Some points of etiquette and information.

Jan 10, 2007

When I posted a link to someone’s account of the education of a bunch of MySpacers, and Sparky Duck asked if my post was a warning against using MySpace, I thought about all the T13 sites I see hosted on Blogger, Blogspot, and LiveJournal. While some folks have sites hosted on their own leased web space, a good chunk of you have probably only started participating on the web within the last five years. Thus, there might be a chance that some of you went through a much different internet learning curve than the one I did. The internet you’re familiar with is different, on the surface, than the one I know. So here’s

Thursday Thirteen 75::11: Points of Interest and Information about Internet Culture

The internet is a society; and like every society it has written, implied, and unwritten rules. They can be confusing to a new user, and once you learn them it’s so easy to wonder why all the other newbies don’t pick it up instantly, the way you did. (Aherm.) Here’s a few of the rules, and some points on the Internet-society curve.

1. The Internet was born in San Diego, CA, USA in March of 1969. I am older than the Internet. That is so depressing. (The World Wide Web, a subset of the Internet, was born in 1991 with the launch of the HTML protocol. So while I’m older than the Internet, most of us are older than the World Wide Web.)
2. The first groups to use the Internet, outside of government agencies, were university departments. Every September, a new flock of freshmen would enter college, get their Internet accounts, and sally forth onto Usenet groups, mailing lists, BBSs, and primitive gaming servers. They would all have to learn the basic rules such as don’t type in ALLCAPS, think before posting, et cetera. The influx of new users was always smaller than the existing, acculturated user base...which would absorb and teach these newbies by, oh, about November or December of that same year. They would learn how to query IMDB to get an email with the known body of work of an actor, director, or writer. They’d learn how to get on to the server at White Sands, New Mexico (the public one). They’d learn how to subscribe to USEnet newsgroups, properly reply to posts, and spot and avoid (or join) flamewars. And then next September, those Internet-sophomores would begin teaching (or laughing at) the next batch of freshmen. When AOL began offering Usenet access to its cloistered subscriber base, the influx of newbies overwhelmed the Internet culture’s ability to absorb their sheer, unending numbers. This phenomenon is referred to as the Eternal September. Another way to look at the Eternal September phenomenon is that while there’s no longer a set time period of relative chaos versus relative harmony, everyone now has the opportunity to be a mentor to someone else who knows less about the Internet than they. And that’s pretty cool.
3. One of the things people learn in elementary school — or middle school — or certainly by the time they graduate high school — is that using someone else’s work and passing it off as your own is rude, and can bring ridicule down upon your head when others find that you plagarized. With the Internet, suddenly large amounts of information were quickly available for people to copy, use, re-use, and share. Part of the yearly September ritual included re-educating newbies in the rudeness of copyright theft. Sometimes this education involved large doses of public humiliation if someone was far too sloppy in composing their USEnet reply, and not only copied and failed to attribute...but used the information in such a way that it undermined the argument they were trying to make. (Ironically enough, these people would often begin their posts by saying, “I’m taking Logic and Rhetoric this semester...” People: if you have to give yourself a label, you’re obviously doing something wrong that people cannot figure it out from your actions alone.)
4. Copyright theft issues aside, hotlinking is not a good thing. To the host of the image, it means that you are using their bandwidth to decorate your site. To you, it means that you’re displaying content that someone else controls. They may delete it, leaving you with a big gaping hole on your webpage (or several smaller ones). They may change the image, throwing your colorscheme off. Their server may slow, which will slow down the load time of your web page (and visitors won’t know or care if it’s your server or their server...all they’ll know is, It’s slow. And they’ll click away.) They may replace the image with something that lets every single visitor to your site know that you were stealing bandwidth...which can be equated to classmates pointing out their fellow who was picking his nose in public. Or the person hosting the image may replace that innocuous image with something retina-searingly, psyche-scarringly horrific. No, you don’t want examples. Really. You don’t. Trust me on this, okay?!??
5. The Internet is a great big bazaar, the ultimate streetcorner. That means you can see anything that someone adds to the Internet, sometimes even when they think they’ve password-protected the thing. That also means that anyone can see anything -=you=- add to the Internet, even if you think you’ve hidden it very well (or used a pseudonym). Don’t put anything on the Internet you wouldn’t want to shout from a streetcorner in your neighborhood, with all your neighbors watching and listening.
