posting a question or an answer. I have never followed this rule, by the way. It doesn’t suit my nature.
3) Don’t Use All Caps.
It is considered a very bad idea to use all capital letters in your Usenet postings or in E-mail, because certain people have decided it is JUST LIKE SHOUTING. To be honest, I have no idea WHY it is just like shouting, since it makes no noise, but people treat it that way. Sometimes, it seems to me, you just want some EMPHASIS. But seriously, if you DO IT, you might get FLAMED!!
4) Don’t Say Anything Stupid.
But that is relative, right? And if intelligence were a prerequisite for admission to the Internet, why would there be a Usenet group called alt.bitch.pork?
And finally:
5) Write Briefly, Be Clear.
A good rule speaks for itself.