Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Tom Valovic is a media theorist and a former editor-in-chief of
Telecommunications magazine. He was the first writer to break the news
about the Internet's commercialization in the early '90s. In Digital
Mythologies, Valovic takes on the conventional wisdom on a wide range of
subjects. 

The author has written extensively on the business and social impacts of
computers and communications for a variety of publications, including
Computerworld, PC Week, Information Week, Whole Earth Review, Media
Studies Journal, the San Francisco Examiner, and the Boston Globe. He is
on the adjunct faculty at Northeastern University and also authored
Corporate Networks: The Strategic Use of Telecommunications.

Leading the conversation with Valovic is Gail Williams. Williams has been
a WELL member since 1990, when the future of cyberspace was an exciting
remote mystery, subject to the full range of idealism and paranoia.
Currently, she is Director of Communities for Salon.com, leading the
development of two cherished gathering places, Table Talk and The WELL.

Please join me in welcoming Tom and Gail to inkwell.vue!
  

    
Thanks, Linda.

Tom, one of the things I enjoyed most about Digital Mythologies was learning
about your historic scoop of the change to a commercial Internet. Talk
about being at ground zero. Did you tell that story on The WELL at the time 
of publication? What sort of reactions did that landmark story get at the
time?
  

    

It was an experience. For a while I was completely out on a limb,
in a journalistic no-man's land. I had some trusted sources within 
the Internet community but the trick was to get some outside and 
independent validation --- and there really wasn't any to be had. 
Vint Cerf was on our advisory board so Vint and I talked a lot 
about it in e-mail and he was very helpful. So was Brian Kahin. 
But it was up to me to draw some viable conclusions as to what 
impact this was going to have on the telecom industry and on life
in general.

In terms of the response, it was not what I had expected. In
retrospect, I guess I should have anticipated the deafening silence.
After we published the piece, I kept waiting for the other shoe to
drop. I mean I knew the story was huge but at the time was probably too
caught up in it to realize that it would take a long time before the
significance to non-technical readers would fully emerge. The story
started to break in some of the trade weeklies about six months after
we published it.

I didn't mention the story on the Well after we published it. But
after the Internet's debut became more widely known, there were some
interesting discussions that took place about the significance of
Internet commercialization. Mitch Kapor posted heavily in some topics.
It was an interesting time with lots of wild speculation about where
things would end up.
  

    

Would you please tell us what happened during this historic event?  From
Gail's question it sounds like the Internet went from being one thing to
being something else.  Would you say what that was, and how it happened?
  

    
Was it a matter of a change in law or NSF policy?
  

    
Sure Linda, although I'm not sure that I would describe it as an
"event". The commercialization of the Internet took place over an
extended period of time with the most important things occurring, I
would guess, in the space of a year or so. It was more like a Polaroid
snapshot taking its time to develop. 

Of course that very fuzzy incremental process was also hard to write
about and describe in a compelling way. I could write something like
"The Internet will become a worldwide network for data comparable in
scope and scale to the public telephone network." but that hardly would
have described the Net as we know it today with all of its infinite
variety and complexity. It was in some respects a quasi-poetic
endeavor, always pushing the limits of language; like trying to make
fog interesting to someone who wasn't there to see it. Events rather
than a sequence of events would have been easier; these were more like
footprints in the sand. 

So commercialization let the genie out of the bottle. Nothing happened
immediately after a somewhat plodding regulatory process. For a while
there was just a limbo of potentiality. But eventually it unleashed a
series of initiatives that allowed Internet technology to move out of
the academic and government sector and into the private sector.
Companies like PSI and UUnet played a big role in that development. 

As to your question, John, I'm not an expert in Internet history ---
that really isn't what my book is about --- but it did, in essence,
involve the commercial development of the Internet backbone by ANS and
NSF policy changes, of course, had to support that. 
  

    
I remember quoting a guy around then saying it would be impossible to
predict what would happen with a commercialized Internet, in the same
way that the people who produced the U.S. highway system wouldn't have
been able to predict the rise of 7-11s.
  

    
No kidding.  It's so easy to confuse the infrastructure and the uses and
changes in attitude and behavior brought by the changing infrastructure.

