Essays. Catscan Columns

Bulletin boards excel at minor aspects of social housekeeping, such as swapping addresses, spreading headlines, breeding rumors, and, especially, exchanging insults. Bulletin board messages are not genuinely epistolary in nature. They are better compared to answering machine messages, CB radio squibs, souvenir postcards, or stand-up comedy performance complete with hecklers.

This brings us to the matter of "flaming," those sudden eruptions of ranting ill-will so common online. Many online veterans declare flaming to be "juvenile." Flaming, however, knows no age group. Flamers do tend to tone it down after a while, but it's not because of their growing emotional maturity. It's because they've become inured to the socially ulcerating, inherent constraints of the medium. And it's surprising how often a livid, ranting, hateful flame will burst from some previously somnolent user, someone with a lot of experience who seemingly ought to know better.

In many ways it's a source of raw astonishment that anything even resembling a polite community can exist among anonymous strangers who are swapping electronic text on screens. This is social interaction with a desperate flatness of affect. There's no voice, no pitch, stress, timing or emphasis in online commentary. There's no body language, no sight, smell, or touch, no pheromones, no breath of life. The best emotional signal one can send online is the skeletal revenant of a disarming smile: the graphically repugnant "emoticon": :-)

There's supposed to be a lot of difference between the hurtful online statement "You're a moron," and the tastefully facetious statement "You're a moron :-)". I question whether this is really the case, emoticon or no. And even the emoticon doesn't help much in one's halting interaction with the occasional online stranger who is, in fact, gravely sociopathic. Online communication can wonderfully liberate the tender soul of some well-meaning personage who, for whatever reason, is physically uncharismatic. Unfortunately, online communication also fertilizes the eccentricities of hopeless cranks, who at last find themselves in firm possession of a wondrous soapbox that the Trilateral Commission and the Men In Black had previously denied them.

I've never gotten a piece of hate e-mail. I've never been seriously harassed or threatened by e-mail. I don't understand why not, and in fact I fully expect it to happen someday. In the meantime, as with the rarity of e-forgery, I marvel at the winsome goodwill of the online community.

However, I've gotten quite a lot of e-mail that, by all rights, should have been written in crayon by a person whom a kindly society had deprived of sharp objects. It can often take several exchanges of e-mail to bring forth a realization that would have taken perhaps seven seconds of contact in real life: *this person is unhinged.* The effect can be disquieting. (Actually, in my personal experience it's usually more disquieting for the unhappy wretch e-mailing me, as most amateur madfolk fare rather poorly when exposed to a science fiction professional -- but the general principle still holds.)

E-mail has great immediacy. Its movement is very swift, electronically swift, and yet it does not intrude into the texture of one's life the way a phone call too often does. You read e-mail at a time when you are ready to read it, a time when you are mentally prepared for the experience. This is a very great advantage.

However, there is a subtler time problem with e-mail -- a synchronization problem. If User Able log on every day and User Betty logs on once a week, it peculiarly affects the nature of their online relationship. For Betty, Able is a steadying, constant presence, someone who "always sends me mail," while for Able, Betty is a spasmodic interloper who always wants to talk about last week's stale news.

The synchrony problem intensifies if User Cecil is widely distributing text files with his e-mail address attached. Now Cecil will get e-mail from all over the world eager to discuss matters he distributed weeks, months, even years ago. This lack of timeliness on the part of the reader is not the readers' fault. Once released, Cecil's texts can be redistributed again and again by anyone who stumbles across them. Worse yet, any clues about the date of their creation are often lost or edited somewhere in the spidery tatters of the distribution network. Cecil's supposedly lightning-swift electronic texts can travel as slowly, unexpectedly and randomly as a messages in bottles.

Another basic temporal difficulty is the performance crunch. If User Betty has to answer 50 pieces of e-mail in an hour and User Able handles only five, no amount of goodwill or eloquence will allow Able and Betty to communicate on equal terms. Able will feel neglected by Betty's brusque and hasty replies; Betty will feel smothered by Able's discursive, insistent meanderings. Eventually they will come to regard one another as exploitative attention-vampires.

Over the past three years, I've made increasing use of the Internet as a vanity press. My CATSCAN columns are available online; so are my F&SF Science columns. I deliberately pitched them overboard into the seas of cyberspace, and the results have been intriguing. While many people online read the CATSCAN columns -- or at least, I know that they download them off the WELL gopher -- I get little direct response from them. Except, that is, for Catscan Ten, "A Statement of Principle," which involved the computer underground. The online response to that particular article was frantic, with e-mail pouring in from Italy, New Zealand, Singapore, Britain and every techie campus in the USA; all in all, I must have gotten five hundred responses.

The response to the Science columns seems to vary in direct proportion to their relevance to computer science. A column about the space program, which got a lot of printed response, aroused very tepid interest online. But my column "Internet" provoked scores of replies, and seems to have an electronic reprint life entirely its own. It keeps re-surfacing again and again, under a variety of titles and often a

On New Years Day 1994, I released the entire text of HACKER CRACKDOWN electronically, including a new foreword and afterword.

At first, very little happened, except for large numbers of timid queries from people who wanted to reproduce the text electronically and were anxious not to be crushed by my publisher. After a month, several of the larger systems had HACKER CRACKDOWN up online and people began to lose their fear. It's now available on the WELL, tic.com, ftp.eff.org., from the Gutenberg Project, and is widely available in Europe. There's a Hypercard version, and a Newton version, and various compacted versions in different data formats, and so forth.

At the moment -- mid-February -- I'm getting three or four direct responses a day, about twenty-five e-mail HACKER fanletters a week. Most of them come from people who say they wanted to buy the printed book but couldn't afford it (teenagers, college students) or who wanted the book but couldn't find it anywhere (Norwegians, Icelanders, Germans, Israelis, vision-impaired online people with electronic readers in their boxes).

I don't know whether distributing the book electronically will damage its commercial prospects as a printed book. People always ask me this question -- as if generating cash-in-hand were my only conceivable reason for writing a book. I doubt there is any real way to judge the effect on sales. The paperback has only been out since November; but even if the print version stopped selling entirely, that wouldn't prove anything. HACKER CRACKDOWN was very topical, involving a contemporary scandal in a community which, though spreading rapidly, is still very limited in scope and influence. Books of that sort tend to have a short shelf-life. In fact, that was the main reason I gave the book away fairly rapidly. There's not much point in giving something away something no longer useful.