6. The Internet is a highly technical place, and while it allows you to share just about anything, you can only keep that ‘anything’ for yourself if you know what you’re doing. When you use any service to archive content on the Internet, ask yourself: do I want to keep this for my own posterity? Would I shriek and wail if this all disappeared one day, without warning? Do I know how to download copies of everything for myself, or even delete things if I so choose? It’s like going into a rowdy but fun-looking bar: sure, order a beer, grab a booth, and start chatting with the locals; but know where the exits are and keep your hand on your coat at all times...just in case.
7. When using a service on the Internet, remember: you get what you pay for. Free means that there will be occasional hiccoughs, and that it may not be as flexible as you’d like...and you don’t really have much choice. You may also have the rug yanked from under you, as did the many users of the once-popular service Diary-X. Like Livejournal, Diaryland, Pitas, and others, Diary-X allowed people to sign up, create a web site, and have their own URL for free. Years went by and things were okay. Then things slowed down just a trifle. Then, one day, the lights went out. People lost years and years of content, and there was no way to get it back. (Some people are trying to bring Diary-X back to life. Their effort appears to have stalled out from lack of interest, though.)
8. Paying for a service on the Internet is not an ironclad guarantee that nothing will go wrong, either. Just as in real life, you must know what you expect from a service, what is a fair value for that service, and how to communicate with the service providers. A service is just that: a service. It isn’t a tangible good, like a painting or a quality photo or a piece of furniture. A service can’t be touched, can’t be poked or prodded, can’t be literally weighed or measured. The test of a service is in how well you can get information about how to use the service, and how does the service work for you. (This is another reason why it’s difficult to evaulate a good hosting provider, web designer, auto mechanic, hairstylist, or event planner: sure, you can read about other jobs they’ve done, and if you’re very fortunate you can ask other people who have worked with that service provider. But the job you want done, and the outcome you expect, will be slightly different from everyone else’s. You will be the one telling the service provider what you want...and that’s all a great big pile of abstracts. If you don’t communicate well, or if they don’t communicate well, the whole thing becomes much more difficult.)
9. For years, the Browser Wars raged. MSIE, the browser of buggy behavior and Jonny-come-lately standards compliance, finally won through sheer persistence (and actually having a bankroll.) Developers struggled with MSIE’s various rendering engines and quirks, and found little hacks that, while not necessarily standards-compliant, wouldn’t actually break other user agents (which includes screen readers, Braille browsers, mobile browsers, and text-only viewers like Lynx). MSIE version seven has recently been released. Its CSS rendering engine has been significantly rewritten. So all the hacks that developers sweated bullets over? The MSIE developers have the gall to say, “Um, hey, guys, can you remove those now please? If you don’t, those pages actually look very bad through MSIE 7.”. Stupid Microsoft. I think they’re just trying to avoid the wrath of internet users who, thanks to the Web Standards project, are just as likely to slag browser vendors as designers if a page behaves oddly. (In some ways, this is a lesson: screw hacks and pixel-perfect layouts across all browsers. Life is imperfect. Live with it. And don’t use MSIE. You know, because they suck.)
13. To everyone who uses that o-so-nifty Snap preview thing on your sites: it’s very annoying, and gets between me and the link I’d like to open in a new window, and I have to play a manic game of dodgeball just to visit other sites. Their “disable anywhere” feature only disables the Snap previews on one page at a time - so anytime a user visits a new page on their site, they have to disable the Snap links on that one, too. It’s as if your site is blocking any move I want to make. Websites are not cats. Cats can get in the way of my every step. Websites should not.

Links to other T13 posts

1. simple pleasures with things collected
2. Johntillman.com with obscure words
3. Gem-osophy with a bunch of must-miss movies
4. the screaming pages with the pre-travel to-do list
5. Still Life with Soup Can with a glimpse at her wish-list
6. altjiranga mitjina with a list of his friends
7. West of Mars with thirteen things about a fictional character
8. Here Comes a Storm with music that has been ruined forever
9. Tennessee Text Wrestling with cats she has known
10. Temporarily Me with things never written about
11. The Naked Truth with photos of vanity license plates
12. Experience Imagination with a rollercoaster of a day
13. Life: The Ongoing Education with ways cats are like toddlers

Keywords: | Thursday | technology | teaching | society | memes |
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