Tom, one of your themes has to do with The Great Conversation, and the
premise that the Internet might undermine the tradition of reading 
the great works of history and adding to a slow dialog over the
centuries.  I had some trouble with that, because when I read about the
Internet as a phenomenon I try to substitute some terms such as
"the intercontinental railroad" "the telephone" or "the printing press." 

I know great thinkers who were contemporaries used trains or phones to
discuss their work, and may today, and that the printed word is still the
primary form of time travel, so I find parallels in some of those uses.
No one invention maps to the commericalization and popularization of
the Internet, but I know some of those past changes similarly scared some
observers and made others giddy with excessive ideallistic optimism.

I remember a press release which went out from The WELL some years ago
with a canned quote attributed to then owner Bruce Katz, who probably
didn't write it but had surely seen it, and he characterized The WELL,
this little old corner of it all, as "One big conversation."  Even that
was absurd on the face of it.  The idea that the net is a big or a great
conversation is to misunderstand the concept of conversation.  

On the other hand, the idea that real conversation, and even great
conversation, can not take place using this medium or this platform for
many media, is also strange to my ear.  I'm a moderately well educated
person, and I always knew if I needed to know more about the importance of
a work I know about but have not read, from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Origin
of Species, I could go to the library and fill in that voice from the 
great thinkers of the past.  Now I can either do that at my terminal, or
have it shipped to me so I can read in the bathtub, something bad for
books but worse for computers and bathers.  I don't feel taken in by 
a "new electronic order" in doing this, should I be?  

Now that some of the technoinfactuation and fear of the first days of 
poularization are behind us, do you feel that the ability to converse
in so many different ways is a threat to the tradition of the grand 
dialog of western culture?  In a good way or a bad way?
  

    
What I was trying to address in that essay was a particular type of
mind set that views the humanities, art, and literature as a kind of
obsolete, vestigial thinking that will eventually be replaced by the
crisp utilitarianism of a renewed scientific rationalism and
cyberculture-influenced point of view. Brockman's concept of "Third
Culture" is a good example of this mindset. 

The real question is whether the "two cultures", to use C.P Snow's
terminology, are locked into a zerosum embrace. I think it's arguable
that they are. Why? Because human "bandwidth" is limited and if you
flood it with micro-messages spinning off wildly and continuously from
an accelerated sense of the present, soon enough there's little room
for anything else. 

In this sense "surfing" is a very apt term for living in an
Internet-driven mediasphere because if you don't keep surfing i.e.
skimming the surface and taking in the next micro-event or
micro-message and the one after that and the one after that in rapid
succession, then you "go under". In the current modality, "wiping out"
does not seem to be an option. (Contrast that with the sixties when
"dropping out" i.e. choosing your own information environment was the
whole point.) 

Personally, I don't think this kind of thinking will prevail --- at
least I hope it won't. I have no doubt that there are many of us who
have straddled these two worlds for a long time and will continue to do
so, culling the value from each. But when I read about college
students who are unaware that other research tools besides the Internet
are available, I think that's cause for concern. What's going to
happen when an entire generation becomes not illiterate but a-literate:
books just aren't on their radar screen?

So I think the threat is real and the lack of dialogue about this
among educators, in the political sphere, and elsewhere is unfortunate.
The field of education is where you can most easily spot the
"zero-sum" paradigm rearing its ugly head. There are many cases of
schools deciding not to invest money in upgrading text books and using
that money instead for wiring schools to the Net. This is already
fairly widespread. 

In the essay, I try to point out the Net's unique value as a larger
forum for conversation and dialogue. I wouldn't want to detract one bit
from the Net's capabilities in that department: there is definite
value there. But even in this realm there are more complex issues to
consider. 

In terms of actually ordering books via the Net, this is obviously a
great convenience; but you can also purchase a lot of things on the Net
so, rightly or wrongly, I tend to see this as somewhat incidental to
the argument. 
  

    
The 'net is such a large *collection* of changes in ways or delivering and
exchanging so many things it is always a bit like comparing apples and fruit
salad.  I share your skepticism about spending all of a limited supply
budget on computers in classrooms, though I believe it's useful for kids 
and teachers to learn how to use the Internet.  

When the 'net becomes part of a delivery mechanism for textbooks and
materials, be it by van, download or spoken textbook audio file, the
effects become more complex because there is not one culture or set of
values reflected online any more than there is one offline.  That's 
something which seems to be changing rapidly now. Is it possible that
as has been said, Cyberspace is dead, and we have lost the sense of
a single "cyberculture" for both better and worse?

Do you see significant changes in online culture?
  

    
Net culture has certainly gotten more diverse, more variegated. This
pluralism is one of the Net's greatest strengths and needs to continue.
Net culture has also gotten more enclaved (gated communities abound)
and blatantly commercial. These are fairly obvious points, I'm sure. 

For those of us who were around in the very beginning of the online
world's genesis (and I know that comprises a lot of people on the
Well), it's easy to get nostalgic about that time. There was a special
sense of participation, of having a front-row seat for a major cultural
transformation, a chance to shape that process in any number of ways,
major and minor. 

This was, of course, bound to be short-lived. The entropy was
inevitable but a piece of you wonders if there wasn't some other way to
maintain that aboriginal condition, so to speak, and keep that
seemingly more primal community going. The cynic, on the other hand,
would question that a real community existed altogether and would
suggest that it was less a true monolithic culture than a group of
admittedly precocious Net-savvy people who just happened to be at the
right place at the right time --- an accident of confluence. 

For me, this sense was intensified on the Well. Unlike the Net, the
Well had borders and distinct role-players: sages, rebels,  community
watchers, fence-sitters, prodigal progeny, charismatic visitors, town
drunks --- the whole nine yards. Watching and participating in that
probably irreproducible drama was fascinating and enjoyable. (I'm sure
that still goes on at some level today --- it's just not nearly as
visible, at least to me.)

Some of this had to do with the Well's size and some with the fact
that there still was a thriving commons. A simpleminded but effective
analogy: one reason I like Boston is that as a city: it is within my
ability to take it all in. It's comfortable, familiar, within my
immediate ability to know it as an entity. I also like New York but for
a very different reason: like the Net, I know I will never be able to
take it all in. 

I think the splintering of the commons was probably inevitable,
especially as the Net developed in parallel along side of the
Well...... 
  

    

My expectations were been pretty different than yours, Tom.  
I joined the WELL in 1990, knowing that this was just one place among 
others.  I don't wonder at the popularity of private email lists, 
intranets, buddy lists and various kinds of gated communities
because it is neither possible nor desirable to be on close terms 
with the whole world, no matter who you are.  Smaller group intimacy 
has more appeal to most people, given the experiences to compare.

But there was that time of tremendous contact high, and sensation that 
everyone was plugged in to some special source, some of which spilled
into that early hype.  I remember an ad for perhaps MCI in about 1995
with the little girl on the beach who was about to be connected to
something ...  probably to be connected to It All ... which I first
noticed as an indication that this enthrallment was crossing into
corporate culture.  And the online discussions of the time which
considered eliminating governments in favor of infinite round tables,
were seductive and fun, even though skeptics stepped back and 
noticed that considering how the human contextualized content of
conversation scales, they made little sense. Some of those images
did have a profoundly mythic quality.

One of your chapters is called "The Psychopathology of Online Life."
To what degree did you feel that time was dangerous?   What do you offer
those who found insight and valued spiritual metaphors in that grab bag
of connections? And do you see that cultural mythology of the spiritual 
aspect of connectivity thriving, mutating or is it in decline now?
  

    

Does the chapter called "The Psychopathology of Online Life" include any
juicy stories about the WELL?  Seems like a perfect place for it!
  

    

Can you say more about the range and variety of "gated" communities
generally, Tom?
  

    
There is this numinous, "wholly other" quality about cyberspace which
seems to beg for interpretation. It's a complicated subject. I'm both
fascinated and puzzled by the notion that the Internet can somehow be
related to religious experience. Mostly it strikes me as a convenient
fiction. 

For some reason, there is a tendency to idealize the
larger-than-all-of-us entity that is the Internet. First comes the
attempt to anthropomorphize it but that's not possible because the Net
easily runs beyond attempts at reductionism; or we can't because it's
beyond our ability to circumscribe it intellectually. So then there's a
shift to the notion that there must somehow be a spiritual dimension
involved.

Linda, most of the Well-related essays are in the third section
entitled "The Electronic Polity". I'm hoping we'll get to those in due
course....
  

    
Hi Mike, nice to see you here. 

By "gated communities" I mean the Net's inevitable partitioning into
less visible and more private communities of interest. I'm not
suggesting anything nefarious by way of a direct analogy here or any
kind of deliberate exclusion; but rather that continuing
commercialization and privatization have in some ways made the Net a
less open place than it was at an earlier time. We also saw this happen
with the Well when private conferences were introduced.
  

    
Herbert Gans coined the phrase "Urban Villages" - where cities have
become massive and alien to the individual and as a result people
gravitate toward other familiar/socially comfortable people, forming
communities (i.e. New York and the Hispanic community, and so on).  Do
you see any similarity with how communities evolve (through natural
cyber lifecycles)on the Internet?  How do you define community?
  

    
Very interesting discussion. I read some statistic not so long ago
that said AOL manages to keep its subscribers for 80% of the time they
are on the Internet, so I suppose that would be a classic instance of a
gated community.

I suppose what will tend to happen is that, people being creatures of
habit, they will go to the same big sites that supply all their needs
and that there will be less interest in exploring all the odd little
sites that are out there (and probably will continue to be). Would you
agree, Tom? 
  

    

I think the WELL and ECHO may qualify as gated communities (where the login
prompt is a kind of gate, and in which the content is not widely available
to non-members). But what I'm wondering is if there are a lot of other
communities like those two (albeit perhaps with different cultures and
interests).
  

    

[Let me just step in for a moment with a hostly reminder to our
non-WELL-member readers, that you, too can participate in this discussion
via e-mail addressed to inkwell-hosts@well.com.]
  

    
There has been a strain of Net idealism that has existed for some time
and it defines a quasi-utopian view of the Net. I don't particularly
subscribe to it but I admire the thinking behind it and agree with a
lot of its tenets. The CPSR has done some great work in defining the
kinds of qualities that might be found in an ideal Internet. Some of
this can be found in their "One Planet/One Net" declaration
(www.cpsr.org).

In the book I also try to argue for the thoughtful evolution of the
Internet but that and $2.80 will buy you the coffee of the day at
Starbucks. I believe in the last analysis that the Net will probably do
a great deal of good despite our best efforts to mess it up.

That said, one of its greatest features is the "many to many" model
and we've all heard its praises sung interminably: communities, free
association, the right of free assembly writ large --- access and more
access. But it's no secret to anyone in this conference that the
traditional media's influence is slowly morphing much of the Net into
something else entirely, at least the Net that most people will
eventually come to know. Old patterns have a way of pretending that
they're new ones. This is to your comment Richard about the shrinking
of the vastness of the Net into a couple of well-worn portals or other
virtual habituations --- an exaggeration of course, but you get the
drift.

In the last analysis, I think the Internet is resilient enough that
various kinds of cultural transformation will still be possible. Most
likely, it will happen at certain levels --- wheels within wheels and
all that --- and ironically enough, most likely in enclaves. So the
kicker is that enclaves can keep the wrong kind of commercialism in but
they can also keep it out. 

When compared against the yardstick of aboriginal cyber-idealism, it
seems to me that as a mass medium, a lot of the Net's potential has
indeed fallen by the wayside. (But, hey, now we all have our own
personal Internet so how can we possibly dislike that?) Here again,
I'll confess that my own expectations weren't all that high, although I
still try to argue, as I do in the book, for some way to reconcile
ever more urgent social concerns with the great entrepreneurial
expansiveness we see in the .com realm. 

Look at the history of television: how many years went by before
something as absurdly simple and useful as C-Span came into existence.
It's just that given the nature of our planetary distress, I think the
need for that integration is more pressing than ever. 

<Apologies if I haven't answered any question directly enough. I will
gladly correct that in e-mail if necessary: tvacorn@well.com>
  

    

Yes, that sense of cyberspace as one great commons was shortlived, 
but powerful.  I remember great rants by Barlow about a constitution for
cyberspace.  You have to smile in retrospect, but the feelings were 
vivid. And I'd have to say they were also mythic in a good sense.  
The most exciting, wonderful outcome of that space madness was that
people became motivated to fight for a free cyberspace and eventually 
figured out that that this can live within the same freedom of expression 
and association those sly old founding fathers had in mind in the US.

In that sense there's one great datasphere or virtual commons the way 
there is a brotherhood of man, or a global village, for example.  It's 
a sweeping, impossible construct, but not a bad myth if you know it isn't 
literally true.  So long as we avoid being fundamentalists or feeling
defrauded, I am generally in favor of shared delusions of this kind.

There are few gated communities in terms of being on the subscription
model, by the way.  I would love to hear about others which are by
invitation or subscription, other than corporate intranets.  It seems to
me that most of the balkanization is purely due to our modest scopes 
of attention and time.  Limited human relationship bandwidth.

I marked a line in your chapter about cyberpathologies...  you said,
"To opt for existance in the denial-laden pleasure dome that is cyberspace
may constitute a kind of avoidance of the necessary and real Great Work..."

Are you writing off any positive uses of this medium, for confronting 
one another in constructive ways, or for communicating in the course of
taking on the Great Work?
 
  

    
Not at all. That quote needs to be seen in its full context. The
reference to the "real Great Work", of course, was a friendly poke at
Barlow. 

The point I'm trying to make is that working on developing and
improving cyberspace is no substitute for involvement as (formally)
national and (informally) planetary citizens. The real Great Work is
the same as it always has been: that of becoming more fully aware as
individuals but not in the facile personal growth sense that's so
trendy today ("How enlightenment can add $15,000 a year to your
paycheck"); and working on myriad issues in the physical world.
Gurdjieff called this "the Work". Incidentally, Erik Davis talks about
this a bit in "Techngnosis". 

In the "Psychopathology of Online Life" the subject of substitution
psychology is raised: people believing that the Net is a superior
"global space" (Barlow's term) to the physical realm. The question is,
what's really going on with this kind of thinking beyond what the
conventional wisdom indicates? There are lots of issues to be explored
here including the inversion of true spirituality by opting for a kind
of super-charged scientific materialism. In the essay, I posit at least
the possibility that the flight into the virtual could constitute a
kind of escapism in light of the fact that society is more or less in
denial about the incredible damage being done to the planet. But even
if that's the case, it still doesn't necessarily detract from the many
positive things that the Net has to offer. Paradox, complexity.
  

    

I'm paging through the book to the chapters grouped as The Electronic
Polity.  This is where you refer frequently to your time on The WELL.

You start out by talking about identity, and noting that some readers know
one another better than others.  Some use their real name in the "pseud"
filed and others use slogans, quotes and nicknames, and while it is possible
for anyone who is logged in to look up a real name for the poster's login,
some don't bother.

These dynamics are sure exaggerated here in Inkwell, where many readers 
are not logged in, and will not know who <mnemonic> is from past 
conversation, nor even be able to look up his name without a password.

I agree that reputation is mysterious and complex, but I don't think this 
particular element is far different than other parts of human life.  Join 
any group of people, and it will take time to find out who is credible, 
and at what.  There are many new wrinkles, but this one doesn't seem to 
me to be significantly novel.   

You say "conversations take place between the named and the nameless, and
the reliable context of identity is no longer a constant."   My sense is
that there is so much constant identity on The WELL compared to so many
online and offline environments that I'm astonished at your observation.
You're here as <tvacorn> over time. Granted, some people only know you
that way.  How is this different than being known only by your first name, 
for example?   I can think of many environments where I might know someone 
socially, and only later bother to find out their last name, or more 
about what they do.  And identity and voice are huge issues in this
environment.  But I don't know how you could make people pay attention to
who is who, in any environment.   
  
  